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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The sure guide to knowing if you live in a marginal – how much is coming through your letterbox
The above polling by Ipsos at GE10 says a lot. By the final week just over a quarter of those sampled in its marginals polling realised that that was the status of their seat.
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Singer Leslie Gore, who topped the US charts in 1963 with her song about teenage angst called It's My Party, has died. Her hits in the early 60s also included Judy's Turn to Cry, You Don't Own Me, She's A Fool, That's The Way Boys Are and Maybe I Know.
Gore, who had cancer, died aged 68 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.
Legend.....
She didn't need leaflets only a voice.
Why would they bother? Because they can and the Tories in particular have money to burn on such exercises (before the main campaign that is). We would be inundated with the damn things right now if they weren't banned. Its bad enough that we have at least three and perhaps up to six government departments pumping out thinly veiled pro-coalition campaign propaganda (Broadband roll out, citizen's service, help to buy scheme etc etc). none of which I believe. appeared on our screens until after Christmas conveniently.
Ed Balls among 12 shadow cabinet members who claimed expenses without receipts
Following shadow chancellor's advice that everyone should get a receipt for cash in hand jobs, Labour MPs put in spotlight over their expense claims
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11416788/Ed-Balls-among-12-shadow-cabinet-members-who-claimed-expenses-without-receipts.html
Its a Great week for Ed!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/iainmartin/11233661/Ukip-cannot-be-allowed-to-keep-dodging-the-detail.html
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/13/tories-david-cameron-buy-election-campaign-spending
It might be fair to say that *more* voters are hostile to UKIP than kippers are to Cameron, but I am not sure you can attribute any relative strength or passion to those feelings. The real picture is more likely to be "quite a lot of voters are marginally unimpressed by UKIP, slightly less UKIP member really didn't have much time for Cameron"
I'm a BoO Tory, about as un-Miliband as you can get, and I am not "hostile" to him, I think he's a bit of a dick, and would make a bad leader of the country, but hostile puts it way too strongly. If that's how I feel, most voters really wont give a cr@p.
That is of course once they've digested that MPs in Westminster want to corrupt their children at ever younger ages.
David Cameron says his reforms aim to end long-term unemployment and help youngsters understand "welfare is not a one-way street".
http://news.sky.com/story/1428774/pm-young-unemployed-will-work-for-benefits
So how does Cameron square this with the minimum wage? There is no way the government can afford to pay them £154 per week surely? Won't charities and so forth stop paying employees if they think they can get unemployed serfs for virtually nothing?
I do not believe for a moment that a minority Tory government has a cat's chance of putting this through
As Iain Martin would say we need the detail!
So it doesn't really matter how much you bang on about it it doesn't matter a whole lot to UKIP today because they have more than enough potential voters to keep them busy. Now do be a good little obsessive and go and annoy somebody else because frankly such considerations are presently irrelevant (particularly as it was less than 10 years ago that the Tories faced similar issues and look how that has apparently changed according to that polling).
Likewise, it's what the voters think of UKIP in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall, that will determine how the party performs on May 7th.
We received a 2015 calendar from our sitting SNP MSP in December and the usual quarterly newsletter from John Thurso before Christmas confirming what he has been doing as our MP. Yesterday his current newsletter arrived. That is it.
I have no idea who the Labour candidate is and I know the Tories have not yet selected a candidate. The SNP selected their candidate a few weeks ago but I have no idea who he is or where he lives.
We did see SLAB in Dundee City centre a couple of weeks ago with a stall. No sign of Jim McGovern though although tbh it was a bit like that in the referendum too until the last couple of weeks. His failure to capitalise on a major local school controversy discussed on here recently is pretty indicative of a man heading into retirement as well.
For all the noise from the SNP I do wonder if a bit of post referendum fatigue has set in. Nothing from them either and we have an SNP councillor in the village.
Personally I think this whole like/dislike measure is a load of tosh. Its going to be subject to rampant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias, I know plenty of people that are planning to vote kipper, but wouldn't tell their friends for fear or ridicule or ostracism, no chance they would tell the nice young lady on the telephone.
