Jonathan Rogers_ifraweb
Jonathan Rogers
This column is supposed to opine about Asian financial markets, but I can’t possibly ignore the results of the referendum held on Scottish independence. Just days after opinion polls suggested Scotland would vote to leave, the electorate has resoundingly cemented the 300-year old union of Great Britain. My immediate thought is that the pollsters who had predicted a “yes” vote to independence have got a lot to answer for, now that the final tally indicates 55% of those Scots who voted in the referendum wanted to retain the union.
No margin of error allows for a 10 percentage point margin if the polls released just a week ago were reliable. Perhaps it is time to reassess the polling industry and the rather smug individuals who populate it.
I’m pleased to say I wasn’t part of the slag-heap of breathless journalism that emerged following predictions that the “yes” camp would win with all its likely terrifying consequences. To reiterate: I write about Asia.
Still, the jarring contrast between the opinion polls and the final result has ramifications for Asia, not to mention the actual concept of the referendum that is so terrifying for a nation such as China, with its numerous would-be secessionist states, some of which are resorting to terrorism to make their case.
Without the production of opinion polls that proved to be no more accurate that the Armegeddon forecasts we live through whenever the stars or the numbers fall in or out of alignment, none of that eminently shreddable copy would have existed. That would be no bad thing, although it has been suggested that the independence referendum did us all a favour by keeping reams of nausea-inducing copy about the imminent arrival of another British royal baby out of the media. Fair point.
PEOPLE TAKE OPINION polls seriously and various bodies pay a lot to pollsters for their work, but in the wake of the Scottish result and the egregious failure of the pollsters to predict it, you wonder why. I’m thinking of Indonesia, where the opposition candidate in the Presidential elections, Subianto Prabowo, recently used polling results as the basis for challenging the victory of president-elect Jokowi. He got nowhere, but without those polls he wouldn’t even have started.
It gets me thinking about all kinds of formal institutions to which we defer as mirrors of reality but which so frequently fall short. I’m thinking of the ratings agencies, which are so often so far behind the curve that they should have offered to take on the polling work for the Scottish referendum pro bono. No doubt they would have forecast the same result as the likes of Britain’s Yougov, just to remind us what a cosy bit of triangulation exists between big money, government and forecasting joints.
In a BBC radio interview held just before the Scottish referendum, director of large polling company ICM stated that he believed the vote could prove the “polling Waterloo” for his industry. That sounds like the right call. After all, since the polling industry came into existence in the 1930s in the US, with George Gallup leading the charge – if you’ll excuse the expression – many things have changed. Reaching young people via smart phones and dealing with their predisposed apathy have become challenges which might just prove the industry’s death knell.
I DOUBT WE will be watching opinion polls pointing to the results of Tibetan independence any time soon, but there’s no doubt that Asia retains a close engagement with the polling industry or however best to describe it.
Generally, indexes that point to how rosy things are will be wheeled out to allow governments to shout about their achievements to the electorate. Last week, for example, the fabulously named Milken Institute – yes, the eponymous creation of the convicted stock fraudster – declared Malaysia and Singapore to be in the top 10 of Asian countries where one was most likely to find a job. Well I never. Jobless banker of Tunbridge Wells has known that ever since he got laid off and began the dismal search for reemployment in old Blighty.
Still, there is room for opinion polls, and that’s where they’re never used. For example, I would rather have the opinion of a country’s or a company’s credit standing from a regular straw poll of investors and other interested parties than I would from a credit agency. Why? Because, as stated above, the agencies are so far behind the curve when it comes to major credit events they slam the proverbial door after the horse has bolted.
Now there’s an idea. If ICM reckons the Scottish referendum was the polling industry’s Waterloo, get them to reinvent themselves as a poll-based credit agency. There won’t be any spotty teenagers to canvass via the latest smartphone, and the violence is likely to be kept to a minimum, shareholder meetings notwithstanding. In the meantime the concept of the nation state lives to fight another day thanks to thousands of Scots who never quite told us what their real intentions were.
