Is this worth a punt? Ladbrokes has put a couple of interesting referendum markets up this morning one of which offers some value. This is the 10/1 shot that there will be a referendum on the Lisbon treat during 2010. The price looks quite tempting. Clearly it requires the Tories to win the election and then to go forward with a referendum plan that happens before the end of next year. As of now the party is only committed to…
Could the Bullingdon attacks still have potency? In her first Conservative Conference week drawing PB’s cartoonist, Marf, touches on an area of potential vulnerability that Andrew Marr sought to bring up in his BBC1 interview with David Cameron yesterday – the perception that the leadership are “toffs” who who don’t really understand so called “ordinary people”. From some of the rhetoric in Brighton last week we can deduce that Labour is toying with how best to use this aspect of…
What about the 7/4 bet that it won’t happen? Long-standing poster, Alex, made what I think was an astute comment on the leaders’ debates on an earlier thread. He wrote: “The leader debates won’t happen IMO. The fact that all three leaders have agreed “in principle†is not a novel occurrence. They often agree in principle, knowing that the legal and logistical minefield is always likely to be insurmountable.” They all want different things. Brown wants “one to ones” starting…
****For discussion on the Greek General Election Click here**** ****This thread for UK Politics only**** What do this pair think of the new system? In view of the heated discussion on the previous thread I thought I would publish comments by Professor Colin Rallings and Professor Michael Thrasher of the University of Plymouth and Co-Directors of the Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre. They are also the academics who produced the Press Association guide to the results of the last election…
Exit Karamanlis, Enter Papandreou? Ta Nea Exit poll: PASOK 42.5 ND 36.4 KKE 7.9 LAOS 5.3 SYRIZA 3.7 No opinion polls may be published during the last two weeks of the campaign, but unless all the earlier polling was extremely inaccurate, then the New Democracy government led by Kostas Karamanlis, beset by economic crises, riots, and a wafer-thin parliamentary majority, looks set to go down to defeat. The opposition socialist PASOK, led by George Papandreou, his father a PM in…
This was a screen shot I took of the Cameron interview with Andrew Marr and shows someone who was under some pressure. He didn’t seem to be his normal self. The questioning was tough – but then he is hoping to be prime minister in a few months time. I thought it was one of his less good performances. Mike Smithson
Is Blair’s being “all things to all people” the right approach? So we are nearly there – the final party conference before the general election – and all the pressure is on Cameron and his Tory team to spell out what a Conservative government would do. But is setting out in detail the party’s plans the wrong approach for it just provides ammunition for his opponents to pick at and then throw back at him? Thus far being evasive has…
CON 40%(+2) LAB 28%(+5) LD 19%(-4) And the Tories move back to the 40s These changes, once again, seem to fit with the general theory of conference period polling that the party that has been last “on” gets a boost and the longer it is since your conference then your share will decline. The poll is for the Independent on Sunday tomorrow and the fieldwork took place between the 30th September and 1st October 2009 – so Thursday and Friday….