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Thoughts on the polling debate from Nick Sparrow – formerly of ICM – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited June 2022 in General
imageThoughts on the polling debate from Nick Sparrow – formerly of ICM – politicalbetting.com

Writing in the Guardian, Peter Kellner asserts that “it is common knowledge that final election polls are sometimes tweaked”.  This should not come as a particular surprise. For a few days before an election, the one place neither a pollster nor the client wish to be is out of line with all the others, whether that means all the others have got it right or wrong.

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    First.
  • londonpubmanlondonpubman Posts: 3,151
    Top 5 like CON in Tiverton and Wakefield
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232
    It comes as a massive surprise to me. What's the point of having a polling methodology at all if you start doctoring the values because you think other methodologies are better and you don't want yours to be thought of as crap?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    edited June 2022
    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.
  • TheWhiteRabbitTheWhiteRabbit Posts: 12,387
    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    But there was not herding as there was in 2015. Survation were pretty close with:

    Con: 41
    Lab: 40
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 2,699
    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    Though David Herdson called it on here the night before. His methodology was to go out and talk to people.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
  • https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1535200065454755841

    Keir Starmer and Wallace tied, everyone else way way down.

    So it's boring vs boring then
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232
    If polls really are 'sometimes tweaked', then the pollsters should forfeit all claims they make to be engaging in anything that can be described as science.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    Off topic, but good

    Heatwave next weekend. Get yourself bikini ready PB and off to the beach!

    https://www.yr.no/nb/værvarsel/daglig-tabell/2-6296599/Storbritannia/England/Stor-London/London City lufthavn
  • 51% say Conservative MPs made the wrong decision by voting in favour of Boris Johnson remaining as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister.

    Majority do not expect him to lead the Conservatives into next General Election.
  • Considering next moves for the Prime Minister, the public have low levels of faith in what he will be able to achieve. Around 6 in 10 say it is unlikely he will be able to win the next General Election (59%) or unite the Conservative party under his leadership (64%). Two-thirds (67%) say he is unlikely to improve public trust in him as Prime Minister.

    The public are equally sceptical about the Government’s ability to deliver on a range of issues. Around two-thirds say the Government are unlikely to reduce the cost of living (69%) or reduce crime (66%). Despite the increase in National Insurance to provide more funds for the NHS and social care, 63% say the Government are unlikely to improve the NHS.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,758
    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.
  • If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746
    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    F1: Perez looking good, as predicted, in Azerbaijan.

    Annoyed at myself for not backing him to top practice, but there we are.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,786
    Another AUKUS moment for France:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/norway-ends-contract-for-nh90-helicopters-wants-full-refund/2022/06/10/aaaf0432-e89d-11ec-a422-11bbb91db30b_story.html

    Norway terminated its two-decade-old contract with a France-based manufacturer for 14 maritime helicopters, citing delays, errors and time-consuming maintenance, the defense minister said Friday, calling the move “a serious decision.”

    The Norwegian government will return the NH90 helicopters it has received so far and expects a full refund of the nearly 5 billion kroner ($525 million) it paid, according to Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    edited June 2022
    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    Zahawi did call though. He's tried to pass it off as a joke, and it probably was on his side - but if you have a call from a major shareholder (Blind trust apparently) you might well listen, even if they don't think it's serious.

    So yes Chris' retraction and Zahawi's explanation give more credence to his original tweet in my mind than if it had just been left.

    His retraction is about as credible as a Ukranian or Russian PoW saying how everything was a dreadful mistake once captured on the other side's TV.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    tlg86 said:

    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    But there was not herding as there was in 2015. Survation were pretty close with:

    Con: 41
    Lab: 40
    Yes. Went and checked after typing that. The surprising thing was how they were all over the place in the week before polling.
    14 polls in the final week. 3 had a 10%+ Tory lead.
    1 with Labour in front. Only 4 within MofE of the actual results.
    The average of these was over 7% lead.
    I call that a polling fail. Even if the clues to a possible huge fail were there, most chose to dismiss them completely.
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793
    FPT:

    Talking of polls
    New Techne Westminster poll:

    Lab: 39% (-1)
    Cons: 33% (+1)
    LD: 12% (-)
    Grn: 6% (-)
    SNP: 4% (-)

    @techneUK. 8-9 June,
    Changes from 2 June.

    Holding pattern still despite Dog Rescue mania

    I strongly suspect that those numbers are where it has been solidly for a couple of months now.
    The varying numbers around them being just MoE.

