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Why LAB could struggle to get a majority – politicalbetting.com
Why LAB could struggle to get a majority – politicalbetting.com
The above chart is based on data from tonight’s YouGov poll for the Times and seeks to show how the 2019 Tory vote is currently viewing the next election.
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Remember what happened in 1997:
Labour increased by 2m votes to 13.5m
The Tories collapsed - a 4.4m drop from 14.0m to 9.6m
Literal millions of Tory voters stayed at home. Which turned what would have been a comfortable Labour win into a landslide.
This is Sunak's problem. He's desperately trying to shore up their 2019 coalition, but driving people away in droves because of a lack of delivery and appalling corruption. So even if previous Tories can't vote Labour or there isn't a LibDem option, just staying home will utterly sink them.
It's why ICM were the top pollster for so long.
It is also why I have a lot of time for Deltapoll.
Far be it from me to contradict OGH but I think this is wrong.
Redfield & Wilton's poll (fieldwork 29/1) split the 2019 GE Conservative vote as follows:
50% Conservative, 22% Labour, 16% Don't Know and 7% Reform so a very different conclusion so it depends which pollster you think has this right. We also have the thorny question of whether people are accurately remembering what happened over three years and especially where some might now regret voting Conservative at the time and might not want to admit it now.
Even if all the R&W Don't Knows ran back to the Conservatives, Labour still had a 14-point lead.
Using past vote as a yardstick may not be the most reliable or accurate.
I've not seen YouGov's latest data but its fieldwork from 18th-19th January gave England voting intention as Lab 49 Con 28 which would be a 17% swing from Conservative to Labour.
Yet we continue to question the ability of Labour to produce a majority on these numbers - a uniform 17% swing (excluding tactical voting) would reduce the Conservatives to 140 seats.
The free flowing meanders of an afternoon of PB are fascinating. Page 2 was full of fierce and tenacious trans related debate (without, as someone commented, anyone actually trans on the forum, something I think is badly missed because it makes the debates very hypothetical).
Page 6 was best pubs. I don’t have a favourite. Used to, should do now (I’d love if to be the Duck in Pett Bottom near the vineyard but it’s not) but don’t.
Now we’re on to polls. Last night I was - rightly - being derided for an overly precious reaction to being interrogated at Copenhagen passport control. Tonight I’m at peace (ish) with Brexit as I tuck into a bit of seafood at an extremely touristy spot in Nyhavn.
It's really an imponderable. But I don't think you lose by betting against the Tories in this position.
https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2023/02/tories-pin-hopes-soft-voters-popularity-general-election-polls
Sometimes though we would be better off in betting terms to take them at face value, and at present they point to a Labour landslide and a rump Tory party in Parliament.
Maybe those polls will drift back, but equally they could get worse for the Tories.
They don't publish the "raw" VI numbers - including DKs - so we've no idea how they have come to their final VI numbers.
To be fair, their Midlands sub sample had the Conservatives on 42%, Labour on 36% and the LDs on 17% so if you think that's credible polling there's a man at my local Spoons who can sell you a Thames River Crossing.
They also really need to get their act together on tacit non aggression pact with the Lib Dems. Promise some sort of constituency level AV after the election. AV would suit Labour very well now, because of the impact on SNP marginals in Scotland.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/boomers-and-the-ultimate-failure?utm_source=direct&r=atl4u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
It also suggests the Tories are fucked for some time, and that we are on the eve of a great change, equivalent to 1945 and 1979.
I think I agree with all of it.
On The Old Forge has anyone been there since Eabhal in 2020? I was there at peak crazy Belgian-it was awful, overpriced (which I guess is understandable) and with crap food (which is not). The locals had made a protest bar just outside. Leon when were you there and why did it make your list?
PS @TimS just want to reiterate I wasn’t personally meaning to deride you in any way over passport control, apologies if it appeared so.
It is an article written by a libertarian with little interest in family or the wider community
I’ve been to the Old Forge in Knoydart a few times. I can’t remember the food, the prices or even the drinks, much. Tho here is a photo of a gin and tonic I had there in July 2009!
