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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on a UKIP by-election upset in the absence of hard
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on a UKIP by-election upset in the absence of hard polling
Oldham West & Royton should have been a spectacularly boring by-election. It is a previously-safe Labour seat held at the last general election by a leftwing MP with a thumping majority and an absolute majority of votes cast. To gain it, UKIP would require a swing of 17.1%. Such a swing would be remarkable against a party of government, never mind against a party of opposition. In normal cir…
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Did the plan have backing of thousands of labour members in an e-mail survey though?
I'm editing PB on Friday, I don't need this kind of stress.
@georgeeaton
Shadow cabinet members were angered when intended conclusion of meeting was pre-briefed to the Guardian (without Corbyn's knowledge).
Seamus?
@stephenkb: Milne overruled Labour spinners who objected and sent release out at any case.
Mr. Anorak, be kind. Mr. Eagles has a track record of being fooled by convincing bounders, such as Caesar.
Amazing false stories don't get put about more often.
*thinks* *rubs hands* *evil laugh*
It's obviously difficult to tell in the context of turnout dropping (and being in government) but it looks to me that there was some Tory --> UKIP tactical voting in Heywood (-15%) and perhaps also Wythenshawe (-11%) and South Shields (-10%). In Newark the Tory vote was only down 9%, from a much higher base (though they may have picked up some anti-UKIP votes).
I'd be backing UKIP here too, at current prices.
Twitter should remove them for misrepresentation.
http://insidecroydon.com/2015/11/30/questions-to-be-asked-over-1-5m-worth-of-viridor-gifts/
During the last Parliament I usually on a Saturday night I emailed Mike the polling figures from The Sunday Times.
Normally they use a graph, however after one budget, they put the polling figures in the editorial it was something like Con 34, Lab 38, except I emailed Mike the figures of
Con 43 and Lab 38
Mike had to ring me to confirm it and I was like oops.
Were all the email checked from a Mr J Corbyn of North London?
@stephenkb: Milne tells @AdamBienkov that reports they only sampled 100 are "a pack of lies".
Seamus showing his team the art of spinning: https://deadwrite.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/keystone-cops11.jpg
I was initially suspicious that the Labour gloom was expectations management but I now think it's probably genuine.
I wish there more straws in the wind from UKIP. From what I've seen they are hopeful (but kippers always are) not confident.
I agree with all Alistair except your views that turnout will be less that 37.50% of the electorate
Let's say 50% of LAB general election voters DO abstain and 25% of the remainder also abstain it will still mean approx 27500 will vote. That means a turnout of very close to 39%.
43000-23000/2+20000/5 =27500
70000/100*39.3=27500
But I don't think 50% will actually not vote and a 25% drop in UKIP and CON vote is also probably an overestimate.
Remember Oldham East in January 2011 returned a turnout of 48% & this by election has produced a lot of interest. I see the turnout being 43-46%.
Opsimath
I'm on turnout sub-44.5% with Ladbrokes. It's the only bet I feel confident about in this by-election.
Talk of UKIP repeating the Heywood and Middleton performance or even bettering it is pure wishful thinking .
I don't suppose the voters in Oldham are thinking "I would vote UKIP here... but they haven't had many monetary donations to speak of recently"
Seamus Milne? I suspect he'd be glad to see the party ripped to bits.
It's sad.
The Kinnock and then the Blair, Brown, Prescott, Cook, Mandelson, Beckett era showed a lot of backbone in crushing the lunatic tendency - only now do I fully respect how ferociously well they saw them off. Sadly, the current generation don't seem to have the gravitas or the collective power to hit back. It's a legacy of the Blairite/Brownite battles - the two sides were too busy fighting one another over spurious policy difference (when the differences were only really ever personal) to notice the rise of the SWP lot.
It's funny what a couple of defeats can do to the psyche. That coupled with the mass retirements of the Blair generation has left a vacuum. Into it have walked the Corbynites, the SWP and Stop the War lot; basically the crazy fuckers.