    (I believe that pretty much every lead - from 3 pts for Labour to 11 pts for Labour) have had the overall scores within MoE of those numbers.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    No they aren't, the latest poll today has the Tories on 33% ie higher than they got in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and far higher than the 20-25% they were polling before May resigned in Spring 2019 when they were leaking votes like a sieve to Farage's Brexit Party
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    Though David Herdson called it on here the night before. His methodology was to go out and talk to people.
    Pedantically. He called it at the weekend. Was surprised to see that there was some polling evidence for the results.
    Everyone chose to ignore it. Indeed. The common reaction on here was that he'd had his account hacked.
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,758
    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    Though David Herdson called it on here the night before. His methodology was to go out and talk to people.
    Pedantically. He called it at the weekend. Was surprised to see that there was some polling evidence for the results.
    Everyone chose to ignore it. Indeed. The common reaction on here was that he'd had his account hacked.
    Yes, as I recall he partially backtracked on what had clearly been an appalling canvassing session or sessions at the weekend as polling day approached but he certainly picked up on the lack of enthusiasm that May was causing and the collapse of certainty to vote. And he was right.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    Dura_Ace said:

    tlg86 said:

    Typical. My parents and sister have gone to lunch without me and Michael Gove is sat at table next to them.

    All tory MPs should have the word c*nt shouted at them when you spot one in public. It's like Pokemon Go but more fun and socially useful. I've only done two. 😔
    Not a PB game I’m playing. In all joking and no offence Tissue Price has it stitched up! Can chalk up one soon as he yawns to mirror first thing in the morning! 🤭
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited June 2022
    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    They might guess right sometimes, but I'm convinced Trafalgar 100% makes it's numbers up.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,955
    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    Unless you were a LibDem.....
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    From Devon Live,

    "The PM is rumoured to be planning a walkabout in Honiton today but not (sic) media invites have been issued."

    Unsure as to what the point of that is. Doubtless a gaggle of Tory activists gathered to look like a throng of excited, grateful locals.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,603
    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,955
    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Always amuses how many on here are on polling panels. Should be an obvious cause for exclusion if you ask me!
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    They might guess right sometimes, but I'm convinced Trafalgar 100% makes it's numbers up.
    HY swears by Robert Cahaly's methodology. I have always suspected darts and a dartboard would be about as accurate.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited June 2022

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
  • FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,005
    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited June 2022

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    Thinking about this though.
    If this did happen, it was an own goal.
    If folk had known Corbyn had clearly won the debate, and the media had therefore picked up on his gaining traction, it may have resulted in fewer Tories sitting on their hands.
    And fewer Tory incumbents on their arses.
    So. It is at least arguable the non-appearance of this poll contributed to the loss of majority.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    HYUFD said:

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
    Farage would likely return to lead RefUK if Hunt replaced Boris as Tory leader and PM
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited June 2022
    HYUFD said:

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
    This is true, but there might be such a cascade of problems over the next couple of years that only two very sober and careful-looking suits like Starmer and Hunt might get a hearing. Then Mordaunt and Rayner or Nandy might come in to change things a bit more interestingly in the next parliament, perhaps.
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    edited June 2022
    dixiedean said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    Thinking about this though.
    If this did happen, it was an own goal.
    If folk had known Corbyn had clearly won the debate, and the media had therefore picked up on his gaining traction, it may have resulted in fewer Tories sitting on their hands.
    So. It is at least arguable this non-poll poll contributed to the loss of majority.
    Don't think I agree. You only stay 'unelectable' if the evidence is you won't win. If companies are distorting the evidence they become an arbiter of public opinion not a mirror to it.

    I know this is all speculation. I've no idea how the world looks as a reluctant Tory.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,603
    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    That legal pressure has been applied tells us that the allegations were not *trivially provable*. Nothing else.

    YouGov had to take legal action, since their reputation was being directly questioned.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950

    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
    The military establishment does what any establishment would do - self-propagate. Another cold war is the generals' dream. Plenty of money hosed at defence while never having to fight the war. Unlike Afghan or Iraq, for example, where fighting had to be done.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    Thinking about this though.
    If this did happen, it was an own goal.
    If folk had known Corbyn had clearly won the debate, and the media had therefore picked up on his gaining traction, it may have resulted in fewer Tories sitting on their hands.
    So. It is at least arguable this non-poll poll contributed to the loss of majority.
    Don't think I agree. You only stay 'unelectable' if the evidence is you won't win. If companies are distorting the evidence they become an arbiter of public opinion not a mirror to it.
    Well indeed.
    I'm merely pointing out that it may not have been such a cunning plan.
  • jamesdoylejamesdoyle Posts: 633
    dixiedean said:

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
    Yes
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341
    edited June 2022
    GE polling essentially gives you a price, several times a week and sometimes daily, on a share that can only be traded every 4 or 5 years on election day.

    In general therefore it cannot be verified either then or later, except by other polls which suffer from the same problem.

    They suffer from the same problem as empirical verification: this can only happen through further empirical verification, which can't tell you if the process itself contains a flaw.

    Herd instinct is bound to creep in as elections approach, as it is more likely that the outlier is wrong than that the herd is wrong, and if you are all wrong that's, of course, OK.

    The big exception is John Curtice's big poll on election day itself, which is, I think based on claimed actual voting behaviour, and has proved remarkably robust, even when surprising.

    For this alone he deserves his knighthood. A seat in the HoL would be even better.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    On topic what an alarming header - bettors, those settings odds and taking bets, ourselves putting our credibility on line Based on what we think is working with true accurate data, not tweaked under the bonnet to THAT degree.

