Given the way that the purples dominated the political narrative for a large part of 2014 it comes as something of a surprise to observe, as Antifrank does on his excellent blog, that UKIP is clear favourite in just five seats, all of them currently held by the Tories.
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I tipped Boston and Skegness at 6s, Thurrock at 16s and S Thanet at 5/2 last year by the way, hope you are all on
Everything for 2014 depends on a good, possible vote-topping performance in the Euros. The Tories are going to throw a lot at them in the coming months to try to stop that happening.
But what would really make 2014 for the purples is a Westminster by-election victory. Alas this year there have only been two such contests. Will next year be different?"
Mike Smithson Dec 2013
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2013/12/20/the-political-party-of-2013-it-has-to-be-ukip/
'UKIP: we can take on Alex Salmond
Scotland’s only elected representative of UKIP is to stand in the same constituency as Alex Salmond in the upcoming 2015 election.'
http://tinyurl.com/kkmsb7q
My view for some months has been that they will win a handful: five or six. But they could just as easily end up with 1 (Carswell).
I reckon my bet is looking pretty near certain so feel free to pay me early if you like.
I notice Rochester isn't amongst them.
While the SNP are riding high at the moment their core base may be eroding in some areas. Nicola Sturgeon has set a target on Glasgow Labour but in doing so may well lose votes in the country and the East coast.
The face of the Tories in Scotland is Ruth Davidson and she is as far from Cameron as it is possible to be in background. The more devolution occurs the less relevant Cameron becomes. The SNP risk becoming obsessed with England and forgetting that they already look after education and health and need to get them right. There is no clear evidence that this is happening.
Hard to say what will happen in Scotland but if the 40 of so staff at my company are any indication then the SNP core base now supports Celtic. This is were the Labour have lost votes and will find them hard to get back. Are the SNP going to be the Sinn Fein of Scotland?
Clacton and Rochester didn't feature for instance
I don't know where @audreyanne gets his of her feeling or near certainty from though.. on SPINs seat markets I am well ahead, on the fixed odds, I am slightly behind
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TDDzlgMrkGM
Who do the Rangers supporters vote for?
And can I just check that the first thing the SNP "We could do anything if it wasn't for those bastards in Westminster" administration did on finding Ebola was ship it to London?
Expectations have been exceeded, goodo!
We could do with some constituency polling in the most UKIP friendly safe Tory seats like Castle Point, North Thanet and Basildon + South Thurrock.
There are however a sizeable number of small-state and/or eurosceptic Tories sitting some way to the right of Cameron who would be gone in a shot if a less toxic option than the current UKIP was available. Cameron should be given pause by the thought that if he is pissing off his core so badly that droves of them have gone to UKIP even with its image problem, how many would he lose if they suddenly got sensible and professional. A Carswell led eurosceptic right-wing party (I think in those circumstances Hannan would join as well) would be an existential threat to the Conservatives.
As for Ebola, there was presumably a UK wide agreement in place.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2890557/Lib-Dem-Scrooge-Families-pay-1-53-letter-arrives-no-stamp-s-MP-s-Christmas-card.html
Ooops. Funny, but I kind of feel sorry for him. There's no way it would have been deliberate.
(A few years back I had to pay over three quid for some 'free' energy saving bulbs an electricity provider had sent, but not put the correct postage on. A card was in the letterbox stating I had a parcel. I drove over to Eastleigh, coincidentally, only to find they were the unwanted bulbs. They still sit in my garage as they haven't been suitable for any houses I've lived in since).
Kudos to isam for backing UKIP when they were longshots in many seats. Those bets have certainly paid off.
Carnyx: We concur!
Scotland, Wales and Ireland do not have the mass to fund such care. As the UK government - albeit via NHS-England - is the organising authority for this mission then a protocol already exists.
Not a time to play politics: Good-luck the Scot-nurse! Can we now talk about the Sterling barrel price of Brent...?
A snide would offer you 6/4 for as much as you wanted, but as a nice guy I will direct you to Ladbrokes who are 9/4 Labour
I refuse to accept that I spent £350 on a laptop that thinks it's an iPad and won't run most of my apps.
[Edit: such facilities should, in any case, be commoner anyway.]
