Can we get consistency on the 2005 notionals?
Shall we now stick with Press Association’s “official list”?
As I’m sure most PBers will know the next election will be fought in England and Wales on new boundaries. That’s fine except when we try to predict seats for betting an other purposes we need to know what happened last time.
And here we can run into some massive confusion because there are at least three sets of 2005 notionals available online and they can all be showing very different figures.
Take the popular betting seat of Morley and Outwood in West Yorkshire where the leading Labour minister and likely leadership contender, Ed Balls, is trying to ensure that he’ll continue to be an MP and we get three very different 2005 outcomes.
Just look at the different notional majorities above. Electoral Calculus has it at 26.5%; UKPollingReport at 24.6% while the official Press Association list, compiled by Thrasher and Rallings, has it at just 20.9%.
There are dozen of examples like this but I’ve chosen the one from the seat of the ambitious Children’s Secretary.
For the future on PB my intention is stick with the official PA list. This will be the one that the media will use and should avoid confusion.