    Maybe they should do both, be open about both like how weather forecasters give us alternate forcasts these days that are very different - our latest unadulterated sub sample said this, but a chat over coffee pooling our psephological minds reckons it nearer this: so there’s the raw data and separately here’s our thoughts.

    I’m serious, it works with weather forcasts “if it stops about here we will get this, if it pushes up to Iceland we will get that instead” you can have more confidence when it’s put like that?

    Did I mention it’s a heatwave end of next week?

    Nb. I don’t know how seriously to take the Zehawri phone call thing. As soon as PM didn’t turn up to the big leadership debate she promised to, the whole point of the debate poll no longer existed, it was never going to measure what it was set up to measure. Anything released saying Corbyn won would have been ignored as mostly irrelevant anyway as it wasn’t a win over the prime minister. The fact she hid in a fridge eclipsed any damage an honest post debate poll would have inflicted.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
    Farage would likely return to lead RefUK if Hunt replaced Boris as Tory leader and PM
    No he wouldn't. Why are you worrying about Leavers? We've left!

    Hunt/Mordaunt/Wallace need to calm the Blue wall without frightening the RedWall. It's a tough balance to achieve, but at present Johnson has pissed off both sets of voters.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    That legal pressure has been applied tells us that the allegations were not *trivially provable*. Nothing else.

    YouGov had to take legal action, since their reputation was being directly questioned.
    Did Yougov take legal action? The apology posted on the previous thread referred directly to Zahawi.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    edited June 2022

    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
    Both @Topping & @Dura_Ace served. Their view of top brass' reasoning and military matters in general is I would say... more informed than most.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,603

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    That legal pressure has been applied tells us that the allegations were not *trivially provable*. Nothing else.

    YouGov had to take legal action, since their reputation was being directly questioned.
    Did Yougov take legal action? The apology posted on the previous thread referred directly to Zahawi.
    I think it probable they got some lawyers to draft a letter.
  • Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited June 2022

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate and coming from slightly left-field helps a lot.
    In 1989 perhaps but by 1990 John Major had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, both far higher positions than Ben Wallace or Penny Mordaunt.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited June 2022

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate and coming from slightly left-field helps a lot.
    In 1989 perhaps but by 1990 John Major had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, both far higher positions than Ben Wallace or Penny Mordaunt.
    I suppose that's true ; but I remember Major's profile in 1990 seeming very low. There was a certain amount of mystification and bemusement about his speed of his rise in the press, I remember.

    He'd held those jobs for very little time, relatively, and a lot of people's response was : "Who ?"
  • EPGEPG Posts: 5,996
    Thanks Nick. But as soon as pollsters try to adjust the raw numbers toward representing likely voters, the pollsters' opinions play a role. And these likelihood-adjusted numbers are usually the basis of headline poll results. Another problem is that the financial incentives to be right are very, very small in this business line. YouGov may be best right now, but politics can't be more than a small part of their revenues.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    LOL - for a more generous take to YouGov, see @Malmesbury. It suggests he doesn't want to get into a ruinously expensive libel suit over it.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926
    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Opinion pollsters also take a lot of respondents' time. Half an hour of ploughing through question after question on what sort of cheese Dominic Raab would be, and that is after wading through an even longer poll on crisp flavours for the pollster's paying customer.

    And polls try to make up for bad sampling with heavy weighting.

    I'd like to see the raw result of a simple one question poll with a huge response, perhaps by tacking it on to a popular web site such as the BBC or Google. And even that would automatically exclude voters with no web access.
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    There are plenty of things I know to be true but could not defend in a court room.
  • Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    LOL - for a more generous take to YouGov, see @Malmesbury. It suggests he doesn't want to get into a ruinously expensive libel suit over it.
    If he has libelled YouGov then what are they supposed to do? If they don't send the lawyers letter and get an apology then people say it must be true, they're not even challenging it. If they do, then you say lawyers are involved so it must be true.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don't it seems.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
    The military establishment does what any establishment would do - self-propagate. Another cold war is the generals' dream. Plenty of money hosed at defence while never having to fight the war. Unlike Afghan or Iraq, for example, where fighting had to be done.
    A Cold War works quite well for the rest of society, compared to the alternative of saving a few quid in the short term, and housing refugees from the Baltic States later on.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    dixiedean said:

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
    Yes
    I like it James. Past history is very important element on assessing the potency of the result, and we often miss that perspective on PB 👍🏻

    “A con win on Redwall council! Starmer in MELTDOWN” but it’s the seat on Redwall council that’s been blue for most 100 years, the one if lost points to a 97 meltdown.

    We have a poster here called HY who set Labour a Bar of winning Swindon Council if they hope to win the general election. Win six from nine seats that bar sounds reasonable - but last year Tory’s picked up seats they have never held before, that’s party of their position this time, it made the true picture of what Labour needed to do this time that much harder set in past history of seats and council, in this way the bar was actually higher for Labour in this years locals, hence the poor headlines they got didn’t truly represent what was going on for them this year, particularly in this places it’s only a third of the council up.

