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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Polling Matters / Political Betting Podcast with James Morris
Keiran Pedley is an Associate Director at GfK NOP and presenter of the podcast ‘Polling Matters’. He tweets about politics and polling at @keiranpedley.
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Depending on who turns up to accompany Evans, the show may or may not work. Presumably the format will have to be changed to showcase the strengths of the team.
It will not be the smash hit that Clarkson et al managed to create, nor should it be expected to be.
It is all a question of avoiding being in the shadow of the previous trio, and the show standing on its own, and not being weighed in the balance and found wanting.
That may take some time, and the new team will have to find their own niche.
The losses to the EU (i.e. not Target-2, non ECB held) amount to about ¢80-120bn (depending on whether you use face or purchase price as your measure). However, as Greece would still owe the money even in the event of default (it's like when you stop paying your credit cards, you still owe the money, even if you haven't sent a cheque to your bank), this would not need to be all written off. My guess is that there would be an agreement where ESF bonds were swapped for national bonds over 10 years, so the impact to Germany or France in an individual year would be de minimis.
The issue with Greece is not "is debt forgiveness required", which it obviously is. But "will Greece make the required reforms that enable debt forgiveness"? A German politician said to me - paraphrasing slightly: "It is politically unacceptable for a German to have to work to 70 to pay for a Greek civil servant to retire at 50."
That means that the earliest private investor bonds are due on July 17th 2017 1.5 billion euros in total.
Peanuts, if they don't pay the official sector creditors (IMF, ECB ect).
Look at the T-Bill auction page (http://www.pdma.gr/index.php/en/debt-instruments-greek-government-bonds/issuance-calendar-a-syndication-and-auction-results) - the interest rate that the Greek government is paying keeps creeping up. It was 1.7% as recently as November. The latest rate was 2.7%. It could be 5% or more next time around.
3 billion with an interest of 2.7% means 80 million interest, that's very small compared with the 7 billion they have to repay the IMF and the ECB, and they can easily repay that interest.
So keep you head together, don't turn into jelly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvqpLaWdz6o
Goodnight.
Oh, and I'm actually on the fence with regards to EU membership - I'll see what Cameron comes back with, and I'm hopeful. However, your accusations that I am "pathetic" and "whinging" for daring to criticise the government is exactly the sort of sneering arrogance that annoys people so much about this high-handed approach Cameron likes to take.
1. Not all T-Bills are owned by Greek banks.
2. It just takes one bank to decide to bid low.
Whether these skills will transfer to politics remains to be seen. But I am hopeful.
The most interesting nugget is that apparently even in Scotland, where people were vehemently anti-austerity, they would STILL say they thought Labour would "spend too much". Which again suggests that Labour supporting cuts or going on about how the deficit should be reduced doesn't solve their economic credibility problem, if even people who are opposed to cuts still have that distrust - the only way to solve it is to change people's views that Labour messed things up in 2008. God knows how they do that, though.
By the time that Labour did start to address it with a counterattack James said that people were taking their claims with a pinch of salt.
I think that the phrase James used was something like a "Deep distrust of Labour as a steward of public money"
I also like the bit about English patriotism. Labour party MPs have to be happy with the flag of St. George outside the house
(That rules out Emily Thornberry, then)
A few points which particularly struck me:
1). James kept repeating the same point: Labour weren't trusted, especially on spending, and therefore whatever message they went with was not going to work. That, as many of us said at the time, goes right back to the deficit denial of the late Brown period; Ed Miliband failed to address it, with predictable consequences.
2) There's a particularly fascinating passage at around 18.30 into the podcast, about the Tories' SNP attack. In particular, the focus groups picked up, early on, the fact that this was going to be a powerful message, once people became aware of it. That in itself is not a surprise - many of us said that at the time - but I am surprised that Labour were surprised by it. That suggests their political antennae were malfunctioning - they should have realised the danger long before the focus groups were picking it up.
3) There's another particularly good bit around 27:40 into the podcast, on the 'trust' issue.
