A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
Just to be clear about the MRP poll: as I understand it, what it does is use a very large sample in order to get detailed polling on demographic subgroups. Thus, if young women with children are swinging more Labour and elderly working-class men are swinging more Tory, it will detect that. It then projects that onto detailed demographic data for each seat - so if a seat has a lot of elderly working-class men, on the above assumption the Tory swing will be higher.
What is does not do is poll by constituency. So no tactical voting is taken into account, nor are special circumstances, such as a well-known independent standing in the seat. It's therefore of limited benefit in seats like Broxtowe, which re a mess with half a dozen very different types of candidate.
Correct?
I think that's a fair point regarding the complications posed by tactical voting and other local nuances. I had much the same difficulty with my earlier seat modelling based on average swings amongst Leave/Remain subgroups within each 2017 party group. YouGov may have attempted to get around it by trying to find correlations between the effect of demographics and the tactical situation of each seat, and then modelling derived variables that tried to combine the two, but that would be a very complicated MRP model indeed.
The MRP model may have worked in 2017 but the challenges posed by tactical voting were also much less then, in what was turned out to be a simple Con-Lab contest in almost every seat. The 2017 YouGov model predicted that the LDs would get 12 seats (the exact result) but on a higher share of 9%, so it's plausible that that overprediction compensated for a failure to fully model the impact of tactical voting. The challenges of modelling tactical voting are greater in 2019 because the LDs are in frame in many more seats and also because of the difficulty of forming a view on whether a party coming from 3rd might have a better chance than one coming from 2nd (or not).
Good post.
Yes, I think MRP is great on the straight two party or very heavily driven Leave/Remain constituencies but is pretty crap on the tacticals.
So I'll take Scotland with a pinch of salt.
From looking at the final 2017 in Scotland it simply got SNP too high - which the regular polling got wrong too. The rest of the calls were basically spot on.
In Ross, Skye and Lochaber for instance it had the Tories on 24.7 (they got 24.8) and the Lib Dems on 20.9 (they got 20.9). That's pretty impressive!
Never mind poll movements. I have projected that, by the time the polls close on Dec 12th, this forum will consist of nothing but excitable Labour cheerleading from @CorrectHorseBattery. The growth is exponential, and unstoppable.
And like other posters before him, I expect he'll disappear as soon as the exit poll is released.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
Don't worry in 30 years you'll all be voting Tory like most 50'somethings.
I don't think most 50 odd year olds today would have voted for an anti-Semite in 1990. Something has changed. The age profile of the Corbyn vote is more depressing than the factit is a third of the country. Listening to my brother today on his reasons for emigrating I found I could only weakly argue against him. I am coming to the conclusion Jews can only find solidarity among ourselves.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
That's normal.
But what isn't normal (this is empirical as records have been broken) is the number registering to vote. I was chatting to people on campus who said the drive to register has been huge. And as CHB says, a lot of that is aimed at booting out the tories.
It's the Stormzy effect
Anyway, these are just opinion polls, none of which seem accurate to me. The mood I feel out there may not be for Corbyn, but I don't think it's for the tories either.
Has anyone done an analysis of which university seats are likely to be relevant in this election? Canterbury, I get, but I assume many others are safe Labour seats anyway. Is that wrong?
There are over 100 universities in the United Kingdom. Stirling, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dundee, Aberystwyth, Bath, Newcastle under Lyme, Derby, Worcester, Reading, Chichester, Winchester, Carmarthen, Harper Adams, Gloucestershire, Bangor, Chester, New Bucks, Lancaster, to name just a few are not in ‘safe Labour seats.’
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
If the Tories do throw this election away the near total absence of meaningful policies will be a big cause.
I don't think it will. Policies hurt them last time, I doubt lack of a catchy policy this time costs many votes, in both this and the last election it is the fear of a Tory government and Brexit which will sink them.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trios over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
Just watched Barry Gardiner being interviewed by Andrew Neil and he was so surprisingly good that I looked him up on Wiki and unlike most of the Labour hopefuls he's well educated and with an interesting back story. Don't be fooled by the shop window there do seem to be some talented people in there.
It does beg the question though...
How the hell did they end up with jeremy?
