Analysing MORI’s 2009 data
Ipsos MORI have put the aggregated results of all their 2009 polling up on their website here (in fact it’s been up for a week, but I haven’t had chance to look at it properly!). The data is, of course, not particularly up to date (some of it would have been collected over a year ago), but the huge aggregate sample size provides us with some interesting cross breaks.
The overall shares of the vote for the whole of 2009 were CON 42%, LAB 26%, LDEM 19% – the equivalent of a 9.5% swing. If we look at different breakdowns by social class (comparing to MORI’s aggregate figures from the 2005 election campaign) we find that ABC1s have a smaller than average swing to the Conservatives: ABs have swung by 6.5%, C1s by 7%. The larger Conservative swings are in C2s (10% swing) and DEs (13% swing). There’s a similar pattern if you look at tenure – amongst those who own their homes the swing is 6.5%, amongst those with mortgages it is 10.5% and amongst those in local authority or housing association properties the swing is 13%.
This pattern of swing, with voters in groups that traditionally support Labour swinging the most strongly toward the Conservatives, produces a truly startling pattern when we get to MORI’s breaks by type of seat. MORI have the Conservative lead in Lab-v-Con seats with a Labour majority of under 8.7% of 21 points. Depending on exactly what notional figures MORI used and how they treated three way marginals, that represents a swing of around about 12.5%. Looking at Lab-v-Con seats with majorities up to 13.9% the Conservative lead is still 21 points – suggesting an even bigger swing in those seats (somewhere around 14%).
If the Conservative swing is biggest in Lab-v-Con marginals it must be lower elsewhere. It isn’t in safe Labour seats, MORI suggest a swing of 13% there. Part of it is Lib Dem seats, where the swing from Labour to the Conservatives is less than 1% (the swing from LD to Con is 7.4%, but I suspect that under-represents how well the Lib Dems would actually do). Where the big swings in Labour seats are really balanced out seems to be in the Tory heartlands – in seats the Conservatives already hold MORI’s figures only suggest a swing from Labour of 5%.
Of course the Conservative lead has shrunk considerably since last year, but if a pattern of swing like this happened in reality it could hardly be more perfect for the Tories – tons of extra votes in the seats they need to win, but very few extra votes in the seats they already hold where they don’t need them. To be honest though, while I’ve no reason not to trust the figures, it just doesn’t seem believable. Previous elections have never shown differential swings of this degree, we simply don’t get swings of 5% in one type of seat and 14% in another. Perhaps this is something different, perhaps this could be a real realignment election, but while other polls of marginal seats have shown bigger swings in marginals, none have shown swings this much bigger. Still, it’s intriguing…
@AW
“I’ve no reason not to trust the figures, it just doesn’t seem believable”.
Excellent advice for interpreting any poll. Always worth asking ‘does is make sense’.
Alec,
“They need to increase their spending to take up the global economic slack while we need to drawn down our overall indebtedness while expanding our economy through exports.”
Actually the chinese don’t “need” to do anything. Their economic policies might not be doing us any good, but they are working just fine for them. If we can’t compete with the Chinese that is our problem not theirs.
We like to go on about them keeping their currency artificially high, but if that is their choice then so be it, its their currency they can set it how they like. They play by their rules and do what is in their interests and we do the same its just that when they don’t do what we would like or would want them to do we call it cheating.
Peter.
That should of course have been artificially “low” not “high”
Peter.
” If we can’t compete with the Chinese that is our problem not theirs.”
Nail-head, Peter.
Hi all
I am a regular visitor but first time poster. Can someone explain this to me, does the scotish vote inflate the labour share of the polls and if so by how much?
Thank you for your help.
P.S I have predicted a tory victory of approx 40 seats for the last year.
Alec,
“…would you like to be the politician that tells the country they are all stupid for borrowing far more than they could afford?” Sadly this is the crux of the problem.
When GO came as close as he dare to saying this at Conference last year it drew a lot of flak and caused a big wobble in the polls.
GB on the other hand leads by example in the other direction.
It seems the public prefer Ostriches to Voltaire.
Is it any wonder Cameron is so cautious he infuriates many on his own side ?
Topcat,
The answers to your questions are:
1 – Yes
2 – but by such a small amount you would barely notice.
