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Will Enfield be the next Wyre Forest? Dr. Richard Taylor caused a shock when he won the Wyre Forest constituency from Labour in 2001. His success was based on a campaign to save Kidderminster Hospital. At the same time, a small political party, Kidderminster Hospital Health Concern, won a number of seats on the local council on a similar platform. Although Dr. Taylor’s majority was cut in 2005, he was the first Independent Parliamentary candidate since 1945, to win his…

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BPIX gives the Tories a 10% lead and puts the LDs on 15%? British Polling Index has carried out another of its intermittent surveys for the Mail on Sunday. The pollster has not been listed as a member of the British Polling Council and whenever I have requested further information my emails have been ignored. In its first published survey for the paper since April BPIX has the Tories on 41%, Labour 31%, with the Lib Dems at 15%. The…

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A guest contribution by Innocent Abroad A tired third-term government with a leader past his sell-by date is a recurrent theme in British politics. The Tories have been there often enough, and the Liberals too, just before World War I. This is Labour’s first experience of it – the party has never held office (discounting the wartime co-alition) for more than six years at a time before. What is new is the inability of the Tories to achieve the kind…

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Landslide victory for ApRhys Following the victories of Dai Davies and Trish Law in Blaenau Gwent, and the Conservatives just managing to see off the Lib Dems in Bromley & Chislehurst, the pb.com prediction competition has yielded a clear winner. ApRhys (post 22) chalked up a comfortable win in the overall rankings, with his score of 21.7 being well ahead of Archibald Schwarz (post 55) in second place with 27.1, and Yet Another David (post 72) in third with 36.4….

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History shows the challenge facing the Tories RodCrosby has done an analysis of by-elections swings, and the Swing-Back to governments’since the War. Using the Butler swing between Labour and Conservative, the Swing-Back is defined as the difference between the average swing to the Opposition in by-elections and the swing to the Opposition at the subsequent General Election. So, for example the average Butler swing from Labour to the Tories in by-elections 2001-2005 was 7.9%. The swing the Tories obtained in…

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Somebody has just emailed me to say that according to Alexa.com Politicalbetting is today the “….82,376th most visited site in the entire world“. I have no idea how this is calculated but apparently nine people in every million web users world-wide have been here today….and I thought it was just Andrea! Thanks to everybody for their support. Mike Smithson

New poll shows Ming’s party continuing to recover The second YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph in a week has the following shares with comparisons on the poll published on Monday – CON 39 (nc): LAB 33 (+1): LD 18 (+1). It really is rather odd that the paper feels it necessary to commission two polls from the same pollster in less than a week and then to publish it on the morning of the by-election news. What’s the Telegraph…

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