Adam Afriyie
Richard Bacon
John Baron
Bill Cash
Philip Davies
Nadine Dorries
Richard Drax
Liam Fox
Cheryl Gillan
Zac Goldsmith
Philip Hollobone
Gerald Howarth
Stewart Jackson
Bernard Jenkin
David Jones
Edward Leigh
Tim Loughton
Anne Main
Stephen McPartland
David Nuttall
Owen Paterson
John Redwood
Andrew Rosindell
Bob Stewart
Andrew Turner
Tellers:
Steve Baker
Christopher Chope
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/commons/todays-commons-debates/read/unknown/196/
ON-THE-FLY TRANSCRIPT OF KIERAN INTERVIEW WITH jAMES MORRIS
==========================================================
The following is the first pass of transcribing "Polling Matters Ep13". It was done as I listened to it and so is full of spelling mistakes and may contain other mistakes. Don't take this as gospel
conference->short campaign
==========================
* Labour Polls had con at poll levels but lab lower
* 2000 national sample
* after labour conference crossover, then con were ahead to march (last national poll) before short
Short campaign
==============
* 70 seats targeted. Those seats were polled and message-tested (mostly the former)
* Their polls contradicted Ashcroft/National polls
* Canvass returns and postal votes also gave Con ahead?
* Libs did smaler list of target seats and did individual seat-level polls
* Lab did 70seat and polled accross that (i.e not seats as individual seats)
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSIN PRT 1
================================
a) did they spot con lead?
Lab polls did not reveal Con lead because Lab did not poll South West and so missed the Lib wipeout in Lib/Con mrginals: THEY GOT DATA FROM THE LIBS (the libs thought they were holding their seats)
Lab polls flat then good three weeks in, then bad two weeks away, then last poll had con 1pt ahead in Lab/Con marginals, BUT tHEY WEREnt polling in CON/LAB marginas and so missed the fact that Con would take seats off them
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSIN PRT 2: PB.COM READERS ASK...
=====================================
q's from PB readers
1) What areas were you testing?
* People thought lots of slack in public sector spending and so cuts not bad.
* deep distrust of labour to manage public spending
* labour were not believed when they trted to address distrust
2) when was snp threat apparent?
* Non-lab poll in Scotland last year (SNP 47), then another one,..lab doomed
* England: Con tried various messages, fastened onto SNP BAD, found it worked, pluged it like crazy, and it worked
3) Labour did not poll individual constituencies? (specificallty Ed balls??)
* Lab dd not poll individual constituencies and did not kno Ed Balls was fucked.
4) Did Ed Milibad think he was going to win?
* Yes, he thinks Ed thought he would form a government. If Lib held their seats, lab gained a few in england, then even with big snp could still defetat quen speech.
5) UKIP?
* Con squeezed UKIP, but LAB did not, and could not recover losses to UKIP in time
* Lab->UKIP mostly economic, not racist
* Can't fatten a pig on market day
6) Labour;s future? Wy did labour lose, where is it going in future?
* Lab has to win back votes from CON voters. Stop assuming they are innately Con. Improve LAB brand instead of tackling subgroups: the brand is fucked with respect to profligacy and favoritism to non-UK people: LAB need to fix this. Lab has to show it has changed wrt spending and eficiency.
* More people thought Con was radical, but 70-20 support practical to radical.
7) Would Labour poll better if it segregated Scotland? (or gave different messages in different areas).
* Scots and England distrust Lab for control borders, and spending money (England also distrusts Englishness).
* Segregated parties may work but ultimately irrelevant to problem of fucked brand
8) Which candidat has best chance?
* James doesn't know. strong candidate must be credible on imigration and spending and as PM
9) Are you planning releasing data?
* He woul like to. He may do so. But no committment per se. The data may not be relevant to the poll enquiry.It may help with question order. Asking warm-up qestions before asking voting intentin is a good idea
10) Are you working on turnout analysis?
* Turnout filter doesn;t make a difference (dafuq?!). Lab questionnaires are longer.
11) Tlephone poll?
* Doesn't make a difference
12) Panel polling?
* Doesn;t make a difference. Lengtht of questionnaire and question order does make a fdifference
13) Client confiedentiality?
* Lab wants to release as much as possible
The Labour party kept obfuscating for far too long when they should have spotted this clear and present danger and completely shut it down immediately with a categorical denial that they would even contemplate doing any deals with the SNP at any level at Westminster! Again, Labour's electoral polling antennae was complete off the chart because they were not even asking the right questions in the run up to the GE.
If Labour had held most if not all their Scottish seats the situation would have looked better, but it was the Tory gains from their erstwhile "partners" "wot won it"!
And if Cameron really is a One-Nation and europhile Conservative, that campaign may have repercussions which he will regret.
