UK General Election - May 7th 2015

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I would have said "or what the Greens think about the environment", but I guess people are more aware of the Greens' general disposition rather than anything concrete they want to do, lucky for them.

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Plus, it voted heavily Unionist in 2014.

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Of course had Yes won, No would now doubtless be leading

Thumbs up. And, don't forget, many polls (especially YouGov polls) before the referendum also had a Yes majority.

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My mistake. I had thought YouGov was systemically more positive than others.

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But... there's a reason why ambitious Labour politicians prefer Westminster to Holyrood.

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I can't be bothered to watch any electoral propaganda video by anyone (life really is too short), but it is a fact that the SNP often relied on Tory votes at Holyrood when they were a narrow minority government (2007-11).

But that just tells us that Scottish Labour wanted to bring down the SNP government in the late 2000s, which had nothing to do with David Cameron.

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Please don't believe any opinion poll of party support conducted in Northern Ireland!

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Please don't believe any opinion poll of party support conducted in Northern Ireland!

I'm not really - I just said I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

Northern Ireland is tricky politically, as people will vote on religious lines rather than policy lines.

Ah, that would be fine! It's easier to measure religion than class. The tricky parts are tactical voting, and turnout propensities that are very difficult to measure: hardly any of the usual methods work.

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SNP at Westminster will cast votes on nominally-English laws that may have some impact on Scottish national or economic interests.

This is a difficult line for Sturgeon to walk. It is a necessary step towards her party's supporting a Labour-led government, but also a movement away from principled abstention, because practically everything voted on at Westminster can have an impact on Scottish budgets through the Barnett formula.

(It is a bit like the harm principle. Taken too simply, it fails because my well-being can be indirectly hurt by someone else's self-harmful behaviour.)

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Heywood and Middleton was really bad; Ukip nearly won but that was far from clear from polls.

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Perhaps they think he can win back the nuns' vote.

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http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/swing-calculator

How reliable is this? Because I put in the Conservatives winning 34% to Labour's 32, and they still gave Labour 30 more seats. Are the boundaries that unevenly drawn?

First, turnout and Conservative support are strongly, positively correlated. Conservative safe seats are in high-turnout suburban or rural areas; Labour safe seats are in low-turnout urban cores. More votes doesn't mean more seats (no PR). Second, Conservatives waste more votes than Labour in fighting other parties unsuccessfully. In 2010, about 1 percentage point of the 7-point Conservative-Labour gap was in seats won by Lib Dems, SNP and others. I believe that if one accounts for each of these factors, there is insignificant Labour skew in the map.

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So let's say that the Tories get 33 percent to Labour's 32 percent, but Labour ends up with more seats... Do you think a scenario like that would lead to increased demands for electoral reform within the Tories?

It's happened before, to both parties; it's just an occupational hazard of their electoral system.

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So let's say that the Tories get 33 percent to Labour's 32 percent, but Labour ends up with more seats... Do you think a scenario like that would lead to increased demands for electoral reform within the Tories?

It's happened before, to both parties; it's just an occupational hazard of their electoral system.

In the past few elections though, the system has strongly benefitted Labour, to a degree I don't think had been seen in a very long time. Just compare the Labour and Tory vote shares in 2005 and 2010 respectively, and what those result got them in seats. In '05, the Conservatives got more votes in England, yet received 92 fewer seats there.

I agree, this is a silly result and it should not have happened, but it is due to the electoral system they have historically favoured as a route to a majority, which they certainly wouldn't have had under a normal PR system. Losers typically lose worse than they ought to, and winners win much more.

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Is Galloway heading for another Labour counter-attack in a GE or can he redo what he did in Bethnall Green? Who is the likely candidate to replace him?

There is little information about Bradford West abroad, though there are lots of Yorkshire delegates here whou might know.

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Look at the man's M.O., touring the country looking for hotspots - he would be dangerous if he were, like Farage, less obviously repulsive.

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It will be quite a stretch for Labour to win Bradford West with a candidate in the field for less than twelve weeks. Are there internal selection disputes?

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Can we just be happy with the irony that, under AV, the Conservatives would be heading for a much better result, if not a majority, and the Lib Dems would be completely shattered by hostile transfers?

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It's Ukip, the party that chose Neil Hamilton as its deputy chairman.

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It's Ukip, the party that chose Neil Hamilton as its deputy chairman.

OK, I realise that UKIP's judgement on such matters has been shown to be questionable (to put it mildly) before, but why parachute Hargreaves into a seat (not a particularly good seat for them, I wouldn't have thought) where they already had a candidate?  Is there some hotbed of fundies in Earlsdon or something?

As you say, it doesn't matter who runs for Ukip in Coventry. There are too many minority and young-ish voters (under-55s). It's like Neil Hamilton: insert him into a seat to benefit from the money he brings to the not-very-large Ukip campaign fund. Apart from Clacton, they have only done well in low-turnout elections, and they need the cash that Hargreaves clearly has.

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The Greens appear unusually dependent on first-time voters, under-30 voters, ex-Lib Dems, students, and generally people who don't interact much with state or traditional community institutions like schools/hospitals. None of these is a good pillar for a British political party to stand on. A while back, I described their strongest seat in Brighton, Pavilion as having

Favourable demographics: largely young-adult households without dependents, very non-religious, transient, rather well-off compared to the country as a whole.

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Labour's very slow progress in choosing a Bradford West candidate. AWS; Galloway describes one of them as a "carpet-bagger"!

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If we're believing on average that the Greens are more likely to wilt down to about 4% or so, we should be revising upward our belief that Ed Miliband will be Prime Minister.

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I'd like to see a detailed poll of the 40% or so of those intending to vote Labour who think Ed Miliband is doing badly; How firm are they in their intentions? What could make them change their minds? etc

It's not easy because the sample will be t * 30 per cent * 40 per cent of the sample, where t is filtered expected turnout. This will not be more than ten per cent of all respondents. One example is the latest Ashcroft poll: 73 Labour-intending voters don't favour Miliband as a better PM than Cameron.

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Tories will be pleased by the ICM poll, as it is seen as the 'gold standard'. But actually that it one of those myths that is widely accepted as fact; they were not the most accurate polling outfit in the two most recent general elections

Who were the most accurate pollsters?
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"This newspaper" speculates on Ukip in 2020, a topic I must admit had not crossed my mind. But the Alliance survived for years after its breakthrough, even though it didn't do well at their best general election, so perhaps Ukip will persist in turn. It does make sense that if Labour get into government these days, they probably won't increase their vote at the next general election, nor will they placate concerns about immigration or the north-south wage gap, so gains in the north would be a prospect. This putative strategy requires no co-operation with the Conservatives.