Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
ore to do with you and Pulpstar being pro landslide when there is no chance of anything less than a small increase in maj at the other end of the scale.
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
It's not Labour spin to note that the Conservative government and Home Secretary May have cut 20,000 from police numbers and significantly denuded the armed forces. Opposition parties and some Tory MP's and PBers have been critical of this foolishness for years.
The Conservative government seems to have forgotten their first duty, which most certainly is not calling a totally unnecessary general election for purely party interest
Lots of us have been very critical of May's border and police cuts and have been damning over Tory defence cuts. The issue is that I don't think Labour would have done anything differently and Jez would most definitely make everything worse.
I do hope that the government reverse all of the defence cuts and domestic security cuts over the next few years.
Well labour and ld are now only pledging to eliminate deficit in day to day spending, and Tories the whole thing but pushed Back to mid 2020s, i.e. Another lifetime practically, so no better time to reverse the cuts.
In a few short years removing the deficit has gone from an overriding necessity to a political slogan, merely a piece of lip service. None of the parties' plans will be able to avoid it rising sharply again, the minute the next economic downturn begins.
* Put the army on to the streets Give them a role protecting all crowded places such as shopping centres, sporting events, and concerts. Ensure that all security staff have regular contact with the military. Increase defence education. Today it is bombs at concerts and marauders with vehicles; tomorrow it may be men with AK-47s at schools or hospitals, as in the Caucasus. Make readiness and defence more than words: mobilise the population.
The army is cut to absolute bare bones, heading for 70k men, already badly overreached
There is no army to put on the streets.
Your second sentence is an exaggeration. As for the first - yes indeed! Cut other commitments. There are still British forces in Afghanistan. They can defend Britain better if brought home.
Enormous resources are spent on NATO involvement too.
Don't tell me we are going to have a referendum on being in NATO next....
Personally, I am not asking for a saving but shifting resources. Defence 1.8% and all matters relating to defence against terrorism [ SAS types, cyber security, cyber intelligence ] given the 0.2% of GDP saved.
In other words spend money on people and intelligence rather than white elephants.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
Look we've had three terrorist attacks since March under Theresa May. The electorate never punishes or holds the government to account and the left is to blame for terrorism.
The tories are counting down the clock and using terrorism as a way to suspend campaigning. So Theresa May can do her typical blowhard "im tough, we wont wilt" and it will be over the news all day.
Great day to be a Conservative. Local campaigns continue. Prime Minister speaking platitudes about terrorism and how we will not be defeated and must go on.
Tories have been counting down the clock since they called the election.
I've read some utter bollocks on here but that is all new level of moonbat crazy.
The acute political problem for the Tories is that when the music stopped in 2010 and 2015 they were in the hot seat. With power come responsibility and accountability.
With Theresa May as Home Secretary and PM the buck on these serious deficiencies stops with her. And we have no commitments to reverse this shocking dereliction of duty.
They don't need commitments. Jeremy was out shooting at British soldiers in Armagh or something with Mullah Omar so There Is No Alternative.
Yes polls are all over the shop. But if nothing else this election has highlighted the absurdity of TINA and this group think that we have to carry on the way things are because thats they way they have always been
Anyway, I have leaflets to deliver, terrorists to poke in the eye.....
Have a good day all, don't let fear change your plans in life. Don't give them the satisfaction.
Good for you. Good hunting.
We've delayed our start this morning til 11
I disagree fundamentally with your support for Corbyn's Labour party but I wish you well in shouting from the rooftops your political positions. Even more so today. Go for it.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
That is partisan - it is only a problem from an anti-SNP tactical voting perspective.
Yes, he was speaking from a Scottish unionist perspective presumably.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
Look we've had three terrorist attacks since March under Theresa May. The electorate never punishes or holds the government to account and the left is to blame for terrorism.
The tories are counting down the clock and using terrorism as a way to suspend campaigning. So Theresa May can do her typical blowhard "im tough, we wont wilt" and it will be over the news all day.
Great day to be a Conservative. Local campaigns continue. Prime Minister speaking platitudes about terrorism and how we will not be defeated and must go on.
Tories have been counting down the clock since they called the election.
I've read some utter bollocks on here but that is all new level of moonbat crazy.
Not even in the top 20. I may have been here too long.
Mr. Owls, disagree with that. The Conservatives either going backwards *or* making substantial gains are both plausible. I stick by my 60-80 majority prediction and think a larger one likelier than a smaller one, but we could credibly see something significantly different.
Mr. Royale, whilst I largely agree, higher turnout means there's less potential increase (ie extra voting) from the elderly than the young.
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
It's not Labour spin to note that the Conservative government and Home Secretary May have cut 20,000 from police numbers and significantly denuded the armed forces. Opposition parties and some Tory MP's and PBers have been critical of this foolishness for years.
The Conservative government seems to have forgotten their first duty, which most certainly is not calling a totally unnecessary general election for purely party interest
Lots of us have been very critical of May's border and police cuts and have been damning over Tory defence cuts. The issue is that I don't think Labour would have done anything differently and Jez would most definitely make everything worse.
I do hope that the government reverse all of the defence cuts and domestic security cuts over the next few years.
Quite so.
The acute political problem for the Tories is that when the music stopped in 2010 and 2015 they were in the hot seat. With power come responsibility and accountability.
With Theresa May as Home Secretary and PM the buck on these serious deficiencies stops with her. And we have no commitments to reverse this shocking dereliction of duty.
I was at a licensing seminar in Glasgow on Friday. The most interesting talk was on immigration and the incredibly onerous duties being put on employers, particularly in an industry dependent upon a large number of casual workers. The latest Immigration Act specifically sets out it is intended to make things hostile for illegal immigrants. It does this by making it risky to employ them, rent them housing, allow them to travel etc etc.
The most startling statistic was that between 2010 and 2015 there were no less than 45k changes to immigration rules and guidance, roughly 5 a day. Immigration judges and advisers cannot keep up, appeals are everywhere and the system is on the edge of chaos.