The reasons are two-fold:
1 – Although Lab have a large lead over Con in Scotland, their absolute share of the vote is not significantly higher than for GB overall
2 – Scotland accounts for less than 10% of UK voters.
You might equally ask whether East Anglia inflates the Conservative share of the vote.
Topcat
Scottish polling
To some extent it depends on which pollsters you look at!
The only one to give England as a separate country is MORI.
If you look at the most recent poll the GB figure is 40/32/16, while the English poll is 44/29/17.
It is, of course entirely up to you whether you think that the difference between a 15% and an 8% lead is “such a small amount you would barely notice” as Paul H-J suggests.
Personally, it seems quite significant to me.
@Peter Cairns – “Actually the chinese don’t “need” to do anything. Their economic policies might not be doing us any good, but they are working just fine for them.” No they aren’t, or at least not long term. At present China needs – absolutely needs – us to buy their goods. If they don’t help the global economy unwind the imbalances in an orderly manner they will have an economy of 1.5 billion people collapsing around their ears. They have as much to lose, and possible more, than we do.
@Bill Patrick – your observation re the focus on the CPI is absolutely right. Somewhat bafflingly, Osborne yesterday nailed his colours very firmly to continuing the myopic focus on a 2% CPI, which it could be argued, was the very policy that got us into this mess in the first place.
Topcat
For YouGov Polls -on average-if you recalculate to total sample by excluding the Scotland content, Cons% & the lead over Labour rises by 2.
@ ALEC
” Somewhat bafflingly, Osborne yesterday nailed his colours very firmly to continuing the myopic focus on a 2% CPI, which it could be argued, was the very policy that got us into this mess in the first place.”
This is the second time you have made this innacurate description of GO’s statement.
I will try once more to correct you.
What he actually said under Benchmark 1 of 8–Macroeconomic stability :-
“We will safeguard Britain’s credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate a large part of the structural deficit over a Parliament. Our fiscal policy will seek to help keep interest rates lower for longer. The independent Bank of England will continue to target 2% CPI inflation and will use its new role in prudential supervision to preserve financial stability.”
The last 12 words Alec, mean that BoE will be given responsibility for asset price bubbles.
PAUL H-J
“It seems the public prefer Ostriches to Voltaire.
Is it any wonder Cameron is so cautious he infuriates many on his own side ?”
There was a period when polls indicated a majority supporting reduced public spending-but perhaps that was vs the alternative of tax rises-I can’t remember now.
Have there been any polling questions recently which actually bear out your assumption PAUL?
Timidity on the point is certainly evident from all parties.
@Colin – “The last 12 words Alec, mean that BoE will be given responsibility for asset price bubbles.” I don’t want to upset Anthony again, but I don’t think you can say that. GO hasn’t made it clear at all how he intends to pursue macro economic stability, and I think you might be equating his desire to give the BoE responsibility over banking supervision with a wider role in macro managing the economy. In this I am backed by the CBI and many others. You could be right – it may be his intention that the BoE will have a wide remit to tackle the whole economic picture, and he certainly seems to imply they will have a role to play in identifying government spending levels, but other than that we just don’t know. With all politicians I always tend to employ the ‘suspension of belief’ approach. When I hear a speech I suspend my belief until I have seen the actual policies.
ALEC:-
“With all politicians I always tend to employ the ’suspension of belief’ approach”
In this case I wouldn’t worry too muchn Alec – the clue is in the Title of Benchmark 1:-
” Macroeconomic stability”
BoE is GO’s favoured oversight & regulatory body.His statement needs interpretation from you really.
….needs NO interpretation… !!!
If i remember rightly wasnt there quite a large swing from labour to SNP in a glasgow by election in 2008.
Alec,
“At present China needs – absolutely needs – us to buy their goods.”
We will always buy their goods but maybe not as much. China can and as our wealth declines adapt.
In the last year while the UK and US budget deficits have ballooned and our economies reversed china has kept growing thanks in no small part to a stimulus package aimed at infrastructure developments which was paid for not by debt but by savings.
Already the Chinese economy has shown itself resilient and able to boost domestic demand if required when we go into recession.
If the US doesn’t get its act together soon and like us stop living beyond it’s means then at some time in this decade the Dollars status as a reserve currency will be in doubt, at which point it really will hit the fan.
