Member Poll: May 2012

Together, members of 38 Degrees decide what we campaign on. Regular member polling helps to provide a clear picture of what 38 Degrees’ key campaign priorities should be.

Sometimes these polls are sent to smaller groups within the whole membership to minimise the risk of people feeling “over-surveyed”. For example, May’s poll went to a randomised 50,000 members. Don’t worry if you didn’t receive this latest poll – the full membership will be polled regularly too.

If you’ve got a burning issue or a campaign idea you needn’t wait to be polled! Share it on the 38 Degrees Facebook page, Twitter, the blog, the website, or by emailing: emailtheteam@38degrees.org.uk

Here’s how the polling works. 38 Degrees office volunteers start by reading all of the ideas that have been suggested or flagged by members. From these a shortlist is drawn up. (For more information on how the team has sorted this data in past polls have a look at this blog post.)

Once the poll questions are finalised, they’re sent out via email and 38 Degrees members vote on the campaigns they think are most important.

In May the priorities (ranked here in order of “a lot” plus “a little”) are:

• Continue to demand a ban on secret lobbying of government by big business
• Continue the campaign to protect our NHS
• Continue to demand a real clamp-down on tax dodging
• Continue speaking up for our forests and challenge future attempts to sell them off
• Continue to campaign for media independence including protecting the BBC from political interference and challenging the government to distance themselves from Rupert Murdoch
• Campaign against excessive executive pay and bankers’ bonuses
• Campaign against the government’s invasion of internet privacy
• Demand that water companies spend some of their profits fixing leaks during the drought
• Undertake more customer-powered campaigns like The Big Switch
• Campaign against pay-day lenders who trap people in a spiral of debt
• Campaign against plans to privatise key bits of the police
• Oppose the dumping of 650,000 tonnes of asbestos in the Chew Valley near Bristol
• Campaign against the extraction of natural gas by fracking
• Ensure that nobody has to turn down a job because they can’t afford childcare
• Encourage the government to follow through on House of Lords reform
• Support moves to sell cigarettes in plain packaging to protect children from tobacco marketing
• Support proposals to make gay marriage legal
• Campaign against new rules that would make it harder for people on lower incomes to bring non-EU family members to the UK to live with them

Below is a graph of the poll results: