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The LAB lead is getting narrower – politicalbetting.com
The LAB lead is getting narrower – politicalbetting.com
As we have seen on previous threads many Tory supporters are getting a little bit of the confidence back with the latest R&W Paul having the deficit down to just 15%. The same trend has been seen with other firms and we are getting a bit closer to the point where a LAB majority might just be in the balance.
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A poll showing Trump with a commanding lead in Iowa belies the idea that any of his rivals have a secret sauce in the state.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/21/trump-is-barely-campaigning-in-iowa-hes-still-crushing-the-field-there-00112109
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqnnvpfqxt0
Like Trump?
On Trump, he looks like he's headed for violation of his bail terms in Georgia - which afaics restrict what he's already done on social media.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66576277
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/aug/22/comedian-lorna-rose-treen-funniest-joke-fringe
Statistical bobbling is normal. The lead might shrink a bit more. But the Conservative goose is almost certainly cooked.
As I mentioned 2 weeks ago when Labour had leads of c. 24%, no one, repeat no one, should pay attention to August opinion polling.
You'd have thought people on here would know this.
And this comment 'One thing is looking pretty clear and that the days of Labour leads of 20% plus are no longer there' is wild. Two days ago YouGov had a poll with a Labour lead of 19%.
Anyway avoid August polling. End of.
42% is fine, heck it certainly means that he'll win Iowa.
But if support consolidates around one or two opponents (which the Caucus format encourages), then it means that we might well have a proper contest.
I would be very surprised if the lead did not narrow further.
Queen Elizabeth was horrified by police conduct at the Battle of Orgreave and described footage of mounted officers charging into picketing miners as “awful”.
Her reaction to the incident during the miners’ strike was disclosed by Julian Haviland, former political editor, of The Times in an interview with Times Radio this summer before his death this month. It will be broadcast this morning, just after 11am.
Haviland, who worked for The Times between 1981 and 1986, also said that Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at the time, would drink a large scotch or two before her weekly audience with the Queen, saying she was “the only person in the world of whom Margaret Thatcher was frightened”.
In the interview, Haviland said he confirmed the story about the Queen’s horror at the events at Orgreave, but it was dropped as incrimination of the sources was likely.
“It turned out there were only two other people in the room when she had said it,” Haviland said. “She had said it — I got that absolutely confirmed.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-queen-horses-miners-orgreave-times-radio-3qbxpr0ml
Pro-independence support will be split at the bellwether Rutherglen by-election, as the Greens have confirmed they will stand a candidate likely to take votes from the SNP.
Despite being in government with their fellow Scottish nationalists, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater’s party will announce a candidate on Wednesday for Humza Yousaf’s first electoral test since becoming SNP leader.
Labour are favourites for the seat and will be buoyed by the Greens, the Scottish Socialist Party and the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition standing — all of which are pro-independence.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/greens-will-challenge-snp-in-crunch-rutherglen-hamilton-west-by-election-fs9b9mdx6
Unfortunately this doesn't fit the facts. I am not a fanatical supporter of Labour. I'm left of centre and consider myself (or like to consider myself) occasionally radical and off-grid. The last 4 votes I have cast have been 2 for the LibDems, 1 for the Greens, and 1 for Labour.
I like making political bets, on which I am usually successful, and when Labour had stonking leads in all of 14 days ago I posted on here not to take any notice of August opinion polling.
The Conservatives have Ratnered their brand. The polls will not significantly narrow so enjoy your surprise.
Nobody believed that 20+% leads were real or likely. So a drop towards something more realistic is not "oh no what is happening to Labour?", just an implausibly massive lead correcting to a massive lead.
We can see the LD uptick. Voters very clearly want ABC. Which means they aren't turning out to vote Labour in unwinnable seats. They're going to vote tactically. Both Labour and the Lads have lost deposits in some seats whilst winning massive swings in other seats. Tactical voting!
So of course the Labour vote will drop a little and others in ABC rise a little. People aren't stupid. UNS isn't a thing any more. They'll vote the Tory out and that doesn't mean just voting Labour.
People are a lot more savvy now than even 1997 about how to vote tactically.
The boats? As ever Lab doesn't have an answer so that is a flush and even bien pensant centre righties like me realise that the Rwanda policy sounds worse and is far more impractical than it is nasty.
Inflation is coming down, wages are robust so I'm not sure the Cons won't do as badly as even tightening polls suggest.
“Nadine Dorries has 'abandoned' Mid Bedfordshire voters - council”
We all hope that inflation comes down from the lofty heights of recent times. But even if it gets back to the bank target of 2%, that only cements in place the huge rises in the cost of everything which wages haven't anywhere near kept up with.
