….but I’ll be otherwise engaged The big polling news this evening should be from Populus – the firm’s first public survey for nearly two months. Fieldwork for the last one finished on July 19th and the shares were C38-L26-LD20. The Tories, surely, must be hoping to be in the 40s like they are with all the other pollsters. I’ll be doing a full thread later but I’m tied up this evening with a big political event in Bedford where I…
A few bets for consideration at home and abroad Following up on the recent autumn preview, here are a few betting opportunities that you might like to consider before the political scene starts to hot up again – naturally the usual caveats apply. Feedback on individual selections welcomed. Norway Norway votes on 14th September and didn’t get covered in the autumn preview, but Labour’s Jens Stoltenberg to be re-elected Prime Minister is 2/5 (in from 1/2) with Ladbrokes and looks…
Wikipedia Is Labour good value at 8/13? So far I’ve not got excited about the pending by-election in Glasgow NE – the seat made vacant by the resignation of the speaker, Michael Martin. Because of the tradition that major parties do not contest the Speaker’s seat there is no direct comparison with what happened at the general election. Martin stood as the speaker not as Labour candidate. He got 53.3% of the votes with the SNP, who did stand, in…
Tory leaflet – Cheadle by-election June 2005 Was this the dirtiest campaign since the general election? There have been two over-whelming themes in the series of Westminster by elections during the 2005 parliament: the intertwined stories of the re-emergence of the Conservatives as a party capable of winning seats and the difficulties that the Liberal Democrats had in maintaining their historically excellent record of doing very well in this form of contest. For the latter Westminster by-elections had over the…
Why was that result so out of line? Just look at the table above showing the change in the actual number of votes cast for Labour in by elections in the current parliament. The list only features those constituencies that the party was defending and the change is compared with the general election. As is generally accepted parties in government do badly in such contests and Labour has lost half of them. But what happened at Glenrothes last November? It…
CON 42 (+4) LAB 24 (+1) LD 18 (-4) But was it more than just the “Norwich Effect”? This clearly is a very good poll for the Tories who are back in the 40s after five consecutive surveys from the pollster that had them below the magical 40 number including one where they had slumped to just 30%. The field-work started on Friday and went through to Sunday when the party, and particularly Cameron, was getting a lot of favourable…
BedfordToday Or will the BBC give her “special treatment”? During the Norwich North campaign one of the most disgraceful acts by the media was the way that the BBC decided that Craig Murray – the former British ambassador sacked for speaking out against torture – was not a serious candidate. This was despite the fact that he’d held into his deposit standing against Jack Straw at the general election and that he’s built up a campaigning operation on human rights…
And if he can’t fight on this then what? For the past three elections Labour core message to get its vote out was that a Tory government would make cuts that would eat into the heart of public services. This worked so brilliantly for so long long that until very recently the new Tory team, Cameron-Osborne, refused even to counter discussions about their post general election plans if this involved hacking back on Labour spending commitments on key services. That’s…