United Kingdom General Elections: December 12th, 2019

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New poll from ComRes:

Tory: 36%
Labour: 29%
Lib Dem: 17%
Brexit: 11%

Given today's events, I think this tweet is helpful for interpretation:

https://twitter.com/benwansell/status/1193930170274590720

A straight factoring in on that ratio would give something like 40/31/17. To be clear: doing this would be extremely simplistic and any conclusions you would like to draw from such a calculation would be faulty.

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I can see it triggering consolidation of the Remain vote toward Labour (which we're already seeing some evidence for) so let's see where things go from there.

Why do you think this? Labour, despite what Corbynites would have us believe, still don't have any credibility on Brexit. The Lib Dem polling slide after the calling of the election was only a few points, was always inevitable once a campaign began and has since stalled.

For what feels like the 400th time, Labour are not a remain party

Besides, the Lib Dems will happily use this in every election leaflet and broadcast from now until December 12th in order to bring Tory remainers over to their side, so if anything, their share of the remainer vote will go up because of it.

Fwiw, I don't think this will change much except at the margins in a few Brexity & Lab held marginals where the Lib Dems were already mostly irrelevant.

Labour is offering a second referendum though. With Labour you get either a soft Brexit or no Brexit at all, both are clearly superior to if Boris wins a majority which would guarantee a hard Brexit. Labour isn't perfect but they're clearly better than the Tories on Brexit (and overall too).

I can't speak for anyone else but I don't trust that Labour will give the second referendum that they offer and even if I did, its too little too late. I also don't believe a Corbyn Brexit would be any softer than a Boris one. Again, this is just me and I'd probably advise against extrapolating this to a wider voting bloc - I imagine there are a near-infinite range of opinions on this among remainer voters.

I've heard this sentiment from a Lib Dem supporter lately and, honestly, it baffles me. Given the agonies Labour has endured internally to get to the policy it has now (which is, for the record, nearly identical to the Lib Dem position from 2017), and given the electoral calculus attached to adopting a pro-Leave position for anyone but the Tories and Brexit/UKIP, what on earth makes a person think Labour would renege on promising a referendum with a Remain option? Whose benefit would it be to? What advantage would it provide?

Add to that, even if a PM Corbyn and his inner circle tried to push  a soft vs hard Brexit referendum through parliament, the PLP would never support it and the membership would go apoplectic. Not holding a referendum at all would just put Corbyn in the same position May and Johnson were in, even if he had a majority (again, PLP is overwhelmingly Remain).

I get that distrusting politicians, and Corbyn in particular, is basically the default position for most voters, but the idea that Corbyn would renege on this policy at this time doesn't hold up to even modest scrutiny.

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Labour say their systems have been hit by a DDoS attack.

No, it was just a compatibility issue with the Soviet hardware the campaign is using.

In socialist Britain, service denies *you*!

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Good on Gauke for standing on principle, I hope he wins. His constituency I believe voted for Remain but I don't know much about the contest, does he have a good shot at winning?

Indeed, kudos to him. His shot at winning is debatable. The seat, South West Hertfordshire, is quintessentially Home County Tory. They always win there - even in 1997 the Tories had a majority of 10K+. Labour came in 2nd in 2017, but 20K votes behind, and in previous years the Lib Dems have occasionally taken second place, again with around a 10K+ deficits.

On the other hand, Gauke has been around for over a decade and appears to have his own 'personal' vote on top of what you would expect any Tory to get. Also, SWH voted remain 53/47, and it's reasonable to assume it's more remainy now than in 2016.

If Gauke runs he could very well poach enough of the Tory vote to win, but probably only if either the Lib Dems or Labour stands down and endorses him, too. Even then, unless it's Labour that stands down I doubt even deep personal affection for Gauke would be enough for most (Tory) voters in the area to 'risk' a vote for him, lest it allow Labour to win by coming up the middle.

Edit:

The Liberal Dem has decided on his own volition to withdraw.  The Liberal Dems are considering replacements.  The Green Party is not contesting the seat. It is also a seat covered by by the Brexit Party standown.
 

Have they? I haven't seen that reported, but it might be buried pretty far down with all the news during an election.