    Those headlines of Labour underperforming probably saved big dog and allowed him to stay until the next election, but it was based on spin and misconception really because it was not based on the index widgets you have.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341

    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Opinion pollsters also take a lot of respondents' time. Half an hour of ploughing through question after question on what sort of cheese Dominic Raab would be, and that is after wading through an even longer poll on crisp flavours for the pollster's paying customer.

    And polls try to make up for bad sampling with heavy weighting.

    I'd like to see the raw result of a simple one question poll with a huge response, perhaps by tacking it on to a popular web site such as the BBC or Google. And even that would automatically exclude voters with no web access.
    I don't think any methodology can correct for the problems of self selecting (ie voodoo) polls.

  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,842
    edited June 2022

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate and coming from slightly left-field helps a lot.
    In 1989 perhaps but by 1990 John Major had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, both far higher positions than Ben Wallace or Penny Mordaunt.
    I suppose that's true ; but I remember Major's profile in 1990 seeming very low. There was a certain amount of mystification and bemusement about his speed of his rise in the press, I remember.

    He'd held those jobs for very little time, relatively, and a lot of people's response was : "Who ?"
    Yes, he'd only been Chief Sec Treasury a year or so previous and that job was in those days not deemed very important.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    I’m not surprised Yougov are more bent than an 8 bob note. Their main business probably won’t suffer, tho. Businesses quite happily pay money for fake polling they can nobble and use to convince customers/other businesses to give them money.

    Shitty business all round.
  • valleyboyvalleyboy Posts: 605

    dixiedean said:

    Wasn't 2017 a polling fail too?
    Sure. It picked up the drift towards Labour during the campaign. But nowhere near the extent of it.
    Plenty more were shocked to the core by '17 than '15.

    Though David Herdson called it on here the night before. His methodology was to go out and talk to people.
    Yes, it was obvious on the doorstep that Labour were rapidly gaining ground. I am convinced another 7 days would have brought a Labour government.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    FPT

    It's ironic that the rail strike is supposed to damage the government if it does in fact prevent LD activists from travelling to Tiverton and therefore increases the chances of a Tory hold.
  • FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,005
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
    The military establishment does what any establishment would do - self-propagate. Another cold war is the generals' dream. Plenty of money hosed at defence while never having to fight the war. Unlike Afghan or Iraq, for example, where fighting had to be done.
    But a Russian defeat might mean there would be less of an argument for defence spending.

    You could argue we are already in a new cold war with China. But with Russia it very much depends on the outcome of the war. A quick humiliation for Putin means things could be nipped in the bud. The 90s after all saw a peace dividend.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926
    algarkirk said:

    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Opinion pollsters also take a lot of respondents' time. Half an hour of ploughing through question after question on what sort of cheese Dominic Raab would be, and that is after wading through an even longer poll on crisp flavours for the pollster's paying customer.

    And polls try to make up for bad sampling with heavy weighting.

    I'd like to see the raw result of a simple one question poll with a huge response, perhaps by tacking it on to a popular web site such as the BBC or Google. And even that would automatically exclude voters with no web access.
    I don't think any methodology can correct for the problems of self selecting (ie voodoo) polls.

    These days it is easier than you'd think to detect multiple responses from the same source, and if you can get a response of over a million, who cares if some herbert has voted a hundred times.

    And it is not just voodoo polls that suffer from self-selection. It is not as if people can be compelled to answer polls. Phone polls (and face to face polls although I think these are no longer used) suffer from response bias, and panels are made up of volunteers, often political activists and even PBers!

  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate and coming from slightly left-field helps a lot.
    In 1989 perhaps but by 1990 John Major had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, both far higher positions than Ben Wallace or Penny Mordaunt.
    Hadn’t he only been in one of those jobs a week though? He had been hidden away as chief sec to treasury the longest (why is chief Secretary to treasury seldom heard of?) so little was known of him or heard from him until he was PM? But if Major spent much time in Boris crosshairs as the one they are saying most likely to take over from Boris, BigDog would have done for him, so you fear for Penny a bit?

    We need to check coming front pages for little negative stories about Mourdant appearing, as that’s how it started when Number Ten murdered Sunak’s career.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    LOL - for a more generous take to YouGov, see @Malmesbury. It suggests he doesn't want to get into a ruinously expensive libel suit over it.
    If he has libelled YouGov then what are they supposed to do? If they don't send the lawyers letter and get an apology then people say it must be true, they're not even challenging it. If they do, then you say lawyers are involved so it must be true.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don't it seems.
    He could well have left that lot up if we had the USA's more sensible views on freedom of speech. It's the fact the UK is the world capital of libel actions that meant he had to remove it.
  • Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    LOL - for a more generous take to YouGov, see @Malmesbury. It suggests he doesn't want to get into a ruinously expensive libel suit over it.
    If he has libelled YouGov then what are they supposed to do? If they don't send the lawyers letter and get an apology then people say it must be true, they're not even challenging it. If they do, then you say lawyers are involved so it must be true.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don't it seems.
    He could well have left that lot up if we had the USA's more sensible views on freedom of speech. It's the fact the UK is the world capital of libel actions that meant he had to remove it.
    Amber Heard might not be quite in agreement.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    algarkirk said:

    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Opinion pollsters also take a lot of respondents' time. Half an hour of ploughing through question after question on what sort of cheese Dominic Raab would be, and that is after wading through an even longer poll on crisp flavours for the pollster's paying customer.

