Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
Here are the single-figure prices. Halifax & Birmingham Northfield have certainly been tipped on here. I additionally quite like some of the low double-figure prices in Wales (Gower etc.)
Southampton Itchen 5/2 Halifax 7/2 Hampstead and Kilburn 7/2 Derby North 4/1 Telford 4/1 Dumfries and Galloway 5/1 Bolton West 5/1 Westminster North 5/1 Birmingham Edgbaston 6/1 Walsall North 6/1 M'brough S and C'land E 6/1 Gedling 6/1 Wirral South 13/2 Wakefield 7/1 Southampton Test 15/2 Penistone & S'bridge 8/1 Birmingham Northfield 8/1 Tooting 9/1 Newcastle-under-Lyme 9/1 Bury South 9/1 Harrow West 9/1
Their tightening was caused by a methodological change (see their Updates tab):
We have revised how we use older constituency polls in constituencies with multiple constituency polls. We now exclude constituency polls that are more than four months old, if there are more recent polls in that constituency.
Fair enough if they think it's a better forecast but you can't really conclude that the underlying picture has tightened.
Indeed. There are (at least) 2 fundamental problems in the housing market. Firstly Demand/Supply of houses (which is at least discussed now, even if solutions aren't particularly forthcoming) and Secondly (which is ignored by almost everyone) Demand/Supply of Credit with which to buy said houses. I think that much much more needs to be done on the latter (ie massively restrict credit available which will cause prices to crash and everything then be more affordable).
There is a good argument to be made that today's house prices in some ways reflect demand more accurately than they did in the past.
In the past it was the case that if a married man had a working wife, she had no personal allowance of her own, and instead paid his marginal rate on all her earnings. She was thus in effect a line item on his tax return. He got an enhanced personal allowance and he got it whether she worked or not.
If that were still the case today, a working married woman whose husband was on or just short of £100k would find herself paying the ~64% marginal tax rate on her earnings. So she'd keep at most a third of her earnings, probably have to spend quite a lot of that on getting to work and clothing herself for it, and that's before considering the cost of things like childcare that she might have to arrange.
In effect, under that sort of tax treatment, her salary is basically zero, unless both she and her husband earn either very little or a huge amount.
This is where building societies originally got their lending multiples from. 3.5x main salary, or 2.5x main and 1x second salary, reflected the value of that second salary in paying a mortgage off.
If you ask people to guess when that was altered, so that women were treated properly, most people would guess it was changed between the wars. In fact it was not until Lawson was CotE that it was fixed, in 1988.
So the house prices of the 1970s seriously undervalued property, because of the sexist tax treatment of women's earnings. That has been permanently structurally altered, so while some of the price today is clearly in consequence of 0.5% base rates, it's hard to see any way in which house prices could go back to what the baby boomers were able to buy them for.
There is a storm coming for Labour -- they have ruled the Welsh Assembly in Corruption Bay since inception, yet have not so far taken any blame for the poor performance in education and health.
Perhaps the Welsh will finally understand how politics works by the Assembly elections next year.
If you vote SNP, then the deal for Scotland gets better. If you vote for compliant Labour MPs, you’ll watch them get rich while you stay poor.
The Scots have finally realised that SLAB are self-serving machine-politics lefty mafiosi who have taken them for granted but delivered 3 parts of sod all - and decided to vote for someone else.
The Welsh will soon enough do the same. Labour have been a shamefully disastrous government in Wales. If PC replace them, and do an even half-way reasonable job of running Wales whilst pushing for Welsh unicorns in Westminster (a la SNP), then Labour will be dead in Wales too.
And then working class voters in England may take a look at the sneering Islington de-haut-en-bas Guardianista millionaires who run Labour and start on a similar journey.
Dear me. One wild poll and suddenly and we have to suffer clap-trap like this. Get Izzy to tell you some jokes.
And as for it being impossible for people in Torbay to "hate" Ed Miliband, I've heard educated London lefties, Highgate-dwelling Labour activists even, tell me precisely that. They hate him.
I'm always shocked when I hear it, because I don't hate the guy. Just revile his policies and despair of his worldview. As a human being he seems quite affable.
But plenty of people out there really dislike him, the same way people dislike posh Tories. And that's probably no coincidence: Miliband is seen as just another one of THEM, the despised, super-wealthy metrosexual elite.
Cant believe the british press either. Never seen such vitriol thrown at a politician before as the onslaught this past week. we can bleat on about less dead tree press influence much as we like but all this will have an effect. The Sun, Mail & even surprising the Express are pounding Miliband with raw hatred & bigging up Cammo same time.
Why do you say "even surprisingly the Express"? Would you have expected anything else?
Cant believe the british press either. Never seen such vitriol thrown at a politician before as the onslaught this past week. we can bleat on about less dead tree press influence much as we like but all this will have an effect. The Sun, Mail & even surprising the Express are pounding Miliband with raw hatred & bigging up Cammo same time.
You are having a laugh right? Thatcher, Major, Kinnock got far far worse from the press.
Even looking at the Newzoids program, it is very tame really compared to Spitting Image i.e. Cameron wanders around being a terribly "nice old chap" but no real idea about the real world and Ed is useless with a catchphrase "at least I tried".
It sounds like Armageddon is breaking out at Clapham Junction this morning. It's days like this you realise how better served North London is in terms of Public Transport.
And in Clapham, North Yorkshire it's a bright morning with a hint of snow on Ingleborough peak and boisterous lambs in the field outside... And with fibre-to-the-home Gigabit broadband about to happen thanks to a community project and flourishing high-tech businesses run from barns and farmhouses, the perfect answer to those who can't afford to buy a house in London...
Please! As a northerner myself, please do not advertise the advantages of Yorkshire/ Durham/ Nland - the southerners think it is all slagheaps and occupied by wasters - and we want to keep it that way to stop them coming up and spoiling the best countryside in England.
Point taken... I have done much over the past few years to hedge against a Milliband government, the recent pension reforms were a very pleasant help, but the one risk I haven't covered is the likelihood of Milliband allowing a free for all on wind turbines in national parks and AONB - cue Dair to label me a Nimby. If anything would lead me to civil disobedience it'd be the ruination of the Yorkshire Dales or Forst of Bowland by wind farms...
Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
Here are the single-figure prices. Halifax & Birmingham Northfield have certainly been tipped on here. I additionally quite like some of the low double-figure prices in Wales (Gower etc.)
Southampton Itchen 5/2 Halifax 7/2 Hampstead and Kilburn 7/2 Derby North 4/1 Telford 4/1 Dumfries and Galloway 5/1 Bolton West 5/1 Westminster North 5/1 Birmingham Edgbaston 6/1 Walsall North 6/1 M'brough S and C'land E 6/1 Gedling 6/1 Wirral South 13/2 Wakefield 7/1 Southampton Test 15/2 Penistone & S'bridge 8/1 Birmingham Northfield 8/1 Tooting 9/1 Newcastle-under-Lyme 9/1 Bury South 9/1 Harrow West 9/1
SNP voting down a CON Queens speech is one of the biggest certs of the election.
Including one that had 'Devo Max with knobs on"?
Any association with the Conservatives sees the SNP go back very very fast indeed.
The only people who might vote Conservative in Scotland actually do so. Association is completely toxic, the realpolitik of Scotland just demands you don't work with the Conservatives.
But, there seems to be a counterexample.
The SNP ran a minority administration in 2007 in Holyrood propped up by the Tories.
It didn’t do them any harm in the in the 2011 election -- though admittedly Labour ran the dumbest campaign on record.
I'd have though all Nicola and Alex have to say is,” We tried to make a deal with Ed Miliband, he wouldn’t talk to us, he offered a poor solution for Scotland. We will never, ever accept second-best for Scotland”.
They will want to arrange for the blame to be shovelled on hapless Ed’s shoulders, of course.
SNP voting down a CON Queens speech is one of the biggest certs of the election.
A battered and bruised Labour party reeling from Scotland on 265 seats has a far harder choice to make.
The Lib Dems will probably support it but I'm not 100% certain about that.
It is in the SNP’s interest for all voters to believe that they will vote down a Con Queens Speech. After the election, I expect them to act in Scotland’s best interests -- whatever they may be.
The battered and bruised Labour party have a very easy choice to make. They need to remove Ed Miliband.
I suspect a Labour leader with say greater roots in the Trade Union movement would not have ended up losing Scotland. The Trade Unions always used to be one of the ways in which working class Scots felt a kinship with working class voters in England or Wales.
There is a set of elections on Scotland & Wales next year, and the Labour party can’t afford to go into it with an ineffectual London intellectual at the helm.
It is in Ed’s interests to spout on about a minority Govt, but it sure isn’t in the interests of most of the rest of the Labour Party.
Who would you vote for in a new Labour leaders contest ?
I cannot think of anyone other than Alan Johnson.
Chukka will walk it.
LAB lose my vote if so
I noticed Ed was only 3rd choice for leader behind DM and Balls from my MP. So i suspect he may be a Chukka man.
Still its not relevant as Ed will be PM next week.
She is cut from the same cloth as every other identkit Labour politician - useless
Completely off topic, but 7th May is the centenary of the sinking of the Clyde built Lusitania..
Her Tyne-built sibling, the Mauritania, continued to reign as speed-queen of the North Atlantic for another decade, holding the record for over two......
.......I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.....
Chuka Umunna is SO not the answer. Jesus how can anyone suggest him? The grandson of Sir Helenus Milmo, QC.
I've seen him in the flesh. He oozes posh London suavity, he's a more handsome version of Miliband and probably as off putting to average punters beyond the M25. Labour need a one nation northerner. Aspirational but ordinary.
The same could probably be said for the Conservatives.
Which sadly does not fit my favoured Rory Stewart. He's anything but ordinary.
I was at a speech largely given to Oxford Uni Labour... the speaker raised the prospect of Chuka and the audience moaned. Should be his strength I would have thought.
Just thinking about the Newzoids program, they have Pickles as the Tories man of the people, no BS, understands the world.
Where is the likes of Pickles in real life campaign, I haven't seen anybody but Cameron and Osborne. When the Tories won Crewe and Nantwich for instance he was given a lot of credit for being a good face for the Tories in Northern cities.
Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
Here are the single-figure prices. Halifax & Birmingham Northfield have certainly been tipped on here. I additionally quite like some of the low double-figure prices in Wales (Gower etc.)
Southampton Itchen 5/2 Halifax 7/2 Hampstead and Kilburn 7/2 Derby North 4/1 Telford 4/1 Dumfries and Galloway 5/1 Bolton West 5/1 Westminster North 5/1 Birmingham Edgbaston 6/1 Walsall North 6/1 M'brough S and C'land E 6/1 Gedling 6/1 Wirral South 13/2 Wakefield 7/1 Southampton Test 15/2 Penistone & S'bridge 8/1 Birmingham Northfield 8/1 Tooting 9/1 Newcastle-under-Lyme 9/1 Bury South 9/1 Harrow West 9/1
Another quality piece. The question is whether specific gains are better value than taking 9/1 on Tory Maj - unless you have local intel I'd suggest not. If they're in play, chances are Tories have only lost literally a handful to Labour and probably gained 15-20 from the Lib Dems, so they'll already be on about 322.
Finally, Corby is sui generis but looks big at 7/2.
Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
Here are the single-figure prices. Halifax & Birmingham Northfield have certainly been tipped on here. I additionally quite like some of the low double-figure prices in Wales (Gower etc.)
Southampton Itchen 5/2 Halifax 7/2 Hampstead and Kilburn 7/2 Derby North 4/1 Telford 4/1 Dumfries and Galloway 5/1 Bolton West 5/1 Westminster North 5/1 Birmingham Edgbaston 6/1 Walsall North 6/1 M'brough S and C'land E 6/1 Gedling 6/1 Wirral South 13/2 Wakefield 7/1 Southampton Test 15/2 Penistone & S'bridge 8/1 Birmingham Northfield 8/1 Tooting 9/1 Newcastle-under-Lyme 9/1 Bury South 9/1 Harrow West 9/1
NOTA
Labour are working Westminster North far harder than you'd expect given that it's a safe hold. Then again, it's the type of area that Lab have to work hard in anyway.
