Another observation on Opinion Leader Research and the Treasury

Apparently, Opinion Leader Research - who people might remember is headed by long standing Labour Party consultant, member of the Smith Institute Advisory Committee and friend to Gordon Brown, Deborah Mattinson - has received further taxpayer money to the the tune of £153,470. This was for undisclosed research it carried out for the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

Going back over some answers on this subject in Hansard, there also seems to be a bit of an inconsistency between answers given by the Treasury Minister, John Healey. In March, when asked about how much the Treasury spent on polling service from Opinion Leader he said the "Treasury has not commissioned any opinion polling in the past three years" and then referred back to an answer he gave on December 4th 2006.

That answer in December was to Mark Francois, and at that time he said that over the last three financial years "the Treasury has employed Opinion Leader Research Ltd. to conduct research on public attitudes towards public services and to inform decisions in the run up to the 2005 Budget (£19,021 in total); and to run workshops for the Financial Inclusion Taskforce (£133,237). The costs stated are excluding VAT".

Now, if someone were to play semantics here, one could argue that "research" is not "opinion polling", therefore there is no inconsistency. However, semantics and credulity are not really happy bed fellows. "Research on public attitudes" is, at the end of the day, research of public opinion, which will, effectively, result in a poll of sorts. Of course, the academic social scientists would probably dispute that on a semantic point, but any normal person would not.

That's not to say of course that John Healey has lied to Parliament. But it does seem that the demarcation between lying and misleading by way of semantics is a fuzzy one.