A recent poll, widely reported on the media, showed a majority of 56% now support the war on Iraq. The source for this poll is not a respected organisation like MORI but the website YouGov. YouGov have been the major promoters of 'e-democracy', a buzzword which essentially proposes that consumer surveys on the Internet could cure so-called 'voter apathy'. The major force behind YouGov? Mister Peter Kellner, former Maoist, now a focus-group obssessed hack in the service of New Labour.

As a YouGov 'voter' myself I can confidently say that whenever an important poll is on the website registered voters are notified by email. So presumably I received an email about the polls on Iraq? Er, no, not one... When you register on the website you fill in a questionaire in order to build a 'demographic profile'. Given that my profile presumably appears fairly left-wing it would be fairly obvious that I'm against the war. It is convienient then that I did not get a chance to vote on the war. This may seem paranoid but, to quote William Burroughs, 'a paranoid is someone who knows what's going on'...

YouGov's website states that f 'respondents are invited from our panel into closed-access surveys, and which are then weighted'. Who chooses the respondents? Who decides which opinions should be 'weighted' (i.e. artificially boosted)? Should we trust polls from organisations with links to New Labour?