This TV review first appeared in The Andersonstown News
THE VIEW (BBC ONE) was thigh-deep in pie- charts last week.
The man who gave birth to the pie-charts, Prof Pete Shirlow, was a bit testy about criticism. Was he satisfied his poll was accurate? “Of course I am. We’ve been doing these kinds of polls for twenty years.”
He directed us to four pie charts.
The first was views on ‘protocol mitigations’. (That means protocol changes but when you’re an academic you use words like ‘mitigations’)/ It seems 36% of the DUP, 31% of the UUP and nearly 25% of the TUV are positively disposed towards the changes made in the protocol. “No mass rejection there” Carruthers noted.
News Letter editor Ben Lowry said he was surprised and wasn’t surprised by the poll.
BBC wise woman Sarah Creighton said the poll showed the DUP didn’t speak for the people of our stateen.
The second pie asked about keeping Stormont standing until the May elections. The DUP was 62% for keeping it going, the TUV just under 50%. So while the leader of the DUP has talked about collapsing Stormont if the protocol isn’t changed or scrapped, the strong majority of his voters think otherwise.
Editor Ben said he was surprised about views on the protocol but not surprised by the wish to keep Stormont standing, And sure hadn’t Sinn Féin threatened to collapse Stormont if it didn’t get an Irish Language Act?
The third pie showed voting intentions in May, with Sinn Féin scoring 23.5% and the DUP 20.6%. Quicker than a rat up a drainpipe, Editor Ben declared this pie was not good for the Shinners, because a Lucid Talk poll had shown them 12% ahead, now they were just 2.9% ahead.
The fourth and final pie was, would you favour a border poll tomorrow. Indeed, Virginia – a daft question about an impossible event. In any case, the comforting news for unionists was that 58.6% of people here want to stay in the UK. The SDLP, we were given to understand, were a substantial part of those who favour a poll but not tomorrow.
Let me make an appeal: Prof Pete, Prof Pete, Prof Pete – have you gone mad? Anyone who can tie their own shoelaces knows that a poll tomorrow would be doing what the Brexiteers did – jumping off a cliff without bothering to check your parachute.
The oddest thing in this pie-feast, though, was that all those informed voices -and I counted about six – navigated THE VIEW without once using the B word. No, Virginia, the B is for Brexit. Has the B(ritish)BC now added that word to its fat manual of Words You Must Never, Never, Never, Never Use on Air?
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