Peter.
Topcat
…… does the Scotish vote inflate the Labour share of the polls and if so by how much?
Because England is larger and not everyone in Scotland votes Labour, the answer is “Hardly at all.”
What is much more important is that the Conservative vote is dispersed, while Labour is concentrated around Glasgow and the LibDems and SNP have almost everything North of the Central Belt.
This gives Labour a disproportionate advantage in FPTP and the number of Labour votes per MP elected is about a third for each SNP MP or a ninth for the sole Con MP.
The number of Con MP’s will be in the range 0-4 and Labour will have at least 30 more. So if you get a Labour government majority of less than 30, it will be thanks to FPTP electing Scottish Labour MP’s who (unlike the SNP and the Conservative) vote on English Education, NHS, and Justice.
Their constituents and famlies do not much care how these services are managed. Scottish Labour MP’s are just lobby fodder.
It was admitted by a Conservative MP (who thought he was underpaid) that you can do the job on two days a week. Scottish MP’s postbags are empty because MSP’s deal with all the common issues that constituents write to their MP/MSP about. Scottish Labour MP’s, if they arn’t ministers. probably only have a few hours work a week apart from waiting in the bar for the division bell to ring.
My projection is that FPTP at the next election will give Labour three times as many MP’s as Labour on much the same share of the vote, but next time round, if the SNP can get a 5% swing from Labour, FPTP could flip and give the SNP30+ seats, about 15 more than their proportionate share.
That would give them a majority of the Scottish MP’s, and they could revive the pre-devolution objective of secession.
5% swing isn’t that much for a party on a generations long, very gradual advance. Consider what they will have in their favour:
a still popular SP government
a Labour opposition that has not yet adapted to loss of office
a Labour SP opposition on it’s 5th, or more likely 6th leader after twelve years, each less successful than the last
a UK Labour opposition in disarray with at least three factions blaming each other.
an insolvent Labour party rejected by former big business donors
a popular FM
an unpopular UK government
a Conservative UK government that has too many problems and too few Scottish MP’s to make allowances for Scottish sensibilities and values
a group of SNP MP’s who will extract a high price for any support they give a hung government party.
I don’t think you should suspect me of partisan over-optimism if I say that 5% swing must be an easy objective in such circumstances. I’ve never been a member of any party and independence is not my first choice (though it’s the quickest way to a fit-for-purpose parliament and I’ll vote for it for that reason).
With a population of X billion wanting to be middle class why does China need us to buy their goods?
It may be fun for them if we do to increase the size of their international monetatary deposits but there is no way they ‘need’ us’…
Get used to the new super power and stop looking to the past. ( But that’s a UK hobby I know)
Paul B:
“If I remember rightly wasn’t there quite a large swing from Labour to SNP in a Glasgow by election in 2008?”
Yes there was, and I’m still struggling to understand how such a thing could happen in Glasgow.
There were problems with the selection of candidates, and the record of the previous MP. The SNP worked hard and were well resourced and organised. Peter Cairns will claim some of the credit for that.
Whatever the local factors were, don’t bet on this seat reverting to Labour. The SNP voters in this constituency enjoyed the both the attention and giving Labour a kicking. They might find that addictive.
It’s not as if they had to vote Conservative to get rid of Labour. The SNP are no further left that the Butskillite consensus of the 1950′s, but that’s well to the left of NewLabour.
Anthony:
I note your comment about “The BNP is on the right/left.”
How about “NewLabour is to the Right of Harold Macmillan/ Winston Churchill”?
@Paul H-J
“It seems the public prefer Ostriches to Voltaire. ”
Spot on – and DC is wise to recognise it. No point setting ones self up for being called nasty.
The public accuse politicians of being two faced, but can you blame them when the electrorate’s support form them goes down when they tell an uncomfortable truth about the need for reduced spending? No one thanked GO for stating this fact and rewarded his honest with an increase in the polls, no one said he had got it right when GB was forced to adopt his policies and accept ‘cut’s – and agin there was no recognition in the polls.
There was an interesting article on the BBC last week – an American study into how in presidential debate (Bush v Gore) the public prefered nonsense over facts that they did not like to hear. Sound familiar? Investment versus cuts?
