Something more to argue about New Year’s Eve and a good moment to launch our General Election Prediction Competition. Apart from the honour and the recognition from your peers we are hoping that a sponsor will provide a suitable prize. At the moment the best we have got is a colour picture of Ken Livingstone with his autograph on it and a Tony Blair mug where the nose grows as you pour in hot water. Post your entries as a…
I am compiling a General Election Prediction competition which as well as the general forecasts has six or seven seat specific elements. At the moment I’ve got Bethnal Green & Bow (George Galloway); Cambridge (the most discussed seat on the site) ; Dorset West (Oliver Letwin’s and a LD decapitation target) ; Brent East (by-election follow-up) and St. Albans (possible tactical vote unwind) . I’d like interesting Scottish and Welsh seats as well as any other suggestions for seats that…
In his attempt to pull off an unprecedented and spectacular third General Election victory Tony Blair is making crime/law & order/ and immigration the centre pieces of Labour’s policy portfolio. These were the main items in the Queen’s Speech last month and they are the centre part of his New Year’s message, just published. Before the 1997 Election Blair had the brilliant “Tough on Crime – Tough on the Causes of Crime” rhetoric to underpin his appeal to both the…
One of the great pleasures of political gambling is when you find situations where whatever happens you end up a winner. With the news in the Sun today that David Blunkett will return to the Cabinet if Tony Blair wins the election then an interesting situation opens up. The current best price on Blunkett returning during 2005 is 4/1 which, given the Sun’s status as almost the “official mouthpiece of New Labour” for such things, makes that the best bet…
The recent speculation that Tony Blair is thinking of a snap election in the first quarter of the year has had no impact on the betting markets. The price on the election being in the April-June period of 2005 has barely moved from the 1/6 to 1/5 region and you can still get 15/2 on the poll being before March 31st. In a good analysis of the election date options the Independent columnist and former Tory MP, Michael Brown observes…
Have the polls really got better? Whenever we’ve criticised polling accuracy apologists for the industry have rushed to their defence saying that techniques have improved and things have got better since 2001 when the average overstatement of the Labour lead was 6.6%. But in a recent example since then, at the Scottish Parliament Elections last year, the overstatement by the conventional pollsters of the LAB-CON margin was two percentage points bigger than the national polls at the 1992 General Election,…
Charles Kennedy’s Catch-22 At their conference in Bournemouth in September the Lib Dems made great play of the fact that their goal was to replace the Tories as the party of opposition and they are still repeating the line, even today, which looks set to become a big plank of their General Election campaign. Given the current dynamic of the Tories remaining static and the big switch being between Labour and the LDs then the party is likely to end…
Telegraph commentator says LDs might be a good buy We don’t know whether Tony Blair is a regular on the site yet but a feature in the Daily Telegraph today by George Trefgarne states that “For real political anoraks, the website of choice is politicalbetting.com.” Whether the thousands of users who come onto the site each day share that view of themselves we do not know but there is little doubt that a huge amount of detailed knowledge about what…