The PCC by-election got 15% turnout. I almost expected worse. It is better than West Midland’s PCC by-election held in 2014 and more or less on par with South Yorkshire’s one.

Newcastle’s turnout was 19%. All other council areas around 13-14%.

And Labour’s Kim McGuinness is elected the new PCC.

This is probably the least credible polling projection I have ever seen:

https://flavible.co.uk/polls/1413

There are plenty of head-scratching gains for both the Tories and the Lib Dems, but if Redcar turns blue I will eat the entire of the late Paddy Ashdown’s hat collection.

Like having Wokingham & Whitney – two of the Tories safest seats in the country – down as LD gains

Not so unlikly to go Tory through it does not seem a key tory target.

Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times reporting Redcar is being seen as Marginal and could fall to the Tories.

Has he got advance preview of the MRP?

Not sure.
Gina Miller has done a rivial to the MRP which is based on October and November polling and shows Labour narrowly ahead here but the Tories ahead in Burnley.

Labour behind in Blyth Valley and Bolsover being the most striking prediction they have.

“Labour behind in Blyth Valley and Bolsover being the most striking prediction they have.”

That’s almost to be expected given the <10% margins.

Redcar would be quite wow though: 55%/33% Lab/Con in 2017.

And perhaps not fitting with the rumour that the Tories are not overtly targeting Sedgefield let alone Redcar.

The Tories apparently expect the MRP to show a 40+ Majority for them. We will see at 10pm.

A reminder that polls are snapshots not prediction. MRP is likely to be a very accurate “nowcast” but polling has rarely been more volatile.

Electoral Calculus are translating a poll lead of 11% of the Tories into a majority of just 32. Seems low to me. It’s also interesting as to how many of the Con gains from Lab are very close (according to their model). Anyway, looking forward to the YouGov poll at 10pm.

MRP has Skinner out by four but Labour four ahead in Blyth, twelve ahead in Wansbeck, eight ahead in Burnley and eight ahead here.

Also Lab ahead by one in Sedgefield.

Brexit Party candidate pulled out here
MRP has it – Lab 40, Con 35, Brexit 14.
Will it make a difference. It’s tightened from 8 to 5 here.

Others Mentioned above.
Labour ahead by 7 in Burnley, 8 in Blyth and 10 in Wansbeck. Tories ahead by two in Bolsover, one in Sedgefield, 5 in Wokingham and 21 in Witney.

They’ll still be on the ballot paper, though.

Lol I misread Wokingham as Workington. Utterly insane that those two seats could now be considered comparably good prospects for the Tories.

Labour is now ahead by two in Workington.

Bluecar

Just spotted that the LibDems came 4th and lost their deposit in a seat they held until 2015.

UNITE seem to be losing a lot of legal actions of late.

They’ve been ordered to pay Turley £75,000 and a similar sum to a far Left activist in the NW.

This sort of behaviour is the sort of thing that has stopped me ever joining a trade union. That’s money raised from honest toil, and handed over in exchange for protection. It is not there to be spent on ideological vanity project which culminate in attacking a woman who has spent the last four and a half years doggedly sticking up for a community devastated by the decline in the British steel industry. She was out on the streets defending them. Where was Len bloody McCluskey?

Polltroll

Just reading your comment from 3 October.

How did the hat collection taste?

Good story about the new young Tory MP working on Christmas Day, ‘cos he didn’t, “want to let the lads down” at the chemical site.

Not the sort of seat you would expect a geeky-looking right-wing, openly gay young tory to do well in, yet the tories absolutely smashed it here (no pun intended) and Redcar has form – the Lib Dem’s even won in 2010.

“attacking a woman who has spent the last four and a half years doggedly sticking up for a community devastated by the decline in the British steel industry.”

I can’t allow that poorly informed comment to stay there without a response.

In fact it is Labour which condemned steelmaking in Redcar in 2008. Tata indicated that they needed to close one of their two remaining UK integrated flat steel works meaning either Redcar or Port Talbot. Despite Redcar being the far more competitive and modern plant of the two, the Labour government pressured Tata to keep Port Talbot open and shut Redcar. For no better reason that they had Plaid breathing down their necks in Wales but felt their core vote in the north east had nowhere else to go. Redcar being in Blair’s locality was also a factional plus point for Gordon Brown and assorted anti-Blairites in government.

The Coalition rescued Redcar for a couple of years but it was always going to be hopelessly uncompetitive without the nearby rolling and finishing capacity which Tata refused to sell, and so it proved.

It is well known in Redcar that Labour sold them down the river hence the Lib Dem victory in 2010 and the Tory win last year. Turley hypocritically whining about the Tories destroying the steel industry happily seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

I don’t think you can hold a woman who became an MP in 2015 responsible for something that happened in 2008. The broader point about the Labour government being at fault for what happened to the steelworks stands.

“I don’t think you can hold a woman who became an MP in 2015 responsible for something that happened in 2008.”

LOL. Labour candidates have spent 40 years blaming every individual Tory candidate in the north for things that happened as far back as 1979. And for the 40 years up until the last election it seemed to work pretty well for them. Now it’s suddenly stopped working they have no other message on the doorstep.