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My overall point was nothing to do with Corbyn anyway. It was that these Lib Dems are self-defeating idiots who have taken down the party's vote share by at least a few points and I'm surprised some are so dismissive of it. They've come out and said 'don't vote for us'. There's a massive difference between doing a non-existent campaign (which they easily could have done if they wanted these Corbyn Mouthpieces re-elected) and making a public display that their own party doesn't matter. If this is a message that gets repeated any further, its the end in any LD-Lab contests and is an easy print on every Tory leaflet in every Con-LD contest ("Vote Lib Dem Get Corbyn"). It's because of poor message discipline and that there's yet to be a strong rebuttal from the leadership speaks volumes. The downward trajectory of the party going into the campaign was probably inevitable but this event could well hasten and amplify the decline. Which leaves Remainers with Mr 7/10 as our spokesman.

There was a nearly instantaneous and unwavering denunciation by Jo Swinson of the mere idea of cooperating with Corbyn/Labour, both now and literally every other time it has come up. As you rightly point out, fearful Tory Remainers need to be reassured that voting Lib Dem doesn't equate to enabling a Corbyn government; the Lib Dem central office was pretty quick to swat down this idea. I'm not sure how you could have missed it.

To the broader point at hand, yes, you are correct to note Corbyn's longstanding Euroskepticism, perfunctory endorsement of Remain, and agonizingly slow adoption of a pro-referendum platform. However, you consistently overstate the case, assert facts that aren't in evidence, and ascribe to Corbyn/Labour motivations that don't make sense.

Corbyn's skeptical about the EU, but to say he's 'been doing nothing but supporting Brexit for years' is patently false: he campaigned for remain in 2016, he voted against the Tories' deal multiple times, and whipped his party to do the same. I'd also point out that among Tory/UKIP/BXP circles Corbyn's nickname is 'Remainer-in-chief'.

Secondly, Corbyn is definitely popular among Labour members but he's not infallible. Speaking as a Corbynite (my Lib Dem husband can attest to this, much to his chagrin), I assure you that I would take a Remain win over a Corbyn one any day of the week. More relevantly (and less subjectively), Corbyn, though popular, is not the only major force within the party. Any informed observation of Labour party politics would recognize the enduring power of the unions (only two of which are pro-Brexit), the influence of Momentum which is overwhelmingly Remain and has called for a referendum repeatedly, and the obviously pivotal role internal party democracy plays in guiding the direction of the party (why else would all those NEC elections get so heated?). Like it or not, Labour is bigger than Corbyn and any attempt to simplistically conflate the two deserves to be dismissed out of hand as nonsense.

Finally, whatever one thinks of Corbyn's personal motivations, the last few years have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that he is far more wily and pragmatic than anyone assumed. Think about it: he's a lifelong Republican and anti-nuclear activist who has comfortably left those passions aside and adopted the mainstream Labour Party pro-monarchy/Trident line; he spent two decades denouncing 'triangulation' by Blair and then spent 3 years straddling the Remain/Leave divide with his 'Brexit if necessary but not necessarily Brexit' style policy; he even started wearing a suit and tie and singing (ok, nodding along) to the national anthem.

It's easy and tempting to denounce Corbyn, I know. But is it really so hard to believe that he might be willing to appease his party on Brexit? Especially when power is so close at hand.

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What do people make of Corbyn saying that in a hung parliament he would not agree to a coalition with the SNP (and presumably the Lib Dems) and would force them decide between supporting a Labour minority or the Tories? I'd call it electioneering, but it seems pretty consistent with the Labour position earlier this year around the "national unity government" debate.

I think it's his way of rebutting the Tories' charge of 'coalition of chaos' and shoring up Labour's vote in Scotland.

More broadly, *of course* it's electioneering. It's *always* electioneering. It baffles me that people and the media insist on going through this pantomime every time. Every party that's aiming for government will say they won't do a coalition, and every party, when presented with the possibility of taking office in a coalition once the votes are counted, will seek to do so anyway.

