For literally the first time this campaign the election came up at lunch in the canteen. We have TVs on BBC news channel permanently with subtitles. Election came on, and someone said "surely May has got more than just "I'm not Jeremy Corbyn"". general laughter and "yeah it's a bit crap isn't it", "they seem to think that would be enough". The feeling that the tories have little to offer is getting through.
Still gobsmacked by how inept the tories have been, and dispirited, almost embarrassed by how crap May herself has been. Astonishingly unimpressive.
Maybe they want to lose??
I do wonder if May is producing "Springtime for Hitler", but that was a surprise hit so not an apt analogy.
Our clinic coordinators were talking positively over Corbyn yesterday. They see him as some hope for the future, though one of the patients (older male WWC) went off on a bit of a rant about terrorism. The other patients edged away a bit.
I get the Hope/change thing with Corbyn, but 30 seconds serious consideration of the labour policies are enough to rule them out as serious contenders for a vote.
Most people don't care about politics most of the time. And if you've only recently tuned in so to speak, and are not considering things in much detail, it's easy to see that Corbyn is more appealing than Grey May.
The worst thing is even if May does get a workable majority, she is apparently going to be Not Very Good.
Personally I am pretty much down to "She's not Corbyn". it's enough for me, but is it enough for a win?
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
I still think May would have lost to Leadsom with the Tory members, had it gone that far...
If the Tories see this as half credible then we'll see both living former PMs, Boris, Ken, and anyone else with reach into the electorate rolling up their metaphorical (or in some cases actual) sleeves this weekend and getting stuck in.
But I don't think we will.
If two party politics is back then I don't think the seat calculators will work.
Perhaps a large chunk of the NOTA party are really members of the "Stop of World" party, people incandescently angry with being left behind in a world they increasing neither liked nor understood. BrExit was one way to stop the world, to crash the system and start again with a new roll of the dice, and supporting May looked like the best way to do it.... right up until Corbyn looked like he was in with a shot, what better way to throw the cards up in the air and get dealt
One explanation for the Labour share being so high is that in the 1990s the turnout in many safe Labour seats collapsed from an average of about 70% to around 55% and hasn't really ever recovered since. It could be that Corbyn is once again enthusing the voters in those seats and turnout could be back up to 70% again. It would have a significant effect on Labour's vote share but it wouldn't win them many seats. Most of the Merseyside seats are good examples of this.
As someone with a 1st in mathematics at a top redbrick university I disagree with you.
Reading your posts, you seem to be very bullish about conservative prospects and very bearish towards labour. I haven't seen one negative post about conservative polling and you seem to be of the belief that the polls are wrong.
1) In Tory wards turnout was 85% in 2015. Labour ward turnout was 45-50%. Had Labour turnout been similar, the tories would have lost 28 seats in the midlands/northern england. Tory enthusiasm is down compared to 2015, labour enthusiasm is up. 2) 3/4 labour voters in the midlands/northern england are ex-labour voters. There is no evidence now that these same UKIP voters are voting heavily for conservative. 3) There are a lot of seats where the tory vote has a very low ceiling. Plymouth, Southampton, Walsall, Stoke, Weaver Vale, Carlisle and any increase in vote enthusiasm could easily see a labour gain. As mentioned on the conservative home website, the tories are campaigning in labour areas they haven't done so in decades and its ok getting 2-3k votes for council elections but to get to 20k to win a seat is very, very hard. The labour vote is not going to down. There aren't enough seats like Tamworth, Burton that are moving away from Labour.
One to savor when the Tories get a nice fat majority.
To paraphrase Thatcher
"Having a 1st in Maths from a redbrick is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
Why are so many so bullish on the Tories? I can't see them bettering 2015 now, all the risk is on the downside.
Do people just not believe the polls anymore?
I think people do believe the polls, hence expectation of comfortable Tory majority. Take the polling average (from FT or Britain Elects or BBC) and type into one of the seat calculators, such as Electoral Calculus.
The commonality of all these polls of course is that the Tory vote share is 44-45%. So Labour's surge is coming from elsewhere and may dependent on them squeezing smaller parties and adding more nonvoters for it to continue.
May knows how hard brexit is going to be, so has purposefully engineered a shit campaign so that Labour can win and take the blame when it all goes tits up. Obviously. Then the tories will win again with a 100+ seat landslide majority and rule for a lifetime. Genius. Utter genius.
there will be no country left to rule after Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn: Labour could write off historic student debts| All those in early 20's with student debt #VoteLabour
I know May might be crap, but f*** me Labour are dangerous.
Fox jr has already voted, but would love that!
Tell me something: when precisely was it that you became an unhinged and pretentious socialist twat?
You voted Tory in GE2010, as I understand it, and were a fan of the coalition. Corbyn and McDonnell will be far worse than Brown and Darling ever were.
You know this (deep down) so there must be something deeply visceral going in inside what passes for your brain.
I don't think I can bear to watch May on BBC QT tonight.
It could be a bloodbath.
I hope I'm wrong.
Theresa May could dazzle us on QT -- for all we know, she could have spent the last fortnight rehearsing QT eight hours a day. It's not as if she's had much else on.
I thought the LDs would be down to 5% with ICM but actually they're on 7%, only down 0.8 points since GE2015. UKIP and Greens must have been reduced to almost nothing.
But with the two main parties up so much, this would still be disastrous for the LDs in terms of seats.
As the LDs appear to be falling in the polls, will they really be taking SW seats off The Tories? Am also wondering if SLAB will really make any headway in Scotland. Corbyn is starting off with 1 not 41 seats in Scotland. Where would he be making headway in England and Wales to offset those losses?