Labour is already busy cutting (e.g. university cuts), but is saying the Cons would cut too soon. A brilliant illustration in how politicians know that they can speak and act hypocrtically – yet also know that many people will still believe a positive lie over an uncomfortable truth.
Such is human nature.
@Colin – Osborne’s speech really doesn’t tell us very much. He can say he wants stability and that he wants the BoE to do this, but with no indication of what the detailed BoE remit will be (other than 2% CPI target) and no idea what their powers will be either, we don’t really have a clear idea of how he intends to deliver the macroeconomic stability. It would be hard to imagine any government handing over total responsibility for all macroeconomic issues to an independent central bank, and without the detailed policy prescriptions we only have a speech, pretty vague in many places, in which a politician says he wants a stable economy. Many independent commentators have noted that the Tory economic policy is still far from clear. That’s all I’m saying.
@Peter Cairns – your point about the Chinese stimulus confirms what I was saying – they were terrified that the west would stop buying, Chinese consumers got nervous and loaded even more into their savings, and without a massive stimulus China would have been in deep trouble. They will adapt, but for their own sakes they need t develop a stronger domestic market and stop relying on western profligacy.
John B Dick
I’m still struggling with the wide range of Scottish polling results, and have no idea of what will happen here!
It could be that Labour’s obsession with reinstating GARL will have a positive effect in Glasgow – but that could equally lose them votes elsewhere in Scotland.
Internet polling should be subtle enough to create appropriate sample populations relatively easily. However, it doesn’t.
All we get is Brito-centric polling – even to the extent of using GB weightings (on some factors) within Scottish polls.
OldNat
Did you see a Scottish Conservative flyer or maybe I wrote a post on it? They quoted an ORB poll of Scottish voters (Dec 09)
Best PM – GB 46% DC 54% but
73% of Scottish voters agree that “Labour look tired and failing”
So 27% don’t agree. Even if these are all Labour loyalists (and many Labour supporters would not disagree) and they all think GB is the greatest Labour leader since Tony Blair, that means that 19% of Scots would still prefer a “TIRED AND FAILING” Labour government led by Gordon Brown to a Conservative government with a better leader.
The article is headlined: “Bad news polls for Labour SNP and LibDems”. I agree there is bad news in it for all these parties, but surely nothing as bad as the fact that the number of people who will vote for a party is no more than those who would prefer, for the next four or five years, a government which has a worse leader and is already TIRED AND FAILING.
They can’t blame the leader. He’s significantly more popular than his party (as well as GB) though less so than he was.
It must be “The Nasty Party” and they don’t think the nice leader can keep them in order. What other explanation is there?
John B Dick
I saw that ORB poll when it first came out.
I asked Anthony on a different occasion about the phrasing of questions in polls, and he said that the questions were suggested by the clients, but that the pollsters then adjusted them to be appropriate.
Anyone who has seen the ORB leading questions will suspect that Anthony was talking mince!
Over to you Anthony! Justify the ORB questions for the Scots Tories as being appropriate!
Alec & Peter
The main reason for the need for China to reduce their savings ratio is that it impinges globally. Most foreign reserves are held in US dollars, so effectively, the Chinese conservative confucian-principled worried wealthy are propping up the dollar and reducing thereby the price of Chinese exports in an ironic but fundamentally unhealthy way.
Global co-operation is the way forward. Little-Island attitudes (including self-loathing) are the way backwards.
So is the over-simplification we get so bored reading by the regular party-line trumpeters on this site. (Not you Peter!)
Alec
“without a massive stimulus China would have been in deep trouble”.
Have you heard of quantitative easing? Have you seen that the US has a trillion dollar debt. We’re in above our heads and China barely got its feet wet.
Chine motored through the worst recession since the thirties on its savings and it could also have boosted consumer spending if it had wanted too.
Saying they would have been in trouble is like telling a boxer to watch it because if he punches you he’ll get your blood on his shirt and then need to wash it.
This is a nation that has average above 10% annually growth every decade since the late 80′s and has a current accounts surplus of 9% of its 3.3 trillion GDP it exports 40% of GDP and has domestic and national savings over 50% of GDP.
its hard to see a healthier set of statistics anywhere. If we stopped spending it would need to change it might even find it hard to sustain double digit growth after a few years…. but it doesn’t need us.