Some of this might work in the medium term but May as Home Secretary let loose a tidal wave of changes to try and drive immigration down. It strongly suggests a bureaucratic mindset to problem solving I instinctively have little affiliation with.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
ore to do with you and Pulpstar being pro landslide when there is no chance of anything less than a small increase in maj at the other end of the scale.
Noone is going to change their vote after this. Well I'm not anyway. Noone should - if you were going to vote Labour, vote Labour.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
Here is my take on all the latest polls having looked at all the data tables ( ORB do not seem to be available ) Ipsos Mori being a telephone poll and having their own unique weighting model cannot be considered with the other pollsters All the other pollsters have consistent data showing a Conservative lead over Labour of around 2 to 3 % . The latest Yougov is a slight outlier with raw data a virtual dead heat . The pollsters then introduce their own methodological adjustments which leads to widely differing final headline VI figures with basically 2 camps ICM/Comres and Yougov/Survation/Opinium We will not know until 10pm next Thursday which camp if either are correct . All pollsters continue to weight Lib Dems down by 1 to 1.5% . Again we do not know whether they are right to do so or indeed whether as in 2010 and earlier elections they should be weighting Lib Dems up by a similar small amount . In the greater scheme of the Con/Lab lead this is not of great significance and again until 10 pm on Thursday we will not know whether they are right .
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
What an incoherent rant. A bit advice - take a break and come back when you've calmed down and regained the use of your brain (if you actually have one).
Use your time away from PB to do a little fact checking. Jeez, the tragic events of the last few weeks have really set the right wing loons on here loose!
I'll repost this, turnout filters may not actually be acting as turnout filters but as a polling enthusiasm filter. Maybe not perfect so they might still be a bit off, but perhaps closer to the mark than others.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
ore to do with you and Pulpstar being pro landslide when there is no chance of anything less than a small increase in maj at the other end of the scale.
I'm not pro landslide. I'm pro a moderate majority which results in Corbyn going and better governance. Unfortunately I do not think the former happens without a landslide. nor did I say I think a landslide will happen - I'm thinking 30-50 - I was making the point if there is one it won't be due to events as such but because it was probably on course anyway.
TSE is right to highlight the parallel with the Guildford pub bombings. If it was right to carry on as normal then then it must be now. Or were we made of sterner stuff in the 70s?
Anyone who lived in or was born in the 70s are made of sterner stuff.
I say that as someone born towards the end of the 70s
I remember as a kid staying in Belfast overnight on the way to a family holiday in Donegal. It happened to be July 21st 1972, Bloody Friday, when rather a lot of bombs went off. Our mother was somewhat apprehensive, I recall, but we got on with the holiday (which was excellent).
The idea that we take more than a brief pause out of respect for the victims seems ridiculous.
They could have heard or seen that it was going to take place. You ask a question, you get a reply. The problem with panel polling is only the political nerds are involved.
Precisely @isam's point. It may well be that matters this time round
@isam's theory is seeing more supporting evidence as every day passes.
The pollsters are now so far away from each other that there's going to be a huge amount of egg on face for someone next weekend.
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
What an incoherent rant. A bit advice - take a break and come back when you've calmed down and regained the use of your brain (if you actually have one).
Use your time away from PB to do a little fact checking. Jeez, the tragic events of the last few weeks have really set the right wing loons on here loose!
Oh thereve bern plenty of loonies the other way, it's just the right are more numerous in general.
That still leaves cuts of 20,000 to the Police, 30,000 to the army, cuts to the security services, cuts to the emergency services, cuts to the NHS, - the Tories keeping the country safe? Answers please to T May, c/o 10 Downing Street - at least until June 9th.
You obviously don't understand how money works. Labour supporters never do. If you spend something, it has to be paid for. If you run up an ANNUAL DEFICIT if 156 billion. It cannot be sustained, unless you believe in the magic money tree.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Certainly difficult to see the Tories attracting Labour unionists. But yes, it's probably an SNP hold, but it could be very tight between all three of them.
On the contrary, the number of my Labour friends who have voted Tory in the last couple of years is remarkable. Some may drift back on this SLAB recovery.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
Look we've had three terrorist attacks since March under Theresa May. The electorate never punishes or holds the government to account and the left is to blame for terrorism.
The tories are counting down the clock and using terrorism as a way to suspend campaigning. So Theresa May can do her typical blowhard "im tough, we wont wilt" and it will be over the news all day.
Great day to be a Conservative. Local campaigns continue. Prime Minister speaking platitudes about terrorism and how we will not be defeated and must go on.
Tories have been counting down the clock since they called the election.
I've read some utter bollocks on here but that is all new level of moonbat crazy.
Not even in the top 20. I may have been here too long.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
To the extent that people do associate the Labour Party with terrorism, perhaps you should ask yourself why? Could it have anything to do with the past associations and publicly expressed views of the Labour Party leadership?
If Labour's post-election spasm last time had caused a lurch right rather than left, and Theresa May were now facing Liz Kendall instead, then do we seriously think that Labour would be experiencing the same problems?
They could have heard or seen that it was going to take place. You ask a question, you get a reply. The problem with panel polling is only the political nerds are involved.
Precisely @isam's point. It may well be that matters this time round
@isam's theory is seeing more supporting evidence as every day passes.
The pollsters are now so far away from each other that there's going to be a huge amount of egg on face for someone next weekend.
I'm gobsmacked that there's such divergence in the polls this close to polling day.
I thought we'd see everyone moving to a 6% lead or there abouts.
My gut feeling is a lead of 8-9% on the day, comfortable majority but not stonking.
* Put the army on to the streets Give them a role protecting all crowded places such as shopping centres, sporting events, and concerts. Ensure that all security staff have regular contact with the military. Increase defence education. Today it is bombs at concerts and marauders with vehicles; tomorrow it may be men with AK-47s at schools or hospitals, as in the Caucasus. Make readiness and defence more than words: mobilise the population.
The army is cut to absolute bare bones, heading for 70k men, already badly overreached
There is no army to put on the streets.
Your second sentence is an exaggeration. As for the first - yes indeed! Cut other commitments. There are still British forces in Afghanistan. They can defend Britain better if brought home.
Enormous resources are spent on NATO involvement too.
