𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

A Home Office whistleblower has revealed what we all feared – just one in 100 asylum claims is genuine. The UK public is being taken for a ride by illegal immigrants masquerading as asylum seekers, and using all manner of hackneyed excuses. We have Iraqi Kurds saying they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region; Pakistanis claiming they were in a gay relationship, and Bangladeshis purporting to be dissidents.

So many of them are copying the same scripts. The law firms that represent these chancers by encouraging them to use dishonest and fraudulent stories should lose their licence to practice. The usually tolerant British public has had enough.

Ban opinion polls during election campaigns

Reform’s latest donation controversy has actually exposed another (arguably bigger) issue – the corrupting influence of polling on politics. Its malign impact was evident at the 2024 General Election. Journalists, seduced by the latest juicy figures, were obsessed with covering stories about a ‘Labour supermajority’ at the expense of performing the more crucial role of holding Labour to account and scrutinising what they would do if they won the election.

Veteran journalist Michael Crick bemoaned the situation at the time, and we can now see why – the public ushered in a Government it knew very little about. Those same journalists focused their questioning of Conservatives on the polling, which showed the Tories and Reform at similar levels of support, again, instead of asking about policies.

The events of this week make me wonder if Reform UK had secretly commissioned any of those polls to try to manipulate the news agenda and voters into thinking they were better placed at the election than proved to be the case. That should certainly be investigated.

Polling in the UK dates back to 1937 when the British Institute of Public Opinion (now known as Gallup) was established in 1937. It acquired a reputation for accuracy after Dr Henry Durant, its founder, accurately predicted, against all expectations, Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour landslide. It also earned its stripes as a vital democratic tool.

Fast forward to 2026, and what had begun as only a handful of pioneering firms – genuinely seeking accuracy – has exploded into an industry of 34 competing polling companies worth approximately £6.5 billion in the UK alone.

But as industry grew, it evolved from being a reflector of public opinion to a manipulator of it (most famously President Roosevelt’s use of it to guide a deeply resistant American population to fighting Nazi Germany in the Second World War) and, into an industry which helpfully seems to provide the answer the people commissioning them want to see.

This latest saga regarding Reform has highlighted flaws in how polls are commissioned (with the real source seemingly able to be masked) and in the media coverage that flows from them.

Currently, the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society have launched investigations into the polling firm JL Partners. The firm faces allegations that it violated transparency rules by failing to disclose that polls had been quietly commissioned by figures within the Reform UK party, even though paid for by a third party.

Dr Henry Durant intended polling to be a tool to give the public a voice, not a method to control. However, I don’t believe the genie can be put back in the bottle, so perhaps the best we can hope for is that people will ignore the polls that are being shoved down their throats.

I think it is now vital that opinion polling is stopped during an election period so as to prevent any possible interference in and manipulation of future General Elections. So we can concentrate on the issues of substance in political interviews, which is what elections should be all about.