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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The big question in the blue-yellow battles is how much you can trust the Ashcroft two stage seat specific questioning
There’s a big debate going on over the Lord Ashcroft style two stage questioning in his single constituency polls of which there have been more than 150. It will be recalled that after asking the standard voting question he puts a second one suggesting that those sampled focus on their own seat and the candidates who might stand.
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Unless of course the Tories private polling is being done by a Canadian firm.......
Admittedly this might just be confirmation bias, since I'm hoping for a Lib Dem annihilation, but I just find it very hard to believe Lib Dem MPs could be getting such huge boosts as these polls indicate. My suspicion is some people interpret the "thinking about your local area" as if they're being asked how they'd vote in local elections (and there's a long history of the Lib Dems doing better in local elections than they do in Westminster elections in a lot of the areas concerned).
http://www.capx.co/greeks-should-look-at-what-happened-to-venezuela-under-hugo-chavez/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2955038/ANDREW-PIERCE-union-comrades-avoiding-tax.html
And yet...the LibDem vote holding up depends on these people having a total change of heart, coming back to the LibDem fold WHILE THERE IS STILL A CHANCE CLEGG COULD DO EXACTLY THE SAME IN MAY - back another Coalition with the Tories.
Sorry, but why the unfrozen-over hell should these voters come back to a Clegg-led LibDem party? Give me some rational reason why people who fundamentally hate Clegg for turning out to be a crypto-Tory should risk giving him the MPs to do exactly the same thing again?
I want to back Labour for value but got big naggings. Alex Salmond = biggest, more than Miliband who I think may be factored in. In final week if E&W voters see Miliband + Salmond as odds on they'll run back blue won't they?
Was also thinking y'day we may be seeing return of shy tories. Last time we had them outside the London mayor vote was last time they were in govt 1992. Several reasons to do with current news items to think shy tories may be back in frame.
Also worried people haven't woken to election yet. When? 18th March? 30th March? Never?
Head says NoM Lab-SNP coalition but little value there.
Hardest election to punt on for ages. Best way is to take the spreads but put time in to follow moves. Too many variables. Chances for serious winnings but also many burnt fingers. Tough tough call this.
If you had to play russian roulette (First past the post) wouldn't you take any chance to remove some rounds from the magazine and improve your chances ?
If you had to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, would you want the one with 6 bullets in it or the one with 4 or 5 ?
Even if you thought there was only 10% chance of the Lib Dems supporting Labour, it's the vote that carries the best percentage of desired outcome.
Tonight Channel4 9pm,
UKIP: The First 100 days - A look at a possible future where Nigel Farage's party has won a shock election victory and taken power in Great Britain. The programme follows Deepa Kaur, UKIP's only female Asian MP, as she tries to navigate frontline politics during her first 100 days in the job.
The facts are tactical voters will vote tactically and Labourites are the biggest tactical voters; only about 20% of kippers have Europe as their No. 1 priority so banging on about a referendum simply misses the target.
Chuka distancing himself from the Eds. A clean pair of hands after the inevitable disaster?
Really ? I think they'll simply view the corruption from another perspective, Labour is heavily prone to cronyism.
The press rather missed the point of the obviously skilfully judged kipper platform for the election, as shown in their recent launch. The patriotism bit is the one thing that the ex-Labour WWC vote and the shire Tories have in common, and it can be interpreted as either or both of anti-EU or anti-immigration according to the listeners own taste.
My view is currently Kipperdom is more about immigration than it is about the EU, because Farage is discovered is plays well with all wings of his party, and the great majority of the public (the Guardian can scoff all it wants, the BES survey showed very strong support for reducing immigration in the UK population, and its likely to be a very shy vote when examined in VI polls because of UKIPs image problem, and because a lot of people might be cautious about flaunting their views on immigration in public).
If you accept Kipperdom is really about immigration, then Dave's failure to deliver the "no-ifs, no-buts" promise makes him no more reliable person to vote for than Redward, the view that both major parties are as bad as each other has been shown to be the case on immigration, so why vote for either ? Might as well vote kipper and see if they can get a dozen seats and start to hold the main parties feet to the flames.
Nope, you miss the point. It's Tories doing what Tories do, its already factored in to their vote. Labour is meant to be cleaner and nicer than the Tories, the evidence is that it isn't, that will come as a shock to some of their voters.
Who is more likely to be shocked about outraged about financial irregularities, readers of The Telegraph, or readers of the Guardian ? Who do they mostly vote for ?
