United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

The Conservatives are promising a ‘quadruple lock’ on pensions, whereby the tax free threshold will always be above the maximum state pension* for pensioners.

I was only going to vote, but will now be canvassing against the government thanks to this.

No humiliation could be harsh enough for this gang of thieves.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

No Conservative MPs have announced they're standing down since the Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom double whammy on Friday evening. Surely that's not the last of them?

Neil Hudson has failed three different selections for the safest of seats and apparently balked at contesting Tim Farron’s seat (notionally Conservative on boundary changes, but they have no hope this time).

The remaining parachutes are shrinking in number, and the holes in them grow by the day. Either he’ll grab one of these or step back for 2024.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

No Conservative MPs have announced they're standing down since the Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom double whammy on Friday evening. Surely that's not the last of them?

Neil Hudson has failed three different selections for the safest of seats and apparently balked at contesting Tim Farron’s seat (notionally Conservative on boundary changes, but they have no hope this time).

The remaining parachutes are shrinking in number, and the holes in them grow by the day. Either he’ll grab one of these or step back for 2024.

Eleanor Laing stood down and he was selected for her (plum) seat, Epping Forest. CCHQ must love him!

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

What they've done (and they were convinced that this was very clever) has been to combine the strongest anti-immigration rhetoric of any government for a rather long time with a deliberate policy of recruiting huge numbers of guest workers to be employed in public services as that is seen as cheaper than training people here.

There is also a section of the Conservative Party/press which genuinely seemed to convince themselves that all the public wanted was ‘control’, and numbers didn’t matter. We would end freedom of movement but more than replace it with Africans and Indians and people would be fine with that.

There was a strain of anti-European globalist sentiment within the elites backing Brexit. Alongside CANZUK and the empire rhetoric, one of the arguments we sometimes heard was that immigration was unpopular only because the policy was discriminatory in favour of Europeans and those who supported it were the Real Racists^(TM). There were some ethnic minority Brexiteers who sincerely believed this.

Farage said in 2015 that he “preferred Indians to Poles”. You will not hear that from any politician today - net migration flows from the UK to the EU now despite our record-breaking numbers, anti-immigration sentiment is higher than ever and Poland is on course to become richer than the UK. It was an easier message for the Tories to listen to than the anti-globalisation impetus behind most of the Brexit movement.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I have watched most UK leaders’ debates since the Brown-Cameron-Clegg ones. I have never seen a coherence/competency gap this large between Farage and the rest.

He’s spinning webs of lies and half-truths, but he’s doing it better than the rest. I’m slightly appalled our politics still doesn’t have an answer to him, but this is a good omen for those of us hoping for a Conservative wipeout.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Not one of the climate answers mentioned planning permission and regulations. I went to a climate conference at Imperial recently, and that was issue #1, rather than funding.

Take from this what you will.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Canvassing has not been great for the past couple of days. The Tories are losing massive amounts of ground overall, but Sunak has access to voters who BoJo lost. He is less offensive (to some?) and doesn’t talk so much about Brexit.

Starmer will still get his landslide, but I would still expect triple figures for the Conservatives as of now. I’ll have a better picture by the end of next week.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Canvassing has not been great for the past couple of days. The Tories are losing massive amounts of ground overall, but Sunak has access to voters who BoJo lost. He is less offensive (to some?) and doesn’t talk so much about Brexit.

Starmer will still get his landslide, but I would still expect triple figures for the Conservatives as of now. I’ll have a better picture by the end of next week.

Where have you been canvassing? I would think that it's balanced out to some extent by Sunak not appealing to a lot of voters who liked Johnson.

More than balanced out at the national level, no doubt, but not in Cambridgeshire. It could be a serious dampener in most LD targets, or even Labour targets where there was a heavily pro-Remain vote.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I think some Tories are using Uniform National Swing, which gives them seats even if they get 0% of the vote.

Similar trap for the LD in 2015 which gave then around 25 on just 8%, some LD though they could hold up to 40.

Similar fantasies when this campaign started, some Tories thought Hung Parliament, 200+seats ect.

All the pieces of the puzzle for a Tory wipeout are currently there (split right, Lab-Lib tactical voting, Labour 20% ahead), we just refrain from believing our eyes to the impossible until it happens.