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
I've always thought she was terrible at interviews - dreadful habit of answering awkward questions with some droning boilerplate or other utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Can't believe they are polling 40%, the issues about defense and security alone should be keeping them away from that even if you agree with their economic policy of increased taxation and borrowing.
How long are PBTs going to cling to this notion? NOBODY. CARES. ABOUT. IT. They just want the goverment that will give them large amounts of other people's money.
I expect there will still be people on here banging on about the IRA and Hamas as JC is being driven up the Mall to see HM the Q.
Shoot to kill, his stance on armed police officers, he won't use drone strikes to take out terrorists who could be plotting attacks on this country and his stance on the security services (though there are some with even more extreme views about MI5/MI6 in his party and close to him.) Total disrespect towards our armed forces when he was supportive of these people trying to prosecute and hound them for past events.
Those are things that concern me more than the IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah hell even the Trident issue.
I genuinely will feel less safe as a British Citizen under his watch and so should millions.
May knows how hard brexit is going to be, so has purposefully engineered a shit campaign so that Labour can win and take the blame when it all goes tits up. Obviously. Then the tories will win again with a 100+ seat landslide majority and rule for a lifetime. Genius. Utter genius.
there will be no country left to rule after Corbyn
Last one out won't need to remember to turn the lights out as the power won't be working...
We could be looking at a country more horribly divided young against old than it seemed it would be Brexit against remain. If this is close, there will be huge ill feeling on both sides. Brexiteers will be livid if it's a HP.
A Tory majority of 50 seats and keeping Corbyn in charge of the oppostion would be a nice result for the blues. Ensures the benches aren't too crowded and might lead to a split in the Labour party.
Given the polls, and the trend, the chances of a Hung Parliament are about 2/1, or 5/2 which means the 7/2 on offer is VALUE?
If the Tories get 44%+ it won't be a hung parliament.
The trend, my friend, the trend.
The trend has been absolutely flat for over a week, mate.
Sure, something could happen in the next 5 days to drop the Tories below 44% - or they could, for the first time in recent history, be being overstated by the polls.
But if neither of those things happens, they get 44%+ and a majority.
That's actually a reasonably encouraging Ashcroft focus group report.
The start of it is utterly terrible for May and the Tories, but, as you read on, it's clear she's trusted on Brexit, and you realise most people aren't taken in by Corbyn and starting to be deeply worried.
Could a late swing of a small number of moderate Labour supporters from Labour *to the Tories* be the saver for May, in this election?
A Tory majority of 50 seats and keeping Corbyn in charge of the oppostion would be a nice result for the blues. Ensures the benches aren't too crowded and might lead to a split in the Labour party.
It's terrible for the country...This GE has legitimised corbynism, it's here to stay now...That scary is as hell...
I think you have it written on one side of a coin, and on the other side it says something about Tory majority nailed on. When you log into PB you pour yourself a nice glass of something red, flip the coin, and that is the view you are going to rant about for the rest of the day
If the Tory vote share was sliding away then I'd agree. At the moment all the emphasis is on proving that Labour are really in the high 30s, otherwise they lose convincingly.
Why are so many so bullish on the Tories? I can't see them bettering 2015 now, all the risk is on the downside. Do people just not believe the polls anymore?
I for one do not believe the polls. They make too many adjustments to the figures afterwards.
We could be looking at a country more horribly divided young against old than it seemed it would be Brexit against remain. If this is close, there will be huge ill feeling on both sides. Brexiteers will be livid if it's a HP.
I don't think I can bear to watch May on BBC QT tonight.
It could be a bloodbath.
I hope I'm wrong.
Theresa May could dazzle us on QT -- for all we know, she could have spent the last fortnight rehearsing QT eight hours a day. It's not as if she's had much else on.
No. She's like Brown.
People at 60 years old with her sort of personality don't change. The best we can hope is she commands her figures, takes responsibility for the cock-ups and puts a bit of passion into it, and outlines the light at the end of the tunnel and the risks of Corbyn.
I hope she's had the good sense to have professional training for it.
One explanation for the Labour share being so high is that in the 1990s the turnout in many safe Labour seats collapsed from an average of about 70% to around 55% and hasn't really ever recovered since. It could be that Corbyn is once again enthusing the voters in those seats and turnout could be back up to 70% again. It would have a significant effect on Labour's vote share but it wouldn't win them many seats. Most of the Merseyside seats are good examples of this.
As someone with a 1st in mathematics at a top redbrick university I disagree with you.
Reading your posts, you seem to be very bullish about conservative prospects and very bearish towards labour. I haven't seen one negative post about conservative polling and you seem to be of the belief that the polls are wrong.
1) In Tory wards turnout was 85% in 2015. Labour ward turnout was 45-50%. Had Labour turnout been similar, the tories would have lost 28 seats in the midlands/northern england. Tory enthusiasm is down compared to 2015, labour enthusiasm is up. 2) 3/4 labour voters in the midlands/northern england are ex-labour voters. There is no evidence now that these same UKIP voters are voting heavily for conservative. 3) There are a lot of seats where the tory vote has a very low ceiling. Plymouth, Southampton, Walsall, Stoke, Weaver Vale, Carlisle and any increase in vote enthusiasm could easily see a labour gain. As mentioned on the conservative home website, the tories are campaigning in labour areas they haven't done so in decades and its ok getting 2-3k votes for council elections but to get to 20k to win a seat is very, very hard. The labour vote is not going to down. There aren't enough seats like Tamworth, Burton that are moving away from Labour.
I think the average of recent polls is probably very accurate, I haven't said otherwise. Interesting points you make.
I still think May will win handsomely on the day, 50-80 majority, not a landslide but decent enough.