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Corbyn surge is real and this time around the gap at the beginning of the campaign is smaller than 2 years ago. Comrades, our dreams may become a reality after all.



https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/coffee-house-shots-live-what-will-happen-in-this-election/

Jezza is an outstanding campaigner. Corbyn's Labour is perhaps as good at campaigning as the Tories are bad. Somehow "Let's not tax rich people, let's cut ties with our main economic benefactor across the Channel, and maybe America's impeached president will bestow glory on us" is emphatically less aspirational than Labour's promises to build a fair, equal, and prosperous future.

Corbyn's a much better politician than his opponents will ever be willing to admit to themselves, and the Tories' policy proposals have been out of step with most of the country since 2015 (at least), but I'm treating this development with more caution than vindication at the moment.

Yes, Labour is following the basic trajectory they did in 2017, but the Tories are gaining ground, too - something that didn't happen in 2017. The Lib Dems are also polling better than they did 2 years ago and their reasons for jumping to Labour are less obvious than they were then (tactical voting notwithstanding). I'd also note that at least part of the Tories' shifting fortunes in the 2017 campaign was due to the collapse of personal popularity for Theresa May. Johnson isn't anywhere near as popular as May was when she called the 2017 election and his supporters are *much* more devoted than May's ever were; he hasn't got as far to fall and he has a higher floor of support.

We'll see how things play out over the next couple of weeks. The leaders' debates will probably accelerate whatever trends have taken hold by the time they happen.

Also, in yet another installment of me not understanding how politics works, Labour's policy announcement of free broadband (and the nationalization of part of BT to do it) is getting huge  positive media attention and the attacks against it from the Tories and Lib Dems are falling flat. Strange times.

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Incidentally, would it be possible to like, ban anyone with a US IP address from posting in this thread or something?

That's not entirely fair as quite a few Americans have made some good posts in this thread. We shouldn't lump these good posters in with MillenialModerate etc. who clearly are talking out of their arses.

Agreed. The place for mindless venting and baseless speculation is the general discussion forum. Or the Telegraph.

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Something a bit different today. A couple of political scientists constructed an election forecasting model around the concept of pendulum swing, with a little extra weighting given to party leader approval/popularity.

As I understand it, the conceit here is that whenever a party wins an election (i.e. has a 'swing' toward it) its popularity automatically starts decaying away. Over time, the residual popularity of the initial win decays enough that the party loses (i.e. has a 'swing' against it). Notably, the size of the initial win (or a larger win for the incumbent in its first attempt at reelection) determines the 'half life' of the party's decay rate. So, a big win means greater likelihood of winning subsequent elections; a small win means the party will likely lose power more quickly.

The popularity of the incumbent party leader can accelerate/arrest this process, and third party performance is factored in as well; the model doesn't seem to take into account opposition leader popularity, though there's some evidence to say such un/popularity can help exaggerate existing trends.

So what does the model predict for 2019?

Tory: 311
Labour: 268

It's worth keeping in mind these numbers are a function of a distribution; 311 is the most likely result, with a bell curve of possibilities on either side. A Tory majority is, all told, about a 1/3 possibility.

I kind of like this model (no, not for its hopeful result) because it tries to quantify a gut feeling I think a lot of people have about governments wearing out their welcome. It's also reassuringly predictive. In the paper this article was based on, the model predicted the eventual 'winner', i.e. the party that got to form the government, in every election but once since 1929 (the model called the 1951 election wrong. Go figure.)

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The chances are that this won't lead anywhere, but it's worth keeping half an eye on just in case.

Indeed. This also seems unlikely to have much lasting impact ... but a girl can dream.

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The chances are that this won't lead anywhere, but it's worth keeping half an eye on just in case.

Indeed. This also seems unlikely to have much lasting impact ... but a girl can dream.

Given that Corbyn was endorsed by David Duke this would be a stupid game to play

No he hasn't. Duke commented on the reports about Corbyn's 'English irony' statement (widely misreported in the press, but never mind that) in 2018. Duke hasn't made an endorsement and if he did Corbyn would likely have the political sense to denounce it right away. Unlike Johnson.

FPP is a cancer. There's a lot I like about Ed Miliband, but his contribution to torpedoing AV will go down as a black mark in history.

Miliband did lots wrong, but this one isn't on him.

