Fun Online Polls: EU Referendum and West Ham's next manager

The result in last week's Fun Online Poll was finely balanced:

Would the EU be able to pump out enough propaganda in the run up to a referendum to persaude us to vote to stay in?

Probably yes - 49%
Probably not - 51%

IMHO, the whole thing's a bit chicken-and-egg:

1. There are plenty of people who have been campaigning steadfastly for a referendum (and thereby focus less on the actual 'issues'), but we know that They would only hold one if They were pretty sure They could pull off a result like the FPTP/AV referendum, i.e. bombard us with simple - yet patently untrue - slogans and get the result They want.

2. The alternative approach is not to waste time campaiging for a referendum as such, but to explain to as many people as you can what the EU is really all about (power, money and corporatism; dressed up with a bit of Greenery and Equality). But let's imagine that somehow most people woke up to this and there were a comfortable majority (say 70%) in favour of 'Out'? What are then the chances of a referendum being held..? Exactly.

See also Witterings' musings on the topic.
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Going by the amount of coverage in the back pages of yesterday's and today's papers, one of the burning issues of the day appears to be who will replace Avram Grant as manager of West Ham football club.

So let's see if that 'wisdom of crowds' thing actually works in practice - vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

My money is on Steve McLaren, for the simple reason that he has openly stated he does not want the job; in the footballing world, what this usually means is "I'm so confident I'll get the job that I can play hard to get, and thereby haggle myself an even more generous salary."