Thursday, April 3, 2008

The "National Identity" poll results.

A bit quicker than Zimbabwe- official results from my national identity poll (on the left of this post) have now been issued:

Those of you who considered yourselves:

Irish were 31% of the total
British: 30%
Scottish: 20%
N.Irish : 14%
English: 10%
Welsh: 4%

The official monitors reported some incidents of vote rigging, in particular from a Scottish nationalist site which shall remain anonymous(;), but overall, they've considered it a fair and legal election.

So, total vote was just under 300, which I’d love to claim as my daily readership (divide it by ten and you’d be a bit closer to the reality), but when various sites (notably that anonymous Scottish Nat site, Campaign for an English Parliament, Slugger O’Toole, PULSE, Irish Blog Awards, Irish Politics.ie, Three Thousand Versts and Everything Ulster) linked into some of my posts, then generally the figures changed the specific way you’d expect with the new and (sadly!) one-off readers.

Anyway, the interesting (and encouraging) aspect for me was that 30% British vote. The UK political blogosphere is dominated by nationalist blogs and commentators; whilst the main NI blog Slugger O’Toole has several Unionists putting up posts, it has only a small minority of Unionists actually commenting on those posts and those English, Scottish and Welsh blogs which do take an interest in the future in the UK are overwhelmingly anti-Unionist in tone. But if over a third taking part in this poll are happy to call themselves British (bearing in mind as I said before that many were directed here from pro-nationalist sites), then all is clearly not lost in our online battle. That leads onto something that I (and I know one or two others) have been mulling over for a while- a means by which we can capitalise on and perhaps coral together the pro-Union blog voices and opinions on a UK-wide basis- but I need to think it through a bit more and ask opinions from a couple of people, so more on that anon.

The other curious fact, perhaps, is that of those 89 who declared themselves British, by my reckoning 53 considered themselves as "solely" British- I’m not really sure what to make of that and it is entirely possible I got the maths wrong!!

Finally, thanks to all who took part and another poll is on the way soon.

4 comments:

Owen Polley said...

O'Neill - also some of us voted for more than one option, so an answer for Irish for example does not necessarily denote someone who does not see themselves as British.

Anonymous said...

O'Neill - also some of us voted for more than one option, so an answer for Irish for example does not necessarily denote someone who does not see themselves as British.

Surely that skews the results a little bit so. Maybe a more flexible British/Irish option could have been included for those who wanted to acknowledge both identities.

Anonymous said...

Maybe it should have been written thus:

British (solely)
English & British
Scottish & British
Irish/Ullish & British
Welsh & British
English (solely)
Scottish (solely)
etc...

O'Neill said...

Chekov and Anonymous
Points taken ( and I was one of those who voted that way!).

But considering British was the only identity that would have been likely to have been chosen in conjunction with another identity, I think that 53 is still a correct number?

Kloot
It was possible to click more than one identity, although I should have perhaps made that a bit clearer on the actual poll.