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Month: November 2009

UPDATED: Sorry folks – We’ve been subject to an elaborate hoax

UPDATED: Sorry folks – We’ve been subject to an elaborate hoax

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CON ???? LAB ???? LD ???? OTHERS ????? Only detail so far – “Tories 16% ahead” According to the blog of the Independent’s political editor, Andrew Grice, there’s a Comres poll in his paper tomorrow that will have the Tories 16 percent ahead. That compares with the C39-L25-LD17 from the most recent survey from the firm where the fieldwork finished a fortnight ago. (HAT-tip Planetnokia) So it looks as though ComRes is in the same broad area as PB’s exclusive…

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Stand by all you punters on northern seats

Stand by all you punters on northern seats

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Is Labour improving on the PH marginals poll? Thanks to Wibbler on the previous thread for spotting this – which looks intriguing particularly because the last major marginals poll that had a lot of detail from the north, the PoliticsHome one in September, showed a disproportionate move from Labour to the Tories. It had LAB>CON swings of around the 10% mark in the North-West, West Yorkshire and the North-East and suggested that at least 31 seats could change hands. It’s…

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Has Johnson made the wrong decision over Gary?

Has Johnson made the wrong decision over Gary?

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BBC News Could there be an electoral price to pay? If the Radio 5Live phone in that I was listening to this morning is anything to go by then home secretary and former Labour leadership favourite, Alan Johnson, has provoked a mass of anger over his decision to allow the extradition to the US of hacker, Gary McKinnon. He’s the man with Asperger’s syndrome, who is accused of breaking into US military computers in his search for evidence of UFOs….

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05/05/05: When a 2.9 percent Tory deficit became 6.1

05/05/05: When a 2.9 percent Tory deficit became 6.1

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House of Commons research paper Can we expect a big shake-up in the boundary system? The above is part of a table that is featured in a House of Commons research paper and covers just about all the statistics that you’ll ever want about May 5th 2005. For me the striking feature is the contrast between the actual vote shares chalked up by the parties across Britain and the comparison with the final column. The latter is calculated by averaging…

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Could this impact on the election outcome?

Could this impact on the election outcome?

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SkyNews Or will it all be forgotten by May? The latest stage of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war gives a sense of problems ahead for the government over what turned out to be Tony Blair’s signature policy – the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of course the main actor, Tony Blair, is no longer on the scene and it was all a relatively long time ago. But the circumstances now being described of how the UK got into…

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Can you suggest a non-voting question?

Can you suggest a non-voting question?

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Is there an area of opinion that we could test? As part of its arrangement with PB, Angus Reid Strategies, have offered to include one or two non-voting questions in the weekly surveys they do from their polling panel. These could relate to current issues or there might be more general points that it would be worth testing. The idea is simple – we would play round with a few ideas on a thread and I’d put forward a couple…

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What are these doing to the seat calculators?

What are these doing to the seat calculators?

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Could their rise be disguising the scale of the swing? The big trend from almost all the polls in recent weeks week has been the increase in the share for “others” – UKIP, the Greens, the BNP and SNP/PC in Scotland and Wales. In some surveys they are now more than double the 8.2% that they got between them at the 2005 general election A question for anybody wanting to bet on and/or predict the outcome is whether these historically…

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The “Super Six Predictions” part 3

The “Super Six Predictions” part 3

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This is the third and final part of the general election constituency bets by half a dozen regulars who call themselves, with appropriate modesty, The PB Super Six. Thanks to Peter the Punter and ScottP for getting this together. The one I like is Norwich South where the incumbent is Charles Clarke – the former home secretary and long-standing Gordon Brown critic. Look how we have four separate views of the outcome. This is the Norwich South 2005 notional result…

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