I fully expect that the intellechewal wing of the party will send out 30p to insist that everything is now cheaper and anyone saying it isn't can do one. The rest will just do their usual sneer as they knowingly lie. Either way, people will still be feeling the pain of what your lot did to the economy and vote accordingly. You say "Labour doesn't have an answer" to small boats - not only is that not true, but if it were true does that not just neutralise the issue as the Tories don't have an answer either?
(To be fair the same happened in England as well but it was particularly egregious in North Britain and Wales.)
SKS may not be creating much enthusiasm but he is being very successful in making disaffected Tories say meh. He isn't going to frighten them to the polls.
The Ratnered brand moment was Liz Truss.
Those catastrophic 49 days trashed the Conservative brand.
They won't get over it this time, nor probably for a decade.
This, incidentally, is why I have always been a supporter of the Royal family despite being on the left.
Her war on the working class allowed the working class to buy their own homes.
1. No one wins on the day by 20%+ unless the situation is truly exceptional, like 1931.
2. The right of centre vote in this country is well above 30%, even on current polling. But, Reform showed themselves to quite incapable of winning votes on the ground in recent by-elections.
3. Inflation has fallen below the rate of increase in wages, and that will remain the case up until the next election. Indeed, the gap between inflation and wage rises will widen.
4. The Conservative vote is depressed by the number of. people saying don't know/won't say.
5. A lot of people have done very well, over the past thirteen years.
6. Unlike the 1993-97 period, there have been some good results for the Conservatives against the run of play, in by-elections and local elections.
As opposed to that:
1. It's plainly time for a change.
2. The government is incompetent and some of its MP's are corrupt.
3. SKS doesn't frighten most of the electorate, unlike Corbyn.
All of which points to Labour enjoying the sort of lead the Conservatives had in 2010, at the next election, barring events.
They'll almost all (and I'm being generous there) be paper candidates, but that's another matter.
The solution of course is good old fashioned Tory council house building. Copy SuperMac.
I think the candidates' debate is quite likely to decide whether or not there's a clear challenger to Trump, though.
In no possible scenario were the government threatened with forced removal. Scargill was a mentalist who couldn't take the whole of the mining industry with him, never mind escalating it into a general strike.
Surely this is a prime example of shit policy set into concrete by multiple governments of multiple parties.
It is undoubtedly true that there has been a 5% drop from the 20% Labour lead in the last R&W and 15% this one. It is also true that that represents a 5% narrowing of the R&W recorded lead since that poll .
However the recorded lead in this R&W poll is exactly the same, 15%, as the one they took on 30 July. Three weeks ago.
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-30-july-2023/
So, it would have equally been true to say, and to publish this header about, the days of 20% leads being over at the end of July. Only for them to come back two weeks later. Are we not getting a bit over excited here?
SWXXHX
This is not as helpful as I thought...
On that basis, we could hire 50,000 immigration officials for a year and clear the backlog fully, save the ongoing hotel costs, then downsize to a level we can process as they come.
I suspect we'd need a fraction of that number, but even that offers a cost saving.
The long asylum seeker backlog is a political choice that actively wastes money. Typical of this fiscally irresponsible government.
And that would never do.
https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/200371526-st-benets-archiepiscopal-chapel-42-greenhill-gardens-edinburgh-edinburgh
Firstly, the Tories have not really had good results "against the run of play" in local elections. The results in May were absolutely dire even with the low base of May's last local elections in 2019.
Secondly, it just isn't true that "a lot of people have done very well over the past 13 years". There are arguments the Conservatives can make over the failure to make any material economic progress over their period in office relating to matters outside their control, and the macro picture is made up of some falls and some rises, but it isn't plausible to argue that there is a big constituency of people who feel they have prospered since 2010.
Thirdly, while you're right that parties rarely win elections by 20%+, That doesn't imply that the election will be more like 2010 (margin 7%) than 1997 (margin 12.5%).
My personal view is this is somewhere between 1997 and 2010. I agree Starmer's Labour don't enjoy the dominance of Blair's shortly before 1997. But they are regularly polling well above 40% with large double digit leads.
So the deliberate backlog of cases suits them perfectly. Not only do they avoid having to accept that so many of the asylum claims are valid, they make the crisis even more acute and thus drive even more of a response from 30p voters.
But remember folks, "As ever Lab doesn't have an answer" - conversely I have to read that this non-plan being implemented in such a ham-fisted way is not only a plan but a properly conceived and implemented plan. Which means the current backlog is the plan.
And, most owner occupiers, without, or with low, mortgages, have done pretty well since 2010.
That was perhaps the single worst decision of the Thatcher years in relation to the country's political economy.
