How will Aghanistan be an election issue?

How will Aghanistan be an election issue?

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Will Brown get credit for staying in a war-zone? Over the past ten days there’ve been visits to Afghanistan by first David Cameron and now Gordon Brown. According to the Sun the latter became the first prime minister since Winston Churchill to spend the night in a war-zone and several papers are carrying the picture that’s on the Guardian’s front-page. Clearly as well as being seen to be “supporting our boys” the visits provide the peg for further coverage of…

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A special Sean Fear Slot…..

A special Sean Fear Slot…..

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What do local by elections tell us? Thursday’s local by-election results were among the worst that I can remember for the Conservatives. The Party lost five out of seven seats it was defending, and saw its vote share fall sharply almost everywhere. By contrast, Labour and the Liberal Democrats performed extremely well, making a net gain of four and two, respectively. Naturally, both parties’ activists have been heartened by this, and Conservatives, judging by the blogs, have been perplexed. Currently,…

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The polls: Punters give their verdict

The polls: Punters give their verdict

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The PB Index: CON MAJ 60 (nc) After a night which has seen two very different views on the state of political opinion in the country what better than to look at how punters are reacting. Are they putting their cash behind the YouGov 40-31-16 or the ComRes 41-24-21? That’s a huge variation in the Labour share which it is hard to explain. Today’s PB Index, which is calculated by taking the average of mid-points on the main seat betting…

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But the YouGov family reports a Labour recovery

But the YouGov family reports a Labour recovery

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CON 40%(40) LAB 31%(27) LD 16%(18) OTHERS 13% (15) So which pollsters do you believe? After the ComRes 17 point Tory lead reported in the previous thread there are two further surveys – a YouGov one featured above for the Sunday Times and a YouGov/BPIX poll for the Mail on Sunday. The latter has C41-L30-LD17. It’s a while since we’ve had anything from YouGov/BPIX. The one consistent theme from the last four polls has been that the Tories are back…

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What’ll this do to the hung parliament talk?

What’ll this do to the hung parliament talk?

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CON 41% (37) LAB 24% (27) LD 21%(20) OTHERS 14% (16) Another poll has the Labour deficit at 17 points As the Tory press office has broken the embargo I feel able to reveal the ComRes details as well. The poll for the Indy on Sunday, shows a sharp change in the position from the pollster barely ten days ago. The shares, as can be seen, are almost the same as Friday’s PB/Angus Reid poll which has 40-23-19. There are…

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Should the Tories be gunning for Vince?

Should the Tories be gunning for Vince?

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Why’s the LDs biggest asset getting such an easy ride? There’ve not been many winners from the economic crisis, political or otherwise. Robert Peston is very probably one, Vince Cable another: he has become the TV and radio studios’ politician of choice for comment on the crisis and related matters. That’s a huge asset for the Lib Dems, as third parties can struggle to get their voice heard when there’s a serious debate between the big two or where the…

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Will the old Tony Blair magic work again?

Will the old Tony Blair magic work again?

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Guardian Can he get away with admitting that he lied? In what the Guardian is describing as a “big shift in his ground” Tony Blair is saying, in a BBC interview to be broadcast tomorrow, that he would have invaded Iraq in 2003 even without evidence of WMDs and would have found a way of explaining this. The papers reports : “.If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked….

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Who benefits when they’re not on the ballot?

Who benefits when they’re not on the ballot?

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Making more sense of the rise of the “others” We had an interesting additional voting intention question in the latest PB/Angus Reid poll which might help us further in trying to work out what will happen to the UKIP/BNP/GREEN vote as we get closer to the election. For a big issue, of course, is that there is not going to be a full slate of candidates in every seat and many of those electors currently telling pollsters that they’ll vote…

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