United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[TheTide]

What changed in the late 1960s which seemed to cause such a dramatic decline in trust in the political class? Or is this just an artifact of the way the data is presented?

Profumo and devaluation are two events of the 60s that seemed to cause an increase in cynicism about politics and politicians.

[YL]

How much worse than 1997 can the result be expected to be for the Tories in terms of seat count, given depolarization since then? Is something like "Liberal Democrats become the Official Opposition" a pipe dream or a realistic prospect?

I lean towards "pipe dream", unfortunately. There are enough constituencies that I really find it very hard to see the Tories losing, even in their current state, that I struggle to see them falling low enough to levels where the Lib Dems might overtake them. I suppose if Reform UK really did split their vote heavily enough then Labour or the Lib Dems might come through the middle and win those seats on a low vote share, but I don't really think that's likely.

(Also, there's a lot of skepticism over the 'Reform UK' surge being real. Is there a time when we'll know whether it is or isn't?

The main reason many of us are sceptical about Reform UK's polling figures is that they aren't performing at a level consistent with them in real elections, especially Westminster by-elections, and we haven't seen a convincing explanation for why not. We have three more of those coming up, and one of those in particular (Wellingborough) looks like an opportunity for them to show that actually they can perform. If that doesn't happen, and their polling figures don't fall back again as the General Election approaches, then the first we'll know of whether they're real or not is the exit poll (to the extent that it tells us about that) and then the first results.

Also, are most 'Reform UK' voters individuals who despise the Tories but can't actually envision themselves voting for a party not on the right, or are they against-all voters who might well end up casting a vote for Labour or the Lib Dems to turf the Sunak government?)

A bit of both, I think, but I did see some polling saying that Labour specifically were very unpopular with people expressing a Reform UK voting intention, which suggests more the former. (But the Tories are unpopular with them too.)

[JimJamUK]

How much worse than 1997 can the result be expected to be for the Tories in terms of seat count, given depolarization since then? Is something like "Liberal Democrats become the Official Opposition" a pipe dream or a realistic prospect? (Also, there's a lot of skepticism over the 'Reform UK' surge being real. Is there a time when we'll know whether it is or isn't? Also, are most 'Reform UK' voters individuals who despise the Tories but can't actually envision themselves voting for a party not on the right, or are they against-all voters who might well end up casting a vote for Labour or the Lib Dems to turf the Sunak government?)

The Lib Dems are unlikely to become the official opposition, as you would truly have to see a Labour landslide, massive tactical voting for the Lib Dems, and a genuine Reform surge. The semi-realistic outcome is that the Tories do get smashed, but the level of Conservative to Labour switchers required would in practice mean Labour would be winning random seats in southern England that pre-coalition would have voted Lib Dem on such an occasion.

As alluded to above, the Reform ‘surge’ seems to be way too hyped by the polls. They are nowhere near achieving what UKIP did even before their peak, as evidenced by their underwhelming by-election performances and their near non-existent local election votes. The polls indicate they are appealing to politically engaged voters who demographically look the sort who turn out to cast a protest vote, yet actual results indicate the opposite. It looks to me like poor sampling. There is a lot of unhappiness with the Tories, including on the right, but it’s not voting Reform at the moment.

FWIW, polling indicates that Reform voters are mostly 2019 Tories with a Brexit Party minority. Their voters overwhelmingly have a very negative view of Starmer/Labour which doesn’t suggest many of them would switch to Labour if Reform didn’t stand/collapsed. Of course, many could just stay home instead of going back to the Tories. That’s not to say there aren’t quite a few ‘Reform-esque’ voters (voted Tory/Brexit Party, Leave and don’t like immigration) who could vote Labour, it’s just that such people are currently indicating they’ll switch to Labour or more likely are ‘don’t know’ at the moment.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I found the Leader of the Opposition rankings fascinating -- Britain didn't have a Watergate, so what caused the enormous decline in trust for political figures in the late 1960s? Up to the 1966 election, all the premiers and opposition leaders (...except Attlee, who set up the NHS) are above water, but then in 1970 Wilson and Heath -- the same candidates as in 1966 -- have net negative approval. Starting with 1970, Britain has had 14 election years, but only four times did an incumbent have positive net approval (Thatcher in '83, Major in '92 -- why was Labour expected to win that one again? -- Blair in '01, and May in '17, which LOL), and only twice did an opposition leader have the approval of the public (Blair in '97 and Cameron in '10, which again LOL).

What changed in the late 1960s which seemed to cause such a dramatic decline in trust in the political class? Or is this just an artifact of the way the data is presented?

