Mail Online Will the Chancellor be the one who brings down Brown? For someone like me who has been a Brown-sceptic for at least four years it is blindingly obvious that Labour would fare better in the coming election with a different leader. Mind you I felt the same in the run-up to Brown’s coronation in 2007 and I was wrong then about what Labour MPs would do. It seemed impossible, in my view, that those who wanted to keep…
Commons Library Why the vast difference in rates? The growing “Keep General Election” night campaign has prompted an excuse from Newcastle upon Tyne about the difficulties they have because of their unusually high number of postal votes. I thought I would check the city’s figures and wow what a surprise. Look at those numbers above compared with the national average. The last general election in 2005 was the first one where the Labour government’s new postal voting arrangements were in…
FT online Or has the FT come to the wrong conclusion? There’s some research in the Financial Times from the the data service firm, Experian, that suggests that fewer people are being hit by the recession in the Labour held marginals than in other constituencies and the paper is speculating as to whether this is good news for Brown Central. The research shows that in those Labour seats which the party would lose with a swing of 6.5% – 8.25%…
Is he now facing up to to reality of what lies ahead? This evening I attended (that’s me in the blue shirt in the second row) a Cameron Direct town hall meeting in Bedford when the Tory leader fielded questions that hadn’t been submitted in advance from an audience which I guessed was less than 50% Conservative. This is all part of the by-election campaign that’s going on for the town’s elected mayor where his party is holding an open…
CON 45 LAB 25 LD 18 Introducing an exclusive new polling service from Ipsos-MORI In a post last week I argued that what we needed was some England-specific polling because this is where the big battles will take place at the general election. England has 533 of the 650 seats that will be at stake and proportionately more marginals than in the others parts of the UK. Also in England there is not the SNP/PC dimension which adds to the…
BBC News
Will this still stand when the results are known? With YouGov yesterday showing a Labour share of 28% while ComRes for the Indy this morning puts it at 24% I thought it might be useful to remind ourselves of the “PB Golden Rule of Polling”. This is based on the the polling record at every single major election since the 1980s where the survey with Labour in the least favourable position has been the best indicator of voting intention. There…