Betting on Clegg a non story‏

The sun has an exclusive story 'And it’s Kauto Star, Denman..and Nick Clegg’s fading ' But this is such a non story. The article states that 'Nick Clegg was left long-faced yesterday as bookies revealed a QUARTER of voters have never even heard of the Lib Dem leader.' But when you read on you discover that this was not a survey of the voting public but a Ladbrokes poll of 1,000 of their own punters. Not a surprised then that more know which horse is favourite to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Personally I have never heard of Kauto Star but then again I'm not a follower of horse racing.

So lets get this clear, this 'exclusive' story is not voters after all but Ladbrokes own punters who may vote. It's another example of a non story, which is spun and printed in one of Britain's biased newspapers.

Plenty of people don't know who many politicians are in general. Would every member of the public know who George Osborne is? I would be willing to bet that a significant percentage don't. A higher percentage of people didn't vote in the last general election 35.9% (of the people eligible to vote only 61.4% did). This was before the expenses scandal, so I would bet that many people who didn't vote have absolutely no interest in politics and therefore would not know or care who the Lib Dem leader is. How many of this 25% are the same people who didn't vote? I bet a high percentage. Do we really believe that everyone in the run up to the 2005 general election knew who Michael Howard was?

I expect this will be more and more the case at every general election unless we can get people switched on to politics. This seems unlikely because if you look at the democracies that don't have compulsory voting then we can see that interest (based on voting) has decreased. This is even the case when people were queuing to elect Barack Obama were the vote was less than even ours in the UK.