Frankie Boyle, CIF - The Labour leadership election is an oasis of boredom
At least the Labour leadership election offers a reassuring oasis of boredom. The candidates have few redeeming features, or features of any kind. They work most successfully not as politicians, but as a sort of broad-ranging challenge to satire. Yvette Cooper has a broken, downbeat delivery that could make Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah sound like a cancer diagnosis. Andy Burnham sounds like he wishes that there were speedbumps in Mario Kart. They both give interviews with the halting, guarded intonation of a hostage. Liz Kendall at least has the alarming air of an Apprentice candidate, and surely that show’s unique dynamic – where you can be fired without actually having a job – meshes neatly with the party’s increasingly colourful views on workers’ rights.
Of course, none of the frontrunners are proper socialists; they don’t even hate each other. Jeremy Corbyn did scrape together enough nominations to stand, causing the left of the party to get quite excited that it is still allowed to lose. One of the few decent politicians remaining in the Labour party, he reminds me of those old drinkers you see haunting a new bar because they used to go to the pub that was there before.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/16/labour-leadership-candidates-boring-rightwing-frankie-boyle#comments
I wonder if it even undermined their attack on tory cuts. As Keiran says people believed that there was so much slack in public spending that the cuts were not a problem.
We had a Parliament where nearly 1m people came off the public pay roll. Some of this was reallocation of numbers but that is still an incredible number of people. Did anyone notice? What services that the general public had contact with actually reduced?
It may be that the cuts in this Parliament will be more into the muscle and be more obvious but the exasperation of the public that so much money was wasted will remain. I think this is their biggest brand weakness and Keiran has a warning that it needs to be addressed early in this Parliament, not just in the campaign. That is largely what he is talking about when he says "you've got to show that in your guts you hate wasting money". Its a real challenge and I don't see any of the candidates talking about it.
Clutching at straws, methinks
Do you really think that fear in England of the SNP holding Labour to ransom made no difference to how England voted? If that were so then the Tories wasted a lot of time and money pushing the SNP threat.
Of course some of this failure was a result of the use the Tories made of the SNP threat. But it was not a draw. Very far from it.
Surely the investigation needs to be about why private polling had it right?
As someone pointed out below, the fact that the polling shifted after Ed's conference speech is surprising, especially s it as not (IIRC) picked up in the public polling.
It's basically a rant, and a recipe for staying in opposition forever. He should stick to comedy.
(PS. Is there *any* mainstream comedian around who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty? No, I don't count Jim Davidson)
Philip Larkin will be honoured at Poets' Corner. In 1976 he shared his Desert Island Discs: http://bbc.in/1HRNOZq pic.twitter.com/8PGtpLGHan
Will the engraving on the stone be from "This Be The Verse"?
The great mystery is whether no "SNP threat" would have a material difference to the seat shares in England.
Personally, I think the Liberal Democrats would still have been hammered, and Ed was unelectable anyway. But Labour might - and I stress might - have clawed back another 15-20 seats.
So David Cameron would still be Prime Minister, just a parliamentary weaker one with C&S from the UUP/DUP.
Labour are spendthrift liberals who dislike the wwc - that message they will ignore (or give lip service too) and they'll concentrate in the logistics. We need to get our message across better.
Unfortunately, that's not the problem; it's that the message is getting across loud and clear but that electorate don't like it. Ed was part of the problem and saying he ran a great campaign is jingoistic guff, Andy.
If Labour had held all their Scottish seats then that would have been apparent in the polls before the election, so the Tory 'SNP threat' wouldn't have rung true and fewer people would have felt that they had to vote Tory in order to stop an SNP/Labour government.
In that case Labour and the LibDems would have fared better in England, probably well enough to deprive Cameron of his slim majority.
Of course, Labour would still have been well behind, but the polls would have been nearer the mark.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/conservatives-unions-tax-housing-brussels
I'm closer to Casino_Royale's position in my thinking.
I think the GBP took one look at Ed Miliband and went "nah"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11680016/Why-Tories-should-join-Labour-and-back-Jeremy-Corbyn.html
I wonder who the other two Top Gear presenters will be.
Mr. Moses, Owen Jones has a Youtube channel. The last video I saw was on the left reclaiming Englishness, or at least not appearing anti-English. Makes sense, but his trot through history was all about leftism and rebellions which, er, failed. I was mildly amused when he mentioned suffrage. Wasn't it the Liberals and Conservatives who extended the franchise?
Edited extra bit: on a related note Beijing's continuing 'reforms' on democracy in Hong Kong:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-33159341
I'm becoming more convinced that it is in lots of people's collective interest, certainly the Conservatives and UKIP supporters, probably a fair number of LDs too.
