Wednesday 4 October 2023

Gully Foyle from Deep Space

Gully Foyle is a dedicated Brexiteer who tweets to his 10,000 followers from the Twitter handle @terraOrBust. He also has a page on the crowdfunding platform Buymeacoffee.com where his mission statement is “Broadcasting Good News About UK Global Trade.” You might think that he wouldn’t find very much good news to tweet about UK trade because it’s not that often you see any following Brexit. But you would be wrong. He is quite prolific. How does he do it? Actually, it’s not that hard. He invents it.

His profile says "Gully Foyle is my name, and Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, the stars my destination."  He sounds slightly spaced out to me and his outpourings often seem to suggest that he is.

Mr. Foyle (if that’s really his name) insists that trade with the EU is at record levels despite the ONS repeatedly saying we haven’t even got back to 2019 levels when you adjust for inflation, which he doesn’t.

With that many followers and some of them making donations he’s probably on his way to a living wage. In that respect he’s not unlike a lot of YouTube conspiracy theorists or any of several Fox News hosts in the US, broadcasting for money disinformation to gullible people which they often know to be untrue. And he’s good at it. Reading his Twitter feed, he puts out a lot of seemingly well-informed stuff claiming that the trade deals in Asia being signed up are fantastic for Britain.

He makes the same mistake as Margaret Thatcher only ten times worse. Like her, he assumes that British industry can boost its exports when a big market opportunity opens up. Thatcher thought that about the SM and he does about the CPTPP. Instead, we had a trade deficit with the EU - even under level playing field conditions. Now when the India deal we are going to be competing with people earning a couple of thousand dollars a year. Watch the trade deficit over the next few years.

Anyway, this isn’t about his tweets on trade but about a letter of complaint he’s sent to OFCOM about Robert Peston and ITV.  

On Monday Peston tweeted a graphic about ITV’s Youth Vote Tracker run by Savanta which showed that 82% of voters aged between 18 and 25 would vote to rejoin the EU in a new referendum. The data was compared with a similar poll done in April where the equivalent figure was 86% (-4). Support for staying out rose to 17% (+4).

All of this sent Gully Foyle into a rage. He described it all as ‘lies.’ 

He said on Twitter:

"Pretty much everything about this graph, the statements on the show about the graph, and even the text in the tweet describing the graph are a lie.

"Savanta released the actual polling data on their website this morning, so we can verify all of this.

- The question asked is a lie

- The sample size is a lie

- The returned results are a lie

- The results from April are a lie

- The statement that "82% of 18-25 year olds would vote to join" is a lie

And now he's sent a letter of complaint to OFCOM about it:

You can find the raw data on ITV's Youth Political Tracker for April HERE and for September HERE. 

In his letter he has 5 points. The first is a meaningless nit-picking quibble about the question, and the second is about the sample size where 296 of the 1021 were excluded because they said they wouldn't vote in a referendum. I'm not sure why he queries this since if they aren't voting what's the point in including them?

Next, he says only 46% - or 470 - of the original sample of 1021 say they would vote to rejoin. This is really an extension of his second point but he omits to say that by his reckoning the number who would vote to stay out is also smaller.

His fourth point is about whether the respondents were 'in' the UK or 'from' the UK and he claims fully a quarter were not from the UK and not eligible to vote in the April data, and he suggests the same in the September poll. I don't see where he gets this from at all and I would be amazed if Savanta, one of the most experienced pollsters in Britain allowed this to happen.

Fifth, he says the 82% figure quoted as being the number who would vote to join the EU is "not true."

And here we come to it. I think Gully Foyle is looking at the wrong table. ITV used Table 17 where the 82% figure is mentioned. The full question was:

If there was a referendum now on whether the UK should or should not join the EU tomorrow with the question, 'Should the United Kingdom become a member of the European Union or not become a member of the European Union?', how would you vote?

The base used was: All respondents likely to vote and expressing a voting intention (LTV weighted)

ITV/Savanta have used a weighted total of 522 'likely to vote and expressing a voting intention' with 425 (81.4%) saying they would vote to rejoin the EU. It's quite normal to exclude 'don't knows' and 'would not votes' in any polling, this is how the actual referendum votes were counted and how all elections are counted. I'm not sure what point he's trying to make. It's all desperate stuff.

I'll keep an eye out to see if he ever publishes OFCOM's reply to his letter. I am sure they will find little if anything wrong with ITV's data or presentation of it.

In any case, accusations of misrepresenting a poll are hard to take seriously from a man who makes a living out of doing it.

And by the way, his pinned tweet is a "Brexit Benefits List, see what you make of it:


Posted by at