There are several issues here and they all need to be understood individually in order to make sense of the whole. The first is that face-to-face polling was the norm in Britain throughout the postwar decades and that, somewhat remarkably, there were still some holdouts in the industry into the 1980s. The second is the decline of deference and - perhaps more importantly in this context - of the perceived need to display deference during this period, a phenomenon that accelerated rapidly in the 1960s. Putting these two factors together without reference even to any other explains rather a lot, but a third factor is also critical: between the early 1950s and the early 1970s there was a continual and very obvious increase in material living standards for people of nearly all social classes in Great Britain, irrespective of the ups and downs of the economy (these often, in any case, deliberately engineered in order to produce pre-election economic booms). This tended to encourage high levels of satisfaction in the political system, though when there were downwards blips they could be oddly, but briefly, savage, perhaps due to the usual issues with face-to-face polling temporarily inverting. This was not the case after the economic shocks of the early and middle 1970s (which convinced many that politics could not solve their problems as the politicians themselves seemed frankly helpless) and this was not the case before the early 1950s. Politics during the late 1940s and early 1950s was incredibly (and for Britain uniquely) polarized, as in straitened circumstances the Attlee government had consistently taken the line that maintaining working class living standards was more important than returning middle class privileges taken away by the War and Austerity, with predictable political consequences in what was very much A Class Society (with all the implications of those capital letters) at the time: there is a reason why Britain managed to have turnouts of over 80% in 1950 and 1951 but never afterwards.

[DL]

Its also notable that in 1945 Churchill had 81% approval!! then lost the election in a landslide

[Torrain]

On the 30th Jan, Government quietly postponed its flagship energy security conference (scheduled for April) until 2025. The Africa Investment Summit, also planned for April, has also been pushed back, as of this morning.

And leaders on the continent are getting tetchy about the refusal to announce dates for the 4th European Political Community Summit, which was scheduled to be held in the UK, in March-April.

I’m not saying we’re going in May - mood music suggests the contrary. I’m just saying that the sort of diary clearing is going on that you’d expect if we *were* going to be busy with other matters this spring.

[YL]

Get your pinches of salt ready…

Constituency polls, carried out by Survation for Plaid Cymru

Ynys Môn

Plaid 39
Lab 27
Con 26
Reform 4
Lib Dem 1

Caerfyrddin

Plaid 30
Con 24
Lab 24
Ind Edwards 10
Lib Dem 4
Reform 4

[Oryxslayer]

I mean in theory those both should be PC seats after a upcoming election IMO. The issue is you can never trust the sample of a constituency poll.

[DL]

Get your pinches of salt ready…

Constituency polls, carried out by Survation for Plaid Cymru

Ynys Môn

Plaid 39
Lab 27
Con 26
Reform 4
Lib Dem 1

Caerfyrddin

Plaid 30
Con 24
Lab 24
Ind Edwards 10
Lib Dem 4
Reform 4

How does that compare with the results in those seats in the 2019 GE?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You can tell that an election is in the offing when smaller parties start to commission constituency polls designed to push a particular local tactical message, lol. I may have a look at the guts later to see if there's anything especially amusing going on there.

I mean in theory those both should be PC seats after a upcoming election IMO.

No obvious reason why Anglesey should: the Plaid vote has been essentially flat there (in both raw and percentage terms) for twenty years now. It goes up a bit, it goes down a bit, but it's never that far from 10,000 votes and 30%. Broadly speaking, it tends to be the Conservative and Labour votes that fluctuate more there these days and there's often direct flow involved (especially on Holy Island and around Valley). Of course a score in that area can be just about enough to win on the Island, but there's no ought or should about anything.

[YL]

Get your pinches of salt ready…

Constituency polls, carried out by Survation for Plaid Cymru

Ynys Môn

Plaid 39
Lab 27
Con 26
Reform 4
Lib Dem 1

Caerfyrddin

Plaid 30
Con 24
Lab 24
Ind Edwards 10
Lib Dem 4
Reform 4

How does that compare with the results in those seats in the 2019 GE?

Ynys Môn was Con 35%, Lab 30%, Plaid 29%, Brexit Party 6%.

Caerfyrddin's notional result is Con 39%, Plaid 31%, Lab 25%, Brexit Party 4%, Lib Dem 1%. This may be a little misleading as the two outgoing constituencies it takes territory from have different dynamics.

[Torrain]

These polls have a sample size of like, 240 voters, right? Feels pretty flimsy, although it'll make for a nice bar chart on the candidate leaflet.

What's the Welsh for "only the Lib Dems Plaid can win here"?