Reneging on our NATO commitments in response to this would be down there with cancelling the election. Possibly even more stupid.
Tory majority over 100 nailed on. pile money into it.
Has there been a lucky general than Theresa May!
People thought that after Manchester but it didn't happen.
Terrorism is normal in the uk. The authorities can't stop it and the people blame the left.
No they don't. Let's say the Tories win by 15 points on Thursdays - early polls said it was possible and it's only a little off from some polls now, so if it happened then likely nothing to do with recent terrorism events.
Look we've had three terrorist attacks since March under Theresa May. The electorate never punishes or holds the government to account and the left is to blame for terrorism.
The tories are counting down the clock and using terrorism as a way to suspend campaigning. So Theresa May can do her typical blowhard "im tough, we wont wilt" and it will be over the news all day.
Great day to be a Conservative. Local campaigns continue. Prime Minister speaking platitudes about terrorism and how we will not be defeated and must go on.
Tories have been counting down the clock since they called the election.
I've read some utter bollocks on here but that is all new level of moonbat crazy.
Not even in the top 20. I may have been here too long.
* Put the army on to the streets Give them a role protecting all crowded places such as shopping centres, sporting events, and concerts. Ensure that all security staff have regular contact with the military. Increase defence education. Today it is bombs at concerts and marauders with vehicles; tomorrow it may be men with AK-47s at schools or hospitals, as in the Caucasus. Make readiness and defence more than words: mobilise the population.
The army is cut to absolute bare bones, heading for 70k men, already badly overreached
There is no army to put on the streets.
Your second sentence is an exaggeration. As for the first - yes indeed! Cut other commitments. There are still British forces in Afghanistan. They can defend Britain better if brought home.
Enormous resources are spent on NATO involvement too.
Don't tell me we are going to have a referendum on being in NATO next....
Personally, I am not asking for a saving but shifting resources. Defence 1.8% and all matters relating to defence against terrorism [ SAS types, cyber security, cyber intelligence ] given the 0.2% of GDP saved.
In other words spend money on people and intelligence rather than white elephants.
I'll repost this, turnout filters may not actually be acting as turnout filters but as a polling enthusiasm filter. Maybe not perfect so they might still be a bit off, but perhaps closer to the mark than others.
"In our paper investigating the 2015 polling miss the key problem we identify with the polls is the tendency to oversample politically engaged respondents: particularly those who have high rates of turnout. This problem is exacerbated because the polling samples are then weighted to resemble the general population rather than only those who turnout to vote. Since turnout is often as much as thirty percentage points too high in polling samples, even demographic groups with low turnout often have high turnout percentages in the samples. This makes the demographics of the sample of voters appear too similar to the general population and not enough like the voting population. Non-voters from low turnout demographic groups are replaced by voters from these demographic groups, skewing the voter sample."
"Imagine now that we do a poll in this world and we have the same problem that the real world does – people who don’t vote also don’t respond to political polls, and that this is the only sampling problem the polls have. Because we either use demographic quotas or we weight our sample we end up with the correct ratio of half young people and half old people – the sample looks representative in terms of demographics, just like real polls do. The problem lies under the surface"
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
That still leaves cuts of 20,000 to the Police, 30,000 to the army, cuts to the security services, cuts to the emergency services, cuts to the NHS, - the Tories keeping the country safe? Answers please to T May, c/o 10 Downing Street - at least until June 9th.
You obviously don't understand how money works. Labour supporters never do. If you spend something, it has to be paid for. If you run up an ANNUAL DEFICIT if 156 billion. It cannot be sustained, unless you believe in the magic money tree.
Tories ditched all that stuff on June 24th. Please keep up!
I think the legal position is actually "of course you can." It just has to be done by the sovereign, probably through the Privy Council.
Of course, it's a non-starter because it drags HM into the political sphere and sets an awful precedent.
The election should not be postponed because the attack in London has not affected what is most important: people's ability to vote for whoever they wish. I could not care less about the monarch.
They could have heard or seen that it was going to take place. You ask a question, you get a reply. The problem with panel polling is only the political nerds are involved.
Precisely @isam's point. It may well be that matters this time round
@isam's theory is seeing more supporting evidence as every day passes.
The pollsters are now so far away from each other that there's going to be a huge amount of egg on face for someone next weekend.
I'm gobsmacked that there's such divergence in the polls this close to polling day.
I thought we'd see everyone moving to a 6% lead or there abouts.
My gut feeling is a lead of 8-9% on the day, comfortable majority but not stonking.
I'm not entirely surprised. I was half-expecting another outbreak of herding, but if that doesn't come to pass then the wide divergence in the polls will simply reflect significant variations in methodology.
If the exit poll projects a decent working majority come Thursday night (so that I can breathe out and relax,) then it'll be interesting seeing how the Con-Lab gap translates into the size of the Tory majority. If the third party squeeze (in England and Wales) is sufficiently hard, then it's not out of the question that a 9% Tory lead could result in a landslide.
My postal vote finally arrived in the sandpit this morning, having spent 13 days in the post. I think I'll be asking DHL to deliver it back!!
Dubai will be a direct bag from Mount Pleasant, and shouldn't have taken more than a few days from anywhere in the Uk. Possibly it was sorted into the wrong box and has been on a little world trip? Or you are on a watch list and it took them a few days to read it?
Here is my take on all the latest polls having looked at all the data tables ( ORB do not seem to be available ) Ipsos Mori being a telephone poll and having their own unique weighting model cannot be considered with the other pollsters All the other pollsters have consistent data showing a Conservative lead over Labour of around 2 to 3 % . The latest Yougov is a slight outlier with raw data a virtual dead heat . The pollsters then introduce their own methodological adjustments which leads to widely differing final headline VI figures with basically 2 camps ICM/Comres and Yougov/Survation/Opinium We will not know until 10pm next Thursday which camp if either are correct . All pollsters continue to weight Lib Dems down by 1 to 1.5% . Again we do not know whether they are right to do so or indeed whether as in 2010 and earlier elections they should be weighting Lib Dems up by a similar small amount . In the greater scheme of the Con/Lab lead this is not of great significance and again until 10 pm on Thursday we will not know whether they are right .
