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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the months before the 2015 election, Lord Ashcroft Polls conducted focus groups all over the country to find out whether the parties' frenetic campaigning was having any effect on the people it was supposed to impress: undecided voters in marginal seats. The reports, collected here for the first time, show what was going on behind the polling numbers - what people made of the stunts, scandals and mishaps, as well as the policies, plans and promises that constitute the race to Number Ten. As well as shedding light on voters' hopes and fears, the book asks crucial questions: which party leader is like a Chihuahua in a handbag? Which cartoon character does David Cameron most resemble? What would Ed Miliband do on a free Friday night? And is Nigel Farage more like Johnny Rotten or the Wurzels? Pay Me Forty Quid and I'll Tell You- packed with shrewd and funny observations from real voters - proves that although most people have better things to do than follow every storyline in the political soap opera, nothing very important gets past them.
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CONTENTS
To Anna and Samuel, whom I missed when on the road, and to the Guerrilla Moderator, for unrelenting insight and good company.KC
INTRODUCTION
Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC
The 2015 general election produced the most unexpected result in Britain’s recent political history. Polls in the final weeks suggested the contest was too close to call; the final surveys completed the night before voting, including mine, had it as a dead heat. The decisive Conservative victory was a shock to the polling world.
But the numbers are only part of the story. From the beginning of 2015 until the election, Lord Ashcroft Polls conducted regular focus groups all over the country to find out what undecided voters made of it all: what they had noticed and what had passed them by; how the leaders were coming across; what they thought the parties were trying to tell them and how believable (or otherwise) they found it; what mattered to them and what didn’t; which way they were leaning and the doubts that stopped them making up their minds; and what they hoped or expected the outcome to be.
Write-ups of the groups were published every Monday on my website and on Conservative Home, alongside the results of the weekly Ashcroft National Poll, which was based on 1,000 telephone interviews. It quickly became clear that the focus-group findings were more interesting – and told us more about what was really going on – than the numbers. The reports acquired something of a cult following, and several readers were kind enough to suggest they should be compiled as a book. Here it is.
It would probably be too much to claim, even in retrospect, that the focus-group discussions pointed unambiguously to the election result that ultimately came to pass. But certain things were clear. There was no enthusiasm for Labour, even among people who were quite fed up with the coalition; there was none of the yearning for change that was evident in 2010, let alone 1997. The general view, as expressed by one of our participants with characteristic pith, was that “David Cameron’s pretty good, but Ed Miliband is a muppet”. If people had yet to feel the benefits of the economic recovery they kept hearing about, at least things seemed to be going in the right direction, while Labour showed no signs of having learned the right lessons from having been booted out five years earlier. They never won people’s confidence on the economy, or, specifically, the public finances: yes, they might spend more on the health service, but all the money would be borrowed – or, as a chap in Wolverhampton put it, if the Labour Party were a house, the furniture would be nice but it would all be on HP. In Scotland, meanwhile, the rise of the SNP as a distinctive political voice heightened the perception that Labour and the Tories had simply become “different shades of shite”. Though even its own supporters conceded that the SNP voting in Westminster on matters devolved to Holyrood would amount to having “two pies at the same time”, south of the border there was indignation in the final weeks at the idea of the party having a big say in the government of a country it did not even want to be part of.
This would all seem to point to a comfortable victory for the Tories. So why did we not see it coming? Because other factors were at play. Many people were torn between two alternatives or were altogether undecided. The things that had held the Conservatives back in the past and helped prevent them winning a majority in 2010 – most importantly, doubts that they were really on the side of ordinary people – had not gone away. And in many Liberal Democrat seats, the formidable reputation of incumbent MPS continued to count even with voters unimpressed with what the party had achieved in government. These considerations lent plausibility to the polls that showed Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck.