    And polls try to make up for bad sampling with heavy weighting.

    I'd like to see the raw result of a simple one question poll with a huge response, perhaps by tacking it on to a popular web site such as the BBC or Google. And even that would automatically exclude voters with no web access.
    I don't think any methodology can correct for the problems of self selecting (ie voodoo) polls.

    Unfortunately all polls are now self-selecting in their sample, because the response rate for those contacted is so low. If pollsters gave figures for the number of people contacted who didn't respond it would show what a strange small sample the results are based on.

    I've thought about this a bit and, besides from making responding to opinion polls mandatory, I can't think of any way round it. You don't know how the small minority who choose to respond to opinion polls differ from the large majority who are too busy, pissed off, paranoid or otherwise not disposed to respond.

    Like DavidL said earlier. I'm surprised they do as well as they do.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    dixiedean said:

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
    Yes
    I like it James. Past history is very important element on assessing the potency of the result, and we often miss that perspective on PB 👍🏻

    “A con win on Redwall council! Starmer in MELTDOWN” but it’s the seat on Redwall council that’s been blue for most 100 years, the one if lost points to a 97 meltdown.

    We have a poster here called HY who set Labour a Bar of winning Swindon Council if they hope to win the general election. Win six from nine seats that bar sounds reasonable - but last year Tory’s picked up seats they have never held before, that’s party of their position this time, it made the true picture of what Labour needed to do this time that much harder set in past history of seats and council, in this way the bar was actually higher for Labour in this years locals, hence the poor headlines they got didn’t truly represent what was going on for them this year, particularly in this places it’s only a third of the council up.

    Those headlines of Labour underperforming probably saved big dog and allowed him to stay until the next election, but it was based on spin and misconception really because it was not based on the index widgets you have.
    Thank you, that's indeed why I set about creating this: it's far too common to either manage expectations before the election, or put huge spin on the results afterwards, in precisely the ways you say. Having an algorithmic approach obviates all that.

    I will aim to post the scores each week from now on, and give a summary with graphs and everything every now and then.
    Cool 😎

    We are spoilt on this site, all different people bringing different dishes to the party table, making this the must be haunt for psephology.

    Being on PB is what God’s Beard must feel like when it’s getting stroked.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Pulpstar said:



    Both @Topping & @Dura_Ace served. Their view of top brass' reasoning and military matters in general is I would say... more informed than most.

    Generally, but not always, once officers get to OF-7 and higher they behave more or less just like any other senior civil servant with all of the blame displacement, arse covering and empire building that implies.

    I actually think the MoD will take the opposite lesson from the Ukraine-Russian festivities. They won't gear up for a return to Cold War levels of defence spending but conclude that the Russians are crap so let's get rid of a load of heavy armour and artillery.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
    Farage would likely return to lead RefUK if Hunt replaced Boris as Tory leader and PM
    No he wouldn't. Why are you worrying about Leavers? We've left!

    Hunt/Mordaunt/Wallace need to calm the Blue wall without frightening the RedWall. It's a tough balance to achieve, but at present Johnson has pissed off both sets of voters.
    Hunt would likely try and return to May's Brexit Deal again, that would inevitably see some Tory Leavers leak to Farage and RefUK
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,955
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    darkage said:

    The more I think about it, it feels to me like the tories are in existential crisis. They could well be on the cusp of a "collapse of the liberal party" wipeout in the next general election. It is early 2019 revisited. Johnson's reinvention of the conservative party looks at the moment like it has completely failed. So, someone has to repeat what Johnson did in 2019, but with the first priority being to fix market credibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Time is short.

    Maybe Penny can reinvent them as the caring but discliplined party. Attractive matron.

    The main alternative, and favourite for the moment, is Hunt - comparatively a focus on pure professionalism. I'm not sure how far that would go, or how long it would necessarily last, though.
    Risk with Hunt is not only do the Tories fail to win back any voters lost to Labour or the LDs but they also leak Leavers back to RefUK and end up on the 20 to 25% they were on before May resigned and even worse than the 33% they are on now
    Farage would likely return to lead RefUK if Hunt replaced Boris as Tory leader and PM
    Farage is as busted a flush as Boris.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    dixiedean said:

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
    Yes
    I like it James. Past history is very important element on assessing the potency of the result, and we often miss that perspective on PB 👍🏻

    “A con win on Redwall council! Starmer in MELTDOWN” but it’s the seat on Redwall council that’s been blue for most 100 years, the one if lost points to a 97 meltdown.