It has the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia and India . It also has asia in its grasp and it is growing faster than we are as well as making big inroads in South america while buying up huge tracts of Africa and securing long term control of global strategic assets.
Peter.
@ALEC
“That’s all I’m saying”
No it wasn’t Alec-what you said was :-”Osborne yesterday nailed his colours very firmly to continuing the myopic focus on a 2% CPI,”
And I am reminding you that the Title of “Benchmark No 1″ in his speech ( from where you took your CPI assertion) is :-
“Macroeconomic stability ”
I am not here to debate how he will achieve his objective or whether he will be successful -and nor are you for reasons which Anthony constantly explains to us.
But I am reminding you that if GO had meant -my policy is ” Myopic concentration on CPI without regard to anything else”-
he would have said so.
Colin,
“”if GO had meant -my policy is ” Myopic concentration on CPI without regard to anything else”- he would have said so.”"
Actually like most politicians if “Myopic concentration on CPI without regard to anything else” was GO’s policy he would have said anything but……
If a politician gives you a list its prudent to suspect that its a list he’ll think you will like which is probably not the list he wants himself.
John TT,
“Global co-operation is the way forward.”
It has been for a century, but as with the US since WW2 it can be Global co-operation on unequal terms with a top dog determining the terms.
Peter.
Peter.
The drop in Tory poll support is quite normal coming into an election and is actually an advantage, as it will bring out their core vote, the swing vote and the ones who may not have bothered if the lead was too substantial. Generally the the Tories always do better than the pollsters predictions, even when they lose badly.
I personally think the female voters will put the Tories in, as they are the ones in the past who usually recognise the right time for change and are less influenced by the pre-election waffle. e.g. Major, Thatcher and Blair
I predict a comfortable small majority for the Tories.
Sure, Peter, all I’m saying is let’s not beat ourselves up because of our debt culture.
The Confucian culture that leads the Chinese to hoard dollars has its pitfalls too, for all of us.
Also, international co-operation was a lot more difficult before the communications revolution of the 90′s
@Peter cairns – I don’t dispute the growth of the Chinese economy, but you have to factor in the growth of the Chinese popultaion and the fact that the countries social fabric is much weaker than we often believe. There was evidence of discontent when the pace of growth dropped and factories closed, with riots and violence in some areas. Their economy is romping along, but it has to in order to provide for an expanding population with a growing expectation of improved living standards. If China’s GDP was to grow at a ‘healthy’ 3% pa there country would be under severe risk of mayhem.
Alec, without turning this into a China debate, their infrastructure is what is weak, rather than “social fabric”. They have an awful long way to go to bring them into the 20th Century in many areas, such as sanitation in rural areas, let alone the 21st.
Fiinancially they are cautious as individuals. Whereas here, low interest rates leads to debt/spending increases, in China low rates lead to savings increases (because you need to save more to yield the same level of interest)
A complete paradigm shift is an unrealsitic expectation of both China and us here. We cannot and should not be a lot more like the Chinese, and vice versa. A bit more like each other would help.
One of the main problems with online debates is that each side reduces the other and over-simplifies in order to feel that they are right and have all the answers.
I think we’d all be a bit better off if we appreciated the others’ views a bit more, instead of trotting out what GO or DC or GB or NC would like us to say.
@ Peter Cairns
“If a politician gives you a list its prudent to suspect that its a list he’ll think you will like which is probably not the list he wants himself.”
Thank you for that insight Peter.
I am busy re-interpreting a number-for example :-
“We intend to lead a government of purpose and direction so that we can offer the people of this nation the opportunity to move forward to independence, democracy and equality.”
“we are committed to sustainable economic growth”
Thanks to all who helped re: the scottish polling. What amazes me is if you talk to the average guy on the street he/she wants a change even ex labour voters, if you take this as a straw poll, how on earth are labour still polling around 30% if you take my area -sitting labour MP- they are lucky to be getting 20% its a strange world!