Cant believe the british press either. Never seen such vitriol thrown at a politician before as the onslaught this past week. we can bleat on about less dead tree press influence much as we like but all this will have an effect. The Sun, Mail & even surprising the Express are pounding Miliband with raw hatred & bigging up Cammo same time.
You are having a laugh right? Thatcher, Major, Kinnock got far far worse from the press.
Even looking at the Newzoids program, it is very tame really compared to Spitting Image i.e. Cameron wanders around being a terribly "nice old chap" but no real idea about the real world and Ed is useless with a catchphrase "at least I tried".
Hardly cabinet of vegetables stuff.
The point about the vegetables was 'look how strong Thatcher is'. Kinnock got battered by the right wing press, but Thatcher??
Only 600,000 views. Not "millions" as some were suggesting on the left and you have to question if the move was worth it; will it generate any additional votes? very much doubt it.
That's not a bad number, what with youtube not being, y'know, live TV, meaning that numbers will continue to increase over the next few days. Out of interest, anyone know how that compares to the number of viewers for the various soft-pedal sofa interviews like This Morning? (Safe, I guess, to assume that not too many people bother with iPlayer etc for these shows).
Hmmm.
According to the stats, Randy-Brandy's Youtube channel had around 170k viewings to the end of all the vids yesterday. The interview was a whole 16 minutes. Attention span etc.
Is that effective after voter registration has closed? He's just trolling for self-publicity.
The problem I have is that Brand's rhetoric is both untrue and dishonest (to be fair it seems to work for the Nats so there's a political case for doing it). In the 45 seconds of the trailer I watched Guss-Russ shows himself shouting out a fake stat from a bit of paper ("Amazon 0.05% tax on a £4bn turnover" vs personal 20% tax rate), and Miliband didn't nail him on it.
Therefore I'm not interested.
If he was interested in political ideas he'd have the "exit pre-roll ad after 5 seconds" option switched on.
There is a good argument to be made that today's house prices in some ways reflect demand more accurately than they did in the past.
In the past it was the case that if a married man had a working wife, she had no personal allowance of her own, and instead paid his marginal rate on all her earnings. She was thus in effect a line item on his tax return. He got an enhanced personal allowance and he got it whether she worked or not.
If that were still the case today, a working married woman whose husband was on or just short of £100k would find herself paying the ~64% marginal tax rate on her earnings. So she'd keep at most a third of her earnings, probably have to spend quite a lot of that on getting to work and clothing herself for it, and that's before considering the cost of things like childcare that she might have to arrange.
In effect, under that sort of tax treatment, her salary is basically zero, unless both she and her husband earn either very little or a huge amount.
This is where building societies originally got their lending multiples from. 3.5x main salary, or 2.5x main and 1x second salary, reflected the value of that second salary in paying a mortgage off.
If you ask people to guess when that was altered, so that women were treated properly, most people would guess it was changed between the wars. In fact it was not until Lawson was CotE that it was fixed, in 1988.
So the house prices of the 1970s seriously undervalued property, because of the sexist tax treatment of women's earnings. That has been permanently structurally altered, so while some of the price today is clearly in consequence of 0.5% base rates, it's hard to see any way in which house prices could go back to what the baby boomers were able to buy them for.
Thanks, that's really interesting - always good to learn something from PB.
Surely, tho, that would at most account for a doubling of prices, i.e. effectively each household being able to double its pre- and post-tax income (due to independent tax thresholds for each) - only it would be a bit less than that because the additional income would be to some extent offset by costs of going to work. So you could reasonably rebase the index from 1988-2015 by dividing by somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75, but I guess it's still going to show a massive multiple of RPI over the period despite that.
The people who see it going their way are calling for it following the derision and forensic investigation when it was showing bad figures for them
Who knew?!
This week 9 polls form 7 different pollsters (all time 26 polls from 11)
CON +10 (+2) LAB -5 (-18) UKIP -1 (+7) LD -3 (-2) GREEN +4 (+5)
Hm. the problem with SPUD is that if I see it every day a lot of polls are double counted. I realise that's not a problem per se but it does create complacency.
Only 600,000 views. Not "millions" as some were suggesting on the left and you have to question if the move was worth it; will it generate any additional votes? very much doubt it.
That's not a bad number, what with youtube not being, y'know, live TV, meaning that numbers will continue to increase over the next few days. Out of interest, anyone know how that compares to the number of viewers for the various soft-pedal sofa interviews like This Morning? (Safe, I guess, to assume that not too many people bother with iPlayer etc for these shows).
Hmmm.
According to the stats, Randy-Brandy's Youtube channel had around 170k viewings to the end of all the vids yesterday. The interview was a whole 16 minutes. Attention span etc.
Is that effective after voter registration has closed? He's just trolling for self-publicity.
The problem I have is that Brand's rhetoric is both untrue and dishonest (to be fair it seems to work for the Nats so there's a political case for doing it). In the 45 seconds of the trailer I watched Guss-Russ shows himself shouting out a fake stat from a bit of paper ("Amazon 0.05% tax on a £4bn turnover" vs personal 20% tax rate), and Miliband didn't nail him on it.
Therefore I'm not interested.
If he was interested in political ideas he'd have the "exit pre-roll ad after 5 seconds" option switched on.
Before even getting into obviously who is watching e.g. people not in the UK, < 18s, not registered to vote, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the raw YouTube numbers, they can be highly misleading. People watch videos multiple times, there are bots that auto watch videos to get the numbers rolling, etc.
There was an article (I think in the Guardian) how a couple of college drop out run a company that is responsbile for a 1000's of twitter accounts and they force feed stuff out to people by using that network of accounts to retweet, favourite, etc amongst the network.
For example the Cameron "Thug Life" one has millions of YouTube views, I doubt that is significant at all.
But Mr Cameron’s allies will be heartened by another improvement in his satisfaction score. The percentage who are satisfied with his performance has jumped from 39 to 46 in two weeks, giving him his best net rating since 2012, at -2, which is markedly better than his rivals.
Mr Clegg’s net score has been boosted by 10 points to -21, while Mr Miliband has stayed level at -19. Mr Farage is down a point to -25.
I haven't managed to stay awake the WHOLE night since 1997 - this time I've stocked up with Red Bull to make sure I don't nod off between 2am-5am and miss all the initial fun.
