What do the Lib Dems do about evaporating support? Nick Clegg may have brought the Liberal Democrats into Government, but his party can only defy political gravity for so long. As one colleague said to me recently ‘let’s not forget that the Lib Dems won more seats led by a drunk Charlie Kennedy than it did with a sober Nick Clegg’. The drama of the coalition has in many ways masked the failure of the Liberal Democrats to meet expectations…
See the blog of the Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh.
Does the focus on marginals miss the nature of electoral reform? There has been much discussion of the Lord Ashcroft commissioned poll, undertaken in the marginals by Populus, which seeks to examine what would have happened if 125 key marginals had used Alternative Vote (AV) instead of FPTP (First Past The Post) to elect their MP. The article on ConservativeHome can be found here, while analysis by Anthony Wells can be found here. Headline results suggest that the Tories would…
Candidate Membership MPs/MEPs Trade Unions Electoral College David Miliband 34.9 38.87 26.08 33.28 Ed Miliband 30.8 27.94 39.5 32.75 Diane Abbott 20.4 6.07 15.23 13.90 Andy Burnham 9 13.77 12.87 11.88 Ed Balls 4.9 13.36 6.32 8.19 But are the brothers really neck and neck? There’ve been sharpish moves to EdM overnight on Betfair following a projected result published on the Left Foot Forward, the blog edited by Will Straw. On Monday EdM was trading in the 3.75 – 3.8…
BBC News Almost certainly the key moment of this evening’s Obama/Cameron news conference were the comments on the decision by the Scottish government last year to free Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and allow him to return to Libya. The condemnation from both leaders was strong and forthright and the PM has promised a review of the case to provide further information. It was, of course, the Brown government that was in power when the controversial decision was made. This has also…
Is this what Blair/Brown did? The announcement by George Osborne that he’s setting up the grandly titled “Office for Tax Simplification (OTS) sounds all well and good. The objective appears a good one and the announcement itself provides a further peg to have a go “at the last lot”. But isn’t the manner of today’s development straight out of the NuLab playbook? You identify a “good cause” and look as though you are trying to address it through the setting…
http://www.populuslimited.com/politics-category.html Is this another reason not to sign up? One aspect of the paywall debate and the challenge that newspapers face with declining circulations is that budgets for polling can suffer. Carrying out a 1,500 sample telephone poll, as Populus used to do for the Times every month, is a costly business and you can see this being scaled back. The last one from the firm, according to its website featured above, was before the general election. All this is…