Baird's CMC -- Blog

Sky News is so good that we often forget it is part of the same media family as Fox, The Sun and The New York Post. Friday was a good reminder that a struggle goes on between News International values and many of the journalists at Sky. A particularly inane poll was breathlessly reported. "46% [of British Moslems] said they thought of themselves as Muslim first and British second". How many blond-haired accountants think of themselves as blond first and accountants second? How many Big Mac-eating taxi drivers think of themselves as Big Mac eaters first and taxi drivers second? The questions are silly because there's no conflict between being a taxi driver and a Big Mac eater. If a polling organisation asked the question, you would expect about half to pick each answer. Surprise, surprise, about half of British Moslems picked one answer and half picked the other.

The question is based on very interesting market research work in the UK over the past few years which has tracked changes in the whether people think of themselves as "English, Scottish or Welsh" first and "British" second (or, for a depressingly small number of us, as "Europeans" first, "Welsh" second and "British" third -- but that's another story). These are all questions about nationality so you can ask people to make valid choices.

How would Christians answer if you asked if they thought of themselves as "Christian" or "British" first? Probably, with our traditional view of Anglicanism as a sort-of Shinto, you would get quite a few who would answer "British". It would be an odd view: "the Creator of the Universe has taken the trouble to personally communicate with me about timeless, unchanging ultimate truth but I think this is less important than being a citizen of a country that's existed for about 200 years and probably won't exist in another 100". Fortunately, no-one is about to commission the polling.

Still, Sky is positively responsible compared to The Times (of course, another News International outlet) which on the 12th of July reported, "stark divisions in attitudes between people living in London and the South East, and those in the rest of the country. The further away from London respondents lived, the stronger their support for tough new [security] measures." Read a bit further on and you will see that the biggest difference is actually about 11% ("While 95 per cent of Scots support security checks and baggage inspections at stations, 84 per cent in London and the South East back this measure.") In a survey with about a thousand respondents across the UK, margins of error in comparing regions and countries must be pretty broad. Maybe 11% is significant at some reasonable level but it is hardly "stark". Most of the "stark differences" were not remotely significant. How did Populus, the market research group commissioned by The Times, ever allow this copy?