I'd suggest Labour need Ed Balls and David Miliband back. And those two need build an alliance and crush the leftis against. And not just crush them, but make them go start a new party - a mirror of UKIP.
Otherwise God help the party if this carries on.
#BREAKING Putin says Turkey shot down Russian warplane to protect IS oil trade
MPs to debate on Wednesday UK air strikes in Syria, the BBC understands
If an enterprising journalist or PBer just rang up the returning officer and asked for the figure of PVs to date, he might get a reply.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/bill-gates-zuckerberg-tech-leaders-launch-fund-for-clean-energy-breakthroughs/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34970121?ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbc_breaking&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=news_central
I'd agree with you on the rest of the points but I wonder whether there's the heft in the rest of the Labour Party, outside the PLP, to take on the left any more. If, say, Balls were to return, he'd have to immediately set himself up as the king-across-the-sea and act on that: setting up his rival shadow shadow cabinet (as someone put it earlier today), and ignoring the whip as he saw fit. I'm not sure he has it in him to do that; he's too much of a Labour loyalist.
DM, by contrast, won't come back and it might be best if he didn't; he's too out of step with the membership now.
It would be more fun if it were otherwise.
OTOH if UKIP do win perhaps the lesson to be learnt is to keep Farage well away. He's been largely invisible in this election. Or is it that we can't see him behind all those Labour MPs stabbing each other in the back?
Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, 24 Nov
http://tinyurl.com/gqzloj9
Turkey openly supports ISIS.
We're going to bomb Turkey then?
But in this case the stupid leadership (Miliband) and then the stupid MPs gave Corbyn a leg up. He should never have been on the ballot. The purpose of the rule is to offer up candidates that can lead MPs in parliament.
Now Corbyn has the power to remake the PLP in his own image.
There is a fundamental and deliberate misrepresentation.
It is not the job of the membership to create policy and tell the 'leadership what to do.
Its the job of the membership to be led... by the leadership.
The clue is in the name.
Corbyn can now misuse his position to remove MPs either directly or by the force of the swingometer.
In this instance, a lot will come down to the postal votes. Can Labour get their vote out there? If so, they should win fairly comfortably. If not - or worse, if there's a decent turnout but a lot of defections - then it'll be mighty tight for them.
Alastair's right to say we have very little hard evidence but there are plenty of straws in the wind to suggest that Labour is very far from confident. This week won't help them either. My guess would be that whatever UKIP's national weaknesses, there'll be a tidal flow to UKIP simply off Labour's ongoing shambles. If I had to set a handicap market, I'd have it starting at Lab to win by 600.
Nigel Farage tells LBC that he believes UKIP have a 50% chance of winning the Oldham west & Royton by-election on Thursday.
UKIP aren't great at managing expectations, and obviously that comment is more about boosting the vote than predicting it, but still...
If David Miliband won't come back surely there is enough quality within the PLP ranks to mount a fightback. After all, from where I see it, the argument against the Momentum heavies is pretty easy to win. They have a rubbish rationale; even I seem to be winning all my arguments with them on Twitter. They keep ranting at me about 'old politics' not seeming to realise that old politics is winning politics, ie: putting together a front bench of collective responsibility, fighting together on a cohesive policy platform and persuading enough voters to vote for you...
They don't seem to want to persuade. They are happy just to abuse... in the forlorn fantasy that there are 12 million voters out there across 650 constituencies who are gonna agree with them on GE night.
Bonkers.
There's one funny thing about this though: it looks as though Putin's cancelled the planned 'Turkish Stream' gas pipeline that was due to go through Turkey, and whose deal was only signed earlier this year.
Unfortunately, it was signed because the previous 'South Stream' pipeline that was due to go through Ukraine was cancelled for the obvious reasons.