Anywhere else it would be a pleasant pub? But it isn’t anywhere else. It’s THERE. And you can meet mad people partly because it is THERE
Also I got chatted up by a bonny but very bored bargirl, on my first long ago visit.
It is an unforgettable place (not just because of sexy bargirls). No roads in!
Far, far better to have a more marginal govt that partners can enforce choices on. I would particularly like to see PR, but no large majority govt would ever bring it in
The second biggest batch of Don't Knows were voters who didn't vote at all in 2019 so if they didn't vote then it's unlikely they'll vote in 2024.
Roughly a third of Don't Knows voted for other parties in 2019 - again, they are all suddenly going to vote Conservative, apparently?
At the most fundamental level, you are correct - add together the Conservative share, the Reform share and ALL the Don't Knows (not just those who voted Conservative last time) and you'd get the Conservative share close to that of Labour.
However, the notion ALL Don't Know will vote Conservative is just absurd - some will of course but all of them?
Lucky them.
Unfortunately, they have hoarded their assets and economic growth has slowed. Their children, unless they inherit (and note the statistic in there about who benefits from inheritance) are being given no hope.
They will not stand for it, and their time is coming.
If Rishi does want to scrape the least bad loss (I think a win is now out of the question), he needs to get rid of Raab and Braverman like he (under duress) got rid of Zahawi and Williamson.
Thatcher's legacy is in my opinion shown in the growth in the number of self employed in the economy.
I'm in my 30s. The only friends of mine who have been able to buy houses without independent or family wealth are those who work in the city, in law, or who own their own businesses. Often small groups of tradesmen, but also tech companies or retailers.
What worries me is not the boomers - they're a temporary blip, the golden generation of beneficiaries of the old and new systems - but that the numbers of self employed are declining. I hope its a Covid blip. If it isn't, then the Tory party should really worry.
Edit to add: Whitehall doesn't understand small business at all. If anything, the general view is negative. Too amorphous, too hard to deal with etc. It is in my opinion why e.g. Cummings was right that the civil service needed more political advice and direction.
I reckon the Tories are doomed whatever they do, but if they stop the boats they can prevent a bad defeat becoming an apocalyptic rout
The point, which is very insightful, is that the moral beliefs behind Thatcherism have essentially been betrayed.
The polling of younger people is scary. They see no stake in an economy or society that promises them very little.
It may be that millenials and younger people are not voting conservative, but nor are they coherently voting for Labour.
And as she is a minister, her job is to STOP THE BOATS.
By your own standard, she is useless.
Why keep her in post?
Reminds me of the first part of the old adage, everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.
Even if Braverman is right about the boats (and I don’t think she is), she is quite clearly thick, incompetent, and narcissistic. She actively repels moderates.
Again, accepting for a moment that the boats need to be addressed, Sunak’s best strategy is to address them via somebody else.
- no significant growth
- higher and higher taxes and spending
- young and enterprising being repeated screwed over
This country urgently needs some Thatcherite tough love and there's absolutely no prospect of it getting it from the two non-entities vying to ruin us.
But is there any potential replacement who is MORE likely to stop the boats? Can’t see it. Braverman will probably fail as well, but at least she looks determined, and she is unruffled by Woke critiques
I read some persuasive analysis today which said that a lot of the disillusionment with Brexit (and, hence, the Tories) is because of the lamentable failure on immigration. Many Brexit voters voted to take back control of the borders. The Tories promised to do this. Instead we have record immigration AND the Dinghy People.
So the Brexiteers who were mainly concerned with migration (eg in the Red Wall) have rightly deserted the Tories - and Brexit. The sovereigntist liberal leavers, like me, are still fine with Brexit, I never cared about Polish plumbers anyway (tho I respect the votes of those that do)
The analysis further reckoned that much of this sentiment is hidden because people are reluctant to admit to misgivings about migration and asylum seekers etc. My hunch is: this is right
TLDR: Tories are gonna lose bad. They have already failed on migration
She failed, but the aspiration kept the Conservatives of the 80s aware that there was a straight and narrow path.
