Is this a foretaste of what the rest of the UK will be like? The embargo on tonight’s MORI poll on voting intentions has been broken elsewhere and is in the public domain. Accordingly I feel that we ought to report it here as well. The big news is contained in the Westminster voting figures in the panel above and point to a LAB>SNP swing of just under 14% – a movement which if replicated on polling day would see…
Could this spice up the betting? The Facebook group of the campaign to “Keep General Election Night”has attracted almost 4,000 members in its first week, and those involved have begun surveying which seats might need to wait until Friday afternoon to know the identity of their new MP. I happen to be absolutely on the side of the traditionalists with this one – not least given that my new home is in a time zone where a late finishing Thursday…
Why doesn’t she take the trouble to look at the polling? This is a graph that was produced by John Cruddas for his big speech to the Compass conference during the week in an attempt to underline his case that there is a near-permanent progressive consensus in British politics. One of the participants, Guardian writer and former SDP-member, Polly Toynbee was reported as saying that “the graph showed that the Conservative Party had never, in the post-war era, had a…
Would this be as popular as their pre-2005 Iraq policy? One of the huge areas of government policy which is increasingly being opposed by voters is the continued deployment of British troops in Afghanistan. A YouGov poll for the Telegraph a week ago found a split of 26% in favour and 62% against to the question “Do you favour or oppose the continued deployment of British troops to Afghanistan?. Surprisingly the party whose voters are most in favour of pulling…
Ladbrokes Would such a plot make this market more attractive? With Ladbrokes re-opening their “Who’ll be PM at the end of the year” betting there’s news this morning of plan to give Labour MPs a secret vote when they could express their views on whether or not Gordon should lead Labour into the general election. According to Tim Shipman in the Mail “a senior backbencher is being lined up to call for Mr Brown’s head and give MPs the chance…
Commons Library Why the vast difference in rates? The growing “Keep General Election” night campaign has prompted an excuse from Newcastle upon Tyne about the difficulties they have because of their unusually high number of postal votes. I thought I would check the city’s figures and wow what a surprise. Look at those numbers above compared with the national average. The last general election in 2005 was the first one where the Labour government’s new postal voting arrangements were in…
FT online Or has the FT come to the wrong conclusion? There’s some research in the Financial Times from the the data service firm, Experian, that suggests that fewer people are being hit by the recession in the Labour held marginals than in other constituencies and the paper is speculating as to whether this is good news for Brown Central. The research shows that in those Labour seats which the party would lose with a swing of 6.5% – 8.25%…
Is he now facing up to to reality of what lies ahead? This evening I attended (that’s me in the blue shirt in the second row) a Cameron Direct town hall meeting in Bedford when the Tory leader fielded questions that hadn’t been submitted in advance from an audience which I guessed was less than 50% Conservative. This is all part of the by-election campaign that’s going on for the town’s elected mayor where his party is holding an open…