BTW - many thanx for the quote info I was looking for. That's such a great one - and so accurate in many situations.
Based, I fear, on an extrapolation of Labours victory in their strongest ward in a council by election
Many people would have been not very keen to see her travel to London from an independent Scotland. You want independence: if you get your wish then you should create and pay for such facilities. *If* the UK was to take them, then it would be on our terms, and on a case-by-case basis.
Any UK-wide agreement that you presume exists would presumably become void on independence. Or are the only ones that would become void the ones the SNP want to void?
Is this yet another example of Better Together?
I get a lot of Russian tweets and no idea what they say. I did Greek as a kid and found that hard. I can spell my name and not much else - and am generally crap at languages bar Latin and French after suffering a decade of teaching.
Belated Christmas greetings to all from the land of Stodge (well, the house anyway).
I read a lot on here about the prospects for the LD vote, the UKIP vote, the Green vote, the SNP vote and even the Labour vote but not a lot about the Conservative vote.
Populus, which is at the moment running the highest Con-Lab share of all the pollsters at around 70%, is the only pollster showing the Party consistently above 33% in the past three weeks. The odd YouGov has shown the Tories at 33% but every other pollster shows the Conservatives below that number (even the IPSOS-Mori showing the party in the lead showed 32%).
ICM, the so-called "gold standard" showed just 28% though I cheerfully concede that's likely to be an outlier.
Even if the Party can get back as much as 40% of the UKIP vote that suggests 39% at the absolute highest but if the UKIP return is more like 25% then we could be looking at a top of 35% which is a long way from a majority.
If the Conservatives are somewhere between 30-33%, how then do they build a majority and from where does that majority come ? Taking seats off the LDs (perhaps as many as 20) will help but the main issue is the 90 or so taken from Labour in 2010 - how many of these will be retained ? The Ashcroft polling of the marginals did give the Conservatives a crumb of comfort suggesting the swing wasn't that large but even if losses are limited, the Conservatives are relying on the SNP to stop Labour being the largest party in May.
OGH has often posited Conservative most votes, Labour most seats as a plausible scenario but if the margin for the former is very small, the margin for the latter is likely to be much larger and vice versa.
Bought a simple Tosh' for remote-services and my Win-7 mousepad is buggahed. Using USB one at mo'.
Beware inconsistent network/wifi issues. Lots of "update" issues have started to appear....
Does that mean there are unlikely to be any draws in the 3pm Saturday afternoon fixtures?
What doesn't get talked about also is the effect of there being over 3.5m (12%) voters for UKIP and around 1.5m (6%) voters for the Greens in GE2015 based on a 2010 type of turnout. Who are those 4.5m votes coming from, if we assume that most of it is from existing voters rather than DNV. 3.5m Kippers is about 4,000 per constituency, which is more than quite a few Tory or Labour majorities. 1.5m Greens is about 1,200 per constituency, which is still a few LD or Labour Majorities. Those smaller parties might not win much, but they are sure as hell going to screw up other peoples majorities.
Since the beginning of 2014, the conservatives poll score is a reasonable guide to who will turn out to put a cross in the blue box in a real election.
That is not true of the labour vote. The poll score always overstates the numbers who turn out for ed or his representative when push comes to shove.
Nick Palmer's chances look good on paper, but next May I reckon he'll be standing on that husting thinking to himself, 'where are all those f8ckers who said they'd vote for me...??
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/politics/11641728.Top_councillors_urged_to_quit_over_love_triangle/
A 30% turnout election tells you one thing, a 60% turnout election something else. For all the so-called apathy towards politicians, I suspect there will be a decent turnout in May albeit affected by the new registration process in some areas.
I'd also argue that the British electorate are superb liars and that canvassing "anecdotes", whether from candidates or activists, should be taken with a bucket of salt.
100% agree. London will be labour's star. The party's policies on housing in particular have genuine appeal for younger voters.
I'd make it a three way marginal, almost impossible to call.. but if Labour are not really going for it, then I may have overstated them
Installing Windows 7 in a virtual machine might be a safer option.
http://uk.pcmag.com/windows-8-preview-release-date-news-features/16246/feature/how-to-uninstall-windows-8-install-windows-7-on-yo
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/hyper-v-run-virtual-machines
Interested to hear people's thoughts
It's incredibly easy for candidates and naive activists to get sucked into "believing they can win" - the only time that happened to me was early 1982 and the Falklands put paid to that. In February of that year, I was out in the cold and was picking up a 20% swing from the Conservatives on a canvass of a third of my Ward.