For all that PB talks about toxic Corbyn (and I also thought he would be toxic) it seems that the IRA stuff really isn't cutting through with the floating voters.
Plus he seems to have inspired a Bernie like momentum with youths. Now, the classic assumption is that youths don't turn up, and that's probably correct. But the EU ref assumptions were based on non voters not turning up, all forecasts of a leave victory assumed a low turnout not a high one. I think we may actually see big youth turnout for once. Bernie only lost to Hillary because of his weakness with minority voters, which doesn't really apply to more white Britain.
Bernie lost because of their weird super delegate system, which some people say is rigged (we can say at the very least the RNC big whigs didnt want him and did everything possible to stop him).
The thing is the comparison sort of stops there...Sanders isn't a terrorist sympathizer, he hadn't taken money from states that kills gays, doesn't surround himself with Marxists and antisemites...
Have not been in the Midlands or North but knocking in marginals in the South. At first there was a lot of usual Labours with very positive things to say about Mrs May with very cool views about Corbyn. Now the negative thoughts about Corbyn haven't really gone away, but now it's framed as "I quite like Jeremy Corbyn but..." then there's IRA or just not seeing him as strong enough. But what is noticeable is that I don't hear any good feelings about May, the best you get now is "She's better than Corbyn". I don't really understand the polls because it feels like a Tory collapse (relatively, from a very high base) rather than a Labour surge but the Tory vote share in polls looks completely solid.
We could be looking at a country more horribly divided young against old than it seemed it would be Brexit against remain. If this is close, there will be huge ill feeling on both sides. Brexiteers will be livid if it's a HP.
Brexit largely WAS young against old.
this election could be the revenge of the young against the old for voting brexit
At most it is Hillary v Sanders which Hillary won, May has the white working class which Hillary did not against Trump and Remain did not against Leave and 45% for the Tories would be their highest voteshare for half a century even if Labour is also up
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
As I said yesterday, if there'd been no Tory leadership contest in 2005 it would have been David Davis as leader, not Cameron. No one even knew who DC was before that campaign.
Leadership elections are very healthy things to have.
In their impatience for party unity, the Tories may have lost the country.
We could be looking at a country more horribly divided young against old than it seemed it would be Brexit against remain. If this is close, there will be huge ill feeling on both sides. Brexiteers will be livid if it's a HP.
If we end up with a coalition of chaos helmed by JC then Breggzit will be consigned to the Recycle Bin of history along with not having tattoos and printed newspapers.
You can make a case for general taxation, as we used to do. My point is the current loans system practically is a graduate tax but with the added disadvantage of saddling with debt people who will never be called upon to repay it anyway.
Effectively it's debt in name only, in that situation.
For me the biggest problem with it is that it discourages some students from going to uni who would benefit from doing so but aren't financially literate enough to understand that it works in their favour and that if things don't come off and they end up in lower-paid work, then the debt doesn't really "saddle" them anyway. The people disadvantaged in this way tend, disproportionately, to be from lower socio-economic backgrounds
There's a flip side to this. One problem with providing things for free is they tend to be over-consumed. If the theoretical possibility of having to pay for your degree crosses your mind, it may put people off from consuming an "unnecessary" degree - e.g. I know young people who did accountancy straight out of school rather than go to uni to study it (in some cases with the hopes of employers funding them to do to do uni later if necessary) which is actually rather a more sensible use of their and society's resources; similarly, if it encourages people into degrees in engineering, nursing and others where you have a stronger chance of a graduate job at the end of it. With government paying for uni, there will clearly be more people going because it's "free" and they can't think of anything else to do for the next year (they may not have a clear idea of opportunity costs of what they could do instead!) and are less motivated to seek a degree with good employment outcomes at the end.
Another disadvantage of free undergrad education is that a lot of the point of a degree is just economic signalling - many people don't use what they studied (applies more to some subjects than others, obviously) but it gives them greater credibility with potential employers. A credentialism arms race is actually counterproductive in this respect, particularly if people aren't taking subjects which are useful in their own right. The issue then gets shunted up to postgraduate study - jobs that used to require a bachelors degree, and could realistically be done, with training, by a bright school-leaver, start needing a masters before you can get an interview. Then all the funding/debt arguments kick in again (definitely easier to afford another year of study if you have well-off parents and so on).
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
I think what it highlights is the dangers of coronations for leaders of political parties. Gordon Brown is a another datapoint on the same curve...
I think you have it written on one side of a coin, and on the other side it says something about Tory majority nailed on. When you log into PB you pour yourself a nice glass of something red, flip the coin, and that is the view you are going to rant about for the rest of the day
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
I still think May would have lost to Leadsom with the Tory members, had it gone that far...
You might be right, though Leadsom clearly didn't want it in the end and I think that would have shown through.
Boris did want it and had he run, would have made the run-off, with or without Gove.
Why are so many so bullish on the Tories? I can't see them bettering 2015 now, all the risk is on the downside. Do people just not believe the polls anymore?
I for one do not believe the polls. They make too many adjustments to the figures afterwards.
Almost all polls in my lifetime have underestimated the Tory vote and seats. It isn't a new phenomenan.
Some pollsters in 1966 forecast a majority of 150 for Harold Wilson. His majority was 98.
The big problem with political polling is that it has to be all of 3 things:
- Accurate - Cost effective - Fast
The British electoral study has been shown to be very accurate but is also far too slow to be used in the same way as current polls are.
One thing I have been thinking about is the level of incentives that these studies pay. I work in healthcare research and if we do a 20 minute survey with a doctor we will pay them in the region of £20-30. If you do a 20 minute survey on a consumer site you will paid 50p or given a prize draw entry. This means these sorts of surveys will only appeal to people who are cash poor, time rich and to people who are very interested in doing surveys. As far as I am aware phone polls don't offer any incentive at all.
