Has the EU simply ceased to be an issue?

Has the EU simply ceased to be an issue?

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Ipsos-MORI Or will the Tories of yesteryear emerge again? Every month for more than thirty years Ipsos-MORI has asked the same two part-question question in the same standard way which, almost uniquely, is totally unprompted. The pollster asks “What do you see as the most important/other important issues face Britain today”. As you’d expect the economy, race relations and immigration, unemployment and crime figure high as you can see here. But there’s one issue that’s been sharply on the decline…

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How can Ed Miliband get onto the news?

How can Ed Miliband get onto the news?

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Google News search -“Ed Miliband” Is visibility always the problem when you are opposition leader? On the face of it yesterday was a pretty bad news day for the coalition. There was Boris and “call me Dave” having their huge public spat over housing benefit, a suggestion that the child benefit move for higher rate tax-payers might be a lot harder to achieve than was first thought, and the PM fighting a tough battle in the EU. Yet the main…

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Win a copy of this book

Win a copy of this book

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Enter this evening’s quickie competition The publishers of the Kavanagh/Cowley General Election 2010 book have given PB a copy for a competition prize. So can you guess the numbers in tonight’s YouGov daily poll which will be out at 10pm. Please post on the thread giving the shares for the three main parties and the government approval/disapproval figures. The competition will be decided by who is the least wrong. So if you have CON 41: LAB 38: LD11 and 41%…

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Can boffins really work out your politics from your genes?

Can boffins really work out your politics from your genes?

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Cambridge University Press Could your politics be determined by your genetic make-up? Like most PB regulars, I guess, I’ve always assumed that a person’s political ideology is determined by family environment and friends. New research suggests something different. For liberals, at least, may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene…

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What’ll slashing 500,000 public sector jobs do to the Tory vote?

What’ll slashing 500,000 public sector jobs do to the Tory vote?

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Populus poll All voters Public Sector Private Sector Retired voters CON 37 23 45 44 LAB 38 50 30 37 LD 15 17 15 10 Do people vote according to their current situation? The above table has been produced from data from this week’s Populus poll for the Times and shows the voting intention shares broken down in terms of respondents employment sector or whether or not they are retired. As can be seen there’s a massive gap between private…

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Betting countdown to the Mid-Terms

Betting countdown to the Mid-Terms

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Betfair Politics Betfair Politics We are less than a week away from next Tuesday’s elections in the US when two of the key issues will be whether the Democrats lose control of both the House and the Senate. So far, at least, the markets think that the Republicans will take control of the House but not the Senate. So far there’s not been a lot of betting in the UK though that could grow sharply in the final few days….

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Has John Rentoul got the PMQ HB row right?

Has John Rentoul got the PMQ HB row right?

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Should EdM be thinking of the wider audience? In his summary of today’s PMQ encounter between Cameron and Ed Miliband the Indy on Sunday’s John Rentoul concluded:- “..Good tactics on Miliband’s part; poor strategy. He succeeded in winding up Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, standing at the end opposite the Speaker’s chair, shouting, “Absolute rubbish!” He succeeded in dividing the left-wing of the Liberal Democrats from their colleagues on the Government benches. (Miliband had a good line about…

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Is welfare the new political divide?

Is welfare the new political divide?

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What are the dangers in getting tough? Maybe I’m being unfair to suggest that there is perhaps nothing that pleases Daily Mail readers more than reading headlines like this morning’s about the efforts to tighten up on who should receive the £95-a-week Employment and Support Allowance – which is replacing incapacity benefit. Phrases like “weeding out the work-shy” are powerful and resonate, surely with the audience. The Mail highlights new statistics showing that 640,000 out of about 840,000 who applied…

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