In any case, in the case of Finchley and Wimbledon, this is probably good news for the anti-Tory forces, as those seats are currently held by Tories and have never really been in reach for Labour. Kensington is currently held by Labour, but it was a *super* marginal seat, and the Tory candidate's showing in that poll is actually down about 4 points on their 2017 total. If some wise dame does a bit more polling in the lead up to election day and gives a clear indication of which party is in second place, I suspect there will be a bit of anti-Tory herding behind them.

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I think a Conservative majority of 50 is at the top end of realistic projections here.

I must confess, I'm all over the place how to read the state of play. The polls aren't good for Labour, but they're also not bad, and not really as positive for the Tories as the commentariat portrays them. Labour's policy announcements are going down well and Corbyn's TV appearances have been pretty good, but his rock bottom personal approval numbers seemed baked in. Johnson hasn't had a great week, but his middling/positive personal approval rating seems untouchable; why he isn't as unpopular as Corbyn still baffles me. With 3 1/2 weeks to go, anything from a Labour plurality to a Tory landslide seem possible, but the upshot of most people's analyses is that the Tories have a near-to-full majority locked in.

Meanwhile, I think IPSOS is going to release a poll for Esher & Walton some time soon. My landline just got called for a pretty extensive survey.

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I don't think that theory is supported by any of the evidence - polling, anecdotal, or otherwise. Most Labour Leavers care more about the NHS/austerity/etc. than they do about the EU, and those that don't are pretty tribal about hating the Tories. Corbyn was attacked in 2017 for being ambivalent about Brexit and had an approval rating pretty much the same as now; there hasn't been much to change those dynamics since.

The idea that this vote is a 'Brexit election' is, and always has been, more of a (Tory) slogan than an analysis. No election is dominated by a single issue. The media spent most of the past week and a half dwelling on candidate selection scandals, and the big policy items discussed have been immigration, Labour's broadband pledge, and the floods in the Northeast. Brexit's being discussed, sure, but it's not the defining issue some would like it to be.

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While we are at the discussion as to the differences/similarities between 2017 and 2019, I remember watching a documentary on the Labour Party of the 2017 vote, the same one that had Stephen Kinnock look shocked as Corbyn clawed his way back and had to receive counselling from the ex-Danish PM (who is incidently also his wife); What struck me the most though was how he and many other Labour MPs effectvely ran a campaign against both the Tories and Corbyn on the doorstep, saying that they knew they would lose but they need a strong voice against Momentum Labour from the electorate. I wager that that kind of rhetoric is no longer in play?

Hard to say. Corbyn's popular with a pretty big chunk of Labour supporters, if not a majority. I suspect most Labour MPs with a decent shot at (re)election have figured out how to read the proverbial room with each conversation.

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Also, just so we're all aware: the only story anyone's paid attention to for the past 48 hours is Prince Andrew's bone chilling interview with ITV about his (apparent total lack of) remorse for associating with Jeffrey Epstein.

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Jermey Corbyn is so bad that he makes Ilhan Omar look good compared to him. Corbyn needs to lose in a landslide

Wow, thank you for the insight, Old School Republican, very cool!

Can we please deport people who know nothing about British politics from the thread?

There's a vicious antisemite running for Prime Minister of a country with nuclear weapons. This ceased being solely about the UK a long time ago.

We've already got at least two racists in control of nuclear weapons, so a third won't make much of a difference.

Also, corbyn isn't antisemitic. Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it doesn't make it true.

Meanwhile, if those YouGov polls are.to be believed (yes, yes, grain of salt and all), Corbyn has probably come out ahead. His personal ratings were so low before, after all, he couldn't help but make a good impression.

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The audience probably shouldn't be allowed to laugh and jeer in the debate, that factors into what the people at home think when they should just focus on the points the candidates make. This isn't a partisan thing because the audience laughed and jeered at both candidates.

I suppose you're right, but I've always enjoyed listening to audience reactions. They're a kind of instantaneous snap poll of whatever the person speaking has just said that cuts through the bullsh!t and bluster. They're especially useful in the age of social media where partisans on either side (online or in commentary panels on TV afterwards) will spin *everything* as pro-us/anti-them.