Always worth noting your take Mark.
With all the usual caveats with 4 days of the campaign remaining, what's your assessment for the scores on the doors in % terms ?
I'll repost this, turnout filters may not actually be acting as turnout filters but as a polling enthusiasm filter. Maybe not perfect so they might still be a bit off, but perhaps closer to the mark than others.
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
Although it may sample more voters it may not accurately represent the voting population though. As to how this can cause problems:
Demographic targets for quotas and weighting are usually taken from information about the British population as a whole, from sources like the census. However those who turn out to vote are not actually representative of the population as a whole – they tend to be older, more affluent, and better educated. The problem for political polling is that those who turnout to vote are also more likely to answer surveys. This may sound like an odd ‘problem’ but when combined with survey targets based on the population, rather than the electorate, it can lead to a distortion in the polls. For example, if young people who vote are more likely to answer surveys than young people who do not vote, then a survey might end up with too many young voters, even when it appears to have the right number of young people. Given that young people tend to be more Labour leaning, this might inflate the Labour share of the vote.
Preston has the Home Secretary on and the Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Why not the Shadow Home Secretary, I wonder...?
Thornberry's doing OK here, but I did raise an eyebrow at the absence of Abbott.
Would you put her up today? I wouldn't.
I wouldn't ever put her up, she's useless. As a woman, I cringe when I see another woman overpromoted in the way that she has been. There are many more talented than her, who won't get the opportunities she has had.
Thornberry wiped the floor with Peston, there, quite enjoyable.
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
What an incoherent rant. A bit advice - take a break and come back when you've calmed down and regained the use of your brain (if you actually have one).
Use your time away from PB to do a little fact checking. Jeez, the tragic events of the last few weeks have really set the right wing loons on here loose!
Are you denying jezza wrote a reference letter for an ISIS fund raiser?
Mr. Indigo, you're mistakenly assuming a party led by far leftists promising everyone a free unicorn paid for by an aristocrat tax will be paying any attention to reality when campaigning on security/law and order.
* Put the army on to the streets Give them a role protecting all crowded places such as shopping centres, sporting events, and concerts. Ensure that all security staff have regular contact with the military. Increase defence education. Today it is bombs at concerts and marauders with vehicles; tomorrow it may be men with AK-47s at schools or hospitals, as in the Caucasus. Make readiness and defence more than words: mobilise the population.
The army is cut to absolute bare bones, heading for 70k men, already badly overreached
There is no army to put on the streets.
Your second sentence is an exaggeration. As for the first - yes indeed! Cut other commitments. There are still British forces in Afghanistan. They can defend Britain better if brought home.
Enormous resources are spent on NATO involvement too.
Reneging on our NATO commitments in response to this would be down there with cancelling the election. Possibly even more stupid.
Agreed, NATO is what has been largely been keeping peace in Europe or preventing conflict on a major scale. Never understood this clamor especially by the left for us to pull out.
As the Scottish polls start to catch up with Corbynmania, I think SCON are now set to come 3rd behind SLAB in the National vote. With the UK polls closing this will present tactical voters with quite a number of dilemmas.
Mr. Indigo, you're mistakenly assuming a party led by far leftists promising everyone a free unicorn paid for by an aristocrat tax will be paying any attention to reality when campaigning on security/law and order.
You may be right, but I was slightly surprised that Mr Pioneers amongst others had the front to come here and rail about Tory cuts on the police when the absurd views of his leadership on the subject are a matter of public record.
I'll repost this, turnout filters may not actually be acting as turnout filters but as a polling enthusiasm filter. Maybe not perfect so they might still be a bit off, but perhaps closer to the mark than others.
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
Although it may have a similar proportion of voters to the real election It may not accurately represent the voting population though. As to how this can cause problems:
Demographic targets for quotas and weighting are usually taken from information about the British population as a whole, from sources like the census. However those who turn out to vote are not actually representative of the population as a whole – they tend to be older, more affluent, and better educated. The problem for political polling is that those who turnout to vote are also more likely to answer surveys. This may sound like an odd ‘problem’ but when combined with survey targets based on the population, rather than the electorate, it can lead to a distortion in the polls. For example, if young people who vote are more likely to answer surveys than young people who do not vote, then a survey might end up with too many young voters, even when it appears to have the right number of young people. Given that young people tend to be more Labour leaning, this might inflate the Labour share of the vote.
I reckon that over-sampling the engaged is going to be the key problem all the pollsters identify post-GE. But how to survey people who don't like being surveyed?
Otherwise Survation are relying on the youth tsunami for Labour, and even then are over-weighting young people IMO. On the other hand Corbyn is clearly enthusing the young in a way that Mili v Cammo never could, so I'd have thought that those pollsters using turnout models from 2015 are going to over-estimate the Tories? Without more data a midpoint between the two types of polling approaches to turnout is probably the safest course.
I notice the labour spinners on here have been attacking tory government over police numbers in response to terrorist attack.
Let's just remember for a second. What did jez do when asked if he would support an ISIS fund raiser release from prison for Christmas, go absolutely no bloody way. Of course not, he supported them. FFS...Robbing old ladies to fund ISIS and jezza goes into bat for them.
Then Of course we have mcIRA who supported getting rid of the spooks. 10k more plods in panda cars but no F##king intelligence agencies, that will do the trick.
These people disgust me.
What an incoherent rant. A bit advice - take a break and come back when you've calmed down and regained the use of your brain (if you actually have one).
Use your time away from PB to do a little fact checking. Jeez, the tragic events of the last few weeks have really set the right wing loons on here loose!
Are you denying jezza wrote a reference letter for an ISIS fund raiser?
I think you'll find he was opening a dialog to facilitate the peace process in the Deiz ez-Zor governate of Syria.
I'll repost this, turnout filters may not actually be acting as turnout filters but as a polling enthusiasm filter. Maybe not perfect so they might still be a bit off, but perhaps closer to the mark than others.
