For the past four years my analysis of GE15 has been that 2010 LD voters in the marginals were likely to be a main driving force. In 2010 they represented nearly one in four of all GB votes. Now the party had been polling only a fraction of that. Where would those votes move?
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If another country fails to ratify despite its government's efforts (with no prospect of a re-run as in Ireland or Denmark in the past), then there would be an irrevocable swing towards exit within the Conservative Party. Cameron's position as leader would depend on whether or not he chose to join that movement.
In 2010 3.1% voted for UKIP (and a further 1.9% for the BNP who seem to have largely switched to UKIP). 23.0% voted LD.
According to the BBC Poll of Polls UKIP are now on 14% and LD's are on 9%
That means that 14% of the electorate are ex-LD and 11% are new-UKIP (9% if you assign BNP->UKIP).
Though of course its over-simplistic to think of UKIP as "blues on holiday" or disappearing yellows as now reds.
You don't hold a referendum after ratification, that doesn't happen. Referendums always happen before ratification, that's why a Lisbon referendum was a non-starter after Brown cancelled the election and ratified it.
Continuing FPT: although it's right that Maastricht was concluded speedily, that's because there was a general consensus that everyone wanted it. I'm not sure that it's generally realised in Britain, or even on PB, that the idea that a big new treaty is desirable any time soon is a British concept which has completely failed to make progress. Nobody is discussing a major new treaty anywhere in Europe that I've spotted, and I read a lot of Continental media in the original. There will be a need for a routine revision near the end of the decade: anything beyond that will need to be sold to 27 dubious partners. Many of them view the idea as an internal device aimed at satisfying the British Conservative Party: they are merely too polite to say so very often.
The position is like a man with 27 wives who wants to agree an open relationship with all of them. Some might like it, some not, but really it's going to take a long time. I actually doubt if anything substantive will be agreed by 2020, let alone 2017, and it's quite possible that there won't be a serious discussion of a major treaty revision at all.
That's one reason a Tory government in 2015-20 would be such an excruciating experience - five years of grumbling and bitching about something that isn't happening.
Either way if Cameron stays as PM we have the possibility of a renegotiation and a commitment to a referendum.
If Miliband becomes PM we have the commitment not to have a referendum.
If you want one the choice couldn't be simpler.
What he has obviously concluded from 2010 is that being straight with the British people and telling them what it is really going to be like goes down like a cup of cold sick. They would rather live in a fantasy land where money is available for all their pet indulgences and any penalties are only paid by those richer than the voter who is being spoken to.
So that is what he has provided. And it does seem to be popular. Labour must be as sick as the proverbial parrot about this manoeuvre. Shame.
I would have been much more convinced if OGH’s argument had been put forward by a dyed-in the-wool Tory or Labour voter.
There is of course a well-known tendency of everyone to be somewhat self-serving -- in the nicest possible way. Hence, UKIP defectors consider themselves to be the most important.
My take is that nothing & no-one in this election is likely to be important -- other than Scotland & ex-SLAB voters.
If the SNP really do manage to destroy SLAB, it will be a truly extraordinary achievement. It will be the defining moment of not just the election --- but also the next 5 to 10 years, and the future of the UK as a country.
Of all Miliband’s failings, it is his failings in Scotland (because he has presided over catastrophe after catastrophe) that look likely to have the longest & most devastating impact.
Not sure those figures are correct as they ignore Don't Knows and WNV, e.g. today's YG has 30% 2010LD going to Labour but that's 30% of 81% as 19% DK/WNV. So today is 24.3% of 2010 LD's.
@GuidoFawkes: LOL at the Moment Miliband Realises Tory Has Made Fool of Him [VIDEO] http://t.co/hgkptECa2y http://t.co/CblkcWVtrm
Talking of austerity last time round probably felt all grown-up but scared people to death. Austerity? People who were old enough to remember post WW2 would remember real austerity. The past five years have been nothing of the sort. I live in a constituency considered to be on the poverty line. It's really not that bad and although post-2008 has been marginally tougher it hasn't been austere by any means. I know a lot of youngsters (through rugby) and they all have cars, Iphones, Netflix and plenty of heavy weekends. They live the dream.
Osborne could probably cut just as much over the next five years and dress-it up as the roaring twenties. It'll be more popular and have the same end result.
He's lived and learned. And he's never going to convince the militant lefty, bedroom tax, people-committing-suicide-at-the-mere-sight-of-a-Tory brigade anyway.
Apologies, see you said excluding DK's, but I think 25% overall is a more realistic figure so around 6% of electorate.
From my POV the position is more complex. I see the EZ gradually becoming a more cohesive bloc (probably ex Greece) who will need to integrate fiscal policy with monetary policy to work effectively. That will require a degree of integration greater than anything seen to date. It is also going to make that bloc more likely to vote as one overriding the interests of those not in it (principally us) by QMV. If we are to remain in the EU we need to find ways of facilitating that integration whilst at the same time protecting outsiders like us from being taken advantage of.
