Single issue anti-LTN candidate unsuccessful in general election

[Penguin68]

10 hours ago, malumbu said:

Clearly you don't believe in scientific research.  Better give Sweden a call and speak to those people at the academy that award the Nobel prize.  As a scientist I'm not sure if I am insulted flabbergasted or both.  Well I understand that GB news is a good watch.

Perhaps try googling 'problems with peer review' - and see how many papers are cited - (you can ignore the citations from news outlets of course) - but just look at the ones from 'respectable' sources. Peer Review should be the gold standard of course, but in many instances it clearly isn't, and that's hardly surprising considering the huge number of papers, both scientific (really) and covering social and other studies (any study which seeks the opinions of others is a social study, effectively). If you believe that all published research now which is peer reviewed is thus cast iron you are very naive for a scientist. The problem is, you (and I) don't know which is which.

There are a huge number of scholars and commercial researchers working, and almost exactly the same number reviewing other's works (indeed they're the same people!) - if you consider that each paper probably should be reviewed by 3 reviewers as a minimum there are perhaps, in any one field, 'experts' who might be doing far more reviewing than their own research. Of course there will be slipshod and slapdash work in review - which is why so many attempts to 'test' the system end in failure, with accepted papers being resubmitted and failing (and vice versa) - sometimes by the same journals, who, remember, are all commercial enterprises publishing for profit. Let alone the successful attempts to get 'rubbish' papers published which are entire fictions as a test of the system.

It is very rare, I believe, for peer reviewers actually to run the numbers - if they are even properly available in the submitted papers - reviewing for face validity and commenting on published methodology ('if you did it this way, that would work') is about the best you will get. And sometimes not even that. The MMR 'research' (word used quite wrongly)  was based on a tiny and self selecting sample for instance, which no reviewer should have accepted - and the published results are still causing death and disability amongst the large population, particularly in London, who chose not to vaccinate.

Oh, and I have never watched GB News.  

[Dogkennelhillbilly]

20 hours ago, Penguin68 said:

I would, in general, trust market research from an independent polling company far more.

Interestingly, Redfield & Wilton gets a mention in this week's Private Eye for being rather "opaque". It's a loss-making company registered at an accommodation address, among other things...

All this rubbish about opinion polls is a side show. Voters locally and across London have had multiple chances to elect candidates that have put abolishing LTNs as the centre of their platform. And those candidates fail time after time because apart from a few obsessives hammering away on their keyboard here, they're not a big deal and everyone's getting on with their lives.

Edited July 18 by Dogkennelhillbilly

[Penguin68]

27 minutes ago, Dogkennelhillbilly said:

Interestingly, Redfield & Wilton gets a mention in this week's Private Eye for being rather "opaque". It's a loss-making company registered at an accommodation address, among other things...

And its bona fides have been immediately challenged by other pollsters. The BPC seems mainly for political polling organisations, and not those market and social researchers who belong to the Market Research Society (as I did, when working) - it is the MRS which sets industry standards of Market Research and which offers professional qualifications in it.

And to make it clear, once again, the 300 who voted for a no-hope candidate standing on a  local issue in a national election are remarkable only in that they felt so strongly about the issue that they were prepared to waste their votes in this way.

In London, certainly, electors in local elections were not going to vote out Labour administrations in their hatred of Tories, so suggesting that voting Labour in London was an endorsement of every council's LTN etc. policies is clearly daft.

[Rockets]

1 hour ago, Dogkennelhillbilly said:

Interestingly, Redfield & Wilton gets a mention in this week's Private Eye for being rather "opaque". It's a loss-making company registered at an accommodation address, among other things...

But they seem to be the go-to people for research on all things LTNs etc now that Aldred & Co have been shown to be anything other than impartial and have something of a bad name.

 

One can only speculate as to why they are "opaque" - it makes you wonder who is behind them and how legitimate they are. Given Private Eye is sniffing around them I suspect it won't be long before we find out and my bet is they have very close ties to the very people commissioning the research or, as became all too apparent with Aldred & Co, they are not at all impartial and have massive conflicts of interest.

 

It's interesting that Carlton Reid's article claimed: The newest poll was conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, a 23-year-old London-based global polling and strategic consulting company.

 

Yet Redfield and Wilton's own website says the company was started in 2020....it was almost as if Carlton (or whomever was pushing the research to him for coverage) was trying to legitimise the survey.

 

The more you research into Redfield and Wilton the more you realise they are questionable to say the least - is that what the Private Eye article is suggesting DKHB?

 

[Spartacus]

Blimey 

Someone standing on a single issue locally has generated a lot of conversation around it. 

Maybe not winning has given them as much publicity of the issue as they would have got by winning. 

[Dogkennelhillbilly]

When you say "a lot of conversation", you may be overstating the reach of a thread on the Road Moaning section of the EDF. But if whatshisname wants to say thank you to me, my DMs are open.