UKPollingReport Who is going to be “The Political Forecaster of the Year”? At the turn of the year we ran our usual 2009 prediction competition when posters were asked to submit their projections for a wide range of political areas during the year. We’ve already looked at the first batch and now its time for the polls Entrants were asked to estimate the high and low shares for each of the three main parties in ICM surveys during 2009 as…
 To what extent is HMG still HM’s Government? Two stories in the media during the week involved Prince Charles and politics. In one, he was criticised for lobbying ministers on policy matters; in the other, he addressed the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, giving his now-familiar appeal for greater sustainability in the use of the planet’s natural resources. The contrast with his mother, who through a reign of over fifty years has barely given an opinion on anything vaguely controversial,…
CON 40%(40) LAB 28 (31) LD 18%(16) OTHERS 14% (13) Is this just getting back to normal? Whichever paper has invested good money in the unpublished MORI poll, completed last weekend, is going to find that it will look even more outdated following news of this latest YouGov survey for the People. That’s one of the risks of holding onto surveys – things can happen. So here is a poll that will ease Tory jitters and provide welcome relief for…
Why did we get the EU elections so wrong? At the start of the year we ran our usual 2009 prediction competition when posters were asked to submit their projections for a wide range of political areas during the year. This January post by Double Carpet, Paul Maggs, sets out a summary of the projections. Well how are we going to do? The above shows the average responses from those who took part and clearly we got the party leaders…
One of the great problems with the Angus Reid poll is that its numbers fly in the face of the current media narrative that we are heading for a hung parliament. It must therefore be a rogue many people seem to be saying. Another challenging aspect is its sheer consistency at a time when many of the other pollsters seem to be reporting big swings from survey to survey. So Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have each only…
Could Mr. Brown be about to “Save the World” in Copenhagen? It’s almost exactly a year ago that PB’s occasional cartoonist, Marf, produced the biting drawing above linking the closure of Woolworths and Mr. Brown’s slip of the tongue at PMQs about “saving the world”. This was one of her best and I have the original on the wall in my office. With the Prime Minister’s unscheduled trip to Copenhagen this week to help build the global consensus on climate…
Are non-doms damaging Dave? Without the key players there (Mr Brown is in Copenhagen) it was a very low key PMQs with Harman, Hague and Cable taking over the leaders’ slots/ As had been widely trailed ahead of time Vince Cable attacked Tory vice-chair for being a non-dom and Harriet Harman appeared to have a prepared statement. It was only the intervention of Speaker Bercow that brought the exchange to an end. As Garry Gibbon in his Channel 4 blog…
Why’s the COI pulling ads from the end of February? In the coming weeks and months we are going to get a lot of different stories which could fuel the election date speculation. One snippet has just been past onto the me. The government’s main communications arm, the COI, is said to be pulling all outdoor advertising from after the end of February. This could be just precautionary but the convention, as I understand it, is that there is a…