This site looks at the ‘hard’ aspects of polling and prediction and I agree that the Conservatives should be a little worried, but not too much: it is reasonably certain that the gap is narrowing everywhere, but more in the safe Tory seats where it doesn’t matter, as well as safe Labour seats. In short the gap is still very large in the marginals. Provided the lead remains at 4% or above David Cameron will have a majority. If it stays at 8% or above he will get a landslide victory. But there is a ‘soft’ side to which no specific figures can be put. Over the past year every left wing political commentator I can think of (Toynbee, Ashley, Bright, Rawnsley, Kettle) has savaged Gordon Brown as being inept, incompetent, useless, a class warrior and nothing else. If Brown wins, they are all going to look pretty stupid, aren’t they ? Is it likely they will all be wrong ? Aren’t they meant to be the experts ? Furthermore, if Brown wins he will be confirmed as our greatest ever politician or even statesman: eighteen years at the top of power at least; no former politician could match him, not Churchill, Lloyd George, Disraeli, Gladstone, Palmerston, Peel; only one perhaps, our first PM, Walpole. With all we know (or at least believe), about Brown’s narrow party political view of the world, his temperament, judgement etc. Is that likely to happen ? Perhaps Gordon Brown is our greatest over political leader. I just wouldn’t put any money on it.
Robert Waller, as one would expect of so distinguished a commentator, makes interesting and important points.
Perhaps the fundamental point is that people commissioning published opinion polls – specifically the newspapers – will ask for the most economical poll that will provide a reasonable estimate of national voting intentions. About 1,000 people. But if one wants to sub-analyse such a poll the sample becomes too small to be acceptably reliable.
In previous discussion on this site, we have run into this problem even when wanting to sub-analyse a single factor: Region. We found the regional analysis in published opinion polls too coarse – three or four regions instead of all the regional government areas.
If you are wanting to analyse several factors – e.g.Social Class within Party holding seat and size of majority, you are just asking too much. You will have to commission a special poll, at considerable expense.
Again, as previously discussed, the polls are trying to cope with increasingly complicated situations. Perhaps the stereotypical idea of polls comes from their early use in the 1950s, when nearly everybody voted Conservative or Labour, and there were fairly cmprehensible class divides. We now live in a mutliparty world, with some parties, notably Plaid and SNP, not standing in all seats. Class factors are different, with the decline of manufacturing and rise of other groupd such as, regrettably, large numbers of unemployed. And their are additional complexities due to ethnic diversity.
One answer is to look for more qualitative infomration, such as that in Robert Waller’s almanacs or, in a less organised and checked fashion, in comments on this site.
Finally, it is dangerous for parties to concentrate, as they do, on very select social groups, and seats.As they are finding through their concerns about the BNP, if parties neglect the interests of core groups and areas on the assumption that they will vote anyway, eventually those neglected people will look for a better option.
@Topcat
“If you talk to the average man on the street”…
With all due respect, the “All the people I’ve talked to are dead set against Labour so obviously the polls are wrong” argument is tosh. You don’t have a bank of phones and ability to make a representative sample of over a thousand people.
Sure, all the people you talk to might be against Labour, but have you considered that the people you most talk to about politics may be the people who most share your views?
I’ve seen this many many many times in discussion here. Where the polls are simply discarded or ignored, because “obviously” the mythical man on the Clapham omnibus can’t really think that way.
The polling is the polling, it may well be wrong, but declaring it wrong because of some gut feeling that “the people simply won’t put up with it” is deep bias.
I guess the real issue behind Topcat’s post is whether these people are telling hin the full truth. The Tories have really bought into the ‘nudge’ theory of social change, where people can be persuaded to act in a certain way by, for one thing, promoting the belief that everyone is doing the particular task in question except them. People mostly want to be in with the crowd, and when Labour is meant to be highly unpopular many people will agree in public in order not to be different. I don’t know if this is happening here, but if the current negative run for the Tories continues it might not be quite so fashionable to ‘hate’ Brown.
To return strictly to the MORI 2009 data, could the UKIP nationwide surge during the European Elections period have been far greater in safe Conservative seats thus weakening Conservative support in those very constituencies and thus appearing to depress the level of Lab to Con swing there?
Also, with the Tories apparently getting far greater swings to them in marginal seats, could this be just a nullifying of the propensity of LD and Lab voters to gang up against Conservatives in the Blair years. Perhaps this is even reversing with ganging up going on to now get the sitting Labour MP out? Thus the supposed in-built 40 seat bias in FPTP in favour of Labour will be corrected to defacto a level playing field by voter behaviour?
