United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's also the earliest possible polling date that lets Sunak have two years as Prime Minister, without having the election day fall on Halloween or the week of the US election.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think also that the demographics of most of the East seat and the more urbanised bits of the West seat are fairly working-class, it's just that there isn't a Labour tradition there in the way that there is in most demographically similar areas of England.

[EastAnglianLefty]

YouGov's statement is worth a read: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/48371-yougov-mrp-shows-labour-would-win-1997-style-landslide-if-election-were-held-today

Effectively it accuses the Telegraph of deliberately misreporting the poll.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Poll shows almost total wipeout for the Conservatives in Wales

Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe is vulnerable to tactical voting (especially as those Labour voters have been moved from Neath, a rock solid Labour seat, into a Con seat therefore they will vote for the party best placed to beat the Conservatives and that will be the Lib Dems) but Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr, that will only be a Con loss if there is a single opposition candidate

It's at least as likely that the addition of the Swansea Valley means that Labour supporters in Ystradgynlais and Brecon start voting for their preferred party and the reverse happens.

In Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr, about 50k electors come from Montgomery and 25k from Clwyd South. Getting a Labour lead twice as large out of Rhosllanerchrugog and environs as the Tory lead from Montgomeryshire is conceivable, but not exactly easy when Labour also has to make sure it gains much lower-hanging fruit elsewhere in North Wales.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Then there is also the morbid theory that people who worked in the mines, factories, and other strenuous jobs from that time are going to die earlier. Not exactly young, but health complications are going to be more prevalent than commuting for a 9-5 from one's London suburb. Not sure how much weight one should assign to this over other explanations though.

Glasgow aside, I don't think you'll see that effect in crosstabs where the oldest group is 70+. What may be more relevant is years of good health - if you're 85 and in good health, you're more likely to still be voting than somebody who is effectively housebound and a decade younger.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Polling of Reform supporters has found that fewer than 4 in 10 would even consider voting Tory. Usual caveats apply, only more so, but it's not a group that looks like it's that susceptible to tactical squeeze.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If you're young and you vote Tory you do if for cultural reasons, or because you're insanely online.

'Cultural reasons' in the class sense yes, otherwise (and the 'insanely online') no. Young, ideological right-wingers in England have as little love for the Conservative Party as anyone else, if not less. Just pure hatred.

There are a decent number of young Tories who hate the current incarnation of the Tory party, they just vote that way because they can't contemplate doing otherwise.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Profiles of insurgent independent candidates have a chequered track record. Sometimes they do accurately report something that is happening on the ground, sometimes they get wildly carried away by candidates who actually struggle to hold their deposit. From the outside, it's more or less impossible to say.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If you look at local election results, there's a fair amount of crossover between the non-urban wards we won in Norfolk in 1973 and in 1995. So a certain amount of continuity was probably there, even if by that time a lot of it will be the kids of agricultural workers rather than agricultural workers themselves.

That said, even in 1973 the Labour vote was already much stronger in small towns and villages which acted as service centres than in the truly rural areas.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The marks on the chart are both blatant editorialising and fail to make any sense on that basis.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I wonder how long they maintain the delusion of the '20' part. Perhaps it quietly transforms into 'list of seats lost at by-elections in this Parliament', plus Leicester East (sigh).

Levido apparently told Tory HQ just this week that "it is going to be a hung parliament at least".

I get that there are downsides to openly conceding defeat is likely, but he's pushing it far enough that if the expected outcome transpires, his reputation is going to be trashed because he won't be able to say that he did the best he could with the tools at hand.

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://twitter.com/KateEMcCann/status/1793297957313273939

If the weather's good all you island monkeys should log off and already get celebrating outside

Unless of course the no confidence letters start pouring in. Then you can put the kettle on

In all seriousness though i maintain that Sunak should have gone for the Autumn election and ride off the coattails of the American Conservative psyops and astroturfing social media campaigns

The weather is very much not good - it appears that Sunak's speech is going to be delayed because it's raining too hard.

This also happened with Truss, of course.

