Straw poll (updated)

I think this has just totally killed my interest in polls of this sort. The New Statesman's readers have been sending in their nominations for 'heroes of our time' and John Pilger comes fourth. Margaret Thatcher comes fifth. George Galloway comes somewhere, would you believe it? Nineteenth, in fact. Which means that he beats Amartya Sen, Desmond Tutu, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison and Andrew Flintoff, among others. I have seen the light - polls, I renounce them.

One interesting snippet:

[W]hat are we to make of the absence of Gordon Brown, especially when his old rival, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, is in our top 20? Lists such as this may be arbitrary and entirely unscientific, and they may even be at the mercy of manipulation, but they are also indicative of a mood and a climate, and if I were Brown and I were, in the argot, seeking to renew the Labour Party, I'd be disturbed that not a single reader of this magazine considered my work and purpose to be in any sense heroic.

Update at 1.55 PM: From a distraught reader:

No no no no no - you must not renounce them. Pleeeese!

Maybe I need to conduct a poll on the issue.