United Kingdom General Elections: December 12th, 2019

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Looks like Tom Watson is not running...

CON gains West Bromwich East ?

Highly unlikely. Tories didn't even win when the SD split the vote near perfectly in 1983.

Note also that despite all the bluster it wasn't even arguably close two years ago: majority of 20% on a vote share of 58%. As Watson polled 50% two years earlier that is probably a relatively 'hard' 58%, so to speak. Labour also won every ward in the constituency in May.

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Godsiff to stand as an independent at Hall Green doubtless on a Save Sparkbrook From Sodomy ticket, because we live in Hell.

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Godsiff to stand as an independent at Hall Green doubtless on a Save Sparkbrook From Sodomy ticket, because we live in Hell.

Whats his chances? Respect got 25% there back in 2005...

He isn't personally popular at all (he's a bloody awful lazy MP from absolutely any way you look at it: does no work in the House, does no work in his constituency...) so it would be nice to say 'none whatsoever', but that issue is extremely toxic. So first thing to do will be to see who the Labour candidate is before speculating further. Of course the issue is not 'live' in parts of the constituency, important not to ignore that.

He will be motivated to cross the 5% line as he's a mercenary toad - one of those retired trade unionists who treat being an MP as part of their pension package - and five hundred quid is five hundred quid.

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https://twitter.com/sima_kotecha/status/1192452762958729221

y i k e s

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Was this one commissioned by anybody?

The Economist.

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They are aggregates from subsamples of pre-campaign polling - in other words, worthless.

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We do, however, now have an actual new poll. From Panelbase. And it reads thus: Con 40, Lab 30, LDem 15, BP 8, Greens 3

This, for the record, would equate to a 4pt swing from 2017.

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It is pretty clear that unless they change something major and fairly soon* that we will start to see, and maybe this will even occur soon as in a decade, a major structural fall in Conservative support; something akin to the declines suffered by the Cold War People's Parties in German-speaking countries. Or, for that matter, similar to the decline in turnouts seen here as the Wartime Generation started to depart in the 1990s.

It is true that people become more conservative as they grow older, but this does not mean that they will automatically become more likely to vote for the Conservative Party. This was not the case with earlier generations, particularly. It has been with older people recently for very specific material factors which cannot and will not be replicated: teachers will not be retiring to golden handshakes and final salary pensions, for instance. That's before we consider the property issues.

Of course this will play no role in the present election.

_{*Which can hardly be ruled out: this is British politics.}

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Let's just say that today was the first time I and probably many other people have heard of Dan Carden, so he didn't exactly make a good first impression.

What has been alleged very likely didn't happen.

On the one hand there are reasons to raise eyebrows at the source and other people on the trip have denied the story. On the other, the MPs in question are known lushes. The denials from them are funny: they clearly can't remember a thing about the journey.

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Keith Vaz has just lost the Keith Vaz game.

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A rather strange decision.

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Might this work in Labour's favour? Spilt the leave vote in seats they need to keep

It might have a beneficial effect to the LibDems in parts of the West Country as well, oddly.

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-in lab constituencies, the goal is to impeach some leave voters to vote for labour and so conservatives can win the seat due to the weaked labour result.

Not how things actually work, though...

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BXP support has been on a pretty clear downward trend anyway and it's likely they'd have been below 5% by polling day anyway. This may increase the chance that they become totally irrelevant in all but a handful of seats, as was the case in 2017.

Yes, there's the possibility that the main effect of this will just be self-sabotage.

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It also seems some BxP people due to stand in Tory seats had no knowledge of this decision and are not happy about it.

Indeed. To quote the (former) Brexit Party Candidate in Crawley:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Wayne_BayIey/status/1193868199361753088?ref_src=twsrc...

Technically, of course, there's no reason why such an aggrieved provisional candidate cannot run as an independent, if they choose.

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Best way to have stopped Brexit would have been to vote Labour in 2015. That was the most important election of our times, everything else just follows the ghastly course it set. Oh well.

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More polls...

