What counts as a disastrous, must-resign result for TMay, what is pretty poor, but maybe survivable, etc?
My thoughts: any result where she actually loses seats, or - heaven forfend - she loses her majority, is a must resign. Though I can see her struggling on for a few months.
25-50 seat majority: very poor, yet perfectly survivable, but many Tories will feel swindled, and it will feel like a defeat
50-80: meh, not great, she is a bit damaged, but people will forget, Brexit next
Over 80: she's almost Boadicea, nice one Theresa, despite the wobbles
Over 120: Fuckyeah
Would be quite amusing if, after everything, the numbers are as they were in 2015.
We're not going to end up with an as-you-were result. That would make no sense.
The Conservatives start this election with about 38% of the electorate (in terms of GB, not UK, vote share) from last time. These are people who wouldn't desert Cameron for Miliband, so why on Earth would they vote for Corbyn - who is far more Left and has far worse ratings - this time around? If anything, you'd think there would be a migration of some wet centrist Labour voters in the other direction.
Regardless, it now looks like any movement of Europhile voters to the Lib Dems will be very slight, and likely compensated for, in terms of vote share at least, by gains in Scotland alone. Bolt on another 6% (i.e. half of the Ukip vote) and realistically the Tories can't do any worse than about 44% - even with zero defections from Labour, which I think unlikely.
Even if the Conservatives do as "badly" as 44%, Labour still needs to make 37% (better than Blair in 2005) to narrow the gap to that achieved in 2015. Given that the SNP, Plaid and various independents and minor parties will account for a bit more than 5%, the remaining parties have at most 51% of the vote to split between them. So, the third parties would not only all have to be seriously squeezed (probably including the Lib Dems actually doing worse than in 2015,) all of the extra votes taken from Ukip as well as the Greens and Lib Dems would have to go to Labour to propel them into the high 30s.
This is all without talking about voter distribution (e.g if Lib Dem voters are trending Labour, then a disproportionate number of those extra votes will be stacked up uselessly in Tory safe seats in Southern England,) or about the fact that the secondary questions still suggest that the Conservatives should be doing better and Labour worse than headline VI would suggest, or the likelihood that greater scrutiny will be applied to Labour's huge borrowing and spending commitments if it starts to look as if they've even a remote chance of becoming the largest party.
There are still a lot of hoops to be jumped through before we get a close result in this election.
That said, I still remain unconvinced about the apocalyptic narrative coming out from some posters on here.
I think the apocalyptic narrative is because posters have had a foretaste of how she will behave when we get down to the business end of Brexit. Black Wednesday on steroids is coming up at some point.
This.
We could do with an interest rate rise.
Don't think the voters will want that, somehow. Especially not to 15%.
But I don't think Williamglenn was a literally alluding to a huge interest rate but rather a political disaster on the scale of Black Wednesday.
pb is always good for obscure cultural references.
I'm hardly Theresa May's biggest fan but she seems to me to be doing fine. I can't for the life of me understand why any politician agrees to be interviewed by Andrew Neil.
He is genuinely scary. So quick , so informed, brutal with waffle.
She could be doing worse. I can't see Corbyn cope with this.
I quite liked the interview with Osborne during the referendum. I think Osborne actually did quite well, but I doubt many people actually watched it or will bother with the interviews this week.
Andrew Neil is a sharp spinner. May just has to defend the wicket here, which she is doing I think. The election can't be won here but it definitely can be lost.
Theresa going on and on about no-one will have to pay in their lifetime, not have to move out, protecting their £100,000....
Should get the message across to those who haven't been paying much attention.
But people like my Mother in law froth at the mouth at the thought she might not be able to leave her house to her kids. She will hate this.
I wonder if this attitude goes back to the old promise that Labour made decades ago: to "look after our people from the cradle to the grave"?
A lovely sentiment, rubbed in so hard that many of the people then alive accepted it as their absolute right to be looked after by the state, instead of paying their way through life?
The state looks after you; what you earn is your pocket money.
Theresa going on and on about no-one will have to pay in their lifetime, not have to move out, protecting their £100,000....
Should get the message across to those who haven't been paying much attention.
But people like my Mother in law froth at the mouth at the thought she might not be able to leave her house to her kids. She will hate this.
I wonder if this attitude goes back to the old promise that Labour made decades ago: to "look after our people from the cradle to the grave"?
