Upheaval for Labour punters in Commons seat markets Big changes are going on in the Commons seat spread markets to take account of the reduction in the number of Scottish seats at the next election. Two markets have been suspended and another has seen big changes to take account of the new House of Commons which will have 13 fewer MPs. The Bet365 seat market is not now available The Sporting Index spread market has been suspended – we assume…
Which party will benefit most from the anti-hunting move? Whatever you might think of him you have to concede that Tony Blair is an extraordinary political strategist and he would not be pushing the hunting ban within a year of the General Election if he didn’t think it would help Labour at the ballot box. The veteran Labour MP, Dennis Skinner, put his finger on it when he told MPs earlier in the year – “there is not a subject…
bbc One of the UK’s leading experts on elections, Professor John Curtice, has added his weight to the view that we might be heading for a hung parrliament. In a powerfully argued feature in today’s Independent (it’s in the premium section so you have to pay to read it!) Curtice takes to task the view of “the Westminster village” that “theTories are going nowhere, so therefore Labour must be comfortably set for a third victory in a row. Yet such…
Party workers win votes and seats With the spread market Labour price moving down and the election appearing even tighter the robustness of the party organisations is going to come under more scrutiny because this can decide seats. There’s absolutely no point in people supporting you if on the day they do not go to the polling station to put an X next to your candidate. Good work on the ground is vital and effective party machines can and do…
Turning conventional thinking on its head The conventional thinking that Tony Blair is certain to be returned with a workable majority even if Labour ’s vote is level with the Tories in the low 30s could be turned on its head by two “tactical voting unwinders” that Politicalbetting users are developing to help forecast the coming election. It is the belief in Blair’s total invulnerability that dominates the betting, the attitude of the media and mostly the way the Prime…
bbc Labour can no longer be considered a certainty We are changing our long-standing call that Labour will win most seats at the General Election because the odds are now tighter than the risk of them not doing it. All bets are about judging risk against the return and recent events have moved far enough for us to recommend a more cautious approach to backing Labour. The current best Labour price is 2/7. Any Labour bet less than 1/2 is…
New poll shows a Hung Parliament now a probality not a possility A Populus poll, just out, shows that Labour has lost the support of LD voters who at the last ’97 and ’01 General Elections were prepared to switch parties to help get Tories out. It shows that the scale of the ‘tactical vote unwind’ is at a level far bigger than anybody envisaged and means that Labour stands to lose far more seats than a calculation based on…
Looking at the British political scene from a sunny French beach it’s clear that’s what’s changed in the past 2 years is that Blair’s adventure with George Bush has cost him the support of the chattering classes. It was these groups’ abandonment of John Major and their enthusiastic embracing of New Labour that set the scene for the ’97 landslide. The media honeymoon that continued until last year was driven by the widespread view amongst the chattering classes that Blair…