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I am delighted to announce that Nick Sparrow, formerly the head pollster at ICM, has accepted an invitation to write some articles on polling for PB. To my mind Nick is the UK’s leading political pollster and in the mid-90s pioneered the system that we now know as “past vote weighting” to ensure political balanced samples. It was he who argued that the 1992 general election polling debacle was the result of samples based on demographic weightings alone no longer…

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Can Labour’s peers stop the bill? The marathon and unprecedented overnight sitting of the House of Lords is still going on. As I write at 6.25am, Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader and not someone known for his brevity, has just got to his feet so one can assume that there’s a lot of life in this yet. Whenever things have been put to the vote the government has had comfortably majorities. The debate on the government’s plans for an…

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Guest slot by Chilon on the Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson has an awful lot to be proud of. Orphaned at 12, raised by his 15 year old sister in a south London council flat, the shelf stacker and postman who rose to lead his union, Alan Johnson is from a different mould to leading Labour politicians of today. As a minister, his natural confidence and panache when roused was clear – most notably in his willingness to take on Labour’s…

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How much of the red support is from the “can’t be arsed”? One of the great things about the way Comres sets out the detailed data from its polls is that it includes a line on what those who didn’t vote at the last May say they plan to do next time. And from the latest poll we find that a move that I’ve identified before is that a significant part comes from those who didn’t vote at the general…

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