I blame, in roughly descending order of guilt: 1. Ed Miliband, for changing the system (as well as losing in 2015 in the first place and for pursuing timid policies in opposition which caused Labour members and MPs to collectively tear their hair out in frustration at the continued absence of any red meat.) 2. Margaret Beckett, for knowingly getting Corbyn over the nominations line. 3. Harriet Harman who used her 15 minutes of fame as caretaker leader to try and promote a radical watering down of Labour's policy on social security. 4. Andy Burnham, for not resigning from the Shadow Cabinet in response to Harman's actions and losing Unite's backing as a consequence. 5. Eric Joyce, who threw the punch that caused his arrest that caused his resignation from Labour that caused Unite to push Karie Murphy on Falkirk and thus caused the debate on union influence over Labour to reignite which caused Miliband to change the leader election system to remove unions in order to try and shut that debate down (not that it did.) Truly an example of a butterfly effect.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
That's normal.
But what isn't normal (this is empirical as records have been broken) is the number registering to vote. I was chatting to people on campus who said the drive to register has been huge. And as CHB says, a lot of that is aimed at booting out the tories.
It's the Stormzy effect
Anyway, these are just opinion polls, none of which seem accurate to me. The mood I feel out there may not be for Corbyn, but I don't think it's for the tories either.
Has anyone done an analysis of which university seats are likely to be relevant in this election? Canterbury, I get, but I assume many others are safe Labour seats anyway. Is that wrong?
There are over 100 universities in the United Kingdom. Stirling, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dundee, Aberystwyth, Bath, Newcastle under Lyme, Derby, Worcester, Reading, Chichester, Winchester, Carmarthen, Harper Adams, Gloucestershire, Bangor, Chester, New Bucks, Lancaster, to name just a few are not in ‘safe Labour seats.’
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
Is it so long ago that you couldn't get to a Tory majority?
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
Why adjust your model to match a different one? Though I think it underestimates Con seats, it should still be tested against the eventual result rather than adjusted to match other models and your own theory remains untested.
I guess the neutral stance really hasn't backfired
Whether it worked or not was secondary to it being a rather lame bit of cynical politics which he is pretending is a matter of principle. Corbyn is as much a career politician, obfuscating and misleading like anyone his cheerleaders ever claimed he was better than. A new kind of politics my arse.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
Just to be clear about the MRP poll: as I understand it, what it does is use a very large sample in order to get detailed polling on demographic subgroups. Thus, if young women with children are swinging more Labour and elderly working-class men are swinging more Tory, it will detect that. It then projects that onto detailed demographic data for each seat - so if a seat has a lot of elderly working-class men, on the above assumption the Tory swing will be higher.
What is does not do is poll by constituency. So no tactical voting is taken into account, nor are special circumstances, such as a well-known independent standing in the seat. It's therefore of limited benefit in seats like Broxtowe, which re a mess with half a dozen very different types of candidate.
Correct?
I think that's a fair point regarding the complications posed by tactical voting and other local nuances. I had much the same difficulty with my earlier seat modelling based on average swings amongst Leave/Remain subgroups within each 2017 party group. YouGov may have attempted to get around it by trying to find correlations between the effect of demographics and the tactical situation of each seat, and then modelling derived variables that tried to combine the two, but that would be a very complicated MRP model indeed.
The MRP model may have worked in 2017 but the challenges posed by tactical voting were also much less then, in what was turned out to be a simple Con-Lab contest in almost every seat. The 2017 YouGov model predicted that the LDs would get 12 seats (the exact result) but on a higher share of 9%, so it's plausible that that overprediction compensated for a failure to fully model the impact of tactical voting. The challenges of modelling tactical voting are greater in 2019 because the LDs are in frame in many more seats and also because of the difficulty of forming a view on whether a party coming from 3rd might have a better chance than one coming from 2nd (or not).
Good post.
Yes, I think MRP is great on the straight two party or very heavily driven Leave/Remain constituencies but is pretty crap on the tacticals.
So I'll take Scotland with a pinch of salt.
From looking at the final 2017 in Scotland it simply got SNP too high - which the regular polling got wrong too. The rest of the calls were basically spot on.
In Ross, Skye and Lochaber for instance it had the Tories on 24.7 (they got 24.8) and the Lib Dems on 20.9 (they got 20.9). That's pretty impressive!
Well, stopped clocks.
I don't doubt it's good. But, it's not so good at tactical voting, local factors or changes in the final weeks.
And we don't know if voters will behave the same this time round.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
That's normal.
But what isn't normal (this is empirical as records have been broken) is the number registering to vote. I was chatting to people on campus who said the drive to register has been huge. And as CHB says, a lot of that is aimed at booting out the tories.