I struggle to take a poll with the Greens at 8% seriously. I'd be stunned if they poll over 2.5% nationally.
But there's the thing, on a result like that Con+Lib Dem is probably only on 315ish and short anyway.
Poor poll for Labour. Agreed about the 8% Green share - most of that will unwind but where will it go?
I expect a lot of them will just be non-voters.
The green vote will be fascinating to watch on the night. A goodly chunk is young - they polled 50% in 18-24 age group in one of the polls yesterday. Will they vote? Are they really fired up and registered? The huge vote reg surge suggests they might be. Another reason to stay up all night on Thursday
Would you believe I have to fly to Istanbul for dinner on election day? I'm going to miss all the fun
When I was on your side of the fence (job-wise), I spent 1997 in Berlin, and 2001 in the US somewhere (Chicago?). I don't remember where I was in 2005. But I do remember 2010 as the first election I got to spend in the UK!
Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
This is list of Labour Marginals as per an old spreadsheet I have with UNS from electoralcalculus. The number indicates Tory seats if all those below were held (inc Clacton/ Rochester & Strood)
To get Luton South would require a 2.8% swing Lab-Con
331 Chorley 330 Exeter ... 324 Gedling
The key with that sort of thing is to identify the seats that have long-term demographic changes that favour the Tories. Exeter's not that sort of seat, but I have my suspicions about Chorley and Gedling.
BTW: given neither Mike Hancock nor his wife was able to win their council seat, even with the LibDems not standing against them, what makes him think he'll be able to get more than 5-10% of the vote this time around? Or is he just doing it to annoy the party that chucked him out?
Allister Heath's version of Casino Royale's excellent potential outcomes essay from yesterday, in the DT today:
The UK is thus about to discover the real meaning of political instability. Under confidence and supply agreements, and even more so in truly informal agreements, every vote would be up for negotiation. Politics will become a game of extortion and blackmail, with taxpayers the big losers. Small parties will yield a disproportionate amount of power.
If Mr Cameron remains in power, he will have to give in not just to the Lib Dems and potentially Ukip and the DUP, but also to his own backbenchers. If Mr Miliband takes over, his greatest challenge will be next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections: the SNP would hold him to ransom in humiliating fashion, demanding that he raids Middle England.
The SNP ran a minority administration in 2007 in Holyrood propped up by the Tories.
It didn’t do them any harm in the in the 2011 election -- though admittedly Labour ran the dumbest campaign on record.
I'd have though all Nicola and Alex have to say is,” We tried to make a deal with Ed Miliband, he wouldn’t talk to us, he offered a poor solution for Scotland. We will never, ever accept second-best for Scotland”.
They will want to arrange for the blame to be shovelled on hapless Ed’s shoulders, of course.
The deal making comes after a Conservative Queen's speech that has got through after the Conservatives winning decisively or Labour abstaining it.
Dave will make them some very generous offers. They will reject them. It plays Labour into a very very hard position if its CON 285; LD 25; Labour 260 seats or so. Why would Nicola deny Ed that sort of pain ?
Anyone got a website which gives tory gains from lab? I know there'll be some so would love to see a list.
This is list of Labour Marginals as per an old spreadsheet I have with UNS from electoralcalculus. The number indicates Tory seats if all those below were held (inc Clacton/ Rochester & Strood)
To get Luton South would require a 2.8% swing Lab-Con
331 Chorley 330 Exeter ... 324 Gedling
The key with that sort of thing is to identify the seats that have long-term demographic changes that favour the Tories. Exeter's not that sort of seat, but I have my suspicions about Chorley and Gedling.
Don't know whether this has been discussed already, but I was just thinking that it may be the case that because Labour aren't going to win an overall majority some of their voters are going to be a bit disillusioned and won't bother voting in the same numbers as they would have done had they thought they had a chance of doing so, which most of them probably did believe just a few months ago (no matter how unlikely it was even then).
That might create an opening for the Tories to make one or two gains in places like Southampton Itchen, Halifax, etc. Unlikely but not as unlikely as it used to be, maybe.
The SNP ran a minority administration in 2007 in Holyrood propped up by the Tories.
It didn’t do them any harm in the in the 2011 election -- though admittedly Labour ran the dumbest campaign on record.
I'd have though all Nicola and Alex have to say is,” We tried to make a deal with Ed Miliband, he wouldn’t talk to us, he offered a poor solution for Scotland. We will never, ever accept second-best for Scotland”.
They will want to arrange for the blame to be shovelled on hapless Ed’s shoulders, of course.
The deal making comes after a Conservative Queen's speech that has got through after the Conservatives winning decisively or Labour abstaining it.
Dave will make them some very generous offers. They will reject them. It plays Labour into a very very hard position if its CON 285; LD 25; Labour 260 seats or so. Why would Nicola deny Ed that sort of pain ?
20 seats or more behind and Lab abstentions from MPs like Mann/Field etc a real possibility IMO
BTW: given neither Mike Hancock nor his wife was able to win their council seat, even with the LibDems not standing against them, what makes him think he'll be able to get more than 5-10% of the vote this time around? Or is he just doing it to annoy the party that chucked him out?
By standing in the 2015 election and being voted out of office, Mike Hancock will receive the MPs 'resettlement' lump sum pay of half salary, £32,000. If he did not stand again he would not receive a resettlement payment.
Plus he is taking revenge on the Lib Dems who kicked him out of the party by taking some votes from them at the election.
What he forgets is that he is making life more difficult for himself after the election by having no friends left.
BTW: given neither Mike Hancock nor his wife was able to win their council seat, even with the LibDems not standing against them, what makes him think he'll be able to get more than 5-10% of the vote this time around? Or is he just doing it to annoy the party that chucked him out?
He's doing it to get redundancy / relocation payments.
Only 600,000 views. Not "millions" as some were suggesting on the left and you have to question if the move was worth it; will it generate any additional votes? very much doubt it.
That's not a bad number, what with youtube not being, y'know, live TV, meaning that numbers will continue to increase over the next few days. Out of interest, anyone know how that compares to the number of viewers for the various soft-pedal sofa interviews like This Morning? (Safe, I guess, to assume that not too many people bother with iPlayer etc for these shows).
Hmmm.
