Labour: time to turn blue?

Labour: time to turn blue?

Comments 0 Comment

What became of Maurice Glasman? Only those of us with a tendency to don the proverbial political anorak will recall the name, but Maurice (now Lord) Glasman was once the intellectual guru du jour for Labour. With roots in the Living Wage campaign and community organization, Glasman coined the term Blue Labour, a profound policy reaction to the perceived human emptiness of Blairism and the Third Way. For a while in the early 2010s Ed Miliband seriously dallied with Glasman,…

Read More Read More

Sunak continues to outperform both Johnson and Starmer in latest Ipsos MORI favourability ratings

Sunak continues to outperform both Johnson and Starmer in latest Ipsos MORI favourability ratings

Comments 0 Comment

The latest Ipsos MORI Political Pulse shows Brits to be more favourable towards Chancellor Rishi Sunak than they are towards PM Boris Johnson or LAB leader Keir Starmer. Some key points. 48% are favourable towards Sunak and 22% unfavourable. These numbers have not changed much since the pollster first asked the question in May where 47% were favourable and 18% unfavourable. Johnson continues to divide opinion with roughly as many favourable towards the Prime Minister (41%) as unfavourable (42%). In…

Read More Read More

Spotting the Difference – what really matters to Johnson when deciding who is in or out

Spotting the Difference – what really matters to Johnson when deciding who is in or out

Comments 0 Comment

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – has usually been seen as a hospital pass (any point during the Troubles), an internal exile for those having to earn their passage back to the mainstream (Mandelson) or somewhere to put rivals or nuisances (Francis Pym, Jim Prior). In some cases, PMs have trolled the residents of that benighted province (Shaun Woodward, Karen Bradley, for heaven’s sake!) Few have shone in the role. One who did was Julian Smith. In his…

Read More Read More

New polling analysis by Peter Kellner suggests that the Tories could lose power if an election was held now

New polling analysis by Peter Kellner suggests that the Tories could lose power if an election was held now

Comments 0 Comment

The data points to a 7% CON to LAB swing since GE2019 in the “Red Wall” The polling expert and former President of YouGov, Peter Kellner, has an article in the latest New European based on his study of the data from the last four weeks of Opinium polls. Unlike most other pollsters this firm has a range of cross tabs that make such an analysis possible. These include vote splits in the seats gained by CON from LAB at…

Read More Read More

Suddenly there’s the prospect of a vaccine, perhaps even by the end of the year

Suddenly there’s the prospect of a vaccine, perhaps even by the end of the year

Comments 0 Comment

It has repeatedly been said over the last five months that the only way that life can really return back to normal will be if an effective vaccine becomes available. There have been reports that more than 100 research teams around the world are working hard on the challenge and now we’ve got news about two of them. Firstly there is the Oxford vaccine which has attracted a lot of interest over the months because it was initially developed to…

Read More Read More

Compulsory face mask wearing – the Brexit divide

Compulsory face mask wearing – the Brexit divide

Comments 0 Comment

Above is today’s polling from YouGov on the compulsory wearing of face masks when at work. As can be seen there’s a relatively tight split, within the margin of error, on whether those sampled back or oppose the idea. What I find interesting is the Referendum vote split with Remainers saying it should be compulsory by an 8% margin and Leavers saying it shouldn’t by the same margin. The compulsory wearing highlights presents ideologically difficulties for those who, like ex-UKIP…

Read More Read More

Ex-US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, continues to be strong in the Dem VP betting with Harris still favourite

Ex-US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, continues to be strong in the Dem VP betting with Harris still favourite

Comments 0 Comment

We could be less than three weeks away from a decision My main political betting activity at the moment is on who Joe Biden is going to choose as his vice presidential nominee. He has to have this in place before the party’s rescheduled convention in middle August but there have been indications that we could know the name by the start of next month. I should state that my record in betting on Vice presidential nominees has over the…

Read More Read More