A lovely sentiment, rubbed in so hard that many of the people then alive accepted it as their absolute right to be looked after by the state, instead of paying their way through life?
The state looks after you; what you earn is your pocket money.
That may be so, but my MiL is a monkey in a blue rosette type voter.
Like four days ago they didn't believe in a cap on care costs?
Her promise not to hold an early general election was stronger. Your taxes are going up folks.
Good. They need to go up. Silly to pretend otherwise if we want to just maintain the level of public services.
Exactly. Harmonising tax and NI - They could do that in a way that was moderately favourable to lower income working people; problem of course is that higher income pensioners would have to pay 10% more tax to help the NHS. Probably a political non-starter.
Neil's tick list of issues to cover is too many to do a decent job in half an hour
Shame it wasn't an hour.
Bring back Brian Walden and Weekend World
I've been saying that for a while. It was in-depth and generally not hostile but gave politicians the chance to loop the rope around their necks and then he just tied the knot. When Parris took over it went downhill.
The Welsh numbers feed into my scepticism about YouGov. Wobbling about all over the place. Am much more inclined to take ICM seriously - they've been very consistent up until today, and the picture they present - of the Tories holding more-or-less stable whilst the anti-Tory vote coalesces around Labour - makes considerably more sense.
Meanwhile, been watching the local news this evening. Anglia are doing a trip down the A10, stopping off at a different town each day to interview people about the election. Today they started off in Downham Market, a town in Norfolk quite a long way from London, which is neither particularly wealthy nor poor. The main subjects raised by the townsfolk were jobs and Brexit. Little sign of a rebellion over elderly care in a place where there aren't too many huge inheritances at stake.
A "rogue poll" has always been one that a PB poster disagrees with!
Well, what is one supposed to make of an 8% swing between two surveys conducted relatively close together? It *might* actually be right, but it does look a bit dodgy. Have the interests of such a substantial proportion of the electorate changed that quickly? Has the electorate grown that volatile? Again, perhaps they have, but it does look a little bit strange.
It's possible the Wales poll was reflecting a Rhodri Morgan sympathy vote, in which case the swing could reverse back just as quickly.
Bit of that, and some natural variation
Also I say this quietly but I'm wondering if Yougov has some severe panel effects of the politically overinterested - the politically uninterested are far more Brexity I think, even than leavers on the Yougov Panel. They'll generally be a bit more Tory methinsk..
What will the future hold for polling if after this election it is found that there is still a problem with sampling? 4-5 years ago I used to fill in frequent surveys for YouGov to try to get my points up to £50 worth. After a while I started to get asked to do political polls quite regularly. It almost felt like a reward for ploughing through all the dreary stuff. Now I only do occasional surveys and have not been asked to do a political one for over three years. Perhaps my demographic is over-represented. Has anyone else found this?
Yes. I was a regular customer until about 2 years ago. As a Lib Dem I was obviously surplus to requirements.
That was a punishment beating, and she is still alive, so that's a pass.
The only actually interesting thing she said: in 10 years time, 2,000,000 more over 75 year olds than there are now. Chilling, and a good reason to take the care question a bit seriously.
Neil asked her to explain, which naturally she didn't. Does it signal the begining of the end of Brexit denial? Does she know how dire the consequence of No Deal would be and is preparing us for a U-Turn - i.e., No Deal means No Brexit.?
Theresa going on and on about no-one will have to pay in their lifetime, not have to move out, protecting their £100,000....
Should get the message across to those who haven't been paying much attention.
But people like my Mother in law froth at the mouth at the thought she might not be able to leave her house to her kids. She will hate this.
I wonder if this attitude goes back to the old promise that Labour made decades ago: to "look after our people from the cradle to the grave"?
A lovely sentiment, rubbed in so hard that many of the people then alive accepted it as their absolute right to be looked after by the state, instead of paying their way through life?
The state looks after you; what you earn is your pocket money.
It's the Great Lie that is National Insurance.
People assume that paying it is like paying your premiums to the Norwich Union. It goes into a pot just for you throughout your working life, and then your policy matures at 65 and you get guaranteed benefits until you kick the bucket.
