Is Brown relying on Wales losing? I’m not going to lie to you – this might be one of my more tangential threads, and it’s not as though directness of purpose has characterised my Saturday morning slots for some time now. Let me take you on a mental journey, into the musing mind of a pair of Catholic Welshmen, pondering rugby, religion and politics over a pint of bitter. One couldn’t help but notice that our Prime Minister this week…
University of Sheffield 177 years of election history with one mouse click Click on the map to start the animation. HatTip: Snowflake5 on Labourhome
Would hurting the Tories come before his own career? In May last year I suggested that a possible outcome to Labour’s leadership saga might be that Gordon would fall on his sword if he felt that bringing in someone new would make life tougher for the Tories. At the time I wrote: “Only a few have suggested that he might come to recognise that his leadership is undermining his party against the dreaded Tories and that he will just fall…
Could Brown rue the day he made the ONS independent? When historians come to examine the final period of Mr. Brown’s career and Labour’s losses in the 2009/2010 general election will the decision to create the UK Statistics Authority and make the Office of National Statistics independent be seen as the decisive error? For yet again this morning the big news in several of the papers stems from official statistics that are hugely embarrassing to the government – numbers that…
Ipsos-MORI Are public purse voters the bedrock of Labour support? Last July Ipsos-MORI introduced a novel new weighting to try to deal with the over-representation of Labour supporters in polling samples. Unlike the other polling firms who weight by past vote or past party ID MORI now split their samples into those who are on the public pay-roll and those who are not. Just look at the chart above to see two key elements. Conventional telephone polling seems to reach…
Evening Standard What is going on at the top of the Labour party? It says something about the febrile state of things at the heart of government that so far this week three names have emerged as candidates for the Labour leadership – even though there does not appear to be a vacancy. First it was Alan Johnson – the former postman who’s now health secretary. Then the word came that Harriet Harman was back into the frame and today,…
Surely she realised it would all come out one day? Just reflecting on the Jacqui Smith investigation the thing that strikes me is that it apparently never twigged to the holder of one of the highest offices in the land that her home expenses claims stank – irrespective of whether she was following the strict letter of the rules or not. Surely someone who has managed to climb up the greasy poll of politics to the height that she has…
PoliticsHome Sept 2008 Are September’s projections still applicable? Last September the then new PoliticsHome site published an amazing poll that covered more than 34,000 separate online interviews in a total of 238 parliamentary constituencies where the big battles at the next election are going to be fought. The sample was seventeen times the current maximum for the polling of marginals and the PH team, in conjunction with YouGov, devised some interesting approaches to testing things like tactical voting. Fieldwork was…