    We have a poster here called HY who set Labour a Bar of winning Swindon Council if they hope to win the general election. Win six from nine seats that bar sounds reasonable - but last year Tory’s picked up seats they have never held before, that’s party of their position this time, it made the true picture of what Labour needed to do this time that much harder set in past history of seats and council, in this way the bar was actually higher for Labour in this years locals, hence the poor headlines they got didn’t truly represent what was going on for them this year, particularly in this places it’s only a third of the council up.

    Those headlines of Labour underperforming probably saved big dog and allowed him to stay until the next election, but it was based on spin and misconception really because it was not based on the index widgets you have.
    To win a majority Labour need to win both Swindon seats and yet the Tories still control the council
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901
    Still think that it is interesting/relevant that no-one has become PM for over 100 years without first being LotO, CofE, HomeSec or ForSec.

  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    Really? Would you expect YouGov to say/do nothing?
    It's like ducking witches.

    - If they float, they are witches. Burn them.
    - if they sink, they are innocent. Shame really.
    Well Curtis clearly had pressure applied to make such a statement. The whiff of lawyers threatening to bankrupt him was very very easy to spot. Their remit is certainly not unalloyed truth.
    If you don't want lawyers involved, its a good idea not to publicly libel your former employer.

    If he could defend what he said, he'd not have backed down, the fact that he has so rapidly and unequivocally suggests he knows full well that he can't.
    LOL - for a more generous take to YouGov, see @Malmesbury. It suggests he doesn't want to get into a ruinously expensive libel suit over it.
    If he has libelled YouGov then what are they supposed to do? If they don't send the lawyers letter and get an apology then people say it must be true, they're not even challenging it. If they do, then you say lawyers are involved so it must be true.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don't it seems.
    He could well have left that lot up if we had the USA's more sensible views on freedom of speech. It's the fact the UK is the world capital of libel actions that meant he had to remove it.
    Amber Heard might not be quite in agreement.
    I followed the US election results closely. The view amongst US lawyers was that the voting machine manufacturers would have a tough time with libel against Giuliani and a couple of other bonkers Trumpers (Can't remember the mad woman's name) - it'd have been trivial in UK courts.
    Depp's team had to prove malice against Heard in court, it's a much much tougher job than in the UK courts. That's the legal fact - that the US jury came to conclude he'd gone over that very very high bar and the UK judge reckoned he'd failed to clear the much lower one is simply evidence that the US jury was wildly more pro-Depp than the UK judge (Or the UK judge much more pro Heard). The US bar for libel is way higher than the UK.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926

    algarkirk said:

    DavidL said:

    The fact is that polling is largely useless. The challenges of getting a representative sample in an age of mobile phones, self selecting panels of people with way more than the average interest and differential responses between age groups (who in turn have differential turnout) are all well known and of course the companies do their best to compensate for each of these.

    What they cannot do is really compensate for a vote that actually matters as opposed to the answer to a hypothetical question. So, right now, huge numbers of natural Tories are disgusted by having a liar for a PM and the fall in public standards. Hypothetically, many or most will want to vote for someone else and in irrelevant bye elections they may well do so. But choosing a government is a different matter. At that point many, not all by any means, will swallow that irritation or disgust and vote for them.

    It is a measure of the skills of pollsters, built on many, many past errors that they get as close as they do but I can fully understand the temptation to tweak the raw data towards the government of the day, whether that is Conservative or Labour. Their best guess at general elections is where the validity of their prognostications the rest of the time are tested, hence the "gold standard" that ICM had for many years, now probably held by Yougov. This matters to their business and could seriously undermine the confidence of clients asking more mundane questions. Given their uncertainties there is no guarantee that the raw data will give a better result.

    Opinion pollsters also take a lot of respondents' time. Half an hour of ploughing through question after question on what sort of cheese Dominic Raab would be, and that is after wading through an even longer poll on crisp flavours for the pollster's paying customer.

    And polls try to make up for bad sampling with heavy weighting.

    I'd like to see the raw result of a simple one question poll with a huge response, perhaps by tacking it on to a popular web site such as the BBC or Google. And even that would automatically exclude voters with no web access.
    I don't think any methodology can correct for the problems of self selecting (ie voodoo) polls.

    These days it is easier than you'd think to detect multiple responses from the same source, and if you can get a response of over a million, who cares if some herbert has voted a hundred times.

    And it is not just voodoo polls that suffer from self-selection. It is not as if people can be compelled to answer polls. Phone polls (and face to face polls although I think these are no longer used) suffer from response bias, and panels are made up of volunteers, often political activists and even PBers!

    Speaking of political activists answering polls, next time the House of Commons updates its register of members' interests, have a look at how many MPs report payments from polling companies.
    https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/contents2122.htm
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
    Which he was against Heseltine and Hurd in November 1990 once Maggie resigned and Tebbit declined to run.

    By 1995 however Redwood ran against Major as the true Thatcher heir as would Portillo had he not bottled it
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901
    HYUFD said:

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
    Which he was against Heseltine and Hurd in November 1990 once Maggie resigned and Tebbit declined to run.