In short we need to accept that the creation of the Euro was a step change in the EU which requires the creation of EU heavy and EU light. Getting the details of that sort of deal sorted out by 2017 seems to me optimistic but it has been obvious for some years now that this is a problem on both sides of the fence and I am not sure I agree with Nick that no progress has been made.
It is yet another real world problem that Labour seems to have nothing to say about.
In an exclusive YouGov poll for Red Box, I asked: "Labour's manifesto says that 'Every policy in this manifesto is paid for. Not one commitment requires additional borrowing.' What do you think about this?"
We offered three options to choose from: 20 per cent chose "Labour means this and in government will keep its promise". Some 47 per cent thought "Labour means this now but would not in practice be able to keep its promise". Just 17 per cent thought "Labour doesn't mean this".
I guess the asumption that they made was anyone ethnic must automatically be a labour voter...
That said I find the 'getting the x vote for us' distateful. Everyone is an individual.
Anecdote alert: we had a guy yesterday when out canvassing. He was out in his front garden, UKIP poster in the front window. He got a cheery smile anyway. His response?
"Yeah, I know I've got a UKIP poster, but I was thinking I'd vote for you lot anyway..."
Don't think so LOL. (Yes I know its more complicated underneath but that's odd).
Of course, the opposite is true. Cash amount is in fact almost double in the latest year compared to 2000-01!!
http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5326/economics/government-spending/
Funny kind of austerity.
I very much doubt this has anything to do with the manifestos and expect it is a somewhat delayed response to the ICM. If they are going to be that slow to respond to a major poll or event there has to be some betting opportunities there.
Can some kind patient poster once again explain that pollster's change in methodology and its rationale/logic (if any) for concentrating on Jan/Feb switchers or whatever they did! Yes, I am confused.
But, critically, does all this mean that YouGov's VI are now more questionable as a consequence compared to all the other polls be they internet or phone?
If Miliband can produce something from the manifesto to excite his support(apart from minimum wage,am sick of it) he can gain some momentum,otherwise it is going to be neck and neck till the election.
I trust we're all looking forward to the big reveal today?
Yes, the fourth episode of Zodiac Eclipse will be up at Kraxon magazine!
Oh, and some Clegg chap will be announcing the Lib Dem manifesto.
The more pollsters you put in the "ignore" pile, the more interesting it gets to hear from the others.
I think Ed Balls panicked when he thought that he was going to have to deliver the first draft and put the red pen through anything costing money. He must be infuriated at what the Tories have done and his boss will not be happy either.
They've moved from a 2010 voter ID weighting, to another, which I think would slightly favour Labour, but not that much.
We're going to find out in 3 weeks time, if they are right or wrong
YouGov are also returning to a method we successfully used in the 2005 general election. Our usual polling method relies upon weighting by party identification. However, for the campaign itself we will be drawing our daily polling samples from people who we previously contacted in January and February this year and weighting our data using how those people told us they were voting at that time (a period when the polls were broadly stable and Labour were, on average, slightly less than a point ahead).
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/04/08/labour-lead-2/
It's this problem, far more than the perennial rumblings about leadership, that make it very difficult for Labour to win elections.
PS And how successful were YouGov in 2005 compared to their rivals. In 2010 they didn't do too badly, did they?
"The kind of society it wants is broadly the kind of society I want
Con 29%, Lab 29%, LD 11%"
p.3
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/3wwffeujmb/YG-Archive-Pol-Sun-results-090415.pdf
Populus Party ID weights
"Regardless of which party, if any, you are likely to end up voting for at the next General Election due in May 2015 or are leaning towards at the moment, which political party would you say you have usually most closely identified yourself with?"
Con 30%, Lab 30%, LD 10%, UKIP 6%
p.12
http://populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/OmOnline_Vote_13-04-2015_BPC.pdf
Whatever the outcome, the story of this election looks set to be the final destruction of the Scottish Labour movement. It has effectively been replaced by the SNP as the progressive party, and certainly it has lost its reputation as the party that will help the ordinary people of Scotland.
There are some fascinating papers to be written in the next ten years on the reasons for it: Labour's corruption, its failures of leadership, maladministration at the local level, its arrogant disdain for its voters, the charisma of Salmond and the provocative government of the SNP - all of these could be considered.
Does perhaps offer opportunities for the Scottish Conservatives to rebrand themselves as the opposition to the SNP. There's certainly enough out there who would consider their policies if they could only shed the tarnishing of their image by Thatcher's ruthless disregard for Scotland's different needs:
http://news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/analysis/317160-analysis-stephen-daisley-on-public-support-for-the-benefits-cap/
But that's for the longer term. In the meanwhile, the SNP seem set to have a political hegemony north of the border for 5-10 years, maybe longer.
1 "Vote Labour" sign up in 'diverse' Darnall, zero election signs seen in WWC Killamarsh.
Certainly if Ed is going to get the core old Labour vote out it won't be with much enthusiasm !