Survation: Con 35, Lab 29, LDem 17, BP 10, Greens 1, Others ?*
ICM: Con 39, Lab 31, LDem 15, BP 8, Greens 3, SNP 3, Others 1

_{*Note that Survation polls include Northern Ireland, so mentally change those figures to 36, 30... for comparative purposes.}

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Anyway, the government's response to the flooding in Yorkshire and the East Midlands has become an election issue.

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For purposes of comparison, 2017 was Conservatives 42, Labour 40.

Actually Tories 43.5 Labour 41 if we are doing GB scores (as most pollsters do)

Though, as it happens, not Survation.

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oof

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Kantar's first poll of the campaign: Con 37, Lab 27, LDem 17, BP 9, Greens 3, SNP 3, Others 3

This is possibly of some minor interest as throughout the Autumn, Kantar had been consistent in showing Conservative leads of 14pts.

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Kantar's first poll of the campaign: Con 37, Lab 27, LDem 17, BP 9, Greens 3, SNP 3, Others 3

This is possibly of some minor interest as throughout the Autumn, Kantar had been consistent in showing Conservative leads of 14pts.

For what it's worth (very little) that poll apparently showed a 1pt Labour lead before demographics were weighted by likelihood to vote. If true the 'interesting' part of this, I guess, is the implied importance for Labour of boosting turnout.

The "certain to vote" figure amongst 18-24 year olds was reportedly a completely ridiculous 10%.

Interesting. Of course this is a big feature of polling these days - they are no longer social surveys that ask a political question, but an attempt to guess the 'right' result. The polling failure at the last election was to a great extent a result of that: assumptions being made, polls being adjusted accordingly... and those assumptions turning out to be incorrect.

Not that this means we can simply assume the same will happen again and in the exact same way and direction (that's voodoo), but it is something to be eternally aware of.

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Not this **** again.

a) the 'social grade' system was faulty even in the 1970s and is a complete disaster now; it in no way reflects the realities of a service sector economy with a very large elderly population (it is true, by the way, pensioners are routinely rolled into category DE by some polling firms).* I can go into far too much detail about this if anyone is interested: I have done before. But for now: how many people in Great Britain consider, for example, nursing to be a middle class occupation? I suspect not many. I wonder how many people (in the countryside, where this is relevant) consider farmers to be working class? No one.

b) even were this not so, YouGov's peculiar polling methods happen to make their internal numbers completely worthless anyway. It's some real voodoo nonsense. Rubbish.

c) even were this not so, different polling firms internals show very different figures and patterns, not just from YouGov but from each other. In fact the main thing that shows up when one monitors numbers for these categories over even a short period of time (say, a month) is how absurdly volatile they are. Which is not surprising as they are almost random categories by this point.

d) this actually takes us back to a) because there are serious issues with sampling for some of the categories, particularly C2 which is a notorious disaster.

e) even were all of this not so, poll internals are not polls or surveys themselves, but a way of making sure that the poll was conducted with an appropriately balanced sample. The way they are thrown around by people who know this but have commercial reasons to ignore that fact amounts to the pollution of public discourse.

f) you wouldn't give your bank details to a 'Nigerian Prince', you don't believe anything hawked by Matthew Badwin.

_{*And there are reasons to be a mildly dubious as to how thorough the ones that say they do not do this actually are.}

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This is most likely too America-centric but why cannot the polls instead group the population by education (grad school, university, vocational, and high school etc etc)?

They often do, but the huge changes to education policy over the past fifty years and the massive expansion of higher education from the 1990s means that while you're clearly measuring something interesting by doing that, it is no longer that closely related to class.

What they could (and should) do is use occupational breakdowns based on the census categories the ONS use. They don't because of laziness on their part and a certain deranged conservatism on behalf of their clients, many of whom seem to like ABC1C2DE as a sort of comfort blanket.

A couple of firms, I have noticed, ask for income instead: these are mostly newer firms, without legacy clients.

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What a boring election.

What a boring, brainless troll.