According to the stats, Randy-Brandy's Youtube channel had around 170k viewings to the end of all the vids yesterday. The interview was a whole 16 minutes. Attention span etc.
Is that effective after voter registration has closed? He's just trolling for self-publicity.
The problem I have is that Brand's rhetoric is both untrue and dishonest (to be fair it seems to work for the Nats so there's a political case for doing it). In the 45 seconds of the trailer I watched Guss-Russ shows himself shouting out a fake stat from a bit of paper ("Amazon 0.05% tax on a £4bn turnover" vs personal 20% tax rate), and Miliband didn't nail him on it.
Therefore I'm not interested.
If he was interested in political ideas he'd have the "exit pre-roll ad after 5 seconds" option switched on.
Before even getting into obviously who is watching e.g. people not in the UK, < 18s, not registered to vote, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the raw YouTube numbers, they can be highly misleading. People watch videos multiple times, there are bots that auto watch videos to get the numbers rolling, etc.
There was an article (I think in the Guardian) how a couple of college drop out run a company that is responsbile for a 1000's of twitter accounts and they force feed stuff out to people by using that network of accounts to retweet, favourite, etc amongst the network.
For example the Cameron "Thug Life" one has millions of YouTube views, I doubt that is significant at all.
Absolutely.
So if even the raw stats add up to a couple of hundred thousand not umpteen million ...
OGH: "My reading of the most seats outcome is that CON leads but not by very much. We are 55-45"
Is this belief what convinced Mike to sell that Tory/Labour 12 seat supremacy bet with Sporting (NOT involving a £20 per seat stake)? The spread-betting firm is currently quoting Con 287 v Lab 267 (mid spreads), following that Ipsos MORI poll this morning, which was pretty sensational to say the least, albeit somewhat unsurprisingly understated on PB.com. It will be interesting to see how this poll impacts on Prof. Fisher's updated GE seats forecast tomorrow.
Don't know whether this has been discussed already, but I was just thinking that it may be the case that because Labour aren't going to win an overall majority some of their voters are going to be a bit disillusioned and won't bother voting in the same numbers as they would have done had they thought they had a chance of doing so, which most of them probably did believe just a few months ago (no matter how unlikely it was even then).
That might create an opening for the Tories to make one or two gains in places like Southampton Itchen, Halifax, etc. Unlikely but not as unlikely as it used to be, maybe.
A sitting Tory PM should see fairly good turnout.
The worry for Labour is their distribution is less efficient as more Labour voters in safe seats who didn't both last time vote against a Tory PM.
Osborne cuts the crap better than any politician since Thatcher. World class.
So Osborne's rebuttal is that when the coalition government looked at making savings of (IIRC) lesser amounts than the Tories are now proposing, the discussion document that the relevant minister commissioned came back with various unpalatable options, which the Tories didn't, and don't, support.... and yet the Tories are still going to make those savings. But not through the ways that were identified as plausible. Good work. Someone's been smoking the leaf of the Magic Welfare Shrinking Shrub.
BTW: given neither Mike Hancock nor his wife was able to win their council seat, even with the LibDems not standing against them, what makes him think he'll be able to get more than 5-10% of the vote this time around? Or is he just doing it to annoy the party that chucked him out?
He wants to deny Gerald the seat. Still OGH was utterly adamant when he said that GVJ was going to hold...
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Do we have "all voters expressing an opinion" figures from Ipsos MORI yet? Usually they publish them alongside their "10/10 certain" figures, but I've not noticed them.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Oddly, the reaction on the Most Seats market in the wake of the Ipsos MORI poll is to see a slight shortening of Labour's price. Last price matched is 4.0.
IT was this kind of reaction to polls that ruined me trading on the IndyRef result.
I haven't managed to stay awake the WHOLE night since 1997 - this time I've stocked up with Red Bull to make sure I don't nod off between 2am-5am and miss all the initial fun.
I struggle to take a poll with the Greens at 8% seriously. I'd be stunned if they poll over 2.5% nationally.
But there's the thing, on a result like that Con+Lib Dem is probably only on 315ish and short anyway.
Poor poll for Labour. Agreed about the 8% Green share - most of that will unwind but where will it go?
I expect a lot of them will just be non-voters.
The green vote will be fascinating to watch on the night. A goodly chunk is young - they polled 50% in 18-24 age group in one of the polls yesterday. Will they vote? Are they really fired up and registered? The huge vote reg surge suggests they might be. Another reason to stay up all night on Thursday
Would you believe I have to fly to Istanbul for dinner on election day? I'm going to miss all the fun
If the Greens win you might have to come back by train. I'm sure there would be a few PBers who would envy you that.
"I have the same feeling of envy when in Wales. In some areas Wales is way ahead of Scotland and not just the rugby. Wales is much better at business development and urban regeneration."
So you are envious of Labour run Wales where unemployment levels are worse than both of Scotland and the UK as a whole? A country where the statistics for A & E are also worse than Scotland and the UK as a whole?
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Oddly, the reaction on the Most Seats market in the wake of the Ipsos MORI poll is to see a slight shortening of Labour's price. Last price matched is 4.0.
I can't work out what on earth is going to happen bar a good night for the Nats now, and some losses for the Lib Dems.
Just hope I've got a well enough balanced book to make money from it all...
Do we have "all voters expressing an opinion" figures from Ipsos MORI yet? Usually they publish them alongside their "10/10 certain" figures, but I've not noticed them.
Nurse! Bring me straws damn it! Probably a lead of 3 or 4, Lab usually tick up a notch on this measure due to their lazy attitude to getting off their arse and voting.
Do we have "all voters expressing an opinion" figures from Ipsos MORI yet? Usually they publish them alongside their "10/10 certain" figures, but I've not noticed them.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
Chuka Umunna is SO not the answer. Jesus how can anyone suggest him? The grandson of Sir Helenus Milmo, QC.
I've seen him in the flesh. He oozes posh London suavity, he's a more handsome version of Miliband and probably as off putting to average punters beyond the M25. Labour need a one nation northerner. Aspirational but ordinary.
Oh, he won't help! Jim Murphy was obviously not the answer either but Labour chose him.