"In our paper investigating the 2015 polling miss the key problem we identify with the polls is the tendency to oversample politically engaged respondents: particularly those who have high rates of turnout. This problem is exacerbated because the polling samples are then weighted to resemble the general population rather than only those who turnout to vote. Since turnout is often as much as thirty percentage points too high in polling samples, even demographic groups with low turnout often have high turnout percentages in the samples. This makes the demographics of the sample of voters appear too similar to the general population and not enough like the voting population. Non-voters from low turnout demographic groups are replaced by voters from these demographic groups, skewing the voter sample."
"Imagine now that we do a poll in this world and we have the same problem that the real world does – people who don’t vote also don’t respond to political polls, and that this is the only sampling problem the polls have. Because we either use demographic quotas or we weight our sample we end up with the correct ratio of half young people and half old people – the sample looks representative in terms of demographics, just like real polls do. The problem lies under the surface"
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
The abstract of Prosser's paper at this link gives a clearer explanation imo -- the polls are not finding enough non-voters, which means their weighting knocks out too many voters.
As the Scottish polls start to catch up with Corbynmania, I think SCON are now set to come 3rd behind SLAB in the National vote. With the UK polls closing this will present tactical voters with quite a number of dilemmas.
Is there any reason to suppose that Scottish Labour is doing dramatically better than it was one or two weeks ago, other than one opinion poll?
Besides anything else, Panelbase have also, apparently, reported this morning (details further down thread) and still have the Tories 10pts ahead of Labour in second.
A polling and betting post.. to distract me from the horrors.
Like many others I'm thinking about the relationship between the polls and reality.
It is clear that there are a substantial group of people in society who are effectively unreachable by any poll, either by phone (thanks partly to cold calling) or internet. Door-step canvassing can reach them though, even if they are probably rather defensive.
How big is it? I don't know but must be tens of pct, and growing all the time.
All polling must assume that the ebbs and flows of opinion within this group are perfectly correlated with the same demographic within the part of the electorate that polls can reach. Suppose that resistance to being polled is actually a key characteristic in itself, and these people don't actually correlate especially well with the rest. The polls will all be wrong, in different ways depending on the assumptions that they make.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
I think you can also start to understand why the main parties still seem to believe in a big Tory win, because they will be registering this in canvass returns.
With that in mind I've had a few relatively modest bets on the bigger Tory majorities while the odds are good.
You wait till their rant is finished, smile, thank them, and leave their doorstep as quickly and politely as possible.
Ye - think the canvasser was a bit poor there really with the IRA stuff. That isn't a wavering voter.
Absolutely no point spending any time with such a core Labour voter.
None.
The canvasser is clearly very inexperienced. You can't just confront a voter with a negative line like that, particularly if the voter doesn't appear receptive to begin with. That isn't canvassing, it's arguing with a random stranger down the pub. Negative campaigning is better done by leaflet than in person, and if done on the doorstep should have been raised very carefully as a gentle question, to see if the voter is willing to bite.
Will he mention why it was a good idea to call a by-election in 2008 in order to curb the detention time for alleged terror suspects?
Complete bollocks from you there.
No one who actually knew anything about counter terrorist work actually wanted the extension. It was just another stupid statist, control freak stunt by Gordon Brown. When the former head of MI5 says your idea is dumb it might be worth listening to them.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
I plump slightly for SNP hold too. On these poll results it could go Labour without tactical voting. The Westminster constituency I think contains Barrhead, which is something of a Labour stronghold. But if Labour supporters are already moving to the Tories on tactical grounds, that would cancel the effect out.
In the election held on 10 October 1974, Labour won the popular vote by 3.4%. The Guildford pub bombs five days before, which killed five people including four soldiers, don't seem to have had much effect on the polls. Whether they had an effect on the election is less clear. Labour were around 8% ahead in the polls (which varied widely) both before and after the bombing.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
I plump slightly for SNP hold too. On these poll results it could go Labour without tactical voting. The Westminster constituency I think contains Barrhead, which is something of a Labour stronghold. But if Labour supporters are already moving to the Tories on tactical grounds, that would cancel the effect out.
Labour voters will not vote Tory in a general election just like the Tories will not vote Labour.
A polling and betting post.. to distract me from the horrors.
Like many others I'm thinking about the relationship between the polls and reality.
It is clear that there are a substantial group of people in society who are effectively unreachable by any poll, either by phone (thanks partly to cold calling) or internet. Door-step canvassing can reach them though, even if they are probably rather defensive.
How big is it? I don't know but must be tens of pct, and growing all the time.
All polling must assume that the ebbs and flows of opinion within this group are perfectly correlated with the same demographic within the part of the electorate that polls can reach. Suppose that resistance to being polled is actually a key characteristic in itself, and these people don't actually correlate especially well with the rest. The polls will all be wrong, in different ways depending on the assumptions that they make.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
I think you can also start to understand why the main parties still seem to believe in a big Tory win, because they will be registering this in canvass returns.
With that in mind I've had a few relatively modest bets on the bigger Tory majorities while the odds are good.
You may very well be right. Would tie in with the historical Shy Tory Problem, and pro-Labour/anti-Conservative bias typically observed in the polls in the past.
That said, this time around the half-expected herding in the polls isn't happening. If that continues until election night then, if your theory is borne out, the houses that are more generous to the Tories (at present, ICM, ComRes and Kantar) could actually turn out to have got this one right.
Four-and-a-half days until we get the first indication...
A polling and betting post.. to distract me from the horrors.
Like many others I'm thinking about the relationship between the polls and reality.
It is clear that there are a substantial group of people in society who are effectively unreachable by any poll, either by phone (thanks partly to cold calling) or internet. Door-step canvassing can reach them though, even if they are probably rather defensive.
How big is it? I don't know but must be tens of pct, and growing all the time.
All polling must assume that the ebbs and flows of opinion within this group are perfectly correlated with the same demographic within the part of the electorate that polls can reach. Suppose that resistance to being polled is actually a key characteristic in itself, and these people don't actually correlate especially well with the rest. The polls will all be wrong, in different ways depending on the assumptions that they make.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
I think you can also start to understand why the main parties still seem to believe in a big Tory win, because they will be registering this in canvass returns.
With that in mind I've had a few relatively modest bets on the bigger Tory majorities while the odds are good.