I think it would be useful to have a debate with no audience but with a more prosecutorial moderator and/or a format that allows the contestants more time to speak freely. Have that alongside other debates where there is an audience and you might get the best of both worlds. 

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Johnson definitely won because he made the debate all about Brexit.

ITV decided beforehand to make the first half of the debate focused on Brexit. The second half was on other topics, including the NHS where Corbyn did substantially better than Johnson did.

Tories being utter c-nts with CCHQPress twitter changed their name to 'factcheckUK.'

This appears to be getting a lot of coverage, with pretty universal condemnation; even right-wing hacks like Janet Hart-Brewer have denounced it. Twitter's also made a formal statement saying that they will swiftly discipline any account that tries this again.

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6.7 million viewersv.  Not a good number at all.

Based on what? The assorted 2010 and 2015 election debates ranged between 2 and 9 million viewers, and the numbers out today are just the overnights. People who watch on catch up aren't counted, nor are the masses of people who watch clips of the debate online.

Some more detailed figures from the YouGov after action poll here:

https://twitter.com/PeterKellner1/status/1197104862179266560

A trend worth keeping an eye on: Whenever Johnson, or to a lesser extent the Tory party in general, has a lead in various 'attributes' (more likeable, more relatable, better on the NHS, etc.) it's almost always because of softer support for Labour/Corbyn rather than a higher regard for the Tories. Put another way: Tories are lock step behind Johnson and his party no matter what while Labour supporters are more ambivalent. This dynamic was also present in 2017.

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Apparently some Jewish People were offended by how Corbyn pronounced "EpSHtein" in the Debate, allegedly in an attempt to make him sound more Jewish?

I have been following the story in question, and was genuinely not aware there was a "correct" and "incorrect" way to pronounce said name before last night - never mind that any particular one betrays AS tendencies

If you go out of your way to pronounce Epstein with an "Sch" sound for the S, you're clearly going for a very Jewish pronunciation...but that's not necessarily anti-Semitic. It depends on context and what Epstein's preference was in life.

Indeed, such "careful" pronunciation is often an attempt to be "respectful" to the minority concerned rather than the opposite - its only because it is Corbyn that certain people are losing their s*** over it.

“Respectful” but wrong, as Epstein’s name is NOT pronounced that way, which makes it look more like stupid-person failed fake PC pandering. I agree that it’s unlikely it was intended to be anti-Semitic, but Corbyn has justifiably lost the benefit of the doubt on anti-Semitism at this point, so one can hardly blame people for having their hackles up.

Problem is, if you try to explain why such hackling might be, in this case, unjustified and even a little silly, it still feeds into the 'Corbyn is an antisemite' discourse and so reinforces that loss of the benefit of the doubt, which in this case is actually pretty unfair to Corbyn.

On the 2010 Lib Dem performance, something I picked up after the fact from people involved is how unprepared the Lib Dems were for the massive surge in their vote mid-campaign. They had no plan for how to expand their map of targeted seats to account for being in first or a three way tie for first. As a result, the party frantically shoveled money/resources into ultimately unwinnable seats, depleting the resources in more marginal ones where they could have won if they had stuck to a consistent plan.

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Bit of ground level anecdotal evidence: My Esher & Walton based landline has now been called 3 (!) times by polling companies, most recently be Deltapoll. In 15 years of living here my partner has never been called by a polling company before.

Meanwhile, the local Lib Dem campaign is in high gear with leafleters at the local train stations each morning. Labour campaign MIA. Tory campaign limited to a single pamphlet pushed through our mail slot that made zero mention of their party leader.

Am heading to a hustings (candidate meet and greet) tonight.

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Bit of ground level anecdotal evidence: My Esher & Walton based landline has now been called 3 (!) times by polling companies, most recently be Deltapoll. In 15 years of living here my partner has never been called by a polling company before.

Meanwhile, the local Lib Dem campaign is in high gear with leafleters at the local train stations each morning. Labour campaign MIA. Tory campaign limited to a single pamphlet pushed through our mail slot that made zero mention of their party leader.

Am heading to a hustings (candidate meet and greet) tonight.