It's the Stormzy effect
Anyway, these are just opinion polls, none of which seem accurate to me. The mood I feel out there may not be for Corbyn, but I don't think it's for the tories either.
Has anyone done an analysis of which university seats are likely to be relevant in this election? Canterbury, I get, but I assume many others are safe Labour seats anyway. Is that wrong?
There are over 100 universities in the United Kingdom. Stirling, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dundee, Aberystwyth, Bath, Newcastle under Lyme, Derby, Worcester, Reading, Chichester, Winchester, Carmarthen, Harper Adams, Gloucestershire, Bangor, Chester, New Bucks, Lancaster, to name just a few are not in ‘safe Labour seats.’
Thanks, I stand corrected.
There is a second order question there though, about size of each one. Some of those are pretty small.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
There's something in this, I think.
They've seemingly taken the wrong lessons from 2017, they've thought Corbyn would muck it up by virtue of being himself and presenting his policies.
But all the polls show he's become more popular.
Perhaps Cummings isn't as smart as he thinks he is?
If the Tories do throw this election away the near total absence of meaningful policies will be a big cause.
You know, I don’t think it is the policies or lack thereof.
The Tories have been in power for 9 years. In that time we’ve had austerity and Brexit. Wage growth has been slow. For many people it has not felt like the joyous sunlit uplands.
Every government gets to a stage where the pendulum starts swinging away from it. The Tories tried policy heavy last time, it didn’t work. They’ve tried policy lite this time, and that might not work either. Perhaps it is not anything to do with what they promise but just there’s a sizeable chunk of people who just don’t want them in government anymore.
Personally if I wasn’t so terrified of a Jeremy Corbyn leading the country I’d be seriously considering voting for someone else.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
The Tory campaign is less crap (avoiding obvious unforced errors, and better on social media) and Corbyn is more crap (less buzz, energy, more socialism, obstinacy and stupidity). And there's less gay sex from the Lib Dems.
That 19% lead for the Tories the other day seems like a lifetime ago.....
But it is withing the week of MRP sample. This release is gonna look bad for Labour but their polling situation has much improved but won't fully be reflected in the MRP.
No, it's very bad, though perhaps enough for Corbyn to not resign immediately. But fancy guesswork is only right by chance anyway. I'm wondering at what point people will stop believing it is not 2017 all over again, seemingly on the basis that it is not because it can not. If Labour had stopped climbing I'd have stopped believing it was 2017 all over again, but they're creeping into the mid 30s, and no different to last time Corbyn does something which gets a horrible reaction, but Labour voters don't care.
Policies > Labour > Corbyn
Why the Tories have absolutely failed so much to make a dent
Electorate favourably impressed by Corbyn's Neil interview, evidently.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
Don't worry in 30 years you'll all be voting Tory like most 50'somethings.
He will, assuming he has capital. If not socialism will happen sooner or later.
You can't expect people without capital to be capitalists.
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
Don't start herding on us, Barnesian!
What do you mean *they* cut the poll lead? How could they cut the poll lead, man? They're socialists!
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
Don't worry in 30 years you'll all be voting Tory like most 50'somethings.
He will, assuming he has capital. If not socialism will happen sooner or later.
You can't expect people without capital to be capitalists.
Most people over 34 have capital and own a property
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
Don't worry in 30 years you'll all be voting Tory like most 50'somethings.
He will, assuming he has capital. If not socialism will happen sooner or later.
You can't expect people without capital to be capitalists.
I have capital and am now in my late 50s and it hasn't happened to me.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
That's normal.
But what isn't normal (this is empirical as records have been broken) is the number registering to vote. I was chatting to people on campus who said the drive to register has been huge. And as CHB says, a lot of that is aimed at booting out the tories.
It's the Stormzy effect
Anyway, these are just opinion polls, none of which seem accurate to me. The mood I feel out there may not be for Corbyn, but I don't think it's for the tories either.
Has anyone done an analysis of which university seats are likely to be relevant in this election? Canterbury, I get, but I assume many others are safe Labour seats anyway. Is that wrong?
There are over 100 universities in the United Kingdom. Stirling, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dundee, Aberystwyth, Bath, Newcastle under Lyme, Derby, Worcester, Reading, Chichester, Winchester, Carmarthen, Harper Adams, Gloucestershire, Bangor, Chester, New Bucks, Lancaster, to name just a few are not in ‘safe Labour seats.’
Thanks, I stand corrected.
There is a second order question there though, about size of each one. Some of those are pretty small.