The same cannot be said of the 2015 election results in Rotherham and Grimsby.
I'm sure you know this, but still.
As for taffy's point, we generally struggle to get people out for locals and succeed in getting them out in GEs. I don't think it'll be very different this time and turnout will actually be unusually high - there is a lot of interest.
CON 33, UKIP 32, LAB 24, LD 6
UKIP seem to be doing a little better in Thanet North than South in the latest constituency polls.
http://newstonoone.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/my-predictions-for-2014-retrospective.html
NickPalmer • Posts: 3,944 October 11
isam said:
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On Thursday I spoke with one of the activists, who is also standing as an MP next year... he reckons the canvass returns in Rochester last week had UKIP on 40-45%... whether the Clacton bounce helps this, or the Tory candidate reduces it is for us to judge, betting wise
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NickPalmer said
A canvass return of 40-45 isn't wonderful. Knock off a quarter for optimism/politeness/canvassing in the most favourable areas first.
In a by-election, you get a lot of visiting activists who go in cold and it doesn't always help. I'd rather keep the canvassers local and have the outsiders do the delivery/clerical stuff but you can't usually get away with that.
Sorry, did I miss the actual predictions here? What do you think the growth rate will be in 2014? I would guess just under 3%, maybe 2.8%.
What do you think will happen to unemployment? I think the number of people employed will increase by another 600K with perhaps half that coming off the unemployment register.
What do you think base rates will be at the end of the year? My guess is that we will have had 2 rates increases by then increasing base rates to 1.5%, still a negative real rate but indicative of steps on a path to something more like normality.
You have said that you expect inflation to fall below target. I don't. My guess is it will be reasonably close to target by the end of the year, maybe 2.4%. I don't see how such strong growth is compatible with deflation even if commodities fall somewhat.
You think that the balance of payments will worsen. This is logical because we are growing faster than our main competitors but I am more optimistic and expect a net contribution to growth from the balance of payments this year. We will still have a large deficit though and it will remain a concern.
You don't mention QE. By implication I would agree and don't expect any more this year either.
There is a bit of a cop out in describing trends without numbers. I would be interested to see your best guesses.
So pretty good on growth, employment and QE but pretty terrible on interest rates, inflation and BoP.
I hope posting this gives isam a false sense of security!
I can't see any odds for this constituency, but I think it could be an outside chance for UKIP. The party has polled well in three rounds of local elections, it has a very strong candidate in Peter Reeve, and the sitting MP is not very well-regarded locally (sometimes I work in the constituency, and that is very much my impression).
Isn't that John Major's old constituency? rock solid tory, one would imagine...
I don't think the calibre of UKIP candidate has very much bearing on their chances. For some reason some flaky candidates have got very winnable seats.
1. The Liberal Democrats. They spent 2011, 2012 and 2013 marooned on 10%. The big change in 2014 was that they declined further from this low level. No tick there I would have thought.
2. The main parties. Sometimes two-party politics does re-establish itself - this seems to be happening in Greece, where Syriza and New Democracy are presenting options that are polarising the electorate.
Last year you expected two-party politics to reassert itself, but in the absence of a polarising choice it is not doing so. This is the truth of British politics that the main parties try to hide. The policy differences between Government and Opposition are small, particularly in comparison to the frustration of the electorate.
Betting wise I'd rather be on UKIP at 25/1 than Tories at 1/100 but probably wouldn't bother
I thought Rotherham was a dead cert a couple of months ago, but I'm starting to think Labour might shore up their Kipper flank in time for May so that's a toss-up now for me.
Which leaves Labour with a 75% chance.
I 'bet' you vanish on May 8th. Hope you prove me wrong.
Rother Valley is different since Labour is weaker there, the latest poll had Labour on 40 and UKIP on 34, so UKIP has a chance there.
You are the crazy one if you think you are almost certain to win our bet, if it were based on the midpoint of the spreads right I am well ahead
I post under my own name w my own pic unlike you so who is more likely to disappear I wonder?