Interesting stats

[andrewducker]

Over here are some YouGov stats (which I linked to this morning) talking about the breakdown over who is in favour of prosecuting over the Twitter joke debacle.

The first interesting stat was the split by age - 22% of 18-24-year-olds were in favour of prosecution, versus 71% of those over 60 years old. Whether that's the nature of making jokes being age dependent, or the nature of Twitter, or both would be fascinating to disentangle.

A more subtle stat I noticed was the figures for people who voted LD at the last election, versus people with a voting intention of LD now - with the percentage of people in favour of prosecution falling from 47 to 44, and those against rising from 42 to 49, indicating that the people who left the liberals were less in favour of free speech than those that remain.

Comments

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Makes sense as far as it goes - the people who voted for us as 'soft left' will have gone, while actual Liberals will have been more likely to stay (though sadly plenty of them will have left too).
That said, I wouldn't trust YouGov when it comes to party-political stats. All the pollsters vastly overestimated our share of the vote in May, and so they've changed their weighting systems, and YouGov's weighting is absurdly different from everyone else, so now they regularly have us five or six percent below ICM or Populus and four percent below Ipsos Mori (they all have about the same values for the Tories and Labour). Their individual surveys might be worthwhile, but when it comes to voting intention they're an outlier.

(That's not the mutterings of a Lib Dem who doesn't like their results, BTW - the other pollsters still have us down 10% or so since the election, which is hardly good - just a recognition that if one pollster (the least accurate at the election) has wildly different results then their methodology is probably questionable).

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the figures would have been had they been referring to Compton rather than Chambers; neither of whom, in the opinion of this ex-LibDem, should have been prosecuted.

[andrewducker]

Good question (and I wouldn't want either of them prosecuted either).

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Of course age is a factor. Age affects your perceptions of lots of things.

When I did jury servive, there were three members of the jury over 50. In one of the bits sitting in the jury room, all three of them agreed that we should find the accused guilty "because if he wasn't guilty of this, he'd admitted taking drugs, so should be taught a lesson. Drugs were for criminals"