It’s more about the size of the university relative to the constituency. So, for example, Harper Adams is unlikely to sway Telford. But I can see the medium-sized universities in Chester or Lincoln being vital to any chance of a Labour hold. Meanwhile, Carmarthen is tiny, but so is the electorate of the seat it’s in. Meanwhile Aberystwyth, in Ceredigion, isn’t huge in itself but does account one way and another for around one in four of the electorate. (Lampeter is very much smaller and seems to be being run down prior to closure.) I would have thought though the ones to particularly watch are in Scotland - places like Stirling, NE Fife and Aberdeen. These are places with relatively large universities with a very diverse voter base, much of it English, who may not be too happy with the SNP. Equally, hard to see them voting Tory.
We’re into that stage of an election campaign when there are jitters. They could be well founded like in 2017 or we could have a 2015 result on our hands. I find it very difficult to predict where things are. I don’t sense the same enthusiastic surge for Labour but it does look like their vote is picking up (I think it was the WASPIs wot done it).
Amongst my age group (20 somethings), I feel a lot of sense to kick the Tories out
That's normal.
Yes but what's different is that people really think there's a lot at stake this time.
And crucially, they think they can change it.
Not many felt that in 2015, because there wasn't much to vote for, in 2017 people went in feeling the same. This time, I don't feel that.
Are you forgetting the fields of youngsters chanting "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn"?
Adding in the ComRes poll gives: Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533 Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40 Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59 TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632 Tory majority 22 When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
Is it so long ago that you couldn't get to a Tory majority?
It's the relative improvement for the Tories in Wales and Scotland that have made the difference.
I think the Waspi effect is working through. As always we are guessing the effectiveness of the adjustments the various companies are doing to raw data.
One thing I've not seen discussed is whether Labour's Waspi proposal would be legal. I "lost" some pension payments on same timescale of notification as the Waspi women (not as much of course) but only women are being compensated. The other point is that it restores a discriminatory situation.
There is a lot of detail that has not been thought through. For one thing, people are assuming any sums paid will be in a lump sum - yay! Holidays! new car! Etc. But one way of paying it would be to add a sum of £x to the state pension currently being paid so that the amount is paid over a number of years, depending on age etc. The women get their money but not as one big payment. Much easier for the government. I would not be at all confident that even if Labour were to win the WASPI women will get their money. Or that even if it is paid it will be less and paid in a way which makes it less like winning the lottery as some may perhaps be assuming.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
There's something in this, I think.
They've seemingly taken the wrong lessons from 2017, they've thought Corbyn would muck it up by virtue of being himself and presenting his policies.
But all the polls show he's become more popular.
Perhaps Cummings isn't as smart as he thinks he is?
Mmm. If Cummings is the evil genius behind things this time, based on the referendum campaign , shit only got real with 2 weeks to go.
Can't be coincidence that the Chief Rabbi comments came out when they did.
A month into the election campaign and I'm still waiting for the Tory election campaign to start. It's exactly like 2017 again: every day the discussion is 'are Labour having a good day or bad?' The Tories never proactively seek to make anything about them themselves, it's simply passivity, hoping Corbyn trips over his lectern.
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
There's something in this, I think.
They've seemingly taken the wrong lessons from 2017, they've thought Corbyn would muck it up by virtue of being himself and presenting his policies.
But all the polls show he's become more popular.
Perhaps Cummings isn't as smart as he thinks he is?
It may be that they have taken the lesson that TMay 'mucked it up' with the dementia tax. They decided not to do that, go steady eddy, and keep the wheels on. But if TMay's mistake was actually to be totally uninspiring and think that just 'not being Corbyn' would win a majority, then they have more or less repeated that so far.
Thankfully, there is plenty of time to adjust course. Labour have shot their last bolt - they literally cannot offer any more bungs. If the Tories decide to fight bribery with bribery, the field is theirs. It doesn't even matter if it looks desperate and, forced - perhaps that would even be an advantage.
I think the Waspi effect is working through. As always we are guessing the effectiveness of the adjustments the various companies are doing to raw data.
One thing I've not seen discussed is whether Labour's Waspi proposal would be legal. I "lost" some pension payments on same timescale of notification as the Waspi women (not as much of course) but only women are being compensated. The other point is that it restores a discriminatory situation.
There is a lot of detail that has not been thought through. For one thing, people are assuming any sums paid will be in a lump sum - yay! Holidays! new car! Etc.