Whether the nation resolved its collective dilemma at the last minute or whether the Tories had it in the bag all along is a question the polling world continues to grapple with. We may never know the answer for sure. But, in future elections, I expect the upshot of the Great Polling Debacle of 2015 to be a more circumspect approach to bare voting intention figures and a greater focus on the bigger picture. The kind of research whose results are described here has a huge part to play in that.
Indeed, one of the reasons these focus-group reports captured the imagination of readers was that they offered an extra dimension to political coverage. They also served as a rebuke to the depressing tendency to over-interpret individual polls or small changes between one survey and the next. (After I published some new figures last year, one of my Twitter correspondents asked, in all seriousness, whether the fieldwork had been done before or after the shadow Communities Secretary had attacked Waitrose for giving away free coffee.) I might also add that the gratifying reaction to this work proved how exotic ordinary electors were to parts of the commentariat.
This book, then, describes the 2015 election campaign as it was seen, not by its protagonists, but by its audience: the voters. The findings were captured by Kevin Culwick, the director of Lord Ashcroft Polls, who (in an effort as heroic as his expenses claims) travelled to thirty-three constituencies for sixty-six focus groups for discussions lasting a total of ninety-nine hours and involving over 500 people.
Above all, I think the reports collected here show that although most people do not follow every storyline in the political soap opera – they have better things to do – nothing very important gets past them. On election night, before the polling stations closed, I spoke at an event and stuck to my policy of not making predictions. Instead, I observed that the British people “are good judges of character and they don’t believe the unbelievable. Whatever they have decided today, I’m sure they knew what they were doing.” I defy you to read what follows and disagree.
MAA
July 2015
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER
Kevin Culwick
For people involved in politics, the first experience of observing a focus group often induces both horror and fascination. The fascination comes from seeing how normal, everyday people react to the kind of questions that occupy the political operative’s every waking hour. This is also what causes the horror.
The first reason for this is that in the political operative’s world – dominated, as it can easily become, by an endless succession of minor crises concerning matters of next to no real importance – normal, everyday people can be something of a rarity. Many of those who work in politics professionally, or who write about it for a living, spend most of their time with people like themselves, or with each other.
The good ones realise the dangers of this and make sure they maintain a broader perspective, but for some, the exposure to normal people can sometimes come as a shock. A few years ago, after we had spent an hour listening to eight middle-aged men in the East Midlands complaining grumpily about immigration and the cost of petrol while displaying no signs of having noticed any of the Tories’ dazzling recent initiatives – standard focus-group fare at the time – a high-flying member of the party’s creative team asked me, “Why are they like that?” Like what? “Well, like that. Is it the kind of media they consume?” To her, these ordinary blokes were as mysterious and forbidding as Komodo dragons.
Elected politicians themselves are somewhat less quarantined, having constituents to contend with. Indeed, most MPS are probably more in touch, as well as harder working and better intentioned, than their voters would give them credit for. But some of them have a tendency to romanticise their role as tribunes of the people. Sometimes they paint a picture of their electors as simple, salt-of-the-earth types whose outlook on life can be easily grasped, as in the case of the MP who likes to claim that it is not possible in his constituency to buy an olive. They can also be prone to thinking that casual conversations in their “patch” give them all the insight they need into popular sentiment.
But the average Member of Parliament represents 70,000 voters. They cannot help but be most in touch with their own supporters and activists, or those who need assistance, or have views about forthcoming legislation, or otherwise have the time and inclination to contribute to their mailbag or inbox. As Gyles Brandreth put it, recalling his own time in the House of Commons, MPS tend to meet two types of people: “Those who have problems and those who are right.”
This means MPS are most likely to be struck by the second big lesson focus groups have to impart, which is that most people do not give politics a thought from one month to the next. It can be dispiriting, to say the least, for politicians to realise that hardly anybody notices most of what they do. Unless and until they transgress, that is; duck islands last longer in the memory than any number of well-judged speeches in the chamber.
