Monday April 18th- the City of London There’s to be another PB gathering at the Dirty Dicks pub across the road from Liverpool Street Station. It’ll take place on Monday April 18 starting from about 6pm. Like the previous events an area of the pub will be solely for PBers. On that day as well there’ll be another gathering a couple of hours earlier at the Guildhall gallery not so far away. There, from April 1st there’s a special exhibition…
The Sun Are the locals set to underpin the Labour leader? Yesterday morning I was accused of seeking “to manage expectation” when I speculated that Labour could be heading for a gain of 1000 or more seats in the local elections in England on May 5th. The poster, who clearly has close links with the party, said that “the last time he looked Labour was expecting gains of about 200”. Well if that is the case then Labour has a…
Meeting the Boojum The YouGov Budget poll provides an opportunity to investigate where the Lib Dems from 2010 have gone. Regardless of the fact that different pollsters have found different levels of support for cuts/Coalition economic competence/blame levels, when we look internally in a poll which provides breakdowns by 2010 vote and current preference, we should (hopefully) be able to track some of the net churn. So, in the YouGov poll, the first thing we see is that either the…
Scottish Election polls Date LAB % SNP % CON % LD % GRN % Constituency TNS-BMRB/STV 27/03/11 38 37 14 7 YouGov 18/03/11 41 38 10 6 ICM 14/03/11 39 35 13 10 Regional TNS-BMRB/STV 27/03/11 35 35 14 8 5 YouGov 18/03/11 39 32 11 6 5 ICM 14/03/11 37 34 13 9 4 Could the SNP hang on to power in Scotland? There’s…
When are all sides going to move on from Maggie? Ed Miliband had a difficult hand to play on Saturday. The thrust of most of the hundreds of thousands who joined the TUC protest was that all cuts were wrong and should be opposed. As Andrew Ranwsley observed in the Observer this is “..not a position the Labour leader can afford to be associated with and not the position he has taken. He tried to finesse his dilemma by addressing…
English local elections battleground May 2011 (Rallings and Thrasher LGC) CON defending LAB defending LD defending OTH defending Metropolitan boroughs: 815 seats in 36 councils 186 393 199 37 Unitary authorities: 1928 seats in total in 49 councils 909 501 380 138 District councils: 6647 seats in 194 councils 3931 726 1287 703 Total 9484 seats 5026 1620 1866 878 How will the parties do in the first test since the general? May 5th, just five and a half weeks…
Labour meets the Four Horsemen Opposition is hard. In the past month, Labour was rudely reminded of the weakness of opposition and just how difficult it will be to regain power. There are four political horseman of the apocalypse that can doom any opposition party. In March, Labour received visits from all of them. Fortunately for Labour, their visits came early, weren’t fatal and the party should learn from the experience. Who are they? Irrelevance. Opposition parties rely on the…
YouGov leadership ratings “…doing well/badly?†All % CON voters LAB voters LD voters David Cameron Well 47(+4) 96 9 69 Badly 47(-3) 3 87 28 Ed Miliband Well 32 (-2) 14 67 22 Badly 47(nc) 71 20 53 Nick Clegg Well 28(+3) 58 5 68 Badly 63(-3) 34 92 29 But Edward drops a couple of notches The first leadership ratings numbers since the budget are out from…