But one way of paying it would be to add a sum of £x to the state pension currently being paid so that the amount is paid over a number of years, depending on age etc. The women get their money but not as one big payment. Much easier for the government.
I would not be at all confident that even if Labour were to win the WASPI women will get their money. Or that even if it is paid it will be less and paid in a way which makes it less like winning the lottery as some may perhaps be assuming.
It will have achieved its purpose, pandering to an important part of the electorate.
Comments
I guess the neutral stance really hasn't backfired
Tories getting zero cut-through on anything, when on the odd occasion they stir from their slumber. Javid did a speech yesterday attacking Corbynomics and it got precisely zero coverage. Labour the only show in town - for good or ill.
In Ross, Skye and Lochaber for instance it had the Tories on 24.7 (they got 24.8) and the Lib Dems on 20.9 (they got 20.9). That's pretty impressive!
The numbers are moving around a bit as certainties to vote and turnout weightings firm up.
Con Lab LD BXP Green PC SNP Total
England 313 195 24 0 1 0 0 533
Wales 14 21 1 0 0 4 0 40
Scotland 9 1 5 0 0 0 44 59
TOTAL 336 217 30 0 1 4 44 632
Tory majority 22
When the youGov MRP comes out, I'll compare it with my model and use it to fine tune my assumptions.
https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1199764692610306048?s=20
https://www.holyrood.com/comment/view,eric-joyce-why-the-brexit-vote-pushed-me-to-support-scottish-independence_12211.htm
Best prices - Falkirk
SNP 1/14
SLab 12/1
SCon 14/1
SLD 80/1
Grn 500/1
Eric Joyce had a 19,500 majority when he was first elected as Labour MP. Now that party are also-rans.
But, maybe I'm just over-cautious.
That line is looking awfully 2017 now
There is going to be money to be made here.
Anyone know any good rain dances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cre0in5n-1E
I don't doubt it's good. But, it's not so good at tactical voting, local factors or changes in the final weeks.
And we don't know if voters will behave the same this time round.
They've seemingly taken the wrong lessons from 2017, they've thought Corbyn would muck it up by virtue of being himself and presenting his policies.
But all the polls show he's become more popular.
Perhaps Cummings isn't as smart as he thinks he is?
The Tories have been in power for 9 years. In that time we’ve had austerity and Brexit. Wage growth has been slow. For many people it has not felt like the joyous sunlit uplands.
Every government gets to a stage where the pendulum starts swinging away from it. The Tories tried policy heavy last time, it didn’t work. They’ve tried policy lite this time, and that might not work either. Perhaps it is not anything to do with what they promise but just there’s a sizeable chunk of people who just don’t want them in government anymore.
Personally if I wasn’t so terrified of a Jeremy Corbyn leading the country I’d be seriously considering voting for someone else.
Otherwise, it really is groundhog day.
Although it is true that MRP last time was one week out not two, so will be interesting to see if they do another one
It would be far better and far more instructive to take a step back and look and see if there are any trends emerging.
And whether Dominic Cummings' warning about us heading for a hung parliament is designed to stir the troops.
Or whether he thinks it's true.
I had almost forgot... titters.
You can't expect people without capital to be capitalists.
2017: Polls overstated SNP
2019: ?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/milestonesjourneyingintoadulthood/2019-02-18
I would have thought though the ones to particularly watch are in Scotland - places like Stirling, NE Fife and Aberdeen. These are places with relatively large universities with a very diverse voter base, much of it English, who may not be too happy with the SNP. Equally, hard to see them voting Tory.
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And our exit poll says.........
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1199809645122138112
Don't post predictions/fake news.
But one way of paying it would be to add a sum of £x to the state pension currently being paid so that the amount is paid over a number of years, depending on age etc. The women get their money but not as one big payment. Much easier for the government.
I would not be at all confident that even if Labour were to win the WASPI women will get their money. Or that even if it is paid it will be less and paid in a way which makes it less like winning the lottery as some may perhaps be assuming.
Can't be coincidence that the Chief Rabbi comments came out when they did.
Thankfully, there is plenty of time to adjust course. Labour have shot their last bolt - they literally cannot offer any more bungs. If the Tories decide to fight bribery with bribery, the field is theirs. It doesn't even matter if it looks desperate and, forced - perhaps that would even be an advantage.
Con 359 (+42)
Lab 211 (-51)
Lib Dem 13 (+1)
SNP 43 (+8)
Plaid 4 (-)
Green 1 (-)
Speaker 1 (-)
Conservative majority of 68