The LDs in 2015 suffered from, among a host of other factors, the loss of tactical voters. They had previously benefited massively from them due to (a)a long absence from government and (b)having a smaller core vote than Labour/the Tories.

The Conservatives today have proportionally fewer tactical voters to begin with, and the infrastructure to build anti-Conservative tactical voting coalitions is somewhat lacking in many of the places where a squeeze would be needed to push them below 100 seats. They will lose a lot of the tactical voters they once had (particularly to Reform), but not on the same scale.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Why are there so many MRPs this election?

Imagine that scientific polls never existed before, and that YouGov was the first election predictor to actually produce one. Suppose that it was accurate, come election day.

Now, imagine the investors.

They will throw money at MRPs until theirs are similarly predictive or the “brand” of MRPs is diminished by widespread failures.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I’m pulling an all-nighter but I don’t have the Friday off. Wish me luck 😎

Same (probably).

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Some historical lows for the Tories in the Commons:

1754: 106/558 MPs
1761: 112/558 (the subsequent election, and with the same leader. What happened?)
1832/1833: 175/658, vote share of 29.2%
1906: 156/670, vote share of 43.4%. 131/670 excluding the 25 Liberal Unionists, although their party merged with the Conservatives a few years later

The Conservatives will probably get a lower vote share than ever before. In terms of seats, 123 or less would, proportionally, be the worst result in all incarnations of the Conservative Party’s history (starting in 1678).

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Much better canvassing this week - in what should have been more Tory parts of the constituency!

The Conservative “stop the landslide” attack line was already backfiring there, as someone was voting against them on the basis that only the LDs could do such a thing.

The betting was mentioned on the doorstep, too.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Just seen something about how well Davey is presenting the Lib Dems as a 'left-wing alternative' to Labour. For goodness sake, Davey is probably the most right-wing leader they have had under the party's current name (i.e. from 1988 onwards).

At the very least, he’s clearly to Clegg’s left.

I would probably say Swinson’s as well, given the completely anti-Tory messaging and the focus on modest tax increases to pay for social care policies (albeit at a massively underestimated cost).

Even if the leadership was more right wing than Clegg’s, the messaging would be more anti-Tory than last time because this is where the (winnable) votes are.

This manifesto, unlike the 2017 one, has no mention of Land Value Tax, except for businesses. It commits to more house-building than any of its rival documents, but there would probably be no national target if conference had not overruled the leadership’s proposal to scrap it. I personally trust Davey over Swinson, but I’m not sure the proposals are more left-wing than 2019’s.

It is still the most detailed/costed of the manifestos this year, but shockingly light on commitments for a LD document. That’s in line with the general trend for all party manifestos this election: fewer public plans to use policy X to address problem Y, more promises to set up a review to solve Y. This means less political capital to use policy X, should a party promising a review find itself in office.

The voters have long lacked faith in the parties to deliver change, but I don’t think the parties themselves have ever been so lacking in self-confidence. The Lib Dems say they will “review” restoring the northern leg of HS2, a project confounded by reviews; the rest of the parties don’t even pretend to believe it could be built.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Focaldata MRP
https://twitter.com/focaldataHQ/status/1805265098803450304

LAB 450 - 41.4%
CON 110 - 23%
LDM 50 - 11.3%
SNP 16 - 2.5%
PC 2 - 0.4%
REF 1 - 15.5%
GRN 1 - 5.2%

https://www.focaldata.com/blog/focaldata-prolific-uk-general-election-mrp

I’ve marked the change from their last MRP results, polled for BestForBritain on the same boundaries, 20 Apr – 9 May 2023. I’m using the version of the model where they reallocate undecided voters and estimating their national vote shares using a weighted average of their projected vote shares for England, Wales and Scotland.

Lab +80 seats, +4.6% of est. national PV
Con -122, -6.4%
Lib Dem +49, +4.5%
SNP -12, +0.0%
Plaid Cymru +2, -0.1%
Reform UK +1, +10.0%
Green +1, +0.8%  (excluding NI in both old and new MRPs)

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Focaldata MRP
https://twitter.com/focaldataHQ/status/1805265098803450304
LAB 450 - 41.4%
CON 110 - 23%
LDM 50 - 11.3%
SNP 16 - 2.5%
PC 2 - 0.4%
REF 1 - 15.5%
GRN 1 - 5.2%

https://www.focaldata.com/blog/focaldata-prolific-uk-general-election-mrp

I’ve marked the change from their last MRP results, polled for BestForBritain on the same boundaries, 20 Apr – 9 May 2023. I’m using the version of the model where they reallocate undecided voters and estimating their national vote shares using a weighted average of their projected vote shares for England, Wales and Scotland.