Your first half hits the nail. Except that doorstep polling, because it is expensive, needs a lot of questions to be answered at once, and hence it quite intrusive. I had kantar round last month and doing their poll in my living room took up half an hour. And the demographics of people who are a) likely to be at home, and b) willing to do this, is at least as biased as the other methods.
Your second part makes a lot of assumptions with rather less evidence; you may be right that there is a bias towards the right amongst the unengaged (although in the past at least many wwc would fall into that box and have leaned left), but there is no way of knowing whether it is big or small.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
That would describe that vast majority of the very elderly, who also we are told slew overwhelmingly to the right. None of my elderly relatives accept cold calls, and to the best of my knowledge they all have unknown calls barred, and the majority are either not online, or use the internet only for ordering their supermarket delivery, personal emails and looking at family pictures on facebook. The few that do have mobile phones only turn them on when they occasionally go out the house. They people are almost uniformly blue rinse Tories, and unreachable by pollsters.
What strikes me is how incompetent these attackers were.
In one van not three, at the wrong time and at a place where there's guaranteed to be armed plods about.
Go to any medium sized town in Britain and they could drive through market squares, pedestrian precincts and bus queues for as long as they liked, with more chance of running out of fuel than being stopped by the local plods.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
I plump slightly for SNP hold too. On these poll results it could go Labour without tactical voting. The Westminster constituency I think contains Barrhead, which is something of a Labour stronghold. But if Labour supporters are already moving to the Tories on tactical grounds, that would cancel the effect out.
Labour voters will not vote Tory in a general election just like the Tories will not vote Labour.
In Scotland some will because they hate the SNP even more.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
I plump slightly for SNP hold too. On these poll results it could go Labour without tactical voting. The Westminster constituency I think contains Barrhead, which is something of a Labour stronghold. But if Labour supporters are already moving to the Tories on tactical grounds, that would cancel the effect out.
Labour voters will not vote Tory in a general election just like the Tories will not vote Labour.
Scottish Survation tactical voting question sees over 50% of 2015 con,LD,lab voters willing to tactical vote.
I've been thinking about this. Would a Tory leaning unionist be prepared to vote Labour? I've had a few quid on Labour in East Renfrewshire and Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both 14-1.
Not in East Renfrewshire they wouldn't. Serious Tory target. Which kind of illustrates the problem.
Snphokd on as vote splits. Those 30+% increases last time have given them a lot of protection.
I'd say SNP Hold - SLab candidate is Blair McDougall, formerly of Better Together, is practically a Tory anyway, so will pick up Unionist votes. However, over half of Scotland Jewish population live in the constituency and Mr. Corbyn's Labour isn't a popular brand with that demographic.
I plump slightly for SNP hold too. On these poll results it could go Labour without tactical voting. The Westminster constituency I think contains Barrhead, which is something of a Labour stronghold. But if Labour supporters are already moving to the Tories on tactical grounds, that would cancel the effect out.
Labour voters will not vote Tory in a general election just like the Tories will not vote Labour.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
That would describe that vast majority of the very elderly, who also we are told slew overwhelmingly to the right. None of my elderly relatives accept cold calls, and to the best of my knowledge they all have unknown calls barred, and the majority are either not online, or use the internet only for ordering their supermarket delivery, personal emails and looking at family pictures on facebook. The few that do have mobile phones only turn them on when they occasionally go out the house. They people are almost uniformly blue rinse Tories, and unreachable by pollsters.
But they are more likely to be at home, particularly in the daytime when pollsters often call, and more likely to have a landline.
Anyway, the pollsters will make sure that their final sample includes the right number of the elderly. The question is whether the elderly who are included are representative of the demographic.
A polling and betting post.. to distract me from the horrors.
Like many others I'm thinking about the relationship between the polls and reality.
It is clear that there are a substantial group of people in society who are effectively unreachable by any poll, either by phone (thanks partly to cold calling) or internet. Door-step canvassing can reach them though, even if they are probably rather defensive.
How big is it? I don't know but must be tens of pct, and growing all the time.
All polling must assume that the ebbs and flows of opinion within this group are perfectly correlated with the same demographic within the part of the electorate that polls can reach. Suppose that resistance to being polled is actually a key characteristic in itself, and these people don't actually correlate especially well with the rest. The polls will all be wrong, in different ways depending on the assumptions that they make.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
I think you can also start to understand why the main parties still seem to believe in a big Tory win, because they will be registering this in canvass returns.
With that in mind I've had a few relatively modest bets on the bigger Tory majorities while the odds are good.
You may very well be right. Would tie in with the historical Shy Tory Problem, and pro-Labour/anti-Conservative bias typically observed in the polls in the past.
That said, this time around the half-expected herding in the polls isn't happening. If that continues until election night then, if your theory is borne out, the houses that are more generous to the Tories (at present, ICM, ComRes and Kantar) could actually turn out to have got this one right.
Four-and-a-half days until we get the first indication...
This time around they all seem to be herding into avoiding each other.
That still leaves cuts of 20,000 to the Police, 30,000 to the army, cuts to the security services, cuts to the emergency services, cuts to the NHS, - the Tories keeping the country safe? Answers please to T May, c/o 10 Downing Street - at least until June 9th.
You obviously don't understand how money works. Labour supporters never do. If you spend something, it has to be paid for. If you run up an ANNUAL DEFICIT if 156 billion. It cannot be sustained, unless you believe in the magic money tree.
People don't need to know how money works, they can see the results. I suspect you or very few people know or care how a hammer or screwdriver is made. But they are used in a variety of ways, some of which the makers had no idea they could be used for. If normally, no problem, if for violence then it becomes a different equation that needs to be resolved.
As for the magic money trees, are those the ones kept in off shore bank accounts in Panama, Belize, the Cayman, Bahamas and many others. For advice, please ask Mr May, Amber Rudd, David Cameron, George Osborne, Lord Rothermere, the Barclay twins, Richard Desmond, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson.......