Interestingly Mr M is reportedly proposing to remain as MP for his seat (if reelected) for the full five year term AND then seek a seat as a MSP in 2016. That does at least answer the criticism of standing only to serve for one year.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I hesitate to say constitutional crisis, but if we get that result with the Tories on say 36-37%, the press will whip one up. Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
Oddly, the reaction on the Most Seats market in the wake of the Ipsos MORI poll is to see a slight shortening of Labour's price. Last price matched is 4.0.
IT was this kind of reaction to polls that ruined me trading on the IndyRef result.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I'm certain some Labour MPs would put party before Ed if it's that close.
"Clearly the Conservatives have no mandate to enact their manifesto. However it is apparent that we need new leadership before the British people will put their faith in us..."
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I hesitate to say constitutional crisis, but if we get that result with the Tories on say 36-37%, the press will whip one up. Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I'm certain some Labour MPs would put party before Ed if it's that close.
"Clearly the Conservatives have no mandate to enact their manifesto. However it is apparent that we need new leadership before the British people will put their faith in us..."
Remove a sitting PM whilst trying to hold together a six faction coalition in an ongoing financial crisis\austerity regime? Would lead to GE and Labour South of 25%
I had my biggest bet of the election yesterday, Farage to win S Thanet at EVS.. hard not to make it value when you've backed EVS -6.5!
Farage at Evens was a great & wondrous price. Had to take some of that myself !
We'll just have to seriously disagree on that one. UKIP are very evidently heading south and this is likely to continue as minds are further concentrated over the few remaining days leading up to the GE.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I hesitate to say constitutional crisis, but if we get that result with the Tories on say 36-37%, the press will whip one up. Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
Pork Barrels all round.... paid by middle england.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I hesitate to say constitutional crisis, but if we get that result with the Tories on say 36-37%, the press will whip one up. Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
The budget would be left wing I suspect.
With a massive giveaway to NI to ensure the ridiculous Hermon votes it through. I just can't see six players agreeing coalition or s and c, it would be electoral suicide for most of them.
Went to see Matt Forde's political party in SW1 last night and his guest was Tommy Robinson.
Very interesting show, the questions from the audience revealed that virtue signalling left wingers like to cling on to petty hatred of people as much as ever
BTW: given neither Mike Hancock nor his wife was able to win their council seat, even with the LibDems not standing against them, what makes him think he'll be able to get more than 5-10% of the vote this time around? Or is he just doing it to annoy the party that chucked him out?
By standing in the 2015 election and being voted out of office, Mike Hancock will receive the MPs 'resettlement' lump sum pay of half salary, £32,000. If he did not stand again he would not receive a resettlement payment.
Plus he is taking revenge on the Lib Dems who kicked him out of the party by taking some votes from them at the election.
What he forgets is that he is making life more difficult for himself after the election by having no friends left.
The best advert this Parliament for why we should have voter recall of MPs - I wonder why that was dropped from the Coalition Agreement..?
Just wondering when this legal duty to be OTT in the search of balance kicks in? Still no mention of BBC favourite politician Margaret Hodge and her hypocritical ways. The Times must not have got delivered to BBC Towers yesterday.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I'm certain some Labour MPs would put party before Ed if it's that close.
"Clearly the Conservatives have no mandate to enact their manifesto. However it is apparent that we need new leadership before the British people will put their faith in us..."
Geez - if Ed did form a govt on this basis, what would it do to Labour in England?
Missed this at the time....Makes even Newsnight look popular...
The news and discussion show, described by the BBC as the first “digital first” TV news programme, drew just 39,000 viewers on Thursday morning, which is rounded down to zero in the overnight ratings.
I had my biggest bet of the election yesterday, Farage to win S Thanet at EVS.. hard not to make it value when you've backed EVS -6.5!
Farage at Evens was a great & wondrous price. Had to take some of that myself !
We'll just have to seriously disagree on that one. UKIP are very evidently heading south and this is likely to continue as minds are further concentrated over the few remaining days leading up to the GE.
It's a far better bet than 284.5- 10-11 Conservatives.
Thanks, that's really interesting - always good to learn something from PB.
Surely, tho, that would at most account for a doubling of prices, i.e. effectively each household being able to double its pre- and post-tax income (due to independent tax thresholds for each) - only it would be a bit less than that because the additional income would be to some extent offset by costs of going to work. So you could reasonably rebase the index from 1988-2015 by dividing by somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75, but I guess it's still going to show a massive multiple of RPI over the period despite that.
I've not checked your maths, but I think that's probably correct, yes. The increase in prices comes from an increase in households' after-tax income; from a reduction in the cost of credit, such that a higher mortgage at today's rates costs the same to service as a smaller one used to do at yesterday's; and from a higher population, so that there are more marginal bidders, and thus more chances for the highest bid to be higher.
Some of those factors will probably mean-revert, but the household after-tax income won't. I don't see the population or the interest rates ones changing quickly either. It is sometimes said that these are emergency rates that won't last and will return to "normal". But we have now had these super-low rates for getting on towards 7 years and you can get 10-year fixes at these rates too. So that's 17 years of a typical 25-year mortgage term, which starts to look structural, rather than an emergency aberration. We've only had base rates above 10% for 20 of the last 300 years, and all 20 of those years were between 1972 and 1994. So there's nothing inherently "normal" about those rates either. A mortgage rate of 4% today is pretty typical of most of the last 300 years. Just not of the last 40.
Another interesting (and house price inflationary) thing about low rates is how fast you pay down the principal. With a 25-year mortgage at 10%, over the first 5 years, you pay off only 6% of the principal. At 2%, you pay off 16% of the principal amount over that time.
It would take you 10 years to pay off 16% of the principal at 10%. Over 10 years on a 2% mortgage rate, you could pay off 35% - and so on. So although these hug mortgages look oppressive, you accumulate equity at an unprecedentedly rapid rate now; which must itself encourage people to pay more.
It is an often-overlooked advantage from low rates that is similar, if not equivalent, to the benefit baby boomers enjoyed, whereby inflation eroded the cost of their mortgage. That doesn't happen any more, but today, you can erode your mortgage pretty damn fast by, er, repaying it!