Or, come to that, where the Liberals/LibDems were so quiet. Or possibly unreported.
http://news.sky.com/story/1428762/tuesdays-national-newspaper-front-pages
One thing re media pple whinge about anti-Tory bias in BBC but it's nothing like the anti-Miliband bias in the current rightwing printed press.
Overall bit of an uptick for Tories yesterday. Finding this hard to call.
It was inevitable that the media would go for the jugular.
I don't think its a lurch to the left as such, I think its populists doing what populists do, spotting what looks like a policy the public will like and adopting it, I doubt the left/right aspect occurs to them.
I've only had the 1 piece of electoral guff through the letterbox. I'd still say this is a marginal, but I suppose some are more ferociously contested than others.
For a party that claims it likes to challenge the consensus, UKIP seems very bad at dealing with uncomfortable truths itself.
A similar thing happens to new populist right-wing parties across Europe, the Swedish Democrats being just one example.
Most people think that Labour under Ed Milliband is unfit for office. But, they might win office on a third of the vote. Most Scots are opposed to independence, but the SNP are about to sweep the board, against divided opponents.
The (Oxfordshire) council boss whose staff failed scores of girls abused by a sex grooming gang is in line for a payoff worth nearly £600,000.
Miss Simons is due to leave her £186,000-a-year role at the council in June with a £151,000 severance payment and a pension package worth £423,000.
Officials insist the 55-year-old chief executive is leaving Oxfordshire County Council for cost-cutting reasons. But there is anger from victims that the deal will allow Miss Simons to dodge any blame.
Catastrophic failings by the police and social workers meant the abuse carried on for years. In a further development, the chief constable whose force will be lambasted in the same report has been promoted to a new £185,000 a year job.
Sara Thornton will step down next month as head of Thames Valley Police – after eight years in charge – to lead the new National Police Chiefs Council.
Like Miss Simons, the 52-year-old refused to resign two years ago despite the failings of her officers in the Oxford sex grooming case.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2956225/
We Tories know all about how toxic that can be. If you are going to preach from the moral high ground, then check it isn't also a patch of quicksand. When Back-to-Basics got shafted by Back-to-my-Place, that should have been a warning to all political parties: the voters really, really hate a hypocrite. I can barely begin to imagine how much further the Tories would have fallen in the 90's if John Major's affair with Edwina had become public knowledge. That would have given the media the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. Mockery. The front page of today's Sun shows Ed Miliband getting close to that.
Labour's other trait it should worry about is the hubris that comes with being certain of its moral certainty. There are two ways at looking at a "Milly Dowler moment". Generally, the voters will take the one that most looks like a prat fall.
Oh, that's right, we did...
Get real.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31499189
I think in the event of an election that was 30 UKIP, 30 Conservative, 30 Labour, 10 LibDem, then a Conservative-UKIP coalition would be almost certain.
The issue is that junior coalition partners tend to get - and this is a technical term - "fucked". It happened the FPD in Germany, it's happening to the LibDems in the UK.
And it's why the "Five Star" movement in Italy refuses to get involved in any coalition.
The big question is how politics in the UK is to be organised if we have the leading party on (or below) 30% of the vote. Is barely more than one-in-four votes a mandate?
IIRC, too, he lost what was expected to be safe seat at the next election!
If it's a defined benefit pension, it will have a value. It's made up of the council and her contributions over the years and the performance of the investment. It us completely wrong to position it as a payment for departure.
This isn't other parties conspiring against the FN. It is the voters choosing other candidates in the second round of voting.
But, hey, if it turns out to be Hollande vs Le Pen this time around, then the FN stands a definite chance.
Before long, when they went outside, Yon Kippers were forced to wear a purple pound sign, sewn onto their coats....
Funniest post on here in ages. Comedy gold.
In Richmond Park, where I live, I've only received 2 leaflets, one by the Tories and he other by the L/Dems, also a sort of truncated, badly printed L/Dem newspaper. The L/Dem leaflet was awful in colour and design; the tory one the usual adgit-prop.
