What do we think of the latest move? The Tory health cuts saga has taken a new turn with the party retracting the apology it found itself having to issue when inaccuracies were found on its list of hospitals at risk. The problem with getting specific, as they did yesterday, is that you can pick off each component and find somebody who will say that a particular service is not under threat. So rather than arguing about the big picture…
Introducing the special area on Facebook for PBC users Last night a PBC regular contacted me to ask if I’d seen what was on the Facebook website about Politicalbetting. I said I hadn’t but when I checked out the social networking site I was amazed to discover that somebody had established what’s called “The Politicalbetting.com Appreciation Society“. Apparently it’s been going for a few weeks and a couple of dozen people have signed up. What’s really interesting is that the…
You’ll have to wait for our multi Gordon pictures With all the talk of a general election everybody it seems, is waiting for the next polls. Sadly I think we are going to have to hold on for at least a few more days. Suggestions that there could be a poll overnight were not correct. I had thought that fieldwork for the Guardian’s August ICM poll was following its normal pattern with the survey taking place over the weekend for…
The polling feast continues.. Normally this is a time of year when we have to put up with a polling-free period. In August 2006 just two national surveys were carried out and we had to wait until the final week of the month before we got the figures. This year, with a new prime minister and change in the air, the polls are coming thick and fast and on top of the Sun’s Ipsos-Mori survey, the YouGov poll for the…
But how much is down to not weighting by likelihood to vote? A new YouGov poll for tomorrow’s Sunday Times has Labour 10% ahead and the vote shares back at 2001 general election levels. These are the shares compared with the last YouGov poll at the end of July – CON 32% (nc): LAB 42%(+1): LD 14% (-2) So the big change has been a drop in the Lib Dem share to 14% – a level they were at in…
Ipsos-Mori finds 81% in favour the EU treaty being put to the vote The second part of today’s Ipsos-Mori poll for the Sun asked about whether there should be a referendum on the EU treaty and how people would vote. The above are the findings to both questions – an overwhelming majority wanting a referendum and a much closer view on what voters would do in the event of such a ballot. The hard message for the government is that…
The Importance of Leeds One favourite piece of lazy journalism is to assert that “the Conservatives have no MPs/Councillors in the main Northern cities†and that, without these, they cannot win a Parliamentary majority. In fact, there are hundreds of Conservative councillors in the urban North, and the main Northern cities usually cited, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield are irrelevant to the Conservatives’ Parliamentary chances. The Conservatives could win an overall majority of 100, without coming close to winning a…
What’s this going to mean politically? Extraordinarily this story from the Financial Times is not covered on the main news page of BBC online. Yet the size of the intervention – an injection of 95 million billion euros into the money markets – sounds too huge to be confined to the business pages. I’m no expert on financial markets but this does look worrying and could have a big political impact. To my mind it makes an early election looks…