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.