So you could put up incentives to say £5 per 5 minutes but this then clashes with point number 2 about being cost effective.
The other thing I would consider along with putting up incentives is trying to set up a closed panel for political research. By a closed panel, I mean rather than letting everyone join, use the electoral roll to segment the electorate by national demographics and then randomly invite people to participate within each segment. With an approach like this you would need to allow longer in field (say a week) and to be prepared to use phone to chase up people who don't participate straight away but this would hopefully prove more accurate.
Why are so many so bullish on the Tories? I can't see them bettering 2015 now, all the risk is on the downside.
Do people just not believe the polls anymore?
I think people do believe the polls, hence expectation of comfortable Tory majority. Take the polling average (from FT or Britain Elects or BBC) and type into one of the seat calculators, such as Electoral Calculus.
June 8th will not be an average of the preceding 12mths of polling.
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
I still think May would have lost to Leadsom with the Tory members, had it gone that far...
Absolutely, said a similar thing a few days ago. Brown got a coronation and it did him no favours.
May has never been properly scrutinised under the lens of the public. It really shows.
The news of charges against Craiig Mackinlay in South Thanet means UKIP must fancy their chances of their candidate the Reverend Stuart Piper taking the seat to make up for the loss of Thanet South
It missed the weekly newspaper though.
Nigel Farage got some national coverage on the BBC news you would think it would help UKip in Thanet.
Given the polls, and the trend, the chances of a Hung Parliament are about 2/1, or 5/2 which means the 7/2 on offer is VALUE?
If the Tories get 44%+ it won't be a hung parliament.
The trend, my friend, the trend.
The trend of the Tory vote share is it has been 45% within margin of error for ages. There is no trend.
The Tories are very slowly edging down. Labour are surging. Extrapolating the trend on nearly all pollsters puts the Tories on about 42-44 by next Thursday, and Labour on, say, 39-42?
That is painfully close, and it means a tiny Tory majority or Hung Parliament with Theresa handing over to Amber or Boris as PM. And another election in a year?
Chaos. But there we are.
The trend can't continue: there aren't enough UKIP votes left: they were down to 2% in today's Mori. Some new trend must become established, even if that is 'no change'.
Can't believe they are polling 40%, the issues about defense and security alone should be keeping them away from that even if you agree with their economic policy of increased taxation and borrowing.
How long are PBTs going to cling to this notion? NOBODY. CARES. ABOUT. IT. They just want the goverment that will give them large amounts of other people's money.
I expect there will still be people on here banging on about the IRA and Hamas as JC is being driven up the Mall to see HM the Q.
Shoot to kill, his stance on armed police officers, he won't use drone strikes to take out terrorists who could be plotting attacks on this country and his stance on the security services (though there are some with even more extreme views about MI5/MI6 in his party and close to him.) Total disrespect towards our armed forces when he was supportive of these people trying to prosecute and hound them for past events.
Those are things that concern me more than the IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah hell even the Trident issue.
I genuinely will feel less safe as a British Citizen under his watch and so should millions.
Surely the millions should decide for themselves? Noone's telling you how you should feel...
And Ipsos-Mori, like ICM, does weight by past voting, doesn't it?
No, I don't think they do. This is what Anthony Wells wrote (admittedly quite a long time ago) about their methodology:
Alone amongst the pollsters Ipsos MORI do not use any political weighting at all (that isn’t to say they don’t weight, or their figures are unweighted. They do use all the normal demographic weights like age and gender). This has two important effects – firstly, the weighting used by ICM, Populus and so on nearly always reduces the proportion of Labour voters in a sample, so the absence of weighting in Ipsos MORI polls has historically helped Labour. Since they don’t weight by it, MORI do not as standard ask about recalled vote, but when they did it showed their samples contained roughly the same proportion of people who said they’d voted Conservative in 2005 as ICM and Populus’s polls… but far more people who claimed they had voted Labour.
Following the 2008 London election when MORI wrongly showed Ken Livingstone ahead of Boris Johnson they conducted a review of their methodology. This found that their samples had too many public sector workers, something that presumably increased Labour support in their polls. Since then MORI have been weighting by public sector employment along with all their normal demographics.
That's actually a reasonably encouraging Ashcroft focus group report.
The start of it is utterly terrible for May and the Tories, but, as you read on, it's clear she's trusted on Brexit, and you realise most people aren't taken in by Corbyn and starting to be deeply worried.
Could a late swing of a small number of moderate Labour supporters from Labour *to the Tories* be the saver for May, in this election?
Wouldn't rule it out.
Apparently he managed to find the only people in the world who think Hobnobs are up themselves and prefer the edges of Jaffa Cakes to the middle.
Given the polls, and the trend, the chances of a Hung Parliament are about 2/1, or 5/2 which means the 7/2 on offer is VALUE?
If the Tories get 44%+ it won't be a hung parliament.
The trend, my friend, the trend.
The trend of the Tory vote share is it has been 45% within margin of error for ages. There is no trend.
yes there is, ever increasing labour share.
and a week before GE2015 Miliband was going to win. All the reasons that made the polls worthless then are even more true now. Even smaller, even more self-selecting samples, with whole groups taking themselves out the pools completely (eg. the elderly with BT call blocker). The polls tell us that small numbers of multiply sampled political obsessives think its increasingly likely that Labour will win.
Jeremy Corbyn: Labour could write off historic student debts| All those in early 20's with student debt #VoteLabour
I know May might be crap, but f*** me Labour are dangerous.
Fox jr has already voted, but would love that!