"In our paper investigating the 2015 polling miss the key problem we identify with the polls is the tendency to oversample politically engaged respondents: particularly those who have high rates of turnout. This problem is exacerbated because the polling samples are then weighted to resemble the general population rather than only those who turnout to vote. Since turnout is often as much as thirty percentage points too high in polling samples, even demographic groups with low turnout often have high turnout percentages in the samples. This makes the demographics of the sample of voters appear too similar to the general population and not enough like the voting population. Non-voters from low turnout demographic groups are replaced by voters from these demographic groups, skewing the voter sample."
"Imagine now that we do a poll in this world and we have the same problem that the real world does – people who don’t vote also don’t respond to political polls, and that this is the only sampling problem the polls have. Because we either use demographic quotas or we weight our sample we end up with the correct ratio of half young people and half old people – the sample looks representative in terms of demographics, just like real polls do. The problem lies under the surface"
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
The abstract of Prosser's paper at this link gives a clearer explanation imo -- the polls are not finding enough non-voters, which means their weighting knocks out too many voters.
Maybe I did not elaborate enough. Their contention is that many people cannot be contacted by polls. However, these people usually do not vote either.
So, rather than weight the sample to represent the population as a whole, they should weight the sample to represent the voting population
The ICM's of this world appears to weight the sample to represent the population as per Census etc*., then adjust again to get rid of people who are not likely to vote.
* Put the army on to the streets Give them a role protecting all crowded places such as shopping centres, sporting events, and concerts. Ensure that all security staff have regular contact with the military. Increase defence education. Today it is bombs at concerts and marauders with vehicles; tomorrow it may be men with AK-47s at schools or hospitals, as in the Caucasus. Make readiness and defence more than words: mobilise the population.
The army is cut to absolute bare bones, heading for 70k men, already badly overreached
There is no army to put on the streets.
Your second sentence is an exaggeration. As for the first - yes indeed! Cut other commitments. There are still British forces in Afghanistan. They can defend Britain better if brought home.
Enormous resources are spent on NATO involvement too.
Reneging on our NATO commitments in response to this would be down there with cancelling the election. Possibly even more stupid.
What a shame you don't provide any reason for your opinion. Britain's military forces are overstretched and there is a growing need to defend this country on its own territory.
Who's talking about reneging? Britain could file Article 13 and leave NATO a year later. That is in accordance with the Treaty.
As the Scottish polls start to catch up with Corbynmania, I think SCON are now set to come 3rd behind SLAB in the National vote. With the UK polls closing this will present tactical voters with quite a number of dilemmas.
Is there any reason to suppose that Scottish Labour is doing dramatically better than it was one or two weeks ago, other than one opinion poll?
Besides anything else, Panelbase have also, apparently, reported this morning (details further down thread) and still have the Tories 10pts ahead of Labour in second.
The subsamples of the UK polls show a small drift from the SNP to Labour for this election, which is backed up by this Scottish poll. There are more SNP to Labour switchers than SNP to Conservative. Having made their point at the last Westminster election, independence supporting ex Labour voters are more willing to consider returning to Labour for UK-wide reasons. It doesn't necessarily mean they have given up on the SNP however.
Comments
Yes polls are all over the shop. But if nothing else this election has highlighted the absurdity of TINA and this group think that we have to carry on the way things are because thats they way they have always been
At 10am, we're going to milk this tragedy and cover the news waves for the next 24 hours. So talk tough!!!!
https://twitter.com/tomosgjames/status/870687114324721664
Mr. Royale, whilst I largely agree, higher turnout means there's less potential increase (ie extra voting) from the elderly than the young.
The most startling statistic was that between 2010 and 2015 there were no less than 45k changes to immigration rules and guidance, roughly 5 a day. Immigration judges and advisers cannot keep up, appeals are everywhere and the system is on the edge of chaos.
Some of this might work in the medium term but May as Home Secretary let loose a tidal wave of changes to try and drive immigration down. It strongly suggests a bureaucratic mindset to problem solving I instinctively have little affiliation with.
Ipsos Mori being a telephone poll and having their own unique weighting model cannot be considered with the other pollsters
All the other pollsters have consistent data showing a Conservative lead over Labour of around 2 to 3 % . The latest Yougov is a slight outlier with raw data a virtual dead heat .
The pollsters then introduce their own methodological adjustments which leads to widely differing final headline VI figures with basically 2 camps ICM/Comres and Yougov/Survation/Opinium
We will not know until 10pm next Thursday which camp if either are correct .
All pollsters continue to weight Lib Dems down by 1 to 1.5% . Again we do not know whether they are right to do so or indeed whether as in 2010 and earlier elections they should be weighting Lib Dems up by a similar small amount . In the greater scheme of the Con/Lab lead this is not of great significance and again until 10 pm on Thursday we will not know whether they are right .
Use your time away from PB to do a little fact checking. Jeez, the tragic events of the last few weeks have really set the right wing loons on here loose!
https://twitter.com/caprosser/status/870022661912616961
https://twitter.com/caprosser/status/870022931908362241
Of course, it's a non-starter because it drags HM into the political sphere and sets an awful precedent.
It happened to be July 21st 1972, Bloody Friday, when rather a lot of bombs went off. Our mother was somewhat apprehensive, I recall, but we got on with the holiday (which was excellent).
The idea that we take more than a brief pause out of respect for the victims seems ridiculous.
The pollsters are now so far away from each other that there's going to be a huge amount of egg on face for someone next weekend.
http://aboutasfarasdelgados.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/the-problem-with-opinion-polls-polls.html?m=1
If Labour's post-election spasm last time had caused a lurch right rather than left, and Theresa May were now facing Liz Kendall instead, then do we seriously think that Labour would be experiencing the same problems?
I thought we'd see everyone moving to a 6% lead or there abouts.
My gut feeling is a lead of 8-9% on the day, comfortable majority but not stonking.
Why not the Shadow Home Secretary, I wonder...?
You wait till their rant is finished, smile, thank them, and leave their doorstep as quickly and politely as possible.
"Imagine now that we do a poll in this world and we have the same problem that the real world does – people who don’t vote also don’t respond to political polls, and that this is the only sampling problem the polls have. Because we either use demographic quotas or we weight our sample we end up with the correct ratio of half young people and half old people – the sample looks representative in terms of demographics, just like real polls do. The problem lies under the surface"
If the initial sample does represent the voting population, then why tinker to make the sample representative of the national population to include people who will not vote ?
