Interested in free speech, FOI. Personal account. "Cheerfully cynical"
Belfast
Joined November 2009
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Fair question, Alan, and I share your hope that the future could be good. But politics doesn't happen in a clean room. It's made of grievance, memory and rival accounts of the same events, and a poll that only touched the comfortable bits would be measuring a politics that doesn't exist.
If we all agreed, we'd all vote the same way and there'd be no point in elections or polls. Divergence of opinion is what gives politics its meaning. A pollster who steers clear of where the cracks run deepest is steering clear of the very thing they're there to measure.
Things you hold dear, I might despise. Things I enjoy might be vile to someone else. If "somebody finds it reprehensible" is the test for what can be asked, the most easily offended person in each community sets the agenda, and nobody will ever agree who that is. The only workable rule is to ask fairly about everything and let the answers speak.
Imagine a pollster saying "we should never touch health, it's too controversial", or a doctor saying "doctors disagree about this, so let's stay clear of it". We'd see straight away that it gets things backwards. Disagreement is a reason to handle a topic with care, not a reason to skip it.
Polling Drumcree isn't endorsing blame or reopening old fights. It's finding out where people stand. "Let's move on" is itself a claim, that people are ready to, and you can test that rather than assume it. If the poll offers an option to disagree, or to say the question shouldn't be asked, everyone who shares your view can be counted. If "move on" really is the majority view, the numbers will show it.
People have every right to say Drumcree, or whatever the issue of the season is, doesn't interest them, and a poll can record that too. But picture three people in a room. One says it doesn't matter to them, and the other two are still at loggerheads. The first person's indifference tells you about them, not about the other two.
If pollsters stay clear of these things, all it does is mask the fractures in our society. Imagine people with broken bones who never went to the hospital and just moaned about it at home: it wouldn't make the bones any less broken. Those fractures turn up on election day, and nobody should be surprised by a result the polls were too nervous to ask about.
Parties already commission private polling on exactly these subjects. If public pollsters steer clear, the information doesn't disappear, it just stops being public. Is that really the outcome we want? The parties know what's working on the fault lines, and everyone else is left in the dark.
Pollsters should be willing to cover any subject, not manicure their questions to suit your agenda or mine. – at Hookwood, South East
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: SF support surges as DUP hits 5-yr low & TUV rises in @LucidTalk poll. UUP down but still just ahead of unionist rivals as Alliance & SDLP fall 🧵
🟢SF 28% (+6)
🔷UUP 15% (-1)
🟠TUV 14% (+2)
◼️DUP 14% (-1)
🔴SDLP 11% (-2)
🟨Alliance 9% (-1)
belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/…
Andy Burnham still has this tweet up in support of Russell Brand – at Bolney, England
Depressing to see media mission to discredit someone who stops playing their game & uses celebrity to help others. Keep going @rustyrockets.
An English antiquarian map seller in Arundel described me as cheerfully cynical. I quite like that – at Arundel, England
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
I’ve never seen luvviness weaponised before, let alone to such spectacular effect.
Thanks to the @beltel for removing the pay wall on this article which informs you more about bowel cancer and it's symptoms – at Bolney, England
A GP from Co Down who had bowel cancer is encouraging more people to be aware of the signs of the disease, after a symptom as simple as severe tiredness led to his diagnosis tinyurl.com/y2f3y6sv
Was in Lyndhurst in the New Forest and saw these @AlexKane221b – at Lyndhurst, England
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
A giant poppy made from bales, built in a field at Crask Farm just outside Culbokie on the Black Isle in Scotland by farmer Myles Dillon, in tribute to everyone who has served in the armed forces.
Looks lovely x
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
John Lewis made a Christmas ad where a grandma gets told off by a talking toy dog for putting cash in her grandkids' cards. The store has a very good reason to want that cash.
Its own research says more than half of grandparents give money because they're not sure what to buy. That's a lot of Christmas spending that never gets anywhere near a John Lewis till.
And John Lewis really can't afford to lose it. Last year its department stores did £4.9 billion in sales and kept £58 million of it as adjusted operating profit. That's about a penny and a half on every pound. Then sales dropped 2% in the first half of this year as people stopped buying bigger stuff.
Hand a kid £50 in a card and it's probably going on Amazon or a Roblox top-up, nowhere near a department store.
So watch how the ad plays out. Gloria writes the cards and tucks the cash inside. Pickles, a toy dog voiced by Paul Whitehouse, comes to life, scolds her, and drags her off to John Lewis. On Christmas morning the grandkids open their cards and find them empty, and then Gloria unlocks her "Gran Cave" full of disco lights and presents she picked out herself. The money leaves the envelope and ends up in a John Lewis basket.
The dog doing all the lecturing is a Fisher-Price pull-along toy John Lewis has sold for 60 years, and yes, you can buy him. Kristin Scott Thomas's outfits and the stuff in Gloria's house are shoppable too.
That's what bugs people who grew up on these ads. Back in 2011 John Lewis ran The Long Wait, the one where a little boy is counting down to Christmas so hard you assume he's dying to open his presents. He wakes up, walks right past his pile, and runs to his parents with a gift he wrapped for them. The agency behind that one, Adam&Eve, spent 14 years building John Lewis Christmas around giving. John Lewis replaced them with Saatchi & Saatchi in 2023, and the stated goal for that first campaign was moving shoppers from "consideration to conversion."
The 2011 ad was set to Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want, and fifteen years later John Lewis picked You Can't Always Get What You Want for the one where grandma has to buy her way back into the room.
🚨BREAKING: The John Lewis Christmas Advert 2026 has become one of the worst reviewed in the stores history
The comments on YouTube have been TURNED OFF
There are currently 5 times the dislikes as there are likes
The Plot:
- Entitled children ignore their Grandmother, won't even hug her
- She tries to give them nice, simple, meaningful toys to play with, they ignore her
- She goes to John Lewis to buy expensive toys
- The kids now love her
It's an awful message featuring a diverse family as always
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
A brutal loss for her family & community. I hope it makes someone with symptoms get checked. I’m 5 years post treatment from stage 3. I was 55 had symptoms for 2 years & waited a long time for diagnosis. 3 women in my small town also had it at the same time as me, 2 are dead
Worth the read. It's behind the pay wall. Would love the @BelTel to make this important article free if possible. – at Swanage, England
A GP from Co Down who had bowel cancer is encouraging more people to be aware of the signs of the disease, after a symptom as simple as severe tiredness led to his diagnosis tinyurl.com/y2f3y6sv
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
The post of head of the Northern Ireland civil service has no formal “performance appraisal system” according to evidence at @NIACfEd today.
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧 retweeted
People invest too much in weddings and not enough in marriages.
(Bonus: this also serves as a political metaphor.)