    By 1995 however Redwood ran against Major as the true Thatcher heir as would Portillo had he not bottled it

    How quaint. The Thatcherites are long gone now. No Thatcherite style Conservative within a sniff of a chance of becoming PM.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,715

    Pulpstar said:

    I'd originally dismissed Curtis' tweet as nonsense, but his subsequent retraction obviously written at lawyerpoint makes me think his now deleted tweet had more than a scintilla of truth to it.

    I think people are only surprised if they took an exaggerated view of what Chris said.

    He said, basically, that YouGov showed a smaller Tory lead than other pollsters, supported by the MRP, and YouGov were concerned that they would lose business if they were wrong when everyone else was right, so they found reasons to nudge it in the Tories' favour while sticking with a defensible position.

    That doesn't seem hard to believe. Of course things have got a bit sidetracked by the Zahawi, which was a joke, but it was only funny because of the obvious truth of the above.

    if we go back to the PB threads, I'm sure that's what we'll find - note of the changes and discussion of whether this was a sop or not.
    I thought his most interesting point was that a poll carried out after the 2017 debates showed Corbyn to have won and won well. This was claimed not to have been published due to pressure from those higher up the chain.

    If true it does show that polling companies may not be independent of the political process. I mean Trafalger has always seemed an outlier in the US.
    If one is claiming to be scientific, one has to accept that sometimes the results one gets are not going to be the results one expected.
  • Jonathan said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
    Which he was against Heseltine and Hurd in November 1990 once Maggie resigned and Tebbit declined to run.

    By 1995 however Redwood ran against Major as the true Thatcher heir as would Portillo had he not bottled it

    How quaint. The Thatcherites are long gone now. No Thatcherite style Conservative within a sniff of a chance of becoming PM.
    Liz Truss would beg to differ.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited June 2022
    Jonathan said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
    Which he was against Heseltine and Hurd in November 1990 once Maggie resigned and Tebbit declined to run.

    By 1995 however Redwood ran against Major as the true Thatcher heir as would Portillo had he not bottled it

    How quaint. The Thatcherites are long gone now. No Thatcherite style Conservative within a sniff of a chance of becoming PM.
    Raab, Patel, McVey, Rees Mogg, Truss, even Redwood again potentially could all be future Thatcherite Tory leadership candidates
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    HYUFD said:
    In Javid's world it's OK to avoid paying tax though by playing dubious games with residency though so I'll treat his opinion as not worth the atoms used in the message.
  • Andy_JS said:
    In the style of XKCD "no ... has ever ..." I strongly suspect Boris will be the end of the "no Prime Minister has gone after four but before five years" 'rule'.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,117
    edited June 2022
    HYUFD said:

    Jonathan said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you've heard of Keir Starmer 36% say would do a good job, 32% otherwise but they haven't all heard of him.

    Wallace does better too, indeed I'd support him for PM

    Wallace and other pb fav Penny Mordaunt have huge don't knows. Rishi is second on positives but also quite high on negatives. Interesting that Dominic Raab is quite high on positive ratings; does he fancy the top job?
    I expect John Major would have been very high up the list of don't knows in 1990, too. Sometimes being a relatively blank slate, and coming from slightly left-field, helps a lot.
    Curiously, Major marketed himself as the carrier of Thatcherite flame at the time.
    Which he was against Heseltine and Hurd in November 1990 once Maggie resigned and Tebbit declined to run.

    By 1995 however Redwood ran against Major as the true Thatcher heir as would Portillo had he not bottled it

    How quaint. The Thatcherites are long gone now. No Thatcherite style Conservative within a sniff of a chance of becoming PM.
    Raab, Patel, McVey, Rees Mogg, Truss, even Redwood again potentially could all be future Thatcherite Tory leadership candidates
    Isn't that a bit like saying that SKS is (say) a Butskellite? A completely anachronistic comparison. Unless one is going on blonde hair and stern expression for the tame photographer retained full time.*

    *which, on reflection, was perhaps not something Mrs T would do, at least for herself personally as opposed to No 10 as a whole, let alone a cabinet post
  • maxhmaxh Posts: 815
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    fpt

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    For Nick Palmer, Dura_Ace and others who think we should negotiate with Putin by giving away parts of Ukraine.

    What I think "should" happen (I'll should you right through that fucking window - M. Tucker) doesn't matter at all.

    What's relevant is what's possible and likely to happen. The Ukrainians can't kick the Russians out of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and the Russians can't get to the Dneiper.

    So what's likely to happen is a negotiated ceasefire along those lines that neither side has any intention of honouring in the longer term.
    Yeah the whole "Nick Palmer, Dura et al Russian apologists" thing is a bizarre PB tick that sees anyone who tries to identify a possible solution which doesn't involve a complete and utter Ukraine victory as Putin's stooge.

    Perhaps we should go back to twitter footage of a Russian platoon in a contact dismounting its APC to draw meaningful insight from the war.
    It really is not. Just before this war began, Nick was going on about how the US and UK warning that Russia was going to invade Ukraine as wrong, as it might 'poke' Russia into the war.

