UK Election 2010

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According to the forecasts it's Poplar and Limehouse that goes Respect

Which is indeed quite strong for Respect, as it gains a strong Respect ward from Bethnal Green and Bow while losing some of Labour's strongest areas to East Ham and West Ham (Poplar and Limehouse being a direct reorganization of Poplar and Canning Town).

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If Respect win a seat next election, it'll be in Birmingham, not Tower Hamlets.

Btw, there's a by-election in Shadwell (by far Respect's strongest ward in the borough) pretty soon. Labour are running Michael Keith.

I thought the new boundaries in Birmingham made it nearly impossible for Respect to win a seat there because Sparkbrook and Small Heath were being split up. Birmingham Hall Green will have a strong Respect showing as Sparkbrook is a Respect fortress, but I doubt Salma Yaqoob manages more than 20% overall in a seat with both strong (non-Muslim) Labour and Tory areas.

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Any chance of the BNP getting near winning a seat?

Highly unlikely. Their best bet is probably Barking, where they came just a few votes short of second in 2005 with 16.9% of the vote, but, while they've had success locally in Barking and Dagenham LBC, all indications are that it won't be enough for them to win the seat. (Plus, the Lib Dem and Tory votes will collapse to Labour to stop the BNP if they look like a real threat; that's been observed in many local by-elections.)

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Dumfriesshire from Conservatives
It will be hard for Labour to take this simply due to the Conservatives focusing all of their energies on their one Scotland seat.

Inverness, Dunbartonshire East from Liberal Democrats
Disagree on Invernesss; north Scotland loves its incumbents, and Danny Alexander wasn't one in 2005. Agree on Dunbartonshire East by the numbers, but Jo Swinson is very popular.

Gordon, Argyll from Liberal Democrats
Given the 2007 result, Argyll can't be ruled out, but the SNP did come in fourth at Westminster in 2005. Not a good starting point. Gordon can be ruled out, however, as the LDs won the area at the Scottish Parliament and the SNP was in fourth there in 2005, too.

Dundee West, Ochil, Kilmarnock from Labour
All three should fall on those numbers.

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And, if the Tories were to do that badly, there'd definitely be anti-Tory tactical voting in favor of the LDs in Dorset West and in favor of Labour in Maidstone and the Weald and Richmond, Yorks, enough to oust Letwin, Widdecombe, and Hague.

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400 seats or more.

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I'd like to see a 4 way race between Gordan Brown, David Cameron, Mayor Livingston, and Nick Griffin.

Pray tell, who are "Gordan Brown" and "Ken Livingston"?

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I'd like to see a 4 way race between Gordan Brown, David Cameron, Mayor Livingston, and Nick Griffin.

Enlighten me on which party Mayor Livingston founded.

As far as I'm aware, he never founded any party. He was formerly the Labour leader of the Greater London Council, but that was abolished. He then became Labour MP for Brent East (1987). When London got an directly elected executive Mayor, he was snubbed by Labour in favour of Frank Dobson, but went on to win as an Independent. He, subsequently, was rehabilitated into the Labour fold.

He is a somewhat larger than life, controversial character; much like Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP, who is the party's candidate in next May's mayoral election

You could be confusing Ken with George Galloway, yet another larger than life controversial character, who founded RESPECT after being expelled from the Labour Party

Dave

It was a sarcastic response to the suggestion that there could be a four-way race between Cameron (Conservative), Brown (Labour), Livingstone (also Labour) and Griffin (OMRLP... err... BNP).

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The coup appears to have failed, which is probably the worst possible result for Labour as a party. The secret ballot would have been dangerous as well, of course, but they could have gotten someone halfway popular in, and there wouldn't have been enough time before the election for Milliband/Johnson/etc. to become unpopular.

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The Lib Dems haven't selected their candidate yet.

Unless you mean "all parties with a serious shot", in which case I'm sure there have been Lab-Con or LD-Con or maybe even LD-Lab marginals with two female candidates before.

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Won't Cameron easily become the next PM?

Yes. There has been chatter that Labour might mount a comeback, but really this is just the media trying to sell a news story. A guaranteed Conservative victory is kind of boring and not very profitable (which actually makes me a little surprised that Murdoch jumped so early and not, say, three days before the election).

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0.1% GROWTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Back into recession again in Q1 anyone?

Well, no, because if we're measuring recessions through quarterly growth then a recession is not declared based on one quarter of shrinking.

In reality the... er... um... 'slump' seems like a useful word... the slump is continuing here and everywhere else and will continue to do so for quite a while.

Something MSM appear to have forgotten. Given that the 0.1% was on the back of Christmas sales growth was probably non existant, shopping spree aside. Now with VAT back up it will make for interesting reading.

The great thing is, from a Tory p.o.v is how sluggish our recovery is in comparison with other comparable nations.

Be careful what you wish for. Small policy changes such as those resulting from a change in government do not revive economies. If the Conservatives inherit a weak economy, they may regret it in four years when the economy is still in bad shape--won't be true worldwide, but could be true in Britain.