They just don't appreciate that all taxes (of which NI is just another one) get spent by Government on whatever it needs or feels like at the time. So yes, they did pay all their taxes - they just all got spent on their defence, their railways, their child benefit, their kids' schooling, their parents' pensions, and everything else they needed spending on at the time. All their pensioner handouts today have nothing directly to do with their own contributions - they're all being paid for by today's working people.
There are now too many olds relative to working people for the existing system to function, especially given - yes - increasingly steep housing costs. Either the olds cough up for the shortfall or the working people do - and the latter are already heavily taxed, and get significantly less largesse from the state than today's pensioners did when they were young.
All this means, of course, that the current Government wants older people to share a bit of the burden for a change (and is arguably right to do so,) but that said olds are particularly cheesed off about being asked to do so. In a way, they were both swindled in decades past and tacitly complicit in their own swindling. Yes, they're being asked to do without benefits they *believe* they already paid for - but they never bothered to seriously question where all the money was coming from to give them jam today when they were young, now did they?
The Welsh numbers feed into my scepticism about YouGov. Wobbling about all over the place. Am much more inclined to take ICM seriously - they've been very consistent up until today, and the picture they present - of the Tories holding more-or-less stable whilst the anti-Tory vote coalesces around Labour - makes considerably more sense.
Meanwhile, been watching the local news this evening. Anglia are doing a trip down the A10, stopping off at a different town each day to interview people about the election. Today they started off in Downham Market, a town in Norfolk quite a long way from London, which is neither particularly wealthy nor poor. The main subjects raised by the townsfolk were jobs and Brexit. Little sign of a rebellion over elderly care in a place where there aren't too many huge inheritances at stake.
A "rogue poll" has always been one that a PB poster disagrees with!
Well, what is one supposed to make of an 8% swing between two surveys conducted relatively close together? It *might* actually be right, but it does look a bit dodgy. Have the interests of such a substantial proportion of the electorate changed that quickly? Has the electorate grown that volatile? Again, perhaps they have, but it does look a little bit strange.
It's possible the Wales poll was reflecting a Rhodri Morgan sympathy vote, in which case the swing could reverse back just as quickly.
Bit of that, and some natural variation
Also I say this quietly but I'm wondering if Yougov has some severe panel effects of the politically overinterested - the politically uninterested are far more Brexity I think, even than leavers on the Yougov Panel. They'll generally be a bit more Tory methinsk..
What will the future hold for polling if after this election it is found that there is still a problem with sampling? 4-5 years ago I used to fill in frequent surveys for YouGov to try to get my points up to £50 worth. After a while I started to get asked to do political polls quite regularly. It almost felt like a reward for ploughing through all the dreary stuff. Now I only do occasional surveys and have not been asked to do a political one for over three years. Perhaps my demographic is over-represented. Has anyone else found this?
If you tell them you are a 100% Tory/ Lab/ Lib Dem, they only poll you once in a millennium. If you tell them you are a swing voter, I reckon you get polled all the time...
I didn't tell them I was 100% anything but if they do this they will be missing people who might change their vote over a significant issue or as they age.
Neil asked her to explain, which naturally she didn't. Does it signal the begining of the end of Brexit denial? Does she know how dire the consequence of No Deal would be and is preparing us for a U-Turn - i.e., No Deal means No Brexit.?
Are you suggesting some proper preparation from May ?
Genuinely 73 year old undecided voter. Will not vote for waffle and wriggle. Why did Andrew Neil not ask why she supported Remain - and then, when the British public opted for Leave - did she decide she was the best person to lead Leave ? I don't think Corbyn is a natural leader - but he appears honest in his views. I haven't a clue what May actually believes -other than she wants - and thinks - she is PM material. In the interview she never admitted she had made a U-turn. When she thought something was positive it was 'I' - when there was something she could not defend - it was 'We'. Will the interview change anything. No - folk have already decided. I have. Not Theresa May.
Neil asked her to explain, which naturally she didn't. Does it signal the begining of the end of Brexit denial? Does she know how dire the consequence of No Deal would be and is preparing us for a U-Turn - i.e., No Deal means No Brexit.?
Are you suggesting some proper preparation from May ?
my concern is that expectations are so low for Mr Corbyn on friday, that unless he pulls out a combat jacket, a bag of semtex, starts singing the Venezuelan national anthem whilst calling the Queen out for being one of the privileged few then people will say he's done ok.