Given he's been at war with a country the first pipeline passed through, and is nearly at war with one the second passes through, which other countries are going to be brave enough to step forwards and take the next route?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34964253
Trans-Pennine Tunnel - story specially released for by election? But how far is the M62 close to maximum capacity. it always seems busy when I have used it recently.
Through explusions and intimidation, they did silence them to a great degree. But this itself was at some cost when they were faced with Galloway and Livingston embarrassing them.
However, it was only ever silencing. They never really went away and most of them just stayed schtum and waited their chance to "get their party back".
The assumption that the Notting Hill sect every did anything but take over the leadership is a false one. All they achieved was the same as multiculturalism ever achieved - silence without the underlying opinions ever changing.
WIll it better your Brighton prediction ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDoncJckows
People just refused to believe that the Liberals could be hurt badly in the SW and that SLAB could be left with less than 15 to 20 seats (with a few exceptions). I think perhaps people are refusing to focus on the noises coming out of the constituencies. Because they have a very familiar ring.
In the SW, the LIberal which were so surely going to hang onto lots of seats lost the lot.
In Scotland, SLAB who were so surely going to hang onto at least a dozen seats probably 20, managed to keep one.
The message is clear on Oldham on Thursday. It will be UKIP. And it will be UKIP by more than 2000 votes.
Labour are still exorcising their Iraq demons and, having tried someone who wasn't in Parliament at the time of the Iraq war and was, therefore, a clean skin, they've now gone to the other end and are now trying someone who was always against it, regardless. They really should have chosen someone who was against it - but for the right reasons e.g. someone like Kenneth Clarke (assuming they had someone like that). As it is, they are now combining economic lunacy with a policy of surrender and appeasement to vicious terrorists. It's not the direction of travel I'd choose......
It's amazing how many times Russia falls victim to the evil machinations of much smaller countries.
I think the electorate dismissed Ed Miliband as a leader from the off and - again - the left wing of the Labour party is to blame for this. McCluskey and co tried to be clever by putting a placeman in and it blew up in their faces. GE2015 was there for Labour's taking - Miliband proved a turn off to the SNP* and to Middle England and that was that.
*To be fair, the surge of the SNP would've been difficult for any Lab leader to deal with.
No worries re Beckett. She came across as a typical New Labour politician, which in the the Blair / Brown era, she was. But if ever there was a weathervane, then she's it.
The problem the PLP have is that they have to mount a fightback against the leadership, NEC and vocal membership, none of whom (except some on the NEC) are interested in listening - as your twitter correspondents show. The PLP don't really have many arguments based on fact that they can deploy. They can point to history or to reasonable expectations but again, as you say, they believe in 'New Politics', so history is worthless to them. Likewise the expectations of people they beat this summer.
I don't honestly see much changing before 2017 at the earliest. By-elections will be written off as 'local anomalies', London (should Zac win) as down to candidates / racist voters, Scotland to the SNP phenomenon predating Corbyn's Labour, Wales to local difficulties - and so on. A second poor set of local results in 2017 might finally convince some of the 'worth a try' Corbynites (NickP - I'm looking at you), that the experiment has failed and it needs to end before permanent damage is done. The problem is that by then, permanent damage might have been done.
However I got carried away from the LordA polls thinking that the LD might survive in 20-30 seats despite polling only 8%, I thought it would be a repeat of 1931 not 1951.
Lab 40.9 (11,633 votes)
UKIP 38.7 (11,016 votes)
Turnout was 36%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heywood_and_Middleton_by-election,_2014
https://twitter.com/twcuddleston/status/671281279275540480
As for the Trans-Pennine Tunnel: the article says they haven't even done a CBR analysis. Just reopen the Woodhead railway line to trains and force the drivers onto motorail trains.
Student Gwant...stuff from Corbyn, almost as bad as a Mili fan.
"I’ll always be a Milifan. Ed was the best prime minister we never had"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/11/milifan-prime-minister-ed-miliband
This is a rare December by-election just months after the GE.
Turkey is openly fighting a war against its own separatists.