Will more than half the cities vote NO on May 3rd? In just two and a half weeks voters in ten cities across England have a chance to vote YES or NO to change the structure of local government in their areas by bringing in US-style elected mayors. This was one of the big ideas in the Conservative manifesto at the general election and the party has been working hard to promote the idea. Cameron, himself, has becoming closely associated…
Will 600+ gains underpin EdM’s leadership? We are in that silly time that we see every April when the parties try to tell us how badly they are going to do in the May locals while the academic specialists who monitor this closely set out what they think we should expect. A central figure in this is Professor Colin Rallings (The R of the famous Rallings & Thrasher partnership who do thing like work out the “official general election notionals”…
David Herdson asks: Is now their best chance to breakthrough? The nature of George Galloway’s victory in Bradford West might have been a one-off but the anti-politics mood it fed off is present far more widely. Mike has recently made timely observations that the combined net approval scores for the three leaders with YouGov is at what is probably a record low of -121%, and that despite a rapid drop in government economic trust figures, Labour has barely benefited except…
But will Boris be hit by the national Tory collapse? Exactly four weeks from today six million Londoners will get the chance to vote on who will be their elected mayor for the next four years. The is the single biggest election in the British political calendar and all three parties will be striving for a good showing. For the Tories this could be their one bright spot on the night. With Labour moving to double digit national poll ratings…
Did the PM’s campaigning encourage anti-Tory tactical voting? There were several requests yesterday for me to do something on why the mayoral election result in Bedford borough bucked the national trend. A bit of history: The Tories should have won this in a by-election in 2009 when their failure was put down to an “open primary” which produced a candidate from the Asian communities leading to huge rows and splits in the local party. This time the selection was restricted…
For the Lib Dems this has been a terrible night in the battles with Labour. What we haven’t got yet is news of the LD-CON battles. From a betting perspective the night is looking great. With SNP “most seats” bets from 7/2 to 8/13 my bank balance is going to look very nice. Mike Smithson
What’ll be the size of the red wedge after tonight? Whenever you talk of gains and losses in local elections the critical factor is the starting point – how many seats that are up for election are held by the respective parties. The last time most of those council seats that are being fought over today was in 2007 – when Labour had a pretty poor year coming out with just over 17% of the seats being contested. The Tories,…
Is this the most important of the 4 battle-grounds? There are four distinct contests on May 5th but only one which will provide real pointers as to the scale of the Labour recovery – the English local elections. A good result in Wales looks like a banker but the Ed Miliband-backed YES2AV campaign looks doomed and the latest polling suggest that the red team’s hopes of coming out top in Scotland might have been thwarted. It was in England on…