Genuinely 73 year old undecided voter. Will not vote for waffle and wriggle. Why did Andrew Neil not ask why she supported Remain - and then, when the British public opted for Leave - did she decide she was the best person to lead Leave ? I don't think Corbyn is a natural leader - but he appears honest in his views. I haven't a clue what May actually believes -other than she wants - and thinks - she is PM material. In the interview she never admitted she had made a U-turn. When she thought something was positive it was 'I' - when there was something she could not defend - it was 'We'. Will the interview change anything. No - folk have already decided. I have. Not Theresa May.
Thanks for that, previously unheard of astroturfer, sorry, commenter.
Was amusing how they went from genuinely undedicded to having already decided.
Genuinely 73 year old undecided voter. Will not vote for waffle and wriggle. Why did Andrew Neil not ask why she supported Remain - and then, when the British public opted for Leave - did she decide she was the best person to lead Leave ? I don't think Corbyn is a natural leader - but he appears honest in his views. I haven't a clue what May actually believes -other than she wants - and thinks - she is PM material. In the interview she never admitted she had made a U-turn. When she thought something was positive it was 'I' - when there was something she could not defend - it was 'We'. Will the interview change anything. No - folk have already decided. I have. Not Theresa May.
Thanks for that, previously unheard of astroturfer, sorry, commenter.
Was amusing how they went from genuinely undedicded to having already decided.
Genuinely 73 year old undecided voter. Will not vote for waffle and wriggle.
I wonder if that Corbyn interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky is available online anywhere? A fine example of wriggling, with more to come, no doubt, when Neil gets his teeth into him.
Corbyn often seems "honest" to people because they buy the nice old gentleman routine.
Theresa going on and on about no-one will have to pay in their lifetime, not have to move out, protecting their £100,000....
Should get the message across to those who haven't been paying much attention.
But people like my Mother in law froth at the mouth at the thought she might not be able to leave her house to her kids. She will hate this.
I wonder if this attitude goes back to the old promise that Labour made decades ago: to "look after our people from the cradle to the grave"?
A lovely sentiment, rubbed in so hard that many of the people then alive accepted it as their absolute right to be looked after by the state, instead of paying their way through life?
The state looks after you; what you earn is your pocket money.
It's the Great Lie that is National Insurance.
People assume that paying it is like paying your premiums to the Norwich Union. It goes into a pot just for you throughout your working life, and then your policy matures at 65 and you get guaranteed benefits until you kick the bucket.
They just don't appreciate that all taxes (of which NI is just another one) get spent by Government on whatever it needs or feels like at the time. So yes, they did pay all their taxes - they just all got spent on their defence, their railways, their child benefit, their kids' schooling, their parents' pensions, and everything else they needed spending on at the time. All their pensioner handouts today have nothing directly to do with their own contributions - they're all being paid for by today's working people.
There are now too many olds relative to working people for the existing system to function, especially given - yes - increasingly steep housing costs. Either the olds cough up for the shortfall or the working people do - and the latter are already heavily taxed, and get significantly less largesse from the state than today's pensioners did when they were young.
All this means, of course, that the current Government wants older people to share a bit of the burden for a change (and is arguably right to do so,) but that said olds are particularly cheesed off about being asked to do so. In a way, they were both swindled in decades past and tacitly complicit in their own swindling. Yes, they're being asked to do without benefits they *believe* they already paid for - but they never bothered to seriously question where all the money was coming from to give them jam today when they were young, now did they?
How many people realise Granny's funeral has to be paid for, come to that? Do they expect the state will cough up for that too?
Granny still loses her house when she dies despite the evasion
Granny can't take it with her in any event.
Well, quite. If only people would frame it in terms of "X" will lose part of his inheritance, and "Y" will keep more of her inheritance, then there could be a sensible discussion about whether "X" will lose more than "Y" will gain, and whether it's entirely fair under the current system that "Y" should lose all but £23k just because her mother's dementia is severe enough for her to go into residential care, while "X" should keep the lot because his father's isn't that bad.
Comments
The Conservatives start this election with about 38% of the electorate (in terms of GB, not UK, vote share) from last time. These are people who wouldn't desert Cameron for Miliband, so why on Earth would they vote for Corbyn - who is far more Left and has far worse ratings - this time around? If anything, you'd think there would be a migration of some wet centrist Labour voters in the other direction.