Tell me something: when precisely was it that you became an unhinged and pretentious socialist twat?
You voted Tory in GE2010, as I understand it, and were a fan of the coalition. Corbyn and McDonnell will be far worse than Brown and Darling ever were.
You know this (deep down) so there must be something deeply visceral going in inside what passes for your brain.
I would have been watching QT tonight, but instead I'm going to be at a festival where the beers include "Red Admiral Corbynista Ale" and the entertainment programme features Mark Thomas.
When the election was called I was expecting a distinctly more subdued event than usual, but this morning's events have guaranteed a roaring atmosphere all weekend
The big problem with political polling is that it has to be all of 3 things:
- Accurate - Cost effective - Fast
The British electoral study has been shown to be very accurate but is also far too slow to be used in the same way as current polls are.
One thing I have been thinking about is the level of incentives that these studies pay. I work in healthcare research and if we do a 20 minute survey with a doctor we will pay them in the region of £20-30. If you do a 20 minute survey on a consumer site you will paid 50p or given a prize draw entry. This means these sorts of surveys will only appeal to people who are cash poor, time rich and to people who are very interested in doing surveys. As far as I am aware phone polls don't offer any incentive at all.
So you could put up incentives to say £5 per 5 minutes but this then clashes with point number 2 about being cost effective.
The other thing I would consider along with putting up incentives is trying to set up a closed panel for political research. By a closed panel, I mean rather than letting everyone join, use the electoral roll to segment the electorate by national demographics and then randomly invite people to participate within each segment. With an approach like this you would need to allow longer in field (say a week) and to be prepared to use phone to chase up people who don't participate straight away but this would hopefully prove more accurate.
Interesting you work in market research. Are you aware of ORB in Holborn who do a lot of phone work for the conservative campaign and also boris johnson?
Given the polls, and the trend, the chances of a Hung Parliament are about 2/1, or 5/2 which means the 7/2 on offer is VALUE?
If the Tories get 44%+ it won't be a hung parliament.
The trend, my friend, the trend.
The trend has been absolutely flat for over a week, mate.
Sure, something could happen in the next 5 days to drop the Tories below 44% - or they could, for the first time in recent history, be being overstated by the polls.
But if neither of those things happens, they get 44%+ and a majority.
she needs to say why we should vote for her instead of just against corbyn, because it clearly just isn't enough.
She needs to bang on on the economy, unemployment, the deficit.
Then she can look to camera (sadly not 1/1,000,000th as good as Dave could look to camera) and tell people, call it a policy announcement, that she hears them on the NHS, on education, on wage growth. She should then say she will make it her priority to ensure that throughout all the coming Brexit negotiations she will set up a special independent unit to look at today's levels of funding and operational efficiency and promise to act upon its recommendations.
Probably not enough. But it will help. Brexit is finished for all Brexiteers, but a huge issue for Remainers so it is a dead rubber to bang on about it.
Would we be where we are had Boris withdrawn not prematurely 11 months ago?
I don't think anyone thought that May would be such a poor campaigner. Had she been exposed to the party membership (against a heavyweight opponent i.e. not Leadsom), this might have become clear before it mattered.
That said, *would* it have become clear? She didn't have a reputation as a poor interviewee before the election and her serious demeanour might still have proven enough against a Boris who still had (and has) several question marks against him.
All water under the bridge - perhaps (Boris is 8/1 with PP and 25/1 to be PM on 1 July with Ladbrokes) - but worth pondering all the same.
I've always thought she was terrible at interviews - dreadful habit of answering awkward questions with some droning boilerplate or other utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I would have been watching QT tonight, but instead I'm going to be at a festival where the beers include "Red Admiral Corbynista Ale" and the entertainment programme features Mark Thomas.
When the election was called I was expecting a distinctly more subdued event than usual, but this morning's events have guaranteed a roaring atmosphere all weekend
I saw mark Thomas last year, still funny, but middle age and family life has reduced his stunts and as such the quality of his tales.
I have got no idea what the hell is going on with the polls.
Yes, MORI is famously the most volatile of all, but I'm wondering if we're witnessing the death spasms of public opinion polling for voting intention in the UK.
Getting a representative sample has become more and more difficult over the last thirty years. The 1987 General Election was the last time that "traditional" sampling and processing worked; the 1992 General Election was the harbinger of doom for the polling companies. They responded in different ways, incorporating political identification and weighting, public/private sector weighting, remembered vote, spirals of silence, re-weighting, and so on and so on.
Phone responses dropped over the years to nearly negligible levels. Something like 5%-10% of contactees became respondents; the others didn't answer or put the phone down. Those that responded were assumed to be representative.
2015 showed that they weren't.
Online polling was pioneered in 2001-2005. Self-selecting panels were viewed with (appropriate) scepticism, but YouGov first, and then others, proved that if you process the responses well enough (and if all your many assumptions are valid), you can get an answer that is close enough to reality. 2010 and 2015 showed that these assumptions fail more often than we would like.
Getting a suitable sample is nearly impossible these days.
Expressed preference and likelihood to vote have a major disclaimer about them. A more wised-up populace know that their responses to polls will be fed back to the politicians who are closely watching them, via the media.
Processing, weighting, and so forth is based on assumption piled upon assumption piled upon rule of thumb.
And now the same population polled at the same time in the same way but with different assumptions are giving weird and chaotic outcomes.
Added to that, I have the suspicion that the seat scores might (only might) end up more decoupled from the opinion poll scores than normal.
Whatever happens, I have the strong suspicion that the main governing factor in whoever gets the closest score will be pure unadulterated luck. And luck never lasts forever, anyway.
I wonder who is winning constituency by constituency in the betting markets ?