Just seen this piece:
http://theconservativeblog.co.uk/?p=2413
What are the chances? Obviously it will be officially denied even if it is going on, but I wonder have there been any suggestions to polling companies or anything of that nature. Perhaps Anthony can let us know if YouGov have been approached about this at all.
Just a couple of disclaimers:
1) I am not saying I believe this story to be true – just pointing to it as a possibility
2) The website is not an official Conservative party one.
I wonder what effect , if any, the Legg Report will have?
Combined with the news of prosecutions of MPs it conjures up the circumstances , last summer , which saw Cons diving to 35% & Labour to 20% .
They have both recovered from that-Labour more successfully than Cons.
Have voters had their say now-or will these final chapters in the saga trigger more negative reaction in the Polls?
Colin,
Ouch…..
More seriously, you should always question rather than just accept the claims of politicians. That doesn’t mean they don’t have good intent or a good idea just that you should be sceptical about their claims.
Probably the best current example of this is Blair on Iraq. He clearly thought he was doing the right thing but the reasons he gave weren’t the ones that convinced him, rather they were the ones he thought would sway the public.
As to the two quotes from the SNP, I am happy to be judged on them. That is what we have said and it is for each of us to look at them and make a judgement.
In some ways its what this site is about, judging the effect of what the public say and looking not so much at what lines from politicians are true but rather what ones are convincing.
Unless you look at all politicians with a critical eye and lay your own preferences aside it is difficult to be objective about what does or doesn’t work in electoral terms.
If you think your preferred party’s every announcement is wonderful then if it goes down badly in the polls they you are likely to focus on Media bias or poor polling rather than on poor delivery or presentation on your party’s part.
A lot of partisan posters tend to shoot the messenger when the don’t like the news.
Peter.
Neil – of course, a big illuminanti lizard from the Bilderberg conference drove to the office the other day in his White Fiat Uno to give us our election orders.
In other words, don’t be so bloody silly, it’s obvious full on tinfoil hattery.
Peter
Perhaps you missed the reason for my posts -Alec misquoted-or to be more correct-partially quoted something from a GO speech-and then made a judgement about the misquote.
It’s a neat trick I know -but I quite like the facts to be used where possible-that’s why I corrected him on the quote.
I didn’t make any judgements myself on the topic-for fear of the wrath of OGH!!
So far as -”As to the two quotes from the SNP, I am happy to be judged on them”-I am sure you are.
But if someone had misquoted the second one as ““we are committed to unsustainable economic growth”-and then criticised you for it, you might perhaps be less happy……………………….
……………………though come to think of it ” ““we are committed to unsustainable economic growth” has a certain ring of truth to it-don’t you think?
Coiln,
Personally I like;
“You should be committed if you go for unsustainable economic growth”
But then we’d be into comments on the PM and that would be partisan…..
Peter.
@Neil – as AW says, it’s patent nonsense, but interesting however that it is appearing on Tory leaning websites. If they had such certainty of victory I doubt they would even consider this stuff, so maybe a sign of nerves. There was some similar stuff flying round in Labour linked circles pre ’97, but that was rubbish too. It always amuses me that people who spend years decrying the incompetence of their opponents then suddenly believe they would have the wit and ability to organise one of the most comprehensive and difficult frauds known.
PS – I’m reasonably sure that if AW was in on it, he probably wouldn’t have told us here, so it was probably a bit pointless asking….
Stay calm Anthony – I didn’t write the article!
Please, Populus, COMRES, Mori, anyone, please send us some nice fresh polls to discuss. Meanwhile, thank you very much to those who have been putting up some really interesting posts. But, we need a decent serving of nourishing new data. Do you know what’s coming next, Anthony, and when it’s due?
For what it’s worth, from a wizened participant and observer of UK elections since the early ’60s, this election campaign thus far, both on the doorsteps and in the polls, does not yet have the feel of major change (eg 1979, 1997). It’s more like the two GE’s of uncertain outcome of 1974, but it’s as well to remember that at the equivalent stage (ie in late 1973) the Feb 1974 election wasn’t even a twinkle in Edward Heath’s eye, and 3 months out we really cannot foretell the result of 2010, whatever anyone tries to tell themselves.
Angus Reid poll on attitudes to FPTP and AV has been published on PB.