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Arab News
3 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
UK public opinion of Israel souring as Gaza war nears 2-year mark: Poll
LONDON: At least half of the British public want their government to launch a range of sanctions against Israel, a new YouGov poll has found. The survey, conducted on behalf of the Council for Arab-British Understanding from July 13-14, found that 57 percent of respondents support a suspension of UK arms exports to Israel, with only 18 percent opposed. YouGov questioned 2,285 adults. The lowest rate of support for a punitive measure against Israel was 48 percent of respondents who called for a trade embargo against the country. Fifty-one percent support tariffs against Israel, and 52 percent believe the UK government should impose financial sanctions on the assets of specific Israeli nationals. Just 18 percent of respondents support Israeli actions in Gaza, almost two years since the devastating war in the Palestinian enclave began. Fifty-five percent of respondents oppose Israeli actions in Gaza — a substantial shift from a similar poll conducted in February, when 46 percent disagreed with Israel's war and 22 percent supported it. Forty-three percent of respondents said their view of Israel has worsened since the war began, while 16 percent said their views have stayed the same. Just 4 percent said they have a more favorable view of Israel since the war began. Sixty-seven percent support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, while 13 percent want a ceasefire when the time is right. Only 3 percent disagree with any ceasefire proposal. Among respondents who oppose the war (55 percent), 81 percent believe that Israel's actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. Chris Doyle, Caabu's director, said: 'Ever since October 2023, both UK governments have been massively at odds with public opinion as well as international law. 'Serious action is required to pressure Israel to end what more and more people as well as experts view as a genocide in Gaza. 'This should include a total arms embargo on Israel, economic sanctions and a complete ban on trade with settlements.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Should we ban opinion polls?
Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time. No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament. If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere. One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as 'the public', thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as 'the British public thinks…' is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as 'the will of the British people', a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed. So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form 'sound public opinions on the whole business of government', and they shouldn't actually have to. 'It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on 'any and every form of social action' which affects us.' The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one's say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: 'It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are 'snails in Sirius', he will soon have an opinion on it.' As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the '1975 Public Affairs Act' should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist. The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: 'More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.' Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government 'should not forbid speeches against democracy' than it 'should allow speeches against democracy', though the options are exactly equivalent. Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the 'manufacture of consent', a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the 'new instrument' of polling, he declared happily in 1938, 'the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times'. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as 'a veritable goldmine'. Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that 'more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration'. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years. It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public's confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then? Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49) Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99) Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99)
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Should we ban opinion polls?
Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time. No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament. If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere. One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as 'the public', thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as 'the British public thinks…' is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as 'the will of the British people', a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed. So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form 'sound public opinions on the whole business of government', and they shouldn't actually have to. 'It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on 'any and every form of social action' which affects us.' The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one's say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: 'It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are 'snails in Sirius', he will soon have an opinion on it.' As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the '1975 Public Affairs Act' should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist. The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: 'More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.' Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government 'should not forbid speeches against democracy' than it 'should allow speeches against democracy', though the options are exactly equivalent. Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the 'manufacture of consent', a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the 'new instrument' of polling, he declared happily in 1938, 'the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times'. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as 'a veritable goldmine'. Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that 'more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration'. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years. It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public's confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then? Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49) Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99) Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99)
The Independent
11-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
This short-sighted cut to foreign aid will come back to haunt the UK
There was no comfort in today's spending review for those across all parties who care about international development. The reduction of Britain's overseas aid budget to meagre 0.3 per cent will come back to haunt us. There are plenty of people who argue that cutting overseas aid should not overly concern us. Why should foreign people in distant countries profit from the UK taxpayers' hard-earned money? If any aspect of our budget is expendable, surely it is this. But much is missing from this simplistic analysis. Aid is not about giving handouts. It is about connecting the dots between conditions abroad and the UK's serious challenges on health, security and migration. Indeed the whole point of international development is to improve social conditions in vulnerable countries to contain the scourge of disease, conflict and extremism – all of which in turn step up the pressure on our borders. Morality aside, aid is a strategic investment of the highest, if not the most glamorous, order. We hear a great deal about the need to 'stop the boats.' And rightly so — irregular migration through small boat crossings is dangerous and deeply unsettling for the British public. But while deterrents and enforcement may grab headlines, they will never solve the problem alone. If we are serious about reducing irregular migration, we must first tackle the reasons that people feel they have no choice but to leave their homes. And that's exactly where well-targeted aid can play a decisive role. New research from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy provides compelling evidence. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a marked improvement in public services like healthcare and education was linked to a 27 per cent drop in migration intentions. In countries affected by conflict or climate stress — such as Sudan, Afghanistan or Syria — aid that stabilises fragile regions, supports livelihoods, or helps farmers adapt to a changing climate can reduce future displacement. Most of the people arriving in small boats today come from countries facing humanitarian crises. They're not mainly economic opportunists — they're often fleeing instability, poverty, or violence. When we invest in making those regions safer and more secure, we reduce the push factors that fuel irregular migration. Investing in development abroad also means protecting ourselves from future threats. There is growing evidence to support the link between development spending and our own security. Again, research from the Kiel Institute found that improving basic services, for example, reduces the aspiration to migrate: In Sub-Saharan Africa, a marked improvement in public services (such as health and education) was linked to the 27 per cent lower intentions to migrate. Similarly, aid that's used to stabilise fragile regions can prevent renewed conflict with mass movement and with far-reaching security repercussions. I still find it difficult to believe that a Labour government has raided the aid budget to plug short-term spending gaps. While I did not expect a return to 0.7 per cent of development spending any time soon, I genuinely believed that Sir Keir Starmer would stand by his manifesto commitment and had the strategic nous to protect the remnants of a budget that has been persistently plucked and picked at. Robbing Peter to pay Paul might play well populistically, not least in an age where the pulse-racing demands of social media are at odds with the slow-burn tempo of international development transformations – but make no mistake, it is a proverbial shot in the foot. Finally, we can't escape the human tragedy that the aid cuts will unleash. An old African proverb says "the axe forgets, but the tree remembers". International development has been denigrated and delegitimised over the years in a burgeoning climate of narrow nationalism flourishing from a broken international system. Those responsible for riding that populist wave will soon move on. But the people left behind will carry this for years to come. We too will suffer.
Daily Mail
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Kate Middleton admits Royal Family teased her over habit she had to correct
She always comes out top in the opinion polls with 72 per cent of Brits feeling favourably towards her. Kate Middleton is known for her quiet confidence, strong work ethic and dedication to her family and public duties. Your browser does not support iframes.
