Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

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The Conservatives won the 2019 election decisively.  Received wisdom has it that it was won by demolishing a red wall in the north of England.  Let’s take a look at how each constituency swung, seat by seat. Before the election, I posed some questions.  One of them was whether seats would continue to sort by Leave/Remain or whether they would now swing more uniformly.  It turns out that the answer is a bit more complicated than either of those answers….

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Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

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All the options are bad and Trump is running scared of them In some ways the world is very fortunate. It may not feel like it at the moment, never mind in a few months or – if we’re lucky – weeks, but pandemics are an inevitable if rare occurrence of nature and the best we can do is ride out the storm with good judgement and timely action. There is probably no other country on Earth that was as…

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This year’s local elections, including Sadiq Khan’s defence of London mayoralty, put back for a year

This year’s local elections, including Sadiq Khan’s defence of London mayoralty, put back for a year

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In a move that was probably inevitable Number 10 has announced this afternoon that the English local elections won’t be taking place in May and have been put back till next year. The last time that elections had to be deferred was in 2001 when there was the Foot and Mouth outbreak. Then the deferral was for a month and included the 2001 general election that saw Tony Blair’s win with a second landslide and a turnout of less than…

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Trump’s Republicans move drop below a 50% betting chance for WH2020

Trump’s Republicans move drop below a 50% betting chance for WH2020

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This looks as though it was driven Trump’s initial reaction to the coronavirus There’s little doubt that Donald Trump is not having a good coronavirus crisis. His initial dismissal of this this being not much more than a commons cold hardly said a lot for his judgement in the early days. He wasn’t helped by several of his right-wing backers declaring that that this had been got up by the Democrats to wound Trump ahead of November’s election. After a…

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The UK’s big Coronavirus gamble – not taking measures now that other nations have in place

The UK’s big Coronavirus gamble – not taking measures now that other nations have in place

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Chart from my live on #Newsnight just now. Right or wrong, there’s no doubt the UK is increasingly an outlier in our Covid response. pic.twitter.com/ZczXx8M48c — Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) March 12, 2020 Unlike many other similar countries there is little doubt that the measures that that have not been put in place here make the UK very much of an outlier. The objective, as is repeated time and time again, is to change the virus timetable so that the peak…

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Amber Warnings – What might be the signals that all is not well in a democracy?

Amber Warnings – What might be the signals that all is not well in a democracy?

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How much should we be concerned about extremism? Just as it is easy to be complacent about a country’s immunity to extremism (“If it didn’t happen before, it won’t happen now”), it is all too easy for any suggested change to the existing constitutional or political set up to be described as the first step towards whichever form of extremism most worries the commentator, especially if from a political opponent.  This focus on who is behind a proposal – rather than on what it…

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Latest PM favourability polling from Ipsos MORI has Johnson’s numbers at a post-GE2019 low

Latest PM favourability polling from Ipsos MORI has Johnson’s numbers at a post-GE2019 low

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Ipsos MORI’s latest Political Pulse, just out, shows an increase in the the numbers viewing Johnson unfavourably compared to just after the election. While 41% had a negative opinion of Mr Johnson after the election in December, this has risen closer to half of Britons now (47%), giving him an overall net favourability score of -13 compared to -8 in late January . The pollster, which has been carrying out leader ratings for four decades, noted: “Having a gradual decline…

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The coronavirus: Trump bans all travel to Europe for a month from tomorrow excluding the UK

The coronavirus: Trump bans all travel to Europe for a month from tomorrow excluding the UK

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In a televised statement from the Oval Office on the coronavirus crisis Trump has annouced that a ban on flights between the US and Europe from tomorrow. There is just one exception – the UK. According to the New York Times this was one of a number of “strong but necessary” actions designed to impede what he described as “horrible infection”. This was a “foreign virus” that had been “seeded” in the US because the EU had “failed to take…

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