FOR anyone on the left, reading political coverage in the mainstream media can be quite a depressing experience. Daily headlines shout that Reform UK leads the latest opinion poll, will certainly win 400 seats at the next election (which will be shortly, not as is much more likely, in several years’ time), and Nigel Farage will be prime minister, if he can find the time between long boozy lunches and visits to Wetherspoons.

Meanwhile, anything and everything on the left is demonised.

It’s not new. Reading Tony Benn’s diaries covering the 1974-79 Labour government reveals many similarities. At one point, Benn notes that people have been raking through his bins in an effort to find something sensational to put on the front page of a paper.

In an earlier generation still, after Labour lost the 1959 general election to the Tories, there was an effort to build a new left to oppose the pro-Nato right-wing Labour leadership of Hugh Gaitskell.

The socialist historian and peace campaigner EP Thompson complained that left ideas were shut out of the mainstream media. Opinion polls produced not psephology but ephology. That is, instead of surveying public opinion, they endeavoured to lead it by the way questions were framed.

YouGov polls used to be regarded with suspicion by the left as they always seemed to give the Tories a lead. In 2025, that would be difficult, but YouGov has now become a commercial polling company. Its business interests suffer if it produces imaginative political polls.

Recently, it underlined just how polls can be skewed. Noting that those describing themselves as a feminist, if asked, were a minority, it looked at other ways of asking the same question. A question that asked if people thought that men and women should have equal rights in society, and this could be a definition of feminism, found that the numbers answering positively increased considerably.

A recent New Statesman article noted: “Though Reform now comfortably leads among every pollster, this is some way short of a truly popular revolt. Back in 1981, the SDP-Liberal Alliance, invoked again in recent months, once achieved a rating of 50.5 per cent; Reform is currently averaging 29 per cent.”

In a poll covering the period December 9-14 1981, the Alliance got 50.5 per cent. That was a high point, but scores in the higher 20 per cents were maintained through 1982. On March 25 1982, Roy Jenkins won the Glasgow Hillhead by-election for the SDP with a third of the vote on a three-way poll split.

In the 1983 general election, the Alliance came third with 25 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 27 per cent and the Tories’ 42 per cent.

The point is that even with poll ratings that suggest a potential election position for Reform in a first-past-the-post electoral system, that is no guarantee of sustained success, whatever Farage and his numerous media echo chambers may say.

While there is no question that, at the moment, the reactionary ideas of Reform have currency and are promoted as such in the media, there is no guarantee that this will be maintained.

Understanding the history of polls is important, but there is something else that is much more significant: organising and spreading the word on the ground.

The Leeds trade unionist Tom Maguire wrote to Edward Carpenter in November 1892: “This new party lifts its head all over the North. It has caught the people, as I imagine the Chartists did. And it is of the people — such will be the secret of its success. Everywhere its bent is socialist because socialists are the only ones who really have a message for it.”

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.