The first time one (then) shadow minister came to an evening of focus groups, he had spent much of the preceding weekend in broadcast studios giving interviews on a story that fell within his brief. He was eager to hear what people had to say about his performance. Not only could our participants not remember the story – let alone his part in it – they could barely think of anything the party had said or done for months. This kind of trauma does politicians no lasting harm, and helps them to keep things in perspective.
The same can be true for the third lesson, which is that the way parties and politicians sometimes conduct themselves can be terribly counterproductive (a truth so obvious to most people that they would wonder at the idea that research might be needed to explain it). Here I have something of the zeal of the convert. Before I started to work in polling – and had the equally epiphanous experience of getting a job outside Westminster – I spent long days in the Conservative “war room” helping to come up with the kind of stories that seemed a triumph at the time but which I now know, and ought always to have known, make newspaper readers turn the page with a disdainful sigh. I literally shudder to think of some of them. In the early days of opposition after 1997, we decided, almost certainly unjustly, that the new Labour ministers were enjoying the trappings of office rather too liberally, and that this ought to be brought to the voters’ attention. The ensuing delivery to 10 Downing Street of a gold-sprayed foam pig on a pedestal – the “Snouts In The Trough Award” – probably represents the pinnacle, or nadir, of our efforts. I wish I were making this up.
Focus groups show in unambiguous terms what people think of politics as it is too often practised, and how they feel about politicians of all persuasions who seem to come from similar backgrounds with similar advantages and appear to treat the whole thing as a game. The message can be so stark that politicians sometimes leave determined to do everything differently. Yet the bad habits can be so ingrained that this resolve often lasts only as long as the journey back to Westminster.
For some, focus groups stand for everything they dislike about contemporary politics, and, indeed, much of modern life: superficial, looking only to the short term, a sorry substitute for principle and conviction. Used wrongly, they could be all of those things, but that is not what they are for. They are not supposed to tell politicians what to say or do or think. Done properly, they are an honest attempt to understand what people think and why. That does not make their findings any the less exasperating for those who do not like, and consequently do not want to hear, what they have to say.
Shortly before the 2010 election, another (then) shadow minister lamented what he felt was the low calibre of ammunition being supplied to him by Conservative HQ: he wanted to be able to deploy, in every interview, six snappy but devastating sound bites that would remind people exactly what to think of the Labour government. Oh, people hate all that, I reminded him. It makes them roll their eyes and switch off. They know what they think of Labour, they’re just not sure they want to vote Tory instead. “The trouble with you,” he mused at length, “is that you spend too much time in focus-group land.”
But research does not take place in a different realm. There is no focus-group land, only voter land, and people involved in politics need to know how things look there. To complain that a party pays too much attention to focus groups is to wish it would stop thinking about the electorate.
*
Despite their value as a barometer of opinion, and as a reminder of who the audience is, what they have noticed and what they make of what they see and hear, the use of focus groups in the media has been comparatively rare. This presented an opportunity for Lord Ashcroft Polls. As part of our work on the 2015 general election, alongside the data we produced in our national and constituency polling, we decided to hit the road and find out whether the parties’ frenetic campaigning was having any effect on the people it was supposed to impress: undecided voters in marginal seats.
As well as getting a good geographical spread – urban and rural, towns and suburbs, from Cornwall to Scotland – we made sure the destinations we chose reflected the local political battles: Tory against Labour, Liberal Democrats against either, UKIP possibilities and, in one memorable week, a taste of the SNP surge.1 Recruiters were despatched with their clipboards to find the right people: in each location, eight men and eight women who had voted at the last election – half for the sitting MP – but had not decided which party to support in 2015. Suitable targets were offered £40 as an incentive to turn up on the appointed night. Indeed, despite what their participants might think, focus groups are probably the only place in British politics where cash really does change hands in brown envelopes. (At the end of each group, as likely as not, someone would ask the moderator whom he or she intended to vote for. The inevitable reply: “Pay me forty quid and I’ll tell you.”)
