Wednesday, November 19, 2003
I've been looking through old blog entries and found this one about the Daily Mail organising a ballot on the European Union Constitution. Hmmm, thinks I, never heard anything more about that. So, I had a look around, and found the Vote 2004 website (due to the Daily Mail's lack of an archive), which claims [a]n overwhelming nine out of ten members of the public want a referendum on the new European constitution, according to the Daily Mail's historic national poll. Unfortunately, that's not quite true...
In the Mail poll, a total of 1,692,071 votes were cast... According to the National Statistics Office the population of the UK at the time of the census in 2001 was 58,789,194 people. So, when they claim nine out of ten people in the UK want a referendum, that's nine out of ten people that bothered to take part in the Daily Mail poll want a referendum. So that's actually one out of every fifty-eight people, or approximately 2.5% of the British public. No wonder the Daily Mail had the good sense to keep fairly quiet about their dismal failure...
In the Mail poll, a total of 1,692,071 votes were cast... According to the National Statistics Office the population of the UK at the time of the census in 2001 was 58,789,194 people. So, when they claim nine out of ten people in the UK want a referendum, that's nine out of ten people that bothered to take part in the Daily Mail poll want a referendum. So that's actually one out of every fifty-eight people, or approximately 2.5% of the British public. No wonder the Daily Mail had the good sense to keep fairly quiet about their dismal failure...
