The Guardian’s pollster shows the party has a 10% lead The vote shares in this month’s ICM poll for the Guardian are just out and show a big move away from Labour with the party down below 30%. The actual vote shares are with changes on the last survey from the pollster taken just after the Tory party conference CON 39 (+1): LAB 29 (-3): LD 22 (+2). The movements are in line with yesterday’s Communicate Research survey and compare…
Is a deal being struck so Brown’s backing Cruddas? In all the discussion on Labour’s leadership elections far too little attention has been paid to what’s driving the third element in the party’s electoral structure – the trade unions. For after years of being half-ignored by Downing Street the union bosses appear determined to put their thumb-prints on the Labour succession if only, at the very least, to assert their key role in the Labour movement. Given that the outcome…
The Independent’s pollster has the Lib Dems on just 14% Gloom for Labour and the Lib Dems and a boost for the Tories is the message from this morning’s poll in the Independent from Communicate Research – which has not had a published a national voting intention survey since last year’s General Election. The headline figures – CON 38%: LAB 32%: LD 14% – show a very high proportion of respondents going for other parties. Just under 1,000 people were…
Could the only black Senator make it all the way? Barack Obama, first tipped here when he was 50/1 in May 2005, has given a strong indication that he might run for the White House. According to the BBC Obama told a TV interviewer that “Given the responses I’ve been getting… I have thought about the possibility” and he said he would give the matter more thought after the mid-term vote. The Illionois Senator was recently featured on the cover…
Labour move to 2% lead Partial details of the Mori poll for October are just out and show the Tories unchanged at 35% but Labour moving up a point to 37%. The online version of the FT, which is reporting the survey, does not include a figure for the Lib Dems. It will be recalled that last month Mori became the only pollster since April to report a Labour lead. Since then there have been other surveys showing the Tories…
Would having the only male leader impact on UK domestic politics? An extraordinary series of developments, which few people seem seem to have picked up, is that in just over two years time the leaders of three of the four biggest economies in the West could be women. Germany got its first ever female Chancellor in the early summer when Angela Merkel just managed to secure the top job after an indecisive election result saw the end of the Schroeder…
How the Tory political funding plan screws Labour By an extraordinary coincidence I found myself sharing a bottle of wine on a train out of St. Pancras last night with the man who is playing a key role on the subject that I had decided to write about this morning – the Tory threat to Labour’s funding. This is Tony Dubbins, a leading Labour movement figure for several decades and now chair of the body that links the trade unions…
What will be the impact of the Scottish switch to PR? The next round of Scottish local elections will be held under the Single Transferable Vote system of proportional representation. First past the post has produced some very distorted results in the past, in Scottish local elections. For example, Labour won 87% of the seats in Glasgow, in 2003, on 48% of the vote, and most remarkably of all, a bare majority in Edinburgh with just 27% of the vote….