ICM (phone): Con 39 Lab 33
Opinium (web): Con 36 Lab 34
Comres (phone): Con 34 Lab 33
TNS (web): Con 34 Lab 32
Ashcroft (phone) Con 33 Lab 33
Populus (web) Con 33 Lab 33
Ipsos (phone) Con 33 Lab 34
Yougov (web) Con 33 Lab 35
Comres (web) Con 33 Lab 35
Survation(web) Con 31 Lab 35
Panelbase (web) Con 31 Lab 37
The problems with this are:
1. Were YouGov polls an accurate snapshot of public opinion in January and February? If they had systematic biases at that time then the new methodology has those systematic biases now, as well as potentially adding some more.
2. It reduces the size of the polling panel to roughly 60,000 people, some of whom will now be too busy with the garden to respond to YouGov surveys. I really don't think you can call the sample thus gained as random** in any meaningful sense of that word, though it partly depends on what the response rate is to an invite to complete a YouGov poll.
However, putting all that aside, bear in mind that His Lordship astutely pointed out that opinion polls in January/February tended to be a fairly good guide to the election result for recent elections, because by then people have largely made up their minds and the campaigns cancel out. If that's the case this time, than YouGov's new methodology will effectively be ensuring that they pretty closely follow their polling average for January/February, and therefore get about as close to the election result as their methodology at the time would allow.
As an aside I would also say that if the above sounds a bit harsh it is only because I regard the biggest problem with opinion polling is achieving a random sample, and because online polling is operated on an opt-in basis it is going to find that harder to achieve than with a phone sample. I'm surprised that they do as well as they do, really, and for that I must give them enormous credit for their efforts.
** By comparison, a journal editor wrote in EOS recently than the response rate to peer review requests was about 1-in-4 outside of Nature/Science, so if you assume the response rate for YouGov is equal to that then they will be sending out invites to their entire panel on average about once a week, or more often if people are less likely to respond to YouGov polls than peer review requests. This is almost as self-selecting as people who choose to reply to Nick Palmer's emails...
http://newstonoone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-labour-battleground-in-april-2015.html
I'll be going through each of the parties in turn this week for the final run-up to the election.
Expect UKIP to hog the headlines, and UKIP generally do well, when they are visible in the media.
In fact, it has been neck-and-neck for six months. In order to achieve greater accuracy and minimise sampling fluctuations, YouGov has changed its methods for the final month of the campaign. Our starting point is the pool of more than 100,000 people we questioned in January and February. At the time we found an average Labour lead of less than 1%. So did an average of 54 polls conducted by other companies, even though individual surveys varied between a Labour lead of 7% and a Tory lead of 4%.
Starting last week, YouGov has been requestioning separate samples of at least 1,600 voters drawn from that initial 100,000-strong pool. This allows us to compare what they told us some weeks ago with what they say now. As a result we can be confident that any marked deviation from neck-and-neck will be real, and not a sampling wobble.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/04/12/parties-find-impossible-gain-edge/
Poster count anecdote. The only one that I have seen in Leicester is a Tory one for the council (3 hindu candidates btw) and several Labour ones outside Keith Vaz's office. Apathy rules in Leicezter East!
Election address today from Labour candidate going on about A E waiting (LRI performance much better over last two years). No picture of either Ed.
In 2010 I got mildly obsessive about it and started driving home from work different ways, and still failed to spot any posters at all more or less - a couple of generic "conservative" ones in farmers fields, and a Lib Dem poster on what transpired to be the Lib Dem candidate's own house! (Erstwhile PB poster and amusingly now Labour party member Andrew Lewin).
And that was it! Pretty dull when the local MP has a 15K+ majority in both my home and work constituencies.
However, I think there is an important thing to remember here. The EU is not a signatory to the Treaties of Rome, Maastrich or Lisbon - only the countries that constitute the EU are signatories.
Therefore, Herr Juncker can say what he likes: if the countries that are members of the EU sign a new EU treaty, there is nothing he can do about it.
If the 0.2% of the voting pool who have self-selected to join YouGov and repeatedly answer polls are not for some reason representative of the remaining 99.8% nation then will YouGov be able to catch that?
EG if the 0.2% are more "aware" of politics then now that the media has ramped up election talk if there is a late swing amongst some of the remaining 99.8% will YouGov catch that?
The only literature I've received has been from Simon Marcus, the Conservative candidate - and we've gotten about three or pieces (one personalised) from him.
There are exactly zero posters for any political parties anywhere in Hampstead, as far as I can tell.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32303622
"It [dark matter] makes up 85% of the total matter in the cosmos and comprises some 27% of the known Universe."
One could refer to mass and the other volume, which is fair enough, but it doesn't say that.
I might take a long walk around the village later to see how many signs are out in this non-marginal.
Saw a clip of the debate on the news / Watched video highlights on YouTube / Watched the whole thing on telly.
9-4 in the 326th seat and yet 40s+ for a majority ?!
Lol....
Anyway I've added Newcastle under Lyme @ 2-7 to the constituency portfolio.
Mr. Thompson, aye, seems to be the case. Cheers to both of you.
Miliband looked at the bloke and saw an Asian who's exactly like all other Asians because he's Asian. There's probably a special Asian version of the manifesto containing special Asian policies for generic identical Asian clones like him.