You don't have to agree with them.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2955220/Far-right-Anti-Jewish-rally-organiser-arrested-series-anti-Semitic-tweets-sent-Labour-MP-Luciana-Berger.html
30% not objecting to a party without policies is woeful. Every single time you introduce a policy, that number goes down. At the moment UKIP have no policies, they can only lose potential.
You don't get to play the game without sticking to the rules that govern everyone else on the pitch. If the bishops want to campaign, then let them stand, let them be candidates, let them knock on doors.
And if they're terribly concerned about poverty, let them pay their full taxes instead of enjoying the charitable tax breaks they currently indulge in. Charities have a duty [flouted often though it may be] to be politically neutral.
Not to mention it paves the way for other religious leaders to start preaching politics. Do we want a precedent set of religious leaders involving themselves in politics? Identity politics is a vile thing, and the Archsocialist should either become a politician or keep out of the election.
Don't get me wrong, I don't know, I'm just trying to work out the source of the figures used.
But I don't see anything objectionable about this letter. It doesn't tell followers who to vote for, but how to think about who to vote for from a religious perspective.
Maybe they should have with 24% of the vote or maybe not with just 60 seats, but they have peddled their wares. And now they promote them as disingenuously as they can.
"It is expected to back the concept of a living wage and urge political parties to avoid scapegoating groups such as immigrants and those on benefits."
Also:
"The letter - the first of its kind to be issued by the Church - is expected to say that the case for the Trident nuclear deterrent needs to be re-examined and more EU integration is needed."
It'd be more subtle for them to say people should vote for Abour-lay, not Onservative-cay. And UKIP-ay is the work of Satan, it would seem.
Priests involving themselves in electioneering is backward.
On which subject, I wonder whether the Balls tax/receipts issue might play personally for him. I've no idea if the Conservatives have any intention of using it negatively against him, never mind whether any other party will, but it's not just a distraction (at best) for Labour as a whole but also an setback for Balls personally. With a majority of 1,101 he doesn't have a great deal of space for upsetting his voters.
Religion is personal thing, I don't mind my vicar telling me about my mortal sins, but when it comes to the church talking/hinting to me about the way I might vote, they can jolly well feck off. its none of their business.
In any case as a party that wont get into government, people don't care what their policies are, they will never get to enact them, what people like I assume is their abrasive tone and the slight impression of burning torches and pitchforks they bring to the party. They are also to be fair the only party that doesn't flannel and prevaricate on immigration, and issue which at least half the electorate feel strongly about.
Unless she's on LinkedIn, of course :-)
That said, I'd expect the SNP to want to keep Labour in power in Westminster until 2016 at least, partly for reasons of readies but mainly so that they can more readily discredit Labour locally in Scotland based on what they're doing in Westminster. It's a long time since 2007 now.
He wrote under a pseudonym, but was very clear that his fellow vicars and bishops considered him something of a pariah. He felt he had to keep it quiet.
In fact the Oxford Times says ''It could potentially save the county council the £217,640 it pays Ms Simons, including salary, pension contributions and bonuses.'' and that the role of chief exec is being scrapped.
Irrespective of what her pension package is worth then if she is not taking early retirement it should surely not be paid until 67. And if she is taking early retirement what is the severance pay for? It looks as if with the job being made redundant she is getting redundancy pay.
http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/archive/2015/01/31/11762848.Oxfordshire_County_Council_scrapping_its_chief_executive_role/
At least the State Pension is effectively paid as a benefit, so it's a genuine ongoing cost. but these overpaid public sector staff are utterly destroying any fiscal hope.
Canvassed a few times.
This is the Lib Dems most recent offering
@SheffieldHallam: From the lib-dems in Sheffield Hallam today, came by Royal Mail post, addressed personally @MSmithsonPB http://t.co/KKuBu16FLc
@SheffieldHallam: Overleaf, it opens out to this. No mention of Nick Clegg. Two Ed's featuring heavily @MSmithsonPB http://t.co/1QxCXTYwEE
UKIP have none. Each policy they publish reduces their 30% max vote. Every. Single. One.