The big question in the Craig Mackinlay case is the real possibility of flight risk ....
I mean Theresa May at the BBC Question Time grilling tonight .... she has form. I suggest she's taken into custody and held until 8:30pm. The police will require mug shots too .... Mind you, with the Tory campaign luck if Theresa did make a run for it she'd probably fly by BA during another "technical glitch".
Or .... she could claim political asylum in the Ecuador embassy. Getting crowded there ....
One explanation for the Labour share being so high is that in the 1990s the turnout in many safe Labour seats collapsed from an average of about 70% to around 55% and hasn't really ever recovered since. It could be that Corbyn is once again enthusing the voters in those seats and turnout could be back up to 70% again. It would have a significant effect on Labour's vote share but it wouldn't win them many seats. Most of the Merseyside seats are good examples of this.
As someone with a 1st in mathematics at a top redbrick university I disagree with you.
Reading your posts, you seem to be very bullish about conservative prospects and very bearish towards labour. I haven't seen one negative post about conservative polling and you seem to be of the belief that the polls are wrong.
1) In Tory wards turnout was 85% in 2015. Labour ward turnout was 45-50%. Had Labour turnout been similar, the tories would have lost 28 seats in the midlands/northern england. Tory enthusiasm is down compared to 2015, labour enthusiasm is up. 2) 3/4 labour voters in the midlands/northern england are ex-labour voters. There is no evidence now that these same UKIP voters are voting heavily for conservative. 3) There are a lot of seats where the tory vote has a very low ceiling. Plymouth, Southampton, Walsall, Stoke, Weaver Vale, Carlisle and any increase in vote enthusiasm could easily see a labour gain. As mentioned on the conservative home website, the tories are campaigning in labour areas they haven't done so in decades and its ok getting 2-3k votes for council elections but to get to 20k to win a seat is very, very hard. The labour vote is not going to down. There aren't enough seats like Tamworth, Burton that are moving away from Labour.
One to savor when the Tories get a nice fat majority.
To paraphrase Thatcher
"Having a 1st in Maths from a redbrick is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
Indeed, he/she didn't get a 1st in modesty!
And it was a TOP redbrick btw, not JUST a redbrick...
And Ipsos-Mori, like ICM, does weight by past voting, doesn't it?
No, I don't think they do. This is what Anthony Wells wrote (admittedly quite a long time ago) about their methodology:
Alone amongst the pollsters Ipsos MORI do not use any political weighting at all (that isn’t to say they don’t weight, or their figures are unweighted. They do use all the normal demographic weights like age and gender). This has two important effects – firstly, the weighting used by ICM, Populus and so on nearly always reduces the proportion of Labour voters in a sample, so the absence of weighting in Ipsos MORI polls has historically helped Labour. Since they don’t weight by it, MORI do not as standard ask about recalled vote, but when they did it showed their samples contained roughly the same proportion of people who said they’d voted Conservative in 2005 as ICM and Populus’s polls… but far more people who claimed they had voted Labour.
Following the 2008 London election when MORI wrongly showed Ken Livingstone ahead of Boris Johnson they conducted a review of their methodology. This found that their samples had too many public sector workers, something that presumably increased Labour support in their polls. Since then MORI have been weighting by public sector employment along with all their normal demographics.
The commonality of all these polls of course is that the Tory vote share is 44-45%. So Labour's surge is coming from elsewhere and may dependent on them squeezing smaller parties and adding more nonvoters for it to continue.
But the LDs an the Greens have barely changed, it's just Con -> Lab swing.
Given the polls, and the trend, the chances of a Hung Parliament are about 2/1, or 5/2 which means the 7/2 on offer is VALUE?
If the Tories get 44%+ it won't be a hung parliament.
The trend, my friend, the trend.
The trend has been absolutely flat for over a week, mate.
Sure, something could happen in the next 5 days to drop the Tories below 44% - or they could, for the first time in recent history, be being overstated by the polls.
But if neither of those things happens, they get 44%+ and a majority.
YouGov now have the Tories sub-44. And after this IPSOS poll, who would totally rule out YouGov?
Arguably YouGov detected the scale of the surge first.
There has been virtually no net movement in any poll from Tory to Labour since 2015 but a few have a slight shift from Labour to Tory, the movement is all coming from the LDs, UKIP, the Greens and SNP. All polls have the Tories on 43% to 45% however ICM and Comres have Labour on 33% to 34% and Yougov and Mori on 38% to 40%. The key is 2015 turnout weighting which ICM and Comres use and which lowers Labour
The big problem with political polling is that it has to be all of 3 things:
- Accurate - Cost effective - Fast
The British electoral study has been shown to be very accurate but is also far too slow to be used in the same way as current polls are.
One thing I have been thinking about is the level of incentives that these studies pay. I work in healthcare research and if we do a 20 minute survey with a doctor we will pay them in the region of £20-30. If you do a 20 minute survey on a consumer site you will paid 50p or given a prize draw entry. This means these sorts of surveys will only appeal to people who are cash poor, time rich and to people who are very interested in doing surveys. As far as I am aware phone polls don't offer any incentive at all.
So you could put up incentives to say £5 per 5 minutes but this then clashes with point number 2 about being cost effective.
The other thing I would consider along with putting up incentives is trying to set up a closed panel for political research. By a closed panel, I mean rather than letting everyone join, use the electoral roll to segment the electorate by national demographics and then randomly invite people to participate within each segment. With an approach like this you would need to allow longer in field (say a week) and to be prepared to use phone to chase up people who don't participate straight away but this would hopefully prove more accurate.
Interesting you work in market research. Are you aware of ORB in Holborn who do a lot of phone work for the conservative campaign and also boris johnson?