On the local elections, though, I just don't think you can read anything into a good result in Slough (where the Labour-run Council was a basket-case) for the other 99.9% of the country.
On people feeling better off, if you're relying on people with mortgages to deliver for Sunak, you might want to think a bit about that.
Except that the only poll with a modern methodology to extract shy Tory voters was the first one, gold standard ICM. Who got the final answer right. So everyone does it that way now.
Compare ICM then to polls now and the gap is about the same size, with both big parties doing worse now than then.
You could use more analysis and less empty rhetoric.
There is no real enthusiasm for either party among many.
Overall, there has been a very slight narrowing in the average Labour lead, but at this stage it looks like noise rather than anything significant. I have not detected any closing of the Sunak/Starmer gap, though. But maybe I have missed some of that polling.
Labour spent buckets of cash between 97 and 2010 and elected not to put it in to housebuilding.
In 2010 the LDs had their chance and didnt push for housebuilding either in the coalition.
The Tories since 2016 have been a shitshow and havent built much either.
In the 30 years since Thatcher went all we have had is moany twats who havent done anything about the things theyre complaining about, but its so much more comforting to blame a dead woman than actually do something.
While retaining policies designed to restrain/prevent infrastructure construction.
Justice WILL be heard: New plan hatched by Ministry of Justice to drag criminals to court after Lucy Letby's cowardly refusal to hear sentencing
nIRhttps://www.gbnews.com/news/lucy-letby-government-rule-change-hearings-sentence
Bloody Tories using this tragedy to point score. Not sure they thought this through
I think we are looking at 2019 in reverse, with the Tories on sub 200 seats, possibly significantly fewer.
I am no fan of the wooden, verbose Starmer but he is a master of setting up heffalump traps for the Tories. He thinks strategically, at least as far as elections go.
I don't disagree that central banks should have targeted a broader measure of inflation, BTW. Consumer price inflation was low because of imported consumer goods from China and elsewhere. They should target a measure of inflation in the domestic economy, like the GDP deflator, which was signalling that rates were too low. This is actually what the theoretical arguments in favour of inflation targeting would suggest. Targeting asset prices themselves would be a mistake, for lots of reasons.
Otherwise it's performative justice - with, as others have noted, the pros and cons.
Have you anything to say about the essential point ?
The Conservative governments of the 80s funded much of their spending from asset sales. It was a neat political trick which their successors adopted - and over the course of decades very bad for the country's economy.
Unlike you appear to be, I am not particularly attached to any of our political parties.
I think SKS goes with the flow. Hes sensibly doing the dont scare the horses act, but post election the horses get to see if they should be frightened or not. I find him a dull politician a manager not a leader, like Sunak in many ways. Being a lawyer he will revert to type and pass loads more pointless laws to give the impression he is doing something, but the fundamentals of the nations problem will remain unaddressed.
RefUK on 7% to squeeze too for the Tories.
If Labour does get a UK wide majority gains from the SNP may therefore be crucial even if it fails to get an overall majority in England
For example 'Liberal' as in 'Left-Liberal' is imo highly authoritarian (eg the often unnecessary big government dictatorial tendencies of the Greens, which are often anti-green). My take is that right-liberal to do with setting / incentivising goals and frameworks to the appropriate extent and expecting solutions to self-organise within a framework as far as possible is more benign.
Similarly for the Ecoloon vs Petrolhead thing. Not all people who enjoy motor vehicles are also ignorami wrt environmental policies; there is an unthinking minority of nutters (see GB News and increasingly columnists in the Spectator), but most are rational.
I think the framework responds a bit to much to current political manoeuvrings. The current Govt is on a desperate search for political life-rafts and will burn their own achievements down to try and find one underneath.
Why pick on council receipts, you could focus on oil revenues or defence spending. The past is gone its only the future that matters and none of the political parties have any plan to address the lack of housing and infrastructure. Frankly that concerns me a lot more than events in the pre internet era.
Perhaps you could enlighten me on which party I support.
It is hard to see such a restructuring happening again as none of those will be repeated, and large lumps of free money are scarce nowadays.
Here's the table from 2015 to 2019:
Votes per seat won in 2019 was 38k for the Conservatives, 51k for Labour, 336k for the LibDems.
During the Blair period, Labour's efficiency was significantly greater than the Tories'. We can expect this to be the case in GE2024.
But we also have the wildcard of the LibDems' efficiency. If that starts heading down towards 150k, as seems plausible, then the Conservatives are in real trouble.
Much of this depends on people's understanding of tactical voting. My gut feeling is that the LD vote is going to jump en masse to Labour in Con/Lab battles outside the South, but I have no idea whether Lab voters in the Blue Wall™ are going to return the favour and go LD.
Build more houses!