The “Death Tax War” – Burnham raises the ante If you didn’t watch today’s “Politics Show” on BBC1 then make sure you check it out when it becomes available on catch-up in an hour or so because if featured the health spokesmen for all three main parties and was very much a fore-runner for the planned TV debates The programme brought together Labour’s Andy Burnham, Andrew Lansley from the Tories, and the LDs Norman Lamb to disucss the growing row…
House of Commons Research paper Will the markets gravitate again towards a UNS view? The above is a chart that features in a recent Commons research paper based on what happens if there’s a uniform swing across all constituencies from 2005 election adjusted for the notional 2005 results because of the boundary changes. So taking last night’s ComRes poll split of 40-29-21 the rigid application of the UNS formula has the Tories still short of a majority even though the…
CON 40% (38) LAB 29% (31) LD 21% (19) Tory lead up four with ComRes The poll is being published in tomorrow’s Indy on Sunday and the numbers should provide a lot of relief at Cameron Towers and something of a boost to the Lib Dems. For after a period when most pollsters had both Labour and the Tories in the 30s we now revert back to what was almost the status quo – Labour in the 20s with Cameron’s…
Is the belief in the rigid UNS starting to wane? With two polls expected tonight – ComRes for the Indy on Sunday and YouGov for the Sunday Times – it will be interesting to see how much the traditional rigid UNS calculations are used to project what the latest shares mean. For in the past week we have seen Andy Cooke’s remarkable analysis here and here on PB and it’s been gratifying to see that parts of the media have…
Can the government avoid the Greek debt trap? After the recent EU summit, a reporter asked Gordon Brown if UK taxpayers’ money would be go towards a rescue package for Greece. He said, after a lengthy preamble that “the discussions at the moment are within the euro area”. That’s very far from a denial. The Greek government’s funding crisis could spread to Britain’s political scene rapidly in two obvious ways: if the UK forms part of a bail-out for Greece,…
The more it seems likely the less chance of it happening Over lunch today with three guys who were closely involved with my campaign at the 1992 general election – the only time I was ever a parliamentary candidate – we looked back to that remarkable campaign and the last really surprising national result. The media narrative in the closing days was that the Tory government which had come to power thirteen years earlier was drawing to a close and…
Was Brown right to take part in this interview? If the objective of the Piers Morgan interview has been to dominate the political news and block everybody else out of the agenda then Gordon Brown’s now infamous session, due to be broadcast on Sunday, has certainly done that. And given that getting blanket coverage on the telly, as we see during the conference season, leads to short-term poll boosts then we should expect Labour increases in the coming few days….
How would his selection go down with the locals? There’s a head of steam building up over the plans by Harriet Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, to try to become Labour candidate in what has been the super-safe seat of Birmingham Erdington. Martin Kettle in the Guardian put it like this: “Not all appointments of family members are necessarily bad ones. But they pretty much all look bad. And they therefore bring dishonour not just upon the individuals involved, but upon…