    It was bullshit (I believe Nick has since moderated his position). He also later went on about how we guaranteed Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards. Which appears not only to be wrong, but immoral as it gives Russia a great deal of power over their (in the minds) vassal states.

    Those states are independent (yes, Russia Duma, even Lithuania). It should be up to them to decide - especially when they have a country near them acting as Russia is.

    I am perfectly willing to listen to people who want to highlight any solution to this mess. I also hope they're willing to listen to why forcing Ukraine to give up territory (again) is a really bad idea in the medium and long term. But they rarely do.
    The only people forcing Ukraine to give up territory is because of facts on the ground. Pretending that those facts don't exist is bizarre and untypical of PB.

    People comment on the Ukraine war as though it has some predestined end whereby the forces of good overcome the bad guys.

    The world is full of countries which have changed borders as a result of military engagements. Why whisper it but some have involved Great Britain if you can believe that.

    The question now is whether Russia is strong enough to do the same. We shall see. But one thing we don't seem to be doing is going to war against Russia to prevent it happening.
    I'm not pretending the facts on the ground don't exist. If you want to make that sort of argument, then I'd say they you're saying Ukraine has already been defeated. Something you seem to have been saying since February 24th. ;(

    The point is fuck-all to do with 'changed borders'. It is to do with the fact that the borders changed in 2014, and Russia just invaded again. Giving Russia territory now is not a guarantee of a peace for even a few years - as Dura_Ace admits.

    We should have faced up to Russia in 2014. Or over Syria. We did not, and it emboldened Putin. If we force Ukraine to give in now, then he will be further emboldened.

    The more Russia is weakened now, the better the future of the world in the medium and long term.
    I didn't say Ukraine has already been defeated; I said that people such as yourself were making huge leaps of logic based upon 30-second youtube clips.
    Or maybe listening to people like Phillips O'Brien, Lawrence Freedman, Michael Clarke and assorted retired generals who do this sort of thing for a living?
    You mean the retired generals who say the answer is for more defence spending and (for example) the UK public should be put on a war footing? Those retired generals?
    I've heard one or two generals say that. I've not heard that from people like David Petraeus Mark Hertling who have been very thorough on the war.

    You are entitled to have a negative view of our military establishment and I'm sure have your own reasons for that. But it strikes me as rather sad if you allow that to colour your perception of everything else.
    The military establishment does what any establishment would do - self-propagate. Another cold war is the generals' dream. Plenty of money hosed at defence while never having to fight the war. Unlike Afghan or Iraq, for example, where fighting had to be done.
    Or, just possibly, they speak from a certain perspective with integrity i.e. they genuinely believe their solution is the best one, based on lots of expertise. Or even: there is variation within any 'establishment'. It seems a foolish idea to dismiss as a bloc the group who have most expertise on this topic in such a sweeping statement.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,786

    Andy_JS said:
    In the style of XKCD "no ... has ever ..." I strongly suspect Boris will be the end of the "no Prime Minister has gone after four but before five years" 'rule'.
    Are you predicting that he will be removed before the next election or that he will call one and lose it?
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    HYUFD said:

    dixiedean said:

    For the past few months, I've been working on an algorithmic approach to working out how well or badly parties have done in council by-elections. It uses the current council make-up, each party's strength, the past history in the ward, recent results and the by-election result to calculate a numeric value. I call this the Good Week/Bad Week index (GWBWI). It also converts this numerica value into an equivalent number of seats won/lost based on the average value of the seat for the party defending: this is called the Adjusted Seat Value (ASV)

    GWBWI for 9/6/22

    LDm +65
    Lab +43
    Grn +1
    Con -143

    This is the worst weekly Con score since the May council elections. Sevenoaks on its own would have outscored every week so far.

    Adjusted Seat Value

    LDm +1.1
    Lab +0.7
    Grn +0.0
    Con -2.4

    Are you the bloke who does that on Vote UK?
    Yes
    I like it James. Past history is very important element on assessing the potency of the result, and we often miss that perspective on PB 👍🏻

    “A con win on Redwall council! Starmer in MELTDOWN” but it’s the seat on Redwall council that’s been blue for most 100 years, the one if lost points to a 97 meltdown.

    We have a poster here called HY who set Labour a Bar of winning Swindon Council if they hope to win the general election. Win six from nine seats that bar sounds reasonable - but last year Tory’s picked up seats they have never held before, that’s party of their position this time, it made the true picture of what Labour needed to do this time that much harder set in past history of seats and council, in this way the bar was actually higher for Labour in this years locals, hence the poor headlines they got didn’t truly represent what was going on for them this year, particularly in this places it’s only a third of the council up.

    Those headlines of Labour underperforming probably saved big dog and allowed him to stay until the next election, but it was based on spin and misconception really because it was not based on the index widgets you have.
    To win a majority Labour need to win both Swindon seats and yet the Tories still control the council
    Thank you for backing up what I said you said.
This discussion has been closed.