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-polls-the-fundamentals-and-ge2017/
If the exit poll projects a decent working majority come Thursday night (so that I can breathe out and relax,) then it'll be interesting seeing how the Con-Lab gap translates into the size of the Tory majority. If the third party squeeze (in England and Wales) is sufficiently hard, then it's not out of the question that a 9% Tory lead could result in a landslide.
a) The security services have had the budget substantially increased by Conservative governments
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/16/david-cameron-to-boost-security-spending-after-paris-attacks
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450402098/UK-government-re-announces-19bn-cyber-security-spend
https://www.ft.com/content/27f63d10-de81-11e2-b990-00144feab7de
b) Their leadership is on record as wanting to abolish the Security Services completely, disarm the police and drastically cut back the Army.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3325294/Disarm-police-scrap-MI5-Labour-new-security-storm-demands-backed-shadow-chancellor-John-McDonnell.html
http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/798261/Labour-John-McDonnell-Corbyn-armed-forces-taxpayers-funding-general-election-2017
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11458816/General-Election-2015-How-each-party-compares-on-defence-policy.html
Not to mention pointing at May for being crap at reducing immigration while their man wants to throw open the borders and let everyone in!
Forshame!
Under the circumstances, it's absolutely no surprise that they subbed him for Thornberry at the last minute. And yes, she did well.
But I am concerned about security on polling day.
With all the usual caveats with 4 days of the campaign remaining, what's your assessment for the scores on the doors in % terms ?
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/why-the-polls-got-it-wrong-and-the-british-election-study-face-to-face-survey-got-it-almost-right/#.WTPQQWjytEa
Demographic targets for quotas and weighting are usually taken from information about the British population as a whole, from sources like the census. However those who turn out to vote are not actually representative of the population as a whole – they tend to be older, more affluent, and better educated. The problem for political polling is that those who turnout to vote are also more likely to answer surveys. This may sound like an odd ‘problem’ but when combined with survey targets based on the population, rather than the electorate, it can lead to a distortion in the polls. For example, if young people who vote are more likely to answer surveys than young people who do not vote, then a survey might end up with too many young voters, even when it appears to have the right number of young people. Given that young people tend to be more Labour leaning, this might inflate the Labour share of the vote.
Thornberry wiped the floor with Peston, there, quite enjoyable.
None.
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/the-corbyn-effect-poll-shows-rise-in-scots-support-as-snp-warn-over-letting-in-tories-in-by-back-door/
I reckon that over-sampling the engaged is going to be the key problem all the pollsters identify post-GE. But how to survey people who don't like being surveyed?
Otherwise Survation are relying on the youth tsunami for Labour, and even then are over-weighting young people IMO. On the other hand Corbyn is clearly enthusing the young in a way that Mili v Cammo never could, so I'd have thought that those pollsters using turnout models from 2015 are going to over-estimate the Tories? Without more data a midpoint between the two types of polling approaches to turnout is probably the safest course.
https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/poq/nfx015/3852137/Missing-Nonvoters-and-Misweighted?redirectedFrom=fulltext
If you don't have/believe in a shoot to kill policy what happens in that situation?
Besides anything else, Panelbase have also, apparently, reported this morning (details further down thread) and still have the Tories 10pts ahead of Labour in second.
Like many others I'm thinking about the relationship between the polls and reality.
It is clear that there are a substantial group of people in society who are effectively unreachable by any poll, either by phone (thanks partly to cold calling) or internet. Door-step canvassing can reach them though, even if they are probably rather defensive.
How big is it? I don't know but must be tens of pct, and growing all the time.
All polling must assume that the ebbs and flows of opinion within this group are perfectly correlated with the same demographic within the part of the electorate that polls can reach. Suppose that resistance to being polled is actually a key characteristic in itself, and these people don't actually correlate especially well with the rest. The polls will all be wrong, in different ways depending on the assumptions that they make.
My theory is these people are of the more insular and cynical kind, like to keep themselves to themselves, lean conservative, and are surely likely to be especially unimpressed by the views of Jezza and co?
I think you can also start to understand why the main parties still seem to believe in a big Tory win, because they will be registering this in canvass returns.
With that in mind I've had a few relatively modest bets on the bigger Tory majorities while the odds are good.
No one who actually knew anything about counter terrorist work actually wanted the extension. It was just another stupid statist, control freak stunt by Gordon Brown. When the former head of MI5 says your idea is dumb it might be worth listening to them.
That said, this time around the half-expected herding in the polls isn't happening. If that continues until election night then, if your theory is borne out, the houses that are more generous to the Tories (at present, ICM, ComRes and Kantar) could actually turn out to have got this one right.
Four-and-a-half days until we get the first indication...
Your second part makes a lot of assumptions with rather less evidence; you may be right that there is a bias towards the right amongst the unengaged (although in the past at least many wwc would fall into that box and have leaned left), but there is no way of knowing whether it is big or small.
In one van not three, at the wrong time and at a place where there's guaranteed to be armed plods about.
Go to any medium sized town in Britain and they could drive through market squares, pedestrian precincts and bus queues for as long as they liked, with more chance of running out of fuel than being stopped by the local plods.
Anyway, the pollsters will make sure that their final sample includes the right number of the elderly. The question is whether the elderly who are included are representative of the demographic.
This time around they all seem to be herding into avoiding each other.
At least some (might) be right on the day...
Election over tory majortiy of 150
As for the magic money trees, are those the ones kept in off shore bank accounts in Panama, Belize, the Cayman, Bahamas and many others. For advice, please ask Mr May, Amber Rudd, David Cameron, George Osborne, Lord Rothermere, the Barclay twins, Richard Desmond, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson.......
So, rather than weight the sample to represent the population as a whole, they should weight the sample to represent the voting population
The ICM's of this world appears to weight the sample to represent the population as per Census etc*., then adjust again to get rid of people who are not likely to vote.
So, why do the first bit ?
* to include those unlikely to vote
Who's talking about reneging? Britain could file Article 13 and leave NATO a year later. That is in accordance with the Treaty.