Hello, I'm Alva, and you're listening to the New States Reportcast.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Ben Walker, a data journalist at the New Statesman and

whole-watcher extraordinaire to talk through what was current and current Taiwan, by the

path of the Union like Louis, and you ask us, what's in the methodology that means some

holes are more encouraging to certain parties than others, and what sort of numbers do

we need to be looking for in voting intention polls to get a result that would not result

in a conservative majority.

So I'm delighted to be joined today by a regular guest on the New Statesman podcast, our data

journalist and polling guru Ben Walker, who's also the founder of Britain Elect, which

is the UK's largest poll aggregate.

So Ben, welcome back to the New Statesman podcast.

Thank you for inviting me, I look forward to alienating half a Twitter in the next few

minutes.

So Ben, maybe before we get into the current standing of the various political parties, I was

wondering, could you run us through what polls can tell us?

And then maybe crucially what they can tell us?

Key to polling is they should always be remembered, firstly as a science, because they're always

giving you, you see a poll and it's like conservative 36% labor 35%, always remember that

it's like, it has a margin of error.

Every poll has a margin of error, so the real actual result could be within that margin.

So conservative 36%, that could mean they could be between 39 and 33%, maybe theoretically,

you'll always remember as well that polling is a snapshot, not a prediction.

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