As a local do you think there's a genuine chance of Raab losing? I'm certainly very sceptical of it but I'd be interested to know what someone in the area thinks.

Based on the hustings tonight *definitely* yes. In the 90 minutes Raab, Monica Harding, and the Labour candidate debated, Raab got booed or laughed at at least a half dozen times. The biggest jeers came when he tried to answer questions on Brexit. Frankly, even as someone inclined not to like Raab's politics, I was surprised at how vociferous opposition to him was in the room. There was still a solid core of audience support for him, but the Lib Dem contingent was definitely bigger and louder.

Added to that, the Labour candidate was quite weak. I went up to him afterwards and he seemed like a nice enough guy. But he was very soft spoken, seemed very nervous, and actually wrapped up his concluding remarks with something like 'we have to beat the Tories with Labour or the Lib Dems'.

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Based on the hustings tonight *definitely* yes. In the 90 minutes Raab, Monica Harding, and the Labour candidate debated, Raab got booed or laughed at at least a half dozen times. The biggest jeers came when he tried to answer questions on Brexit. Frankly, even as someone inclined not to like Raab's politics, I was surprised at how vociferous opposition to him was in the room. There was still a solid core of audience support for him, but the Lib Dem contingent was definitely bigger and louder.

Added to that, the Labour candidate was quite weak. I went up to him afterwards and he seemed like a nice enough guy. But he was very soft spoken, seemed very nervous, and actually wrapped up his concluding remarks with something like 'we have to beat the Tories with Labour or the Lib Dems'.

Must be hard standing in front of a crowd trying to argue that you're more than a sacrificial lamb candidate, even though everyone and yourself knows that's a lie.

Interesting that the LDs can follow up on their word to seriously contest the seat though. One has to assume that their prospects are looking up in those Tory seats to the North if they can get a vibrant crowd in the more reachy Raab seat.

If by 'north' you mean Kensington, Wimbledon, and so on, then yes I'd agree. The Lib Dems aren't serious contenders in most of 'The North', i.e. Yorkshire, Lancashire, etc. They *are* making a big play in the Southwest (Cornwall and Devon) but I haven't heard anything about the campaigns in that part of the country.

On the way to work this morning the Tories were handing out pamphlets to commuters at the train station. A bit late to the game, tbh; the Lib Dems have been doing that for two weeks, albeit intermittently.

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Swinson bombed, and anyone who actually watched it and disagrees is simply delusional.

I watched all but Corbyn's bit and I thought Swinson did reasonably well given how hard she was getting hit. The evening was probably still a net negative for her, but I didn't see a moment that was truly irredeemable. Sadly, Johnson also didn't have such a moment, though I think he also came out looking worse overall. The part of his shtick where he babbles/stutters in the lead up to point gets old fast in a setting like this. I also think it makes him look frazzled and unprepared, but that might just be my motivated reasoning at work.

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I think it's based on sizeable majorities insulating governments somewhat of which there's some political theory behind; 1987 helping Major in 1992, 2001 helping Labour in 2005 despite just a 3 point lead (and 2005 making 2010 harder for the Tories). This is the third (quick) election for the incumbent Tories and if Boris walks away with a majority of 100, it's probably not going to become a Labour majority of say 10 in one cycle.

There's a certain logic to the idea of mass-incumbency bonuses, sure, but I would say that it is more of an occasional tendency than a rule. Three figure majorities melted away at the first challenge in 1964 and 1970, for instance. A long time ago now, a literal lifetime away, yes, but the issue is the operation of this most obviously idiotic of electoral systems rather than direct comparison. And of course one only needs to look at what happened in Scotland in 2015 to see what can happen when the electorate has decisively changed its mind these days: if things turn, they turn. Party affinity and party loyalty at present are also so extremely low now that I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if a genuinely new party were to do randomly very well out of nowhere at some point.

This is basically the idea behind the model I posted a link to a couple weeks back. It's based on previous election performance, the concept of swing, and leader ratings, and predicted a hung parliament with the Tories losing a handful of seats.

For all the sturm and drang of polling hype, there seems to be a few clear patterns: Tories stable in the low/mid 40s, Labour slowly rising. If those trends continue for the next three weeks a hung parliament is more likely than not.