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YouGov Mask Poll Nonsense

5 July 2021

YouGov, the go-to company for garbage statistics and opaque, small cherry-picked sample-size percentage polls founded by the current Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi and used all the time by the Government and mainstream media are once again attempting to convince the world that the entire UK population holds a certain opinion based on a miniscule sample.

Today the BBC (of course) reports “Most Britons in favour of keeping masks mandatory” and this is based on an opinion poll by… yes the State’s trusty pollster YouGov. What is meant by “trusty” in this context is not that they are actually trustworthy, honest, transparent and so on, but that the Government can always trust YouGov to find the opinions they need to feed the narrative they want.

But, does the claim that “there is clear support for continuing to wear masks” really stack up? The YouGov poll says that 71% of Britons think that “masks should continue to be mandatory on public transport for some time”, which is not quite the same as “most Britons in favour of keeping masks mandatory”. But let’s overlook the deceitful wordplay and pretend for a moment they are the same thing, that the headline was indeed what the polls asked, which it isn’t.

71% sounds like a compelling figure, and the ever-helpful split of voters is intended to assure the public this is a non-partisan, across the political spectrum thing and therefore a good representative sample that could appropriately be used to extrapolate the opinions of the entire United Kingdom from. They don’t mention how many non-voters, or non-State-worshippers were in favour but presumably a company named YouGov is not remotely interested in the opinions of anyone not prostrating themselves before the Holy Church of the State.

According to Worldometer the UK population (at the time of writing) is 68,248,928 and the YouGov poll sample size in this case, according to the BBC was 2,749. The figure 2,749 is 0.004% of 68,248,928 so what YouGov are trying to pass off as “most Britons” is 71% of four thousandths of a percent of the UK population, or roughly 1,952 people. A percentage that small is quite difficult to picture, so to add some perspective to this, here is a simple graphic to illustrate what 71% of 0.004% looks like next to 100%, and you can decide for yourself if you think it could possibly be considered a representative sample size and truly reflect the opinions of the nation.

The only way you could think that is if you really thought there were only three kinds of people in the UK, those being Conservative voters, Labour voters and Lib-Dem voters. If you actually live in the real world, or are not attempting to dishonestly portray some hand-picked tiny fraction as being representative of the whole you’ll see this for what it is… yet more garbage propaganda.