A week on from the London Mayoral Election and our abortive call you cannot but admire what an extraordinary politician Ken Livingstone is. Looking at the results again the striking feature is that more than a third of all those who gave Ken their first preference did not vote Labour in the London Assembly election at the same time. They were voting for the man and not the party. To work out why all you have to do is get…
Labour’s Barry Sheerman Polititcal gamblers should ignore what appears to be a concerted campaign, that includes Downing Street, to rubbish YouGov, the internet company that this week proved itself to be the UK’s most accurate polling company. Only two of the four organisations that regularly look at voting intention in the UK carried out surveys ahead of the European elections, the results of which came out on Sunday and Monday. One was Populus that uses conventional methodology – the other…
How Labour’s 22.6% Euro votes would have produced 300 Westminster seats For several months we’ve been warning political gamblers about the risks of backing the Conservatives for the General Election because the way that Westminster seats are distributed means that the system is skewed towards Labour. With the rise of non-traditional parties such as UKIP this bias has become even more acute. It’s now possible for Labour to be 9% behind on votes and end up with more MPs. Nothing…
This 2001 General Election poster seeks to address a big problem for the Lib Dems – that of credibility. Electors might be attracted by the policy platform, they might give them a try at a local level as 29% did last Thursday, but at a General Election many do not believe they can win in a particular seat and see the Lib Dems as a “wasted vote”. But performances like this year’s local elections might start to change perceptions, especially…
The price on Tony Blair being Labour leader at the General election dropped nearly a third in the aftermath of yesterday’s press conference when he appeared to look unwell. Prior to yesterday the Blair price had been trading at about 1.6. In the immediate period afterwards it went to touch 1.8 and has now settled down at about 1.68. For those not familiar with this form of pricing it means that if you had £100 at 1.6 you would receive…
Are the spread gamblers reading it wrongly? Either spread gamblers or the spread bookmakers seem to have concluded that Super Thursday was better for Labour than the Tories or Lib Dems and prices have moved Labour’s way. LAB 328-338 (+5) CON 240-250 (-3) LIB 53-58 (-2) Although our General Election CALL remains with Labour this was not reinforced by Thursday’s elections and we think that the spread markets are reacting wrongly. The Lib Dem spread seems to offer good value…
What will almost certainly be the most important and significant test of the opinion polls ahead of the General Election has been completed now all the results from the Euro Elections in Great Britain are in. We’ve been saying for months that a test of this nature is unique and incredibly valuable for political gamblers as we look forward to the next General Election. There’s no hiding place when a pollster puts out numbers that can be tested against real…
On Saturday we wondered whether the all-postal voting experiment had been an own goal for Labour. Certainly it attracted a lot of bad publicity and this might have had an impact on the overall result. But it is clear that Labour’s performance in the Euro Elections would have been substantially worse if it had not been for the experiment. Looking at the relative performance of Labour in the nine English regions that were declared last night the party’s shares dropped…