The current crop don't even have that awareness.
The Tories have the over 60 vote in Lowestoft stitched up. But you can’t win an election with that, you have to reach into the middle, or somewhere closer.
Braverman has the noisy support of the night shift on Radio Broadmoor (ie the ERG) and the Daily Mail editorials. But it’s a 20% strategy.
What do you expect in a democracy?
I have been rather lucky, weather wise, on my many visits to wild northern Scotland. I even got sunburned on St Kilda, once (and didn’t there used to be a makeshift army pub there? That would have been amazebombs), I have also experienced Sleat and Knoydart in brutal cold weather but with clear blue skies and snow on the peaks. Equally glorious, but tough
OTOH I have spent a few days in and around Glasgow during a cold dark wet early January. There are few places ON EARTH as depressing as Glasgow, in those circumstances. It is Satanically awful
The only reliable group now is (by definition) those who always vote Tory. The Fellowship of The Ring has sundered and cannot soon be put back together.
It would take phenomenal own goals from Labour to blow it. Though they have a group of MPs and hangers on who will keep trying to lose right to the end.
He flunked it, and possibly, with that, flunked his chances in 24.
Labour were only in government as were the Liberals because of the War, the Conservatives had a majority
As Duncan Robinson recently noted in the Economist:
“On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.”
And yet despite this the boomer sense of entitlement remains undimmed, as we can see in the current debate about how to reduce the number of older people dropping out of the labour market. Despite its obvious absurdity the idea of giving people in their 50s and 60s income tax breaks in order to continue working is being heavily promoted in the Tory friendly press; the Telegraph, Mail and Express now being essentially Union newsletters for pensioners.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/01/watchdog-examines-220000-public-funding-for-boris-johnson-partygate-defence
I mean, the Tories were only in government from 2010 to 2015 because of the Liberal Democrats, but it didn't mean they weren't 'in power.'
Your argument is the more bizarre because I'd left you two loopholes - I even obligingly emphasised one of them for you - which you could have quite justifiably used to reject my example on a technicality but you overlooked entirely.
That's no way to govern. And totally unlike the Tory party I once supported.
I presume because it's about values and identity and so it never ends.
For the umptieth time, we can only stop illegal migration by stopping the pull factor - we must make it easy for illegal immigrants to shop those who employ them (and give them fast track right to stay if they do so) and have massive criminal penalties for the owners and managers caught doing so.
You could write a similarly decent essay showing the problems inherent within modern socialism (the expectations of a post-Thatcher world without the state collecting enough income to fund it, leading to bust - possibly quite literally - which betrays the moral beliefs behind Atleee etc).
I also consider Truss an idiotic lightweight who's a menace to our economy.
Who I remain a great fan of, even as I understand that many of her reforms didn’t succeed on her own terms.
You continue to hope fondly that the feted return of managerial politics and the civil service taking the country on the slow trudge toward full European integration whether the lumpen proles like it or not is a votewinner. It isn't. It never was, and it is certainly proving manifestly inadequate to the issues we face now.
Entire wars can be decided over forts and towns that no one had really heard off, before hostilities
https://www.tayvallichinn.com/images/gallery/DSCN1268.jpg
https://twitter.com/refugeecouncil/status/1620315009992773633?t=MOypKT_9blB8OPReSNkXmg&s=19
Shortly after a moan about rising prices.
Obviously I think you are a moonbat, but I tentatively agree with you that Sunak is a managerialist waste of time.
My argument is based purely on what I think makes electoral sense for the Tories, and is made as an intellectual exercise.
In reality, I want the Tories annihilated and humiliated.
The need is for a moral (ie not Boris) version of that leadership charisma which can take the actuality of the moment, and replace 'My glass is half empty and I think it is going to get emptier' with 'My glass is half full and I think that half full is the starting point for getting fuller'.
There are no factual differences between these two positions. This is what leadership is made of.
Labour did not have the PM from 1940 and 1945 and the Tories had a majority of MPs, it was a completely different scenario. Without WW2 Labour would not have been in government