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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Seat projection from today’s ICM poll has CON ahead on MPs eve
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Seat projection from today’s ICM poll has CON ahead on MPs even though behind on votes
The latest ICM Guardian poll out and the figures – C40/LB41/LD7 – are included above in the seat projection from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus.
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There’s the theory and then there’s the reality.
Quaint.
Edit. And universal swing. It'll be tartan trousers next.
[When things are as squeaky as that, you really need to separate out the Norn Irn parties.]
Right.
Zac’s majority of 45 is buggered.
Not many of the yuff will be going large in Magaful etc.
But I also am sceptical about prediction models at present. There seems to be a sorting of voters taking place which doesn't seem to be happening on uniform national lines.
The point that the current system does not favour Labour as much as some Tories think is well made. As for the rest....
So, a 7% lead in 2010 put the Conservatives 48 ahead of Labour in 2010, but a 2.5% lead in 2017 put them 55 ahead.
There are now precisely ZERO Lib Dem held Labour facing seats.
A mere 1 point ahead when Ed Miliband, Neil Kinnock and even Michael Foot in 1980-1 had bigger leads. Until it all disintegrated on election day.
And even if Corbyn did (unlikely) squeak in as the 73 year old PM of a minority government, what would be the point? He could not get his programme through, he would hold office without power,and the stress of it all would either kill him or lead to him resigning due to ill heath.
(P.S. Your gut feelings on the matter are not actual reasons)
This ought, theoretically, to make swingometers like Electoral Calculus better predictors.
But there is a third "party" of DNV within the system, and that could be very volatile. The Tories lost some to DNV last June and Labour gained bundles from them. Will turnout look the same next time?
I've just read a piece in the Times that will stir up everyones' inner revolutionary socialist.
Barclays pension fund has 250,000 members and a huge deficit. Barclays is ring-fencing its risky investment banking business away from its safe and profitable retail banking business. Most of the pension fund members spent their careers in the retail banking business (or their spouses did).
Guess which arm of Barclays will be responsible for funding the pension fund deficit in the future?
But there is so much water to flow under the bridge before we should start reading too much into the current polls, even if their present stability is curious. We're not really in mid-term yet, though it's felt that way since June 9th!
Useful insight to your political predictions....
'The system' remains, for example, Welsh seats covering ca. 10k fewer people than English ones.
see: researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05677/SN05677.pdf
1. Disparities in constituency sizes, which benefits Labour (because people in the NE and Wales get more MPs per 100K registered voters than voters in the SE and elsewhere). That is a systematic bias towards Labour, as it happens, but more to the point it's a systematic bias against voters in some parts of the country.
2. Differences in the distribution of votes across the country, which is not a systematic bias in either Labour's or the Conservatives' favour, but is the effect of choices made by different voters. In the past, for example 2005, Labour was the big beneficiary of this second effect, which was much bigger than the first. That now seems to have changed, so that the vote distribution of the Conservative vote happens to be slightly more efficient than Labour's, although there's no guarantee that it won't change again.
To have 12 MPs on a FPTP system with 7.6% of the vote is actually pretty remarkable. To suggest it would go up on 7% is, I think, optimistic.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/brexit-is-a-collective-english-mental-breakdown-1.3356258
The EU challenged England not to give up a national identity, but to acquire one – to give up the illusions embodied in a United Kingdom that never was a nation, but was always a device to conceal England’s colonial relation to the other nations inhabiting Great Britain and Ireland. Instead the EU offered England the opportunity for equal partnership in a common endeavour, which is nowadays all that nationhood can mean.
On June 23rd, 2016, the English rejected that offer and opted to continue living the fiction of splendid isolation that sustained the UK and the British empire before it, and to continue denying the Scots and the Irish a will of their own. Any recovery from this collective mental breakdown will involve treating it in the light of its deep historical causes. Not until there is a separate English parliament, giving England at last the distinctive political identity it has shunned for 300 years, will the delusions that led the country to Brexit finally be dissipated by contact with reality. Perhaps then, with their psychosis healed, the English will apply to rejoin the EU.
What do you expect there?
The FT reports that Carillion had reached a perilous financial position by the time it fell into liquidation on Monday morning.
Well there's a surprise. Who'd have thought that a company entering compulsory liquidation might be in a perilous financial position?
Of course it might also suggest that cities where all of the above factors apply are being seriously overrepresented on the basis of faulty electoral registers.
.....
Apart from that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln?
And, as usual, Wales is excluded from the argument.
I'm not sure I would offer better than evens.
Mr. Mark, silence, heretic! Global warming has always been the Truth.
I mean, who knows anymore?!
We have 533 seats out of 650 in the national parliament.
We’re not the castrated Celts, Scots, and Ulster Scots who need to over compensate with a glorified council.
We need fewer politicians not more.
If you take the Labour vote back down to 2010 levels in the likes of St Ives and Richmond Park, and transfer those extra votes over to the LDs, then the LDs gain the seats, even without the Tories losing a single vote.
For example, Scottish MPs can vote on income tax for England/Wales which does not affect their constituencies. Meanwhile, English and Welsh MPs cannot do the same for Scottish income tax. There's a democratic deficit as Scottish MPs can vote without being accountable to those affected by the policy.
The numbers argument is a fallacy. It's not England Versus Scotland, it's a question of the balance of power. An English majority could be overruled by UK-wide MPs on matters that relate to England (and perhaps Wales too) whereas the corresponding problem does not occur for Scotland because of its devolution.
The upswing in the Labour vote in 2017 is largely down to ex-Labour voters who switched to SNP because of their support for independence switching back to Labour for the UK election, I think. So it's a combination of them being more in tune with Labour than the Conservatives in the UK context and also deciding independence wasn't the key issue for that election. Will the same apply next time, and more so? Possibly, but they may decide to stick with the SNP. The independence issue is abeyance but it hasn't gone away.
Gerrymandering UK style!
Now, obviously, on first glance, that might not seem a valid comparison, since the SNP don't stand in the vast majority of seats - but in fact, the LDs' support in so many seats is so completely, shockingly derisory (losing their deposits in well over half of seats in 2017) that the arithmetical effect isn't that much different to the SNP's case - not too dissimilarly to them, the LDs are now basically only registering at all in a small % of seats. Their vote is now quite efficiently-distributed, so they will do better than suggested by just voteshare.
You consider yours good enough most of the time.
My old man's sparring partner at Coventry council.
Wrong Ann
As it happens, I think you are probably right - with the caveat that there is only realistic LibDem gain in Scotland, Fife NE.
And the reason I think you are right is that the LibDem votes are getting more and more concentrated in leafy Remainia. (By which I mean SW London, some parts of Scotland, and a few other seats.) Were an election to be held now, I think they'd probably grab a couple of seats. (But no more than a couple.)
The two interesting things (to me) about the LibDems are:
1. Will Brexit still be a live issue in 2022? I suspect it will be, in that there will be parts of the country where there are concentrated Brexit losses and therefore residual "cross-ness". And it so happens, that a lot of those seats are LibDem/Conservative fights
2. How will the LibDems do in London in the locals this year? I suspect, based on last year's GE, that they will do well in Kingston and Richmond. But are there going to be other areas of recovery? Right now, I don't see it. But it's something to watch out for.
The SNP example is not relevant because they have a dominant position over a certain geographical area. In 2015 this gave them spectacular results but 2017 showed how vulnerable they are to a modest fall. The Lib Dems no longer have anything like that.
The fact that it is snowing somewhere up north does not prove global warming theory to be false; just as the fact that it is bright and springlike in London this afternoon does not prove it to be true.
Climate and weather are not the same thing.