Here people are required to issue a receipt for any purchase of goods or services by law, if your tradesman doesn't issue a receipt you can phone the hotline and he will get a visit from revenue inspectors. Does that stop cash-in-hand ? You have to be joking! Receipts are instead made out for a much smaller sum than the actual value of the transaction, the customer goes away happy with his discount, the tradesman pockets (most) of the cash.
On the subject of cash-in-hand, a few years ago I was chatting with the man from Customs and Excise as he reviewed my VAT returns, and he told me that their biggest nightmare was dry-cleaning shops.
I asked why. He said well if you have say a sandwich making company, they can look at the receipt for the bread and fillings you buy, and estimate how many sandwiches you would make as a result, look at your sales and see if the two are in anyway comparable.
In the dry cleaning world, the business runs the machine two of three times a day, it has the same amount of solvent put in regardless of how many items of clothing are in the load, and the cycle runs for the same time regardless, in short there is no relationship between inputs and outputs, and the services are the sort of price where people just hand over a fiver or a tenner for their suit, as sufficiently inconsequential that very few customers care about, or keep the receipts. The only real chance they have he said was to watch customers going in out out for a significant period of time, or run a lot of dummy customers, both of which are expensive, so they have to be pretty sure they are on to something.
People like to be able to pay for items untraceable, as a privacy thing, certain sorts of items are always going to be paid for cash, because people don't want it on their bank statement or credit card bill. One wonders how many cheques "adult shops" get in the average day! Similarly people are often nervous about handing their financial details to an unknown tradesman, cash is much more cut and dried with no follow-on exposure.
Plausible deniability. When I pay a tradesman, whether he pays his tax or not is none of my business, I might have my suspicions, but its really not my problem, any more than if I was selling garden implements I should be worried in case every time someone buys an axe that they are going to use it for murder.
Most people save money from it, tradesmen offer a discount for cash, so the customer pays less. Making paying less socially unacceptable is going to be an uphill fight!
More fundamentally most of the population view taxation as legalised robbery, I have never met anyone that was offended by the request from a tradesman for a cash payment, reactions have varied between indifferent to "good one if you can get away with it". The vast majority of the population would avoid tax if it could, that makes making socially unacceptable effectively impossible, contrast say drink-driving, which the vast majority of the population wouldn't do, so was easier (but still took a long time) to make socially unacceptable.
A bigger factor is that I suspect the reason the second specific question understated the result was the Cleggasm. Although they lost a few seats the Lib Dems polled really well in 2010, more than twice as well as they are polling at the moment and better than they would have been polling when PoliticsHome did their polling. This shows the major problem for me of the Ashdown constituency polls. Even if they were accurate (very big if) they are historic and the general drift down of the Lib Dem vote since most of them were done is not reflected.
This shows that even strong incumbents are vulnerable to national swings. If the Lib Dems do not substantially improve their national polling they are facing serious losses (that is up to 30). Last time around the debate structure gave Clegg a tremendous boost. This time around he is not going to get that, being excluded from the head to head and in amongst the minor parties. It is not a good position and I suspect it will cost the Lib Dems up to 10 additional seats.
Also have small blue punts in Bath and Twickers
I think this is one of the trickiest ones to call, LDs who have kept a distance from Govt may fare better than those who haven,t
...otherwise I would not be able to expense it...
Ummm...
And getting a receipt does nothing to stop the tradesman not declaring it, not does it help the taxman if there is an audit. How does he know you got a receipt, and how does he get you to produce it?
Madness.
One area always under HMRC scrutiny is taxis - where HMRC will calculate an assumption for tips. Believe that there has been some interesting battles over this. Of course this could apply to the restaurant/cafe trade where a service charge is not invoiced or where a tip is given on top of the the service charge.
But the real point of a receipt is to be allowed to set that cost against something whether it is recoverable expenses in the case of Mr Balls or taxable income in the case of any other business. As homeowners cannot do that why on earth should they demand receipts? I don't. We have enough clutter from my VAT receipts for my business.
Ask a person the same (or similar) question again, some will think they answered wrongly the first time and say something different because of that.
@afneil: Jim Naughtie getting exasperated with Chuka Umunna on #r4today. Don't blame him.
See that, "Smoking potent cannabis was linked to 24% of new psychosis cases analysed in a study by King's College London" is a strong argument against those who wish to legalise/decriminalise the drug.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31480234
It would be possible to clamp down on cash in hand quite effectively, by saying if No Receipt - then No Consumer Protection Laws apply..... Of course, you could go further and rigidly apply a law that made both parties guilty of fraud for cash in hand payments, but that would be a major leap and make something which may currently have a wholly innocent explanation into something automatically criminal.