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Keep in mind the Unionist part refers to Ireland; it's a leftover from when the Liberal Party schism over home rule happened.

Highly misleading, although true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionist_Party_(Scotland)

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Amusingly, the ComRes poll has Labour at 50% in Scotland and the Tories at just 9% (no idea on SNP and LDs). So removing Scotland is a little bit dishonest (clearly they accidentally oversampled Scottish Labour voters in exchange for undersampling English ones if their overall sample is balanced), but it also shows that ComRes is unreliable anyway.

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BPIX aren't a member of whatever the self-regulating body of the polling industry calls itself these days. So, caution.

How did BPIX do in the past elections, relative to other pollsters ?

They didn't exist in 2005. They were not totally awful in 2009 except that they didn't prompt for the Greens and did prompt for the BNP.

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I take it that there's not much (any?) Wales-specific polling, but are there signs that Plaid is having a similar resurgence to the one their Scottish counterpart has had?

There are no signs of a Plaid surge ala SNP, though they'll make a few gains (and one 'gain'; boundary changes here turned Caernarfon (now Arfon) into a Labour win in 2005 by a handful of votes. Probably won't be all that close this year, but we'll have a shot in decent years).

TBH, I don't see any Plaid gains as particularly "likely" (the problem here is that Ceredigion is behaving very randomly and could well be a Plaid gain, but it's no more or less likely to be one than if Plaid were much more or much less popular) other than the "gain" in Arfon and Ynys Mon.

In a really, really good year, they could win Llanelli, I suppose.

Ynys Mon would go Conservative, I would think, except that Peter Rogers is running again. (Do you happen to know why he's not running under the Conservative banner, Al?)

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Ashok Kumar, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland has died suddenly. What details there are (not many) are in this Northern Echo article: http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/5062190.Ashok_Kumar_found_dead/

He was 53. RIP.

Sad.

And, not to be too political, but really unfortunate for Labour and fortunate for the Conservatives in a seat of the sort the Conservatives will be hoping to win to get a decent-sized majority.

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Well, you're a bit lucky in Scotland in that the SNP have very few opportunities for gains despite their improvement. If they were still polling in the mid-30s, they would have a chance at massive gains, but right now there are only maybe 15 seats at most where they'll even be a factor (including their current ones).

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Have you guys watched the Chancellor's Debate?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8593509.stm (Small clip)

Yeah. Vince Cable made a brilliant showing. Darling was alright. Osbourne was terrible, as expected.

General consensus seems to be that Cable was very good, Darling was mediocre, and Osborne was slightly worse than mediocre but better than expected. Helps the Lib Dems but neutral in the Lab-Con battles, maybe favoring the Cons because this was always going to be the worst debate for them, yet they didn't bomb.

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Can someone explain to me where the liberal dems stand in the UK political spectrum? I thought that they were to the left of Labour but this seems not to be true...

Al explained them as the party of muesli or tractors but not both, which is not a totally awful analogy.

Perhaps an explanation in terms of US regions would help. The Lib Dems would dominate the Seattle metro, the Portland metro, the Denver metro, etc. but would have almost no presence in the Detroit metro, the Pittsburgh metro, the St. Louis metro, etc.

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The Conservative candidate is also a belly dancer who defected from the LDs in 2009 and was the LD candidate in Battersea in 2005 and Brent East in 2001. I think she lives in Birmingham. So, perennial no-hope candidate who defected to the Conservatives to try to get a shot at winning something but instead got put in Tory target number 400. (She was the LD selectee in ultra-safe Conservative Chelsea and Fulham before defecting. Incidentally, the new LD candidate in Chelsea and Fulham defected from the Conservatives and used to be fairly prominent in Tory London circles.)

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Forgive me if I know nothing about UK politics, but I'm thinking if there's a hung parliament, the Labour and Lib Dems  might compromise and elect somebody not named Brown or Cameron, someone like, say, Milliband?

Only if Labour is the largest party. In that case, the price for Lib Dem cooperation would almost certainly be Brown's head (figuratively), but it's not totally clear if Labour would be willing to toss him out to get a shaky government that wouldn't last more than two years anyway. If the Conservatives are the largest party, there would most likely be a Conservative minority government with tacit Lib Dem (and SNP and DUP, and non-tacit UUP) support.

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They'd rather have a Conservative government?

They have said that they will support whichever party wins more seats. (I'm not sure what he's talking about with the LDs saying they would support no one--simply untrue.) I would also say that, for tactical reasons, they would prefer a Conservative government, although not necessarily for ideological reasons.

The Lib Dems know that Brown is very unpopular and would never be caught working with him. Working with Labour sans Brown would not be nearly so harmful and is quite plausible.

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Would it be Ed or David, though.

David if either, but I doubt either would ever be PM regardless of this election's outcome.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_February_1974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_October_1974

Note on Feb 1974: Lab + Ind. Lab + Dem. Lab. + SDLP = Con + UUP.