Corbyn must prevent ‘statistical junk’ as seen in Syria survey, warns peer
Statistical expert Lord Lipsey says future consultations of Labour members should be independently designed and verified to carry weight
Jeremy Corbyn has been warned by one of Labour’s statistical experts that consultations on the views of party members must be free of the “statistical junk” the leadership produced on voters’ opinions of military involvement in Syria.
The warning from Lord Lipsey, the Labour peer and co-chair of the all-party committee on statistics, will be seen as a warning to Corbyn that if he is to deploy a new internet democracy inside the party, some minimum standards will be necessary.
Concern has also been expressed about the Syria consultation by senior members of the party’s national executive committee, who have asked the general secretary, Iain McNicol, to provide them with the raw data.
Lipsey, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, stressed he is not motivated by his own views on Syria – describing himself as undecided on the wisdom of bombing – but instead by a desire for the new leadership to behave in a transparent manner.
He said: “If the party is to hold such consultations in future, as Corbyn has suggested it will, they need to be independently designed and verified by neutral and professional third parties. Otherwise they too, like this poll, will produce one thing only: statistical junk.”
In a press release n 30 November, Labour presented the outcome of a survey in which 75% of the 64,711 party members who responded were opposed to bombing.
In his note Lipsey commented: “I do not know if this is true or not. What I do know is that the consultation does not provide a shred of evidence for such a proposition.” He pointed out “there is no way of knowing if the 64,711 that responded were a representative sample of party membership. Indeed, prima facie, it seems likely that opponents of bombing would be more likely to reply.
“In any case this ‘poll’ is a classic example of the Dewey blunder – the same confusion of a straw poll for an accurate measure of opinion which caused the Chicago Daily Tribune to lead its report on the 1948 US presidential election ‘Dewey defeats Truman’.”
He added: “The poll was based on a sample of the non-sample, comprising some 1,900 members. The party claims that this sample was random. But nothing is said about how it was drawn. Was it done from a full alphabetical list of members, or just the first 1,900 read? What allowance has been made for the statistical margin of error on such samples? What checks have been made to see if it was representative of the whole membership, by age and region?”
He concluded: “You would expect greater statistical caution of a party that believed from the opinion polls it was going to win power in May only to find that real votes had decided otherwise.”
The issue is expected to be raised by NEC members in a review of the executive’s powers and in a separate review of Labour’s digital operation.
THE GUARDIAN