Is laying the Tories here an almost total certainty? Like one or two other punters, it seems, I have been taking as much as is available on lay bets on the Tories in the Betfair Buckingham market. My reasoning is quite straightforward – this is the seat of John Bercow, the Speaker, who in the traditional way renounced his link with his former party and all others when he got elected to the post in June. At the coming general…
Does this show that marginals are behaving differently? The first information about the YouGov poll of Northern marginals is just coming out. We haven’t seen a report yet of the poll and much detail is missing but an editorial for tomorrow’s paper has been published and contains the crucial headline figures. It notes that the Conservative party: “…. leads Labour by 42 per cent to 36 per cent in northern marginal seats. Indeed, the Tories appear to be doing better…
CON ???? LAB ???? LD ???? OTHERS ????? Only detail so far – “Tories 16% ahead” According to the blog of the Independent’s political editor, Andrew Grice, there’s a Comres poll in his paper tomorrow that will have the Tories 16 percent ahead. That compares with the C39-L25-LD17 from the most recent survey from the firm where the fieldwork finished a fortnight ago. (HAT-tip Planetnokia) So it looks as though ComRes is in the same broad area as PB’s exclusive…
Is Labour improving on the PH marginals poll? Thanks to Wibbler on the previous thread for spotting this – which looks intriguing particularly because the last major marginals poll that had a lot of detail from the north, the PoliticsHome one in September, showed a disproportionate move from Labour to the Tories. It had LAB>CON swings of around the 10% mark in the North-West, West Yorkshire and the North-East and suggested that at least 31 seats could change hands. It’s…
BBC News Could there be an electoral price to pay? If the Radio 5Live phone in that I was listening to this morning is anything to go by then home secretary and former Labour leadership favourite, Alan Johnson, has provoked a mass of anger over his decision to allow the extradition to the US of hacker, Gary McKinnon. He’s the man with Asperger’s syndrome, who is accused of breaking into US military computers in his search for evidence of UFOs….
House of Commons research paper Can we expect a big shake-up in the boundary system? The above is part of a table that is featured in a House of Commons research paper and covers just about all the statistics that you’ll ever want about May 5th 2005. For me the striking feature is the contrast between the actual vote shares chalked up by the parties across Britain and the comparison with the final column. The latter is calculated by averaging…
SkyNews Or will it all be forgotten by May? The latest stage of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war gives a sense of problems ahead for the government over what turned out to be Tony Blair’s signature policy – the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of course the main actor, Tony Blair, is no longer on the scene and it was all a relatively long time ago. But the circumstances now being described of how the UK got into…
Is there an area of opinion that we could test? As part of its arrangement with PB, Angus Reid Strategies, have offered to include one or two non-voting questions in the weekly surveys they do from their polling panel. These could relate to current issues or there might be more general points that it would be worth testing. The idea is simple – we would play round with a few ideas on a thread and I’d put forward a couple…