I know of them but I don't know them. Healthcare tends to be a little bit cut off from the rest of market research as we have our own special conference and don't tend to go to the MRS.
Let me try and explain things for the hard of thinking. For the masses of the electorate about there life isn't brilliant. Its hard. Its been grindingly hard for years and they are sick of it.
The Brexit vote wasn't all about Europe, it was a protest vote against how shit things are. They want change for the better. For a little while May spoke their language on Brexit and the media had free reign to portray Jezbollah as a terrorist lover (fuelled by Jez's epic inability to do professional politics). So the polls pointed to a Tory landslide, and so May called an election to cash in for more seats.
And then it all changed. May assumed that because Jeremy was so hated and because she was so positively received on Brexit and JAMs that she could do what she liked. The Tory manifesto was genuinely stupid and nasty and reminded everyone how shit things really are right now. The Labour manifesto offering hope and change, and shooting the "uncosted tax and spend" meme dead at birth (helped by the Tory manifesto not being costed and them being very shifty on taxes).
And at the same time the media spin legally was swept away and more balance brought in. May isn't Thatcher after all, she's a socially inadequate loner unable to speak to people. Corbyn isn't Marx after all, he's this cuddly grandfather figure. And the anger that so many people have about their lives, Corbyn is articulating it.
So here we are. Your issues aren't necessarily the issues of the mainstream. Most voters vote based on their situation now and their wallet, and faced with more grinding austerity appear to have plumped for "bollocks to that".
The big problem with political polling is that it has to be all of 3 things:
- Accurate - Cost effective - Fast
The British electoral study has been shown to be very accurate but is also far too slow to be used in the same way as current polls are.
One thing I have been thinking about is the level of incentives that these studies pay. I work in healthcare research and if we do a 20 minute survey with a doctor we will pay them in the region of £20-30. If you do a 20 minute survey on a consumer site you will paid 50p or given a prize draw entry. This means these sorts of surveys will only appeal to people who are cash poor, time rich and to people who are very interested in doing surveys. As far as I am aware phone polls don't offer any incentive at all.
So you could put up incentives to say £5 per 5 minutes but this then clashes with point number 2 about being cost effective.
The other thing I would consider along with putting up incentives is trying to set up a closed panel for political research. By a closed panel, I mean rather than letting everyone join, use the electoral roll to segment the electorate by national demographics and then randomly invite people to participate within each segment. With an approach like this you would need to allow longer in field (say a week) and to be prepared to use phone to chase up people who don't participate straight away but this would hopefully prove more accurate.
The other consideration is that political polls pay nothing or not very much in return for a substantial block of time. It should be possible to cut the time right back by dropping most of the supplementary questions. Who will you vote for? And one or at most two other questions to be rotated around respondents. Time taken, 20 seconds not 20 minutes.
Comments
Most people don't care about politics most of the time. And if you've only recently tuned in so to speak, and are not considering things in much detail, it's easy to see that Corbyn is more appealing than Grey May.
The worst thing is even if May does get a workable majority, she is apparently going to be Not Very Good.
Personally I am pretty much down to "She's not Corbyn". it's enough for me, but is it enough for a win?
:-/
But I don't think we will.
If two party politics is back then I don't think the seat calculators will work.
Those are things that concern me more than the IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah hell even the Trident issue.
I genuinely will feel less safe as a British Citizen under his watch and so should millions.
Brexiteers will be livid if it's a HP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHXlmn9Xgyw
Sounds like he's has diction lessons from Robert Peston too.
Sure, something could happen in the next 5 days to drop the Tories below 44% - or they could, for the first time in recent history, be being overstated by the polls.
But if neither of those things happens, they get 44%+ and a majority.
The start of it is utterly terrible for May and the Tories, but, as you read on, it's clear she's trusted on Brexit, and you realise most people aren't taken in by Corbyn and starting to be deeply worried.
Could a late swing of a small number of moderate Labour supporters from Labour *to the Tories* be the saver for May, in this election?
Wouldn't rule it out.
People at 60 years old with her sort of personality don't change. The best we can hope is she commands her figures, takes responsibility for the cock-ups and puts a bit of passion into it, and outlines the light at the end of the tunnel and the risks of Corbyn.
I hope she's had the good sense to have professional training for it.
I'm not sure I have faith in my hopes.
Yes, she does have them.
At most it is Hillary v Sanders which Hillary won, May has the white working class which Hillary did not against Trump and Remain did not against Leave and 45% for the Tories would be their highest voteshare for half a century even if Labour is also up
Tories break election law to beat farage.
Cameron/Osborne were always pro-eu and despised farage more than blair/brown
Leadership elections are very healthy things to have.
In their impatience for party unity, the Tories may have lost the country.
For me the biggest problem with it is that it discourages some students from going to uni who would benefit from doing so but aren't financially literate enough to understand that it works in their favour and that if things don't come off and they end up in lower-paid work, then the debt doesn't really "saddle" them anyway. The people disadvantaged in this way tend, disproportionately, to be from lower socio-economic backgrounds
There's a flip side to this. One problem with providing things for free is they tend to be over-consumed. If the theoretical possibility of having to pay for your degree crosses your mind, it may put people off from consuming an "unnecessary" degree - e.g. I know young people who did accountancy straight out of school rather than go to uni to study it (in some cases with the hopes of employers funding them to do to do uni later if necessary) which is actually rather a more sensible use of their and society's resources; similarly, if it encourages people into degrees in engineering, nursing and others where you have a stronger chance of a graduate job at the end of it. With government paying for uni, there will clearly be more people going because it's "free" and they can't think of anything else to do for the next year (they may not have a clear idea of opportunity costs of what they could do instead!) and are less motivated to seek a degree with good employment outcomes at the end.