Lab +80 seats, +4.6% of est. national PV
Con -122, -6.4%
Lib Dem +49, +4.5%
SNP -12, +0.0%
Plaid Cymru +2, -0.1%
Reform UK +1, +10.0%
Green +1, +0.8%  (excluding NI in both old and new MRPs)

It’s also worth noting that their methodology for seat allocation seems to have changed. The newer map does not actually match the seat count this time, because they are using a probabilistic seat count at the national level. Using their point estimates for individual seats, we get:

Lab 451 (+1 seat from probabilistic alternative result, +81 seats from previous MRP result)
Con 113 (+3, -119)
Lib Dem 50 (+0, +49)
SNP 14 (-2, -14)
Plaid Cymru 2 (+0, +2)
Green 1 (+0, +1)
Reform UK 0 (-1, +0)

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

So the previous Focaldata MRP projected just 1 seat for the LibDems???

At just shy of 7% of the vote and once undecided voters were factored in, yes. Also a wipeout for Plaid and the Greens.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Election certainly in that slower end stage now as the parties move to GOTV and skimming or expanding their target seats.

Two comments perhaps worth making on the Holborn and St Pancreas constituency poll.

1. It would be vaguely embarrassing (in a geeky psephological sense) for Starmer to get a big drop in his vote share when his party is almost certainly going to be making big advances, but it doesn't really matter.

2. The much more important point is that it is perhaps further evidence of the efficiency of the Labour vote. I'd be vaguely interested to see a poll of, say, the fifty safest Labour seats or something. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an overall drop in their vote compared to 2019 in them.

It would nice to see him suffer a big drop if not lose because he's such a boring leader and has few positions on anything. I don't think he will last a full term as PM.

I thought the line was that he was too right wing, not that he has no positions.

But after the last 14 years I am ready for boring; I have had 27,000 in student debt added, home ownership made a lot harder and my right to work in the EU taken away by successive Conservative leaders.

Failing to position at all is (ultimately) positioning to fail.

Starmer isn’t so much playing a centrist hand as keeping his cards close to his chest. My concern is that he’ll ultimately prove hesitant or otherwise unable to play much of a hand at all. This would be bad for the country, and also for Labour, because it would cede the setting of the political agenda to the other parties’ ideologues.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Even if not totally accurate, this Islington North effort puts the claimed "scientific projections based on canvass returns" from a certain other ex-Labour independent into perspective doesn't it.

Shaheen is obviously not winning, but when co-workers brought up the election last week, a mostly disengaged cynic from Stella Creasy’s constituency spontaneously namechecked her. Wouldn’t be shocked to see her crack (low) double digits.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I had started to think Corbyn was going to lose for some time actually. It seems as if the poll has detected a relatively sizeable number of people who were unaware of Corbyn's suspension, also as expected.

Yeah a problem for JC is he doesn’t have an alternative parties vote to rely on; a lot of people will either vote Labour because they always vote Labour, or because they didn’t realise he had been suspended.

Wouldn’t this become obvious in the voting booth? If so, it could mean the polls underestimate him.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

So if Basildon and Billericay does go, then decent chance we don't end up seeing any non-Labour seats until the 2:00 wave. Would be something to see.

I believe one of the MRPs had it as a possible Reform gain and my own guess is that it's one of their most plausible targets. However, I don't know if they are contesting it heavily, and Labour starts out with a higher base than in some better Reform targets.

Has anyone picked up a strong Reform ground game anywhere?

“Lack of a strong ground game anywhere” has been a defining feature of the party since the UKIP days. Douglas Carswell had a firm personal vote in Clacton; to a lesser extent, Mark Reckless (after his defection) and Tim Aker seemed to enjoy this as well.

At the council level, they are notorious for failing to retain councillors, although they’ve been much better at this in Derby.