Browsed by
Month: March 2005

Whatever happened to UKIP?

Whatever happened to UKIP?

Have they been beaten off by the Kilroy-Silk, Sykes and Crosby shows?. Just 22 weeks ago today UKIP pushed the Tories into 4th place in the Hartlepool by-election. A couple of days later YouGov and Populus recorded Tory shares of 28 and 29%. The talk on the site and elsewhere was of a UKIP-driven “Tory meltdown” with many contributors predicting double figure vote shares for the anti-EU party. Then the tensions between Robert Kilroy-Silk and the UKIP leadeship got bigger,…

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Could Blair may face a Martin Bell-like challenger in Sedgefield?

Could Blair may face a Martin Bell-like challenger in Sedgefield?

Anybody interested in the Blair’s majority in Sedgefield market should read this by Michael White, the Guardian’s political editor. Tony Blair faces the prospect of a celebrity anti-war candidate seeking to unseat him in his constituency stronghold of Sedgfield at the coming general election if a suitably wholesome figure can be found to follow Martin Bell’s 1997 example. The chances of Britain waking up on May 6 with a Labour government but no elected Labour leader remain largely in the…

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New markets come thick and fast

New markets come thick and fast

Anybody would think that there’s an election coming up! With the bookies trying to repeat the bonanza they enjoyed with the US presidential race lots of effort is going on to create betting interest on May 5, if that is when it is. The challenge is that unlike last November the UK election is seen as a foregone conclusion – the only question at issue being the size of Blair’s majority. IG Index has just opened this a a spread…

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How to improve your YouGov ratings

How to improve your YouGov ratings

Get invited more and increase your weighting Ten days ago I reported here how in recent surveys the weighting given to Sun readers was almost double that attached to Guardian and Indy readers. After doing that piece I decided to see if I could improve the chances of me being invited to take part in polls by changing the basic information that YG have stored on me and, presumably, is used to determine which of the 50,000+ members on their…

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