Why I’m not risking any cash at the moment? Over the past four months I have studiously avoided the spread betting markets on the number of seats each of the parties will get at the next election – something that’s felt very strange because for years this has been my main betting arena. My Labour sell and Lib Dem buy contracts have been closed down at reasonable profits as I have waited to see how things look in for the…
CON 42 (nc) LAB 26 (-2) LD 18 (nc) So all the August polls are in the same territory Whether or not there’s a big effort at the Daily Telegraph to get us to buy printed copies of their paper I do not know but their August YouGov poll is now out and is not online. The figures are as above with the changes on the Sunday Times YouGov poll – the last from the pollster – in mid-August. Then…
Sunday Times Was it a “murky” deal for oil after all? The main lead in the Sunday Times tomorrow looks set to take the Megrahi release debate into new territory for the paper says it has leaked ministerial letters suggesting this was all about an oil deal with Libya. This is how the story starts: “The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom†to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for…
BBC News Scotland ICM suggests both have been damaged Only a few days ago I was bemoaning the fact that there did not seem to be any polls of Scottish opinion on the release of Megrahi – the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and murder of 270 people. Well this evening we have a second with strong suggestions that there might be another one this weekend. The survey is by ICM for the BBC and is of 1,005 people…
Could the tactical switchers of ’97 now go straight to the Tories? One of aspects of the electorate that both the YouGov Scottish poll and this week’s GB survey from Angus-Reid have shown is the very distinctive approach to the Lockerbie bomber release by Lib Dem voters. This is symptomatic I believe of their approach to politics generally and why what they think and do at elections can have a disproportionate impact at general elections. We saw that in 1997…
Could the polls be as wrong now as they were then? If there is one precedent that could provide some hope for Brown Central it is John Major’s surprise victory in the general election of April 9th 1992. In the year or so beforehand the Tory government’s by-election performance was even worse than Labour’s at the moment and with the exception of one or two polls all the pollsters were pointing to a dead heat in vote numbers as the…
Survey finds SNP Holyrood support down 5 points Opinion polls confined to just Scotland are rare things indeed and according to UKPollingReport there have only been two this year – one by YouGov for the Sunday Times last January. UPDATE – the last Scottish YouGov poll was in June. This morning the Daily Mail is carrying details of a new YouGov Scottish poll it commissioned following last week’s controversial release of Megrahi – the man convicted for the Lockerbie bombing….
Has Labour’s time run out? Nick Sparrow, boss of ICM, has sent me an email in response to recent comments suggesting that August polling is somehow unreliable. He makes a strong case that this isn’t correct by looking at his polls in the August ahead of the past three general elections and what actually happened. Nick notes that comparing Guardian ICM polls for the August before a general election with the result you get:- August 1996 poll suggested that Labour…