Don't know whether this has been discussed already, but I was just thinking that it may be the case that because Labour aren't going to win an overall majority some of their voters are going to be a bit disillusioned and won't bother voting in the same numbers as they would have done had they thought they had a chance of doing so, which most of them probably did believe just a few months ago (no matter how unlikely it was even then).
That might create an opening for the Tories to make one or two gains in places like Southampton Itchen, Halifax, etc. Unlikely but not as unlikely as it used to be, maybe.
There are always lots of reasons for a poor Labour turnout, and we always see lower turnout in Labour seats than Tory ones - but will the Labour turnout be worse this time than in 2010?
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I hesitate to say constitutional crisis, but if we get that result with the Tories on say 36-37%, the press will whip one up. Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
Pork Barrels all round.... paid by middle england.
Just wondering when this legal duty to be OTT in the search of balance kicks in? Still no mention of BBC favourite politician Margaret Hodge and her hypocritical ways. The Times must not have got delivered to BBC Towers yesterday.
I think I am right in saying that only Panelbase and Populus now show Labour leads (albeit a healthy 3% lead with both)
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
In 2001 William Hague was Mr Plus One Seat since he increased the number of Tory seats from 165 to 166. Maybe something very similar could happen with Ed Miliband in 2015.
Unlike William Hague, Ed Milliband might become Prime Minister, if he makes a net gain of one seat.
Hague polled 32.7% in 2001. Ed may struggle to reach that level if a fair number of the latest polls are to be believed.
Imagine it. If Labour won 259 seats with 32% of the vote, he could still be PM. I think that such a government would be a desperately weak one, but it could be done.
Say 259 Labour 58 SNP 3 Plaid 3 SDLP 1 Green Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
I'm certain some Labour MPs would put party before Ed if it's that close.
"Clearly the Conservatives have no mandate to enact their manifesto. However it is apparent that we need new leadership before the British people will put their faith in us..."
Geez - if Ed did form a govt on this basis, what would it do to Labour in England?
Cram them back into the ghettos and send them South of 150 seats
Just wondering when this legal duty to be OTT in the search of balance kicks in? Still no mention of BBC favourite politician Margaret Hodge and her hypocritical ways. The Times must not have got delivered to BBC Towers yesterday.
By all accounts only one freebie newspaper gets delivered to the BBC every day ...... by the barrow load it is rumoured.
Comments
We have revised how we use older constituency polls in constituencies with multiple constituency polls. We now exclude constituency polls that are more than four months old, if there are more recent polls in that constituency.
Fair enough if they think it's a better forecast but you can't really conclude that the underlying picture has tightened.
In the past it was the case that if a married man had a working wife, she had no personal allowance of her own, and instead paid his marginal rate on all her earnings. She was thus in effect a line item on his tax return. He got an enhanced personal allowance and he got it whether she worked or not.
If that were still the case today, a working married woman whose husband was on or just short of £100k would find herself paying the ~64% marginal tax rate on her earnings. So she'd keep at most a third of her earnings, probably have to spend quite a lot of that on getting to work and clothing herself for it, and that's before considering the cost of things like childcare that she might have to arrange.
In effect, under that sort of tax treatment, her salary is basically zero, unless both she and her husband earn either very little or a huge amount.
This is where building societies originally got their lending multiples from. 3.5x main salary, or 2.5x main and 1x second salary, reflected the value of that second salary in paying a mortgage off.
If you ask people to guess when that was altered, so that women were treated properly, most people would guess it was changed between the wars. In fact it was not until Lawson was CotE that it was fixed, in 1988.
So the house prices of the 1970s seriously undervalued property, because of the sexist tax treatment of women's earnings. That has been permanently structurally altered, so while some of the price today is clearly in consequence of 0.5% base rates, it's hard to see any way in which house prices could go back to what the baby boomers were able to buy them for.
Even looking at the Newzoids program, it is very tame really compared to Spitting Image i.e. Cameron wanders around being a terribly "nice old chap" but no real idea about the real world and Ed is useless with a catchphrase "at least I tried".
Hardly cabinet of vegetables stuff.
https://royaleleseaux.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/could-the-conservatives-win-an-overall-majority-in-the-2015-general-election-next-year-part-2/
Jon Cruddas is the man for the job
Her Tyne-built sibling, the Mauritania, continued to reign as speed-queen of the North Atlantic for another decade, holding the record for over two......
.......I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.....
Where is the likes of Pickles in real life campaign, I haven't seen anybody but Cameron and Osborne. When the Tories won Crewe and Nantwich for instance he was given a lot of credit for being a good face for the Tories in Northern cities.
Finally, Corby is sui generis but looks big at 7/2.
The people who see it going their way are calling for it following the derision and forensic investigation when it was showing bad figures for them
Who knew?!
This week 9 polls form 7 different pollsters (all time 26 polls from 11)
CON +10 (+2)
LAB -5 (-18)
UKIP -1 (+7)
LD -3 (-2)
GREEN +4 (+5)
According to the stats, Randy-Brandy's Youtube channel had around 170k viewings to the end of all the vids yesterday. The interview was a whole 16 minutes. Attention span etc.
http://vidstatsx.com/russellbrand/youtube-channel
Is that effective after voter registration has closed? He's just trolling for self-publicity.
The problem I have is that Brand's rhetoric is both untrue and dishonest (to be fair it seems to work for the Nats so there's a political case for doing it). In the 45 seconds of the trailer I watched Guss-Russ shows himself shouting out a fake stat from a bit of paper ("Amazon 0.05% tax on a £4bn turnover" vs personal 20% tax rate), and Miliband didn't nail him on it.
Therefore I'm not interested.
If he was interested in political ideas he'd have the "exit pre-roll ad after 5 seconds" option switched on.
Surely, tho, that would at most account for a doubling of prices, i.e. effectively each household being able to double its pre- and post-tax income (due to independent tax thresholds for each) - only it would be a bit less than that because the additional income would be to some extent offset by costs of going to work. So you could reasonably rebase the index from 1988-2015 by dividing by somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75, but I guess it's still going to show a massive multiple of RPI over the period despite that.
There was an article (I think in the Guardian) how a couple of college drop out run a company that is responsbile for a 1000's of twitter accounts and they force feed stuff out to people by using that network of accounts to retweet, favourite, etc amongst the network.