It's also really good for anyone with more than pennies at 100/1 or more, who can for a small amount of money materially affect the result! He's in to 20s now with most bookies.
Not too sure about the Greens and SNP, they are probably competing with Corbyn for the unreconstructed 1970s leftie voters. The electorate is quite wide however, so there will need to be 70-100,000 votes needed to swing it.
Perhaps that makes him a Tory in the eyes of his fellow comedians; I don't know.
https://brianbackblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/liz-kendall/
- Labour are for the NHS, are a bit better at being for *ordinary* people - but will be nicer to those who aren't British, are terrible with money, will spend it on anything.
And that a new leader has TWO WEEKS to set out their stall/brand. If you get that wrong, the next years won't redeem your position. Nor will litigating the past.
On issues - the Scots are less keen on cuts and more liberal on immigration [how much have they had?] - but they STILL don't trust Labour either. So the problem is the same North and South of the border.
Frankly, if I were in Labour HQ - I'd have my head in my hands after listening to that podcast.
Bloody odd you can buy a vote for £3. You'd be better off saving 70p and buying yourself Journey to Altmortis from Amazon
Edited extra bit: incidentally, I'm writing a vague and fuzzy round-up of E3 news, of which there's quite a lot, that I'll put up on my blog and link to here. Just a summary, but there have been quite a few interesting reveals this year.
Unfortunate really because I never thought him very funny :-(
I kind of assume Griff Rhys Jones and Rory Mcgrath are Tory supporters as well.
Still makes me laugh.
Possibly NSFW.
http://youtu.be/H6HRQVki-HM
Must have been weird for a Kipper playing that role.
It was scary how he looked and sounded exactly like Sir Geoffrey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu6MDdxBork
Maybe. Chemistry between the three matters as much as how they stack up individually.
Have been thinking about who would be a decent figurehead for the NO EU campaign. How about Michael Portillo? I'm sure he said a few weeks ago on This Week he's going to vote No. Articulate, popular but with a front line political background.
Until Farage agrees to be locked in an underground bunker with a few dozen DVD boxed sets for the duration of the campaign, who else is going to step forward?
More people in work, fewer people out of work and real terms wage growth of 2.5%. It really does show why Ed's "Cost of living crisis" fell on deaf ears in middle England. Basing the campaign around it was stupid, as many of us pointed out the government would just squeak by with the majority of people feeling better off than they did in 2010 in March/April 2015. By the end of this year household finances should have recovered to pre-crash levels and by 2020, taking into account a recession or slowdown in 2017/18, they will be well above 2008/9, possibly making up for a bit of lost time.
Now would be a good time to start looking at reforming in-work benefits. Limit child tax credits to two kids, lower the limit on the working tax credit to £12,500 and lower the top up amount, start reforming housing benefit as well and take a look at the whole of the rental sector. Last time I looked around £40bn of the benefits bill is paid out to working people/families, that needs to be cut drastically and we need to make work pay properly rather than have low wage subsidies and corporate subsidies for multi-nationals who don't want to pay a decent wage. In a booming jobs market we can achieve and at least maintain the high level of employment.
Doesn't, of course, alter the fact that Labour could have done a whole lot better.
Depending on what happens (or doesn't!) with the renegotiations, there should be a few well known Con grandees come out for the No side that can lead the campaign team. Portillo would be a good choice, especially as most people under 35 know him as a TV presenter rather than an MP.
The fixture calendar is out, our first match is away to Stoke, where we lost 6-1 on the last day of last season.
Then after that, our next away matches are Arsenal, Man Utd, Everton, Spurs, Chelsea & Citeh
Fighting over where they can sit.
The long struggle for freedom goes on
As an aside, Labour website people, deduct several million diversity points for only offering 'male' and 'female' gender options. I feel hurt, confused and betrayed
Lots of people seem to think the female voice of Fallout 4's protagonist will be the lady who was Jack in Mass Effect 2 [she was one of my least favourite characters, but hopefully I'll like FemSurvivor rather more].
Oh, and it seems Dogmeat will be invincible. And mods will likely come to both consoles.
There is other news (Mass Effect, FF7, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Last Guardian). But right now I'm trying to decide whether to get Fallout 4 on release. I think I need to sell more books...
Edited extra bit: finished Witcher 3 recently, I'll put the review up either today or tomorrow [not written yet and got some other stuff to write too].