"The Lib Dems gained in weak seats and declined in strong seats"
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/trackrecord_10models.html
"It is also worth noting that even with a much smaller sample size, a similar analysis of the 2009 wave of the BES internet panel rightly suggested little difference in Liberal Democrat 2010 performance in the seats they previously won compared with those where they came second in 2005."
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/what-the-bes-suggests-about-constituency-variation-in-party-performance-by-stephen-fisher-university-of-oxford/
Also as a a business we never use the cloud for any of our databases - all those are held on systems that do not link to the internet.
Given the Lid Dems rating are so low the tactical voting argument is less strong than in 2010.
My belief is therefore that UNS will again be the best seat forecaster with a few additional losses where Lib Dem MP,s are standing down and in University seats where a strong tuition fees backlash can b expected.
Does abuse in earlier life transpire as narcissim later on ?
Have they found definitive proof that cannabis causes psychosis then?
Until I see the details of the study, I will remain sceptical as the headlines are usually less nuanced than the actual study.
I'm really quite surprised the Danish attacks haven't gotten more coverage.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-creativity-cure/201408/if-you-are-the-target-narcissistic-abuse
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31480234
Tho'
'They also concluded the use of hash, a milder form of the drug, was not associated with increased risk of psychosis.'
I suspect that the main tax concern for such businesses is more likely to be an over declaration of sales, because their huge (97+%) profit margin could potentially make such businesses ripe for money laundering.
We might also say that being a loner makes things more disturbing, not less (cf Breivik). Hard to intercept communications if someone's working solo. As for 'few links to Islam', he carried out a copycat attack based on the murderous assault of jihadist lunatics. He may have few links to Islam, but that's a pretty damned big link to jihad.
The other thought is that seats the LibDems have taken from Labour might prove stickier this time, because they will have squeezed the local Conservative vote dry - which could prove to be rather more loyal because of the Coalition.
This would be the same skunk that is a thousand times more powerful than normal cannabis?
Or is it specifically the THC/CBD ratio?
Is that tax planning or tax avoidance?
The "lone" wolf seems to have had accomplices. Two more arrested in Copenhagen on charges of supporting him.
There are attacks by mentally deranged people but obviously when groups attack in defence of Mohammed and attack Jewish places, it's entirely unconnected with Islam. Mere coincidence.
When five hundred lone wolves leave the UK to join IS and when the numbers reach thousands, you need to know the collective term for lone wolves.
They're small in percentage terms, but significant in effect.
We await an attack by lone wolf nuns.
Most cash in hand probably isn't the couple of grand for tarting up the bathroom, because people are more caution with big sums, its more likely to be window cleaners, gardeners, odd job men, sparkies, plumbers etc. Fifty notes for an hour or twos work which may or many not go straight into the back pocket.
Soon we shall see the same phenomenon in the American primaries, where leading candidates will stumble after years of preaching to the choir have left them unprepared for hostile questioning.
Japan is screwed up in the opposite direction (lowish income taxes, national insurance de-facto optional for small businesses, crazy-high corporate taxes), and everybody tries to get all their money out in wages and perks and have the company end up making as close as possible to zero.
But, I agree that in more urban areas, local elections should be a good guide. It's why I'm still fairly bullish about Nick Clegg's chances.
Islam causes psychopathy in 24% of cases?
Raoul Moat had a following of deluded morons, but we didn't see copycat attacks.
School attacks in America may be so, but the attacker usually had a pre-existing grudge against the school.
The Copenhagen attacker and his colleagues may have been encouraged by the Paris attack but they already had issues based on anti-Western values (or even, dare we say it, Islam).
It would however cause a real problem for those who are illiterate, who are I would expect amongst the highest group of cash-in-hand, no paperwork workmen.
Another rubbish piece of legistation though, thank Gordon Brown for that.
This is the primarly set up for all owner managed business. Pay directors salary up to the personal allowance, and then everything else as dividends. It effectively 'avoids' paying National Insurace, but is basic tax planning which all accountants advise if its suitable.
If labour consider that to be tax avoidance and clamp down on it; they'll effective kill all small companies dead. Not to mention my job probably.
Inviting in large numbers of Muslim immigrants whilst destabilizing the Middle East and insulting their religion is not a good strategy. Pamela Geller et al do not speak for me.
Regarding IR35 I found this note in Wikipedia particularly amusing Expected to raise £300m, actually raising £220k (assuming it doesn't cost anything to administer) another cracking Labour success story.