For example the Cameron "Thug Life" one has millions of YouTube views, I doubt that is significant at all.
But Mr Cameron’s allies will be heartened by another improvement in his satisfaction score. The percentage who are satisfied with his performance has jumped from 39 to 46 in two weeks, giving him his best net rating since 2012, at -2, which is markedly better than his rivals.
Mr Clegg’s net score has been boosted by 10 points to -21, while Mr Miliband has stayed level at -19. Mr Farage is down a point to -25.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/exclusive-poll-cameron-ahead-by-five-points-one-week-before-election-day-10214988.html
Osborne cuts the crap better than any politician since Thatcher.
World class.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iE8RU4rVmDmtRhjo1Ws3Om3IjrmgUVSbcW-tO7cY-RE/edit#gid=0
Dave will make them some very generous offers. They will reject them. It plays Labour into a very very hard position if its CON 285; LD 25; Labour 260 seats or so. Why would Nicola deny Ed that sort of pain ?
"Including one that had 'Devo Max with knobs on"?
Cameron may not think very often or care very much about Scotland but he does want to lord it over the Scots.
He will therefore never offer anything like your suggestion.
World class.
Shame he has the likability factor of a cockroach in your undies.
That might create an opening for the Tories to make one or two gains in places like Southampton Itchen, Halifax, etc. Unlikely but not as unlikely as it used to be, maybe.
LAB 260 seats gives Ed M a theoretical chance of being PM, but I would say that must be close to the floor.
Plus he is taking revenge on the Lib Dems who kicked him out of the party by taking some votes from them at the election.
What he forgets is that he is making life more difficult for himself after the election by having no friends left.
http://www.bitly.com/Xb3122
So if even the raw stats add up to a couple of hundred thousand not umpteen million ...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f6PlK5ig7p1I9aqfMzV6AMBKKX8TPvEuqoPakoX2W_M/edit#gid=0
Is this belief what convinced Mike to sell that Tory/Labour 12 seat supremacy bet with Sporting (NOT involving a £20 per seat stake)? The spread-betting firm is currently quoting Con 287 v Lab 267 (mid spreads), following that Ipsos MORI poll this morning, which was pretty sensational to say the least, albeit somewhat unsurprisingly understated on PB.com.
It will be interesting to see how this poll impacts on Prof. Fisher's updated GE seats forecast tomorrow.
The worry for Labour is their distribution is less efficient as more Labour voters in safe seats who didn't both last time vote against a Tory PM.
You're out of touch in your Tuscan dead end.
Osborne is now an enormous asset for the Tories, a political Mourinho.
World class.
So Osborne's rebuttal is that when the coalition government looked at making savings of (IIRC) lesser amounts than the Tories are now proposing, the discussion document that the relevant minister commissioned came back with various unpalatable options, which the Tories didn't, and don't, support.... and yet the Tories are still going to make those savings. But not through the ways that were identified as plausible. Good work. Someone's been smoking the leaf of the Magic Welfare Shrinking Shrub.
"I have the same feeling of envy when in Wales. In some areas Wales is way ahead of Scotland and not just the rugby. Wales is much better at business development and urban regeneration."
So you are envious of Labour run Wales where unemployment levels are worse than both of Scotland and the UK as a whole? A country where the statistics for A & E are also worse than Scotland and the UK as a whole?
Wilfully blind, I call it :-)
Just hope I've got a well enough balanced book to make money from it all...
Probably a lead of 3 or 4, Lab usually tick up a notch on this measure due to their lazy attitude to getting off their arse and voting.
Say 259 Labour
58 SNP
3 Plaid
3 SDLP
1 Green
Lady Hermon, makes 325 votes.
Hope LAB can be persuaded
http://www.electionforecast.co.uk/
Can you imagine the stress of trying to hold that together through a budget?!
"Clearly the Conservatives have no mandate to enact their manifesto. However it is apparent that we need new leadership before the British people will put their faith in us..."
Ashcroft 6% Con lead
Ipsos Mori 5%,
BGM 3%
ICM 3%,
Survation 3%,
TNS 1%,
Yougov 1%,
Opinium 1%
ComRes Tie
Populus -3%
Panelbase - 3%.
Average Conservative lead 1.5%.
Would lead to GE and Labour South of 25%
I just can't see six players agreeing coalition or s and c, it would be electoral suicide for most of them.
Very interesting show, the questions from the audience revealed that virtue signalling left wingers like to cling on to petty hatred of people as much as ever
Just wondering when this legal duty to be OTT in the search of balance kicks in? Still no mention of BBC favourite politician Margaret Hodge and her hypocritical ways. The Times must not have got delivered to BBC Towers yesterday.
The news and discussion show, described by the BBC as the first “digital first” TV news programme, drew just 39,000 viewers on Thursday morning, which is rounded down to zero in the overnight ratings.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/24/victoria-derbyshire-bbc2-show-viewers-bbc-news
Some of those factors will probably mean-revert, but the household after-tax income won't. I don't see the population or the interest rates ones changing quickly either. It is sometimes said that these are emergency rates that won't last and will return to "normal". But we have now had these super-low rates for getting on towards 7 years and you can get 10-year fixes at these rates too. So that's 17 years of a typical 25-year mortgage term, which starts to look structural, rather than an emergency aberration. We've only had base rates above 10% for 20 of the last 300 years, and all 20 of those years were between 1972 and 1994. So there's nothing inherently "normal" about those rates either. A mortgage rate of 4% today is pretty typical of most of the last 300 years. Just not of the last 40.
Another interesting (and house price inflationary) thing about low rates is how fast you pay down the principal. With a 25-year mortgage at 10%, over the first 5 years, you pay off only 6% of the principal. At 2%, you pay off 16% of the principal amount over that time.
It would take you 10 years to pay off 16% of the principal at 10%. Over 10 years on a 2% mortgage rate, you could pay off 35% - and so on. So although these hug mortgages look oppressive, you accumulate equity at an unprecedentedly rapid rate now; which must itself encourage people to pay more.
It is an often-overlooked advantage from low rates that is similar, if not equivalent, to the benefit baby boomers enjoyed, whereby inflation eroded the cost of their mortgage. That doesn't happen any more, but today, you can erode your mortgage pretty damn fast by, er, repaying it!