[EastAnglianLefty]

And Corbyns former seat becomes even more of a stitch-up:

https://twitter.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1793378252154913030?t=l8uSukHrwSpAga0xdI...

I don't think that is a stitch-up. Moema is the local London Assembly member, which isn't immensely high profile but does mean she'll be known amongst the CLP, whilst Nargund is a local councillor and is rumoured to have the most local support. Honestly, it's surprisingly fair by the standards of snap selections in seats with large Labour majorities.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The PM is whoever the monarch appoints, until such time as the House of Commons votes that it has no confidence in them. The monarch doesn't need to wait for anything to happen in Parliament before appointing somebody who obviously can win a confidence vote.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Sunak timing this so he can lose and move his family back to California before the school year starts is very funny.

If he hops on a private jet five minutes after the exit poll drops at 22.00 BST, he should be back home in California just in time for the Independence Day fireworks

I fully expect at least one other candidate in his constituency to pledge that if they're elected, they will still be the MP come August.

[EastAnglianLefty]

We should also note that there is, of course, also an election on in Northern Ireland and that an unusually high proportion of seats seem likely to be competitive this time around.

Wish that we’d get some polling. I’d be interested to see if Alliance can get a second seat. No idea what else to expect until we know if there’s any seats that parties stand down in.

Polling in NI isn't necessarily very useful for Westminster elections as a) constituency polling in general is bad; b) there's a lot more tactical voting than you get in Stormont contests; c) NI-wide voting shares don't tend to correlate particularly closely to seat counts.

Slightly easier this time, as the only SF seat that seems vulnerable this time is Fermanagh & South Tyrone (although perhaps less than usual), we'll have no idea what's happening in Foyle until they open the ballot boxes and the remaining seats viewed as somewhat competitive are all Alliance-DUP (or united Unionist) contests.

[EastAnglianLefty]

You can find census data by ward mapped here: https://boundaryassistant.org/census/index.html?v=2.0

In terms of religion, most wards in the constituency are about 10% Muslim, rising to 20% in Finsbury Park. So it's not a big factor.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I heard a rumour at work that Sunak was going to be in Belfast yesterday morning and would be visiting the Ulster University campus, which is a nice shiny new building with suitable links to hi-tech industries.

The fact that they changed to the Titanic Quarter doesn't make me disbelieve the theory that somebody is trying to sabotage the campaign. Have any large bets been placed from IP addresses in Downing Street in recent days?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Regarding Scotland, it's worth pointing out that (so far as I can tell - correct me if I'm wrong) we haven't seen much polling breaking down different regions.

It's not entirely certain that we'll see the same shifts in Greater Glasgow to the rest of the Central Belt, the North East may be different again and the Borders and Highlands might also go their own way. It's also not clear how much tactical voting we'll get and to what extent it will be on unionist or anti-Tory lines.

So whilst on UNS the Labour vote is pretty efficient and the SNP vote very inefficient, whilst the Tories are holding up surprisingly well, it's possible that things could be either better or worse for all those parties depending on if there are significant regional variations.

Sunak has 100% placed a bet on Labour to win.

Only question is whether that's nationwide or for his constituency.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Con to Lab switchers care about the economy and public services, while Con to Reform switchers are basically single issue anti-immigration voters.

Relatedly, Reform voters are once again shown to be very disproportionately politically engaged, which makes their underperformance in basically every election even odder (read likely big polling error).


https://twitter.com/steveakehurst/status/1795033765044949185?s=61&t=I1DE8_cg...

Also worth noting that Reform tend to do better with men, whereas amongst women polling finds from Don't Knows. There is a plausible theory that a lot of men picking Reform are actually undecided and just picking a vague label to hide this fact. The sort of man who would do this is also the sort of man who would claim to pay a lot of attention to politics when he doesn't.

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://twitter.com/WhoTargetsMe/status/1794689116862656896

This is astonishing given that one of the things Sunak did prior to calling the election was to reach out to big donors to make sure they were prepared to contribute. If they're still getting outspent, then things are desperate.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Exactly — parties stand down all the time in Northern Ireland — unlike in Great Britain, there’s no strong cultural norm that the major ones contest every seat. This is certainly not a case of Alliance and SF sitting down and ‘carving up’ the map between themselves.

