Does anyone feel up to reporting the Express to the press regulator for this ridiculously misleading headline?

There's an article on the Scottish Daily Express website today with the title "Humiliation for SNP as Nigel Farage's Reform UK now level in shock new by-election poll".  This does not in fact refer to a full-scale poll, but to the Scottish subsample from the latest GB-wide More In Common poll.  It's obviously ludicrous to pass off a tiny subsample of 137 people, which is highly unlikely to have been structured and weighted correctly (as far as I'm aware only YouGov do that) as a "poll".  However, we know from past experience that the press regulator IPSO think it's totally fine for newspapers to mislead readers by reporting subsamples as if they're full-scale polls.  On this occasion, the Express have also reported the numbers accurately - they do show both the SNP and Reform on 24% apiece, although it took a hell of an adjustment for More In Common to get to that point.  Among likely voters, the SNP actually had a comfortable lead over Reform UK of 22% to 14%.  The discrepancy is caused by More In Common's approach to undecided voters - first of all a follow-up question tries to "force" undecided voters to make a choice, and if they still refuse to do so, they are then "assigned" to a party on the basis of a statistical model of how similar voters behave.  My question would be whether voters in Scotland are being assigned on the basis of how supposedly "similar voters" in England behave - if so, there's bound to be a pro-Reform distortion built in.  But that's an issue for More In Common, not for the Express.

Where I do think the Express have broken IPSO rules, though, is in the headline itself.  IPSO are clear that their code can be considered to have been breached if the text of the article does not support a claim made by the headline, and that is clearly the case here, because the More In Common poll is not a "by-election poll".  It does not relate to the Hamilton by-election in any way whatsoever.  It is not a poll conducted among residents of the Holyrood constituency of Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse asking for their voting intentions for the by-election next week.  Nor is it a national poll asking questions related to the by-election.  It is simply a Britain-wide poll asking for voting intentions for the next Westminster general election, expected in 2028 or 2029.    The Express are quite clearly trying to use the headline to give the false impression that there is a by-election poll showing the SNP and Reform level-pegging in Hamilton.  No such poll exists.

If you feel up to making a formal complaint to IPSO, the complaints form can be found HERE.  As regular readers will know, I've made complaints myself about the misreporting of polls in the past, with mixed results - one of my complaints against the Express was upheld, but IPSO bizarrely refused to force them to properly correct the inaccuracy.  It's probably better if the complaints don't always come from the same person.  If you do take the plunge, please let me know via my contact email address, which is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

If I don't hear from anyone by close of play today, I may take a deep breath and have a go myself.