Browsed by
Category: General Election

Jeremy Corbyn’s path to Number 10

Jeremy Corbyn’s path to Number 10

Comments 0 Comment

Picture: Why this shouldn’t be the Tory reaction were Labour to elect Corbyn. Governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them – A recession & no Cameron could hand the election to Corbyn. There are those, inside and outside of the Labour party, who think by electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader, Labour are committing the greatest strategic blunder since Emperor Palpatine allowed the Rebel Alliance to know the location of the second Death Star. By electing Corbyn Labour can say goodbye to…

Read More Read More

Corbyn will win but he is popular with the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons

Corbyn will win but he is popular with the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons

Comments 0 Comment

Surfing a wave of superficial attractiveness can only get so far There is no good reason for believing that Jeremy Corbyn is not going to win the Labour leadership. The polls have all pointed heavily in that direction, constituency nominations have favoured him ahead of his rivals, union nominations (and organisation) will count for even more, and the late and huge surge of voters joining up to take part cannot rationally be explained other than as an active endorsement of…

Read More Read More

This YouGov polling hits the nail on the head about policies and leadership contenders

This YouGov polling hits the nail on the head about policies and leadership contenders

Comments 0 Comment

https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/629259031253790720/photo/1 Having policies that poll well doesn’t necessarily mean electoral success This supports my long-standing view about the importance of policy positions. They have a part to play but only a part. The quality that voters most look for in a leader is competence – the word that the successful Crosby GE15 campaign used repeatedly. Thanks to Matt Singh (NumberCruncher) for highlighting this. Mike Smithson Follow @MSmithsonPB Tweet

Methinks that Burnham’s nationalise the railways plan could come back to have haunt him

Methinks that Burnham’s nationalise the railways plan could come back to have haunt him

Comments 0 Comment

It just looks as if he’s scared of Corbyn Although Burnham has been careful to say that he’d move the railways back into the public sector line by line it is the headline that is going to stick and will be used by the Tories. This can easily woven into a narrative about the red team’s economic credibility and we saw in May how blisteringly effective that can be. Lynton Crosby always says that it is not policies themselves that…

Read More Read More

Remember the Saturday when the Telegraph and Sky News both declared that Alan Johnson had won the deputy leader election

Remember the Saturday when the Telegraph and Sky News both declared that Alan Johnson had won the deputy leader election

Comments 0 Comment

With AV LAB elections don’t always go to plan Remember June 2007? So many Labour MPs had chickened out of doing other than nominate Brown for leader that there weren’t enough left for another candidate to go on the ballot. The result – the party got what the polling indicated was a leader who was an electoral liability – not someone who could lead them into a fourth successive general election victory. Instead there was a hard-fought deputy race which…

Read More Read More

David Herdson asks: Where are UKIP’s 34 peers?

David Herdson asks: Where are UKIP’s 34 peers?

Comments 0 Comment

An unreformed Lords shouldn’t be a closed shop for the old parties Sex, money and people in high places all make for a good scandal, as Lord Sewel found out to his cost this last week. And as usually happens when a member of the Lords gets into trouble, the opponents of the institution cite it as an example of the need for reform of it, or even its outright abolition. Not that there’s a chance of serious reform any…

Read More Read More

The Temperate Desert

The Temperate Desert

Comments 0 Comment

Antifrank asks who will appeal best to centrist voters? The centre ground of politics used to be very crowded.  And with good reason.  Roughly half the electorate sit in the middle stratum of electoral geology.  In a YouGov poll taken just after the election, 13% described themselves as slightly left of centre, 19% described themselves as centre, 14% described themselves as slightly right of centre and a further 23% didn’t know where to place themselves (presumably they would regard themselves…

Read More Read More