Google News search -“Ed Miliband” Is visibility always the problem when you are opposition leader? On the face of it yesterday was a pretty bad news day for the coalition. There was Boris and “call me Dave” having their huge public spat over housing benefit, a suggestion that the child benefit move for higher rate tax-payers might be a lot harder to achieve than was first thought, and the PM fighting a tough battle in the EU. Yet the main…
Enter this evening’s quickie competition The publishers of the Kavanagh/Cowley General Election 2010 book have given PB a copy for a competition prize. So can you guess the numbers in tonight’s YouGov daily poll which will be out at 10pm. Please post on the thread giving the shares for the three main parties and the government approval/disapproval figures. The competition will be decided by who is the least wrong. So if you have CON 41: LAB 38: LD11 and 41%…
Cambridge University Press Could your politics be determined by your genetic make-up? Like most PB regulars, I guess, I’ve always assumed that a person’s political ideology is determined by family environment and friends. New research suggests something different. For liberals, at least, may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene…
Populus poll All voters Public Sector Private Sector Retired voters CON 37 23 45 44 LAB 38 50 30 37 LD 15 17 15 10 Do people vote according to their current situation? The above table has been produced from data from this week’s Populus poll for the Times and shows the voting intention shares broken down in terms of respondents employment sector or whether or not they are retired. As can be seen there’s a massive gap between private…
Betfair Politics Betfair Politics We are less than a week away from next Tuesday’s elections in the US when two of the key issues will be whether the Democrats lose control of both the House and the Senate. So far, at least, the markets think that the Republicans will take control of the House but not the Senate. So far there’s not been a lot of betting in the UK though that could grow sharply in the final few days….
Should EdM be thinking of the wider audience? In his summary of today’s PMQ encounter between Cameron and Ed Miliband the Indy on Sunday’s John Rentoul concluded:- “..Good tactics on Miliband’s part; poor strategy. He succeeded in winding up Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, standing at the end opposite the Speaker’s chair, shouting, “Absolute rubbish!†He succeeded in dividing the left-wing of the Liberal Democrats from their colleagues on the Government benches. (Miliband had a good line about…
What are the dangers in getting tough? Maybe I’m being unfair to suggest that there is perhaps nothing that pleases Daily Mail readers more than reading headlines like this morning’s about the efforts to tighten up on who should receive the £95-a-week Employment and Support Allowance – which is replacing incapacity benefit. Phrases like “weeding out the work-shy” are powerful and resonate, surely with the audience. The Mail highlights new statistics showing that 640,000 out of about 840,000 who applied…
Is the plan a big bang rather than a dribble? We all know that a key part of the coalition’s electoral reform package is to reduce the commons from the current 650 seats to 600 all apart from one or two of the same size. What I understand tonight is that next September there’s going to be a big announcement when the boundaries of all the new seats will be revealed all at once. Until now the process has been…