In fact, Alliance are still running in both of the seats which Sinn Fein hold marginally over unionists: Belfast North (Alliance polled 10% there last time) and Fermanagh and South Tyrone (where they got 5%). Some pact.

Although I suspect Alliance standing benefits SF in both of those seats.

In any case, SF standing down in Belfast South is to the benefit of the SDLP and it's as much against the Alliance as it's against the DUP.

EDIT: Also worth noting that in 2022, SF transfers in North Down predominantly went SDLP and more went Green than Alliance; in Lagan Valley they favoured SDLP over Alliance about 75-25 and in Belfast East (where the SDLP were already eliminated) around half the SF vote didn't transfer and the remainder went Green before it went Alliance. It doesn't particularly hurt Alliance, but I don't think Naomi Long is going to be piling up the votes in Short Strand.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Exactly — parties stand down all the time in Northern Ireland — unlike in Great Britain, there’s no strong cultural norm that the major ones contest every seat. This is certainly not a case of Alliance and SF sitting down and ‘carving up’ the map between themselves.

In fact, Alliance are still running in both of the seats which Sinn Fein hold marginally over unionists: Belfast North (Alliance polled 10% there last time) and Fermanagh and South Tyrone (where they got 5%). Some pact.

Although I suspect Alliance standing benefits SF in both of those seats.

In any case, SF standing down in Belfast South is to the benefit of the SDLP and it's as much against the Alliance as it's against the DUP.

EDIT: Also worth noting that in 2022, SF transfers in North Down predominantly went SDLP and more went Green than Alliance; in Lagan Valley they favoured SDLP over Alliance about 75-25 and in Belfast East (where the SDLP were already eliminated) around half the SF vote didn't transfer and the remainder went Green before it went Alliance. It doesn't particularly hurt Alliance, but I don't think Naomi Long is going to be piling up the votes in Short Strand.

 aren’t alliance defacto unionist (( based on a chat with a Irish nationalist friend in ni who said he sooner vote for the uup then the alliance

No. Their position is that the constitutional situation of NI isn't the most important thing. Their voters would historically have come more from the unionist community, these days it's a more even split but with a relatively limited presence outside Greater Belfast.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Stewart is a hypocrite because he is the kind of lover of multinational pro-globalization forums that encourage this kind of thing, but how the  hell did the Tories screw immigration up so badly when it's a pretty clear concern for their core electorate?

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.

I get that they wanted to bolster public services such as social care. Apparently (I read this on r/ukpol as a disclaimer) the visas afforded to social care  and NHS workers is something like 200.000 in the last few years, yet the backlog is only reduced by 30.000. that means 170.000 people arrived to bolster the NHS and social care but ended up where exactly? Working in the black? Surely there are pretty simple measures in place to ensure they only keep their visa if they're fulfilling the conditions. It is mana from heaven for the Farages of this world.

You've got to factor in retirements; UK staff moving abroad or leaving the sector; non-UK staff leaving the sector (particular problem in social care, where wages are often worse than supermarkets are paying for much tougher jobs); and the fact that the demand for health and social care increases year on year.

Also note that many students on student visas may also be working in social care whilst they study, but will then have to leave if they can't get new visas that allow them to continue working.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed what will happen between July-September; the Conservatives will want a long leadership race if they are wanting to make rule changes, or to stop someone from winning.

Even with the summer recess they are still going to need a leader of the opposition; would Sunak really be happy to do that for two months, as Major & Callaghan did as caretakers. They don't formally have a deputy either and I'm not sure they can actually appoint a temporary leader (as Labour did with Harman in 2010 & 2015)

Dowden is deputy PM, so would be the natural one to step in under those circumstances. In practice the only duty of the leader is going to be PMQs and a bit of press, those can either be given to a placeholder or divided up amongst whoever's willing.

In practice the Conservative Party isn't particularly bound by formal procedures.