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…
Punters who have been playing the Tony Blair and Party Leader markets will be intrigued by the comments from broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg, about how close the Prime Minster came to stepping down in the late Spring. At one stage in mid-May the price on Gordon Brown being PM at the General Election touched evens and the timing of this seems to coincide with the period that Bragg and others were talking about. What’s said to have changed Tony Blair’s mind…
Tories win their first ever council seat in Tower Hamlets An impressive performance by the Tories and a big surge for George Galloway’s RESPECT’s party saw Labour forced into third place in what at first sight looks a bizarre local council election yesterday in Tower Hamlets. In the Millwall ward on the Isle of Dogs the Tories took a seat because RESPECT split the Labour vote and there was a huge surge in the Tory vote. The result is even…
bbc Punters re-assess the Chancellor’s chances The price on Gordon Brown being Labour leader at the General Election has moved out and that on Alan Milburn tightened following Tony Blair’s Cabiner re-shuffle that sees a return to office of the former Health Secretary. In just four months the odds on the Chancellor making it to Number 10 before the election have slumped from touching evens at one point in May to about 7/2 today. Milburn had been at 250/1 and…
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…
Blair needs a clear poll lead to avoid a hung Parliament The fact that only the Guardian seems to be reporting that all is not well with Labour does not mean that it’s not in electoral trouble. Support down by a quarter since the General Election; membership at a 70 year low having lost almost half of those that were there when Tony Blair came to power in 1997; a collapse in the popularity of the Prime Minister, and an…
What happens if they never come back? All the General Election betting markets have been reacting to the by-elections and the Butler report on the assumption that voters will automatically return to Labour. The spread-betting market, extraordinarily, thinks that all this means that Labour is going to get more Commons seats. But what happens if those who stopped supporting the party because of the war just never come back? The conventional theory is that they’ll return to stop the Tories….
UPDATE NOON Ignore the post by-elections odds changes on Blair and Labour After Labour losing its parliamentary seat in Leicester South to the Liberal Democrats but holding Birmingham Hodge Hill with a majority in hundreds rather than thousands smart punters should stick with Tony Blair even though the response of the markets has been against him and Labour. The William Hill price on Blair going before the General Election is down to 5/4 and Labour’s odds have lengthened. We disagree…