Another disadvantage of free undergrad education is that a lot of the point of a degree is just economic signalling - many people don't use what they studied (applies more to some subjects than others, obviously) but it gives them greater credibility with potential employers. A credentialism arms race is actually counterproductive in this respect, particularly if people aren't taking subjects which are useful in their own right. The issue then gets shunted up to postgraduate study - jobs that used to require a bachelors degree, and could realistically be done, with training, by a bright school-leaver, start needing a masters before you can get an interview. Then all the funding/debt arguments kick in again (definitely easier to afford another year of study if you have well-off parents and so on).
Boris did want it and had he run, would have made the run-off, with or without Gove.
Some pollsters in 1966 forecast a majority of 150 for Harold Wilson. His majority was 98.
The big problem with political polling is that it has to be all of 3 things:
- Accurate
- Cost effective
- Fast
The British electoral study has been shown to be very accurate but is also far too slow to be used in the same way as current polls are.
One thing I have been thinking about is the level of incentives that these studies pay. I work in healthcare research and if we do a 20 minute survey with a doctor we will pay them in the region of £20-30. If you do a 20 minute survey on a consumer site you will paid 50p or given a prize draw entry. This means these sorts of surveys will only appeal to people who are cash poor, time rich and to people who are very interested in doing surveys. As far as I am aware phone polls don't offer any incentive at all.
So you could put up incentives to say £5 per 5 minutes but this then clashes with point number 2 about being cost effective.
The other thing I would consider along with putting up incentives is trying to set up a closed panel for political research. By a closed panel, I mean rather than letting everyone join, use the electoral roll to segment the electorate by national demographics and then randomly invite people to participate within each segment. With an approach like this you would need to allow longer in field (say a week) and to be prepared to use phone to chase up people who don't participate straight away but this would hopefully prove more accurate.
May has never been properly scrutinised under the lens of the public. It really shows.
It can't be allowed to happen again.
Alone amongst the pollsters Ipsos MORI do not use any political weighting at all (that isn’t to say they don’t weight, or their figures are unweighted. They do use all the normal demographic weights like age and gender). This has two important effects – firstly, the weighting used by ICM, Populus and so on nearly always reduces the proportion of Labour voters in a sample, so the absence of weighting in Ipsos MORI polls has historically helped Labour. Since they don’t weight by it, MORI do not as standard ask about recalled vote, but when they did it showed their samples contained roughly the same proportion of people who said they’d voted Conservative in 2005 as ICM and Populus’s polls… but far more people who claimed they had voted Labour.
Following the 2008 London election when MORI wrongly showed Ken Livingstone ahead of Boris Johnson they conducted a review of their methodology. This found that their samples had too many public sector workers, something that presumably increased Labour support in their polls. Since then MORI have been weighting by public sector employment along with all their normal demographics.
(The whole description is well worth reading).
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/faq-weighting
Tony Blair comes out and endorses Theresa May.
Would it help her?
Failing that, Canada?
When the election was called I was expecting a distinctly more subdued event than usual, but this morning's events have guaranteed a roaring atmosphere all weekend
They dropped from 46-47% before the manifesto launch to 43% ish immediately after it, and have since stabilised.
Labour on 40%. Blimey + WTF + !!!!!!
Then she can look to camera (sadly not 1/1,000,000th as good as Dave could look to camera) and tell people, call it a policy announcement, that she hears them on the NHS, on education, on wage growth. She should then say she will make it her priority to ensure that throughout all the coming Brexit negotiations she will set up a special independent unit to look at today's levels of funding and operational efficiency and promise to act upon its recommendations.
Probably not enough. But it will help. Brexit is finished for all Brexiteers, but a huge issue for Remainers so it is a dead rubber to bang on about it.
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2017/news/daily-journalist-tells-of-three-minutes-of-nothing-with-theresa-may/
I mean Theresa May at the BBC Question Time grilling tonight .... she has form. I suggest she's taken into custody and held until 8:30pm. The police will require mug shots too .... Mind you, with the Tory campaign luck if Theresa did make a run for it she'd probably fly by BA during another "technical glitch".
Or .... she could claim political asylum in the Ecuador embassy. Getting crowded there ....
Titter ....
And it was a TOP redbrick btw, not JUST a redbrick...
I mean, I could say more but I think that covers it.
So, in short, Brown was right not to call the 2007 General Election.
Landlines (older age groups?) or mobiles (younger age groups?)?
The Brexit vote wasn't all about Europe, it was a protest vote against how shit things are. They want change for the better. For a little while May spoke their language on Brexit and the media had free reign to portray Jezbollah as a terrorist lover (fuelled by Jez's epic inability to do professional politics). So the polls pointed to a Tory landslide, and so May called an election to cash in for more seats.
And then it all changed. May assumed that because Jeremy was so hated and because she was so positively received on Brexit and JAMs that she could do what she liked. The Tory manifesto was genuinely stupid and nasty and reminded everyone how shit things really are right now. The Labour manifesto offering hope and change, and shooting the "uncosted tax and spend" meme dead at birth (helped by the Tory manifesto not being costed and them being very shifty on taxes).
And at the same time the media spin legally was swept away and more balance brought in. May isn't Thatcher after all, she's a socially inadequate loner unable to speak to people. Corbyn isn't Marx after all, he's this cuddly grandfather figure. And the anger that so many people have about their lives, Corbyn is articulating it.
So here we are. Your issues aren't necessarily the issues of the mainstream. Most voters vote based on their situation now and their wallet, and faced with more grinding austerity appear to have plumped for "bollocks to that".