Regardless, it now looks like any movement of Europhile voters to the Lib Dems will be very slight, and likely compensated for, in terms of vote share at least, by gains in Scotland alone. Bolt on another 6% (i.e. half of the Ukip vote) and realistically the Tories can't do any worse than about 44% - even with zero defections from Labour, which I think unlikely.
Even if the Conservatives do as "badly" as 44%, Labour still needs to make 37% (better than Blair in 2005) to narrow the gap to that achieved in 2015. Given that the SNP, Plaid and various independents and minor parties will account for a bit more than 5%, the remaining parties have at most 51% of the vote to split between them. So, the third parties would not only all have to be seriously squeezed (probably including the Lib Dems actually doing worse than in 2015,) all of the extra votes taken from Ukip as well as the Greens and Lib Dems would have to go to Labour to propel them into the high 30s.
This is all without talking about voter distribution (e.g if Lib Dem voters are trending Labour, then a disproportionate number of those extra votes will be stacked up uselessly in Tory safe seats in Southern England,) or about the fact that the secondary questions still suggest that the Conservatives should be doing better and Labour worse than headline VI would suggest, or the likelihood that greater scrutiny will be applied to Labour's huge borrowing and spending commitments if it starts to look as if they've even a remote chance of becoming the largest party.
There are still a lot of hoops to be jumped through before we get a close result in this election.
But I don't think Williamglenn was a literally alluding to a huge interest rate but rather a political disaster on the scale of Black Wednesday.
Cameron, Blair and even Brown are in a different league!
The election can't be won here but it definitely can be lost.
A lovely sentiment, rubbed in so hard that many of the people then alive accepted it as their absolute right to be looked after by the state, instead of paying their way through life?
The state looks after you; what you earn is your pocket money.
no
44% is a big swing to them. Some of those odds in Wales look very suspect then...
@KentRising Ah, so I'm not missing much.
She said they had an ambition for lower taxes but wouldn't rule out a tax rise. What does that tell you?
Slippery. Boring. Survived.
If the Party agrees!
"What a week"
Granny still loses her house when she dies despite the evasion
Who is I'm sure grateful for your support.
Every answer was i might be a liar/shite/boring/spineless
But at least im not Corbyn
I am pretty certain this will be enough to increase her majority
The only actually interesting thing she said: in 10 years time, 2,000,000 more over 75 year olds than there are now. Chilling, and a good reason to take the care question a bit seriously.
The people who will be losing out are those who expect to get a multi hundred thousand pound inheritance for doing nothing.
And they can always increase their inheritance by looking after Granny a bit.
Neil asked her to explain, which naturally she didn't. Does it signal the begining of the end of Brexit denial? Does she know how dire the consequence of No Deal would be and is preparing us for a U-Turn - i.e., No Deal means No Brexit.?
People assume that paying it is like paying your premiums to the Norwich Union. It goes into a pot just for you throughout your working life, and then your policy matures at 65 and you get guaranteed benefits until you kick the bucket.
They just don't appreciate that all taxes (of which NI is just another one) get spent by Government on whatever it needs or feels like at the time. So yes, they did pay all their taxes - they just all got spent on their defence, their railways, their child benefit, their kids' schooling, their parents' pensions, and everything else they needed spending on at the time. All their pensioner handouts today have nothing directly to do with their own contributions - they're all being paid for by today's working people.
There are now too many olds relative to working people for the existing system to function, especially given - yes - increasingly steep housing costs. Either the olds cough up for the shortfall or the working people do - and the latter are already heavily taxed, and get significantly less largesse from the state than today's pensioners did when they were young.
All this means, of course, that the current Government wants older people to share a bit of the burden for a change (and is arguably right to do so,) but that said olds are particularly cheesed off about being asked to do so. In a way, they were both swindled in decades past and tacitly complicit in their own swindling. Yes, they're being asked to do without benefits they *believe* they already paid for - but they never bothered to seriously question where all the money was coming from to give them jam today when they were young, now did they?
Not sure about the interview being held in an empty office, very low budget.
Doesn't seem likely to me.
I believe the latter still offers value.
Nobody currently receiving care at home can lose their house.
That all changed a week ago.
80% of people getting social care get it at home.
They now have worries that didnt exist a week ago.
Corbyn often seems "honest" to people because they buy the nice old gentleman routine.
He's not nice.