[YL]

These polls have a sample size of like, 240 voters, right? Feels pretty flimsy, although it'll make for a nice bar chart on the candidate leaflet.

What's the Welsh for "only the Lib Dems Plaid can win here"?

Tables are here for Caerfyrddin and here for Ynys Môn. The sample sizes quoted on the front pages are 520 and 507 respectively, which are not I think unusual for constituency polls; the lower figures being reported are what's left after don't knows, won't votes and so on are removed.

The Ynys Môn one has breakdowns according to how long voters have lived in the constituency and Welsh language ability. Sample sizes are of course very small for many of these categories.

Both polls prompted for certain named candidates: Plaid, Labour and Tory in Ynys Môn and Plaid, Labour and Ind Edwards for Caerfyrddin. ("Ind Edwards" is Jonathan Edwards, the sitting MP for Carmarthen East & Dinefwr, elected as Plaid.) Owain Sutton's spreadsheet of candidate selections shows some other names in both cases.

[CumbrianLefty]

Some of Survation's constituency polls at the last GE weren't bad at all, and they called the Hartlepool byelection right as well (though they wrongly had the Tories winning Batley and Spen, which was IIRC their most recent individual seat effort up to now)

But their samples then, whilst not large, were somewhat bigger than these two.

[YL]

Some of Survation's constituency polls at the last GE weren't bad at all, and they called the Hartlepool byelection right as well (though they wrongly had the Tories winning Batley and Spen, which was IIRC their most recent individual seat effort up to now)

But their samples then, whilst not large, were somewhat bigger than these two.

They also polled Wakefield (not great: they overestimated both the top two, especially Labour) and Mid Beds (not bad).

[TheTide]

Another constituency poll.

https://twitter.com/OprosUK/status/1753040594035679541?s=20

Two points about this.

1. Reform are very unlikely to be on 10% nationally if they can't break 20% in this seat.

2. The swing from the Tories to Labour is 24%, considerably larger than the ~16% swing being indicated in the current national polls. Of course that might be at least somewhat due to Reform, but it does show that the Tories have, to perhaps state the obvious, a steeper hill to descend in seats such as this.

[adma]

Two points about this.

1. Reform are very unlikely to be on 10% nationally if they can't break 20% in this seat.

2. The swing from the Tories to Labour is 24%, considerably larger than the ~16% swing being indicated in the current national polls. Of course that might be at least somewhat due to Reform, but it does show that the Tories have, to perhaps state the obvious, a steeper hill to descend in seats such as this.

Then again, one might argue that the Tories are already overleveraged in a seat like Clacton, particularly given how it was a New Labour two-termer a generation ago.  So there's an element of being brought back down to earth after basking in being a poster child for "Leave Populism"...

[Hnv1]

What's the shortest time span legally possible to hold a GE? Can it be scheduled within a month?

[YL]

What's the shortest time span legally possible to hold a GE? Can it be scheduled within a month?

It's 25 working days from dissolution of Parliament to polling day, and normally the dissolution would be announced a few days in advance. So just over a month.

[CumbrianLefty]

Two points about this.

1. Reform are very unlikely to be on 10% nationally if they can't break 20% in this seat.

2. The swing from the Tories to Labour is 24%, considerably larger than the ~16% swing being indicated in the current national polls. Of course that might be at least somewhat due to Reform, but it does show that the Tories have, to perhaps state the obvious, a steeper hill to descend in seats such as this.

Then again, one might argue that the Tories are already overleveraged in a seat like Clacton, particularly given how it was a New Labour two-termer a generation ago.  So there's an element of being brought back down to earth after basking in being a poster child for "Leave Populism"...

The present Clacton seat would have stayed Tory in 1997 and 2001.

[adma]

Two points about this.

1. Reform are very unlikely to be on 10% nationally if they can't break 20% in this seat.

2. The swing from the Tories to Labour is 24%, considerably larger than the ~16% swing being indicated in the current national polls. Of course that might be at least somewhat due to Reform, but it does show that the Tories have, to perhaps state the obvious, a steeper hill to descend in seats such as this.

Then again, one might argue that the Tories are already overleveraged in a seat like Clacton, particularly given how it was a New Labour two-termer a generation ago.  So there's an element of being brought back down to earth after basking in being a poster child for "Leave Populism"...

The present Clacton seat would have stayed Tory in 1997 and 2001.

True, but the fact that it's had Labour representation *at all* has got to leave a mark.

[CumbrianLefty]

Some of Survation's constituency polls at the last GE weren't bad at all, and they called the Hartlepool byelection right as well (though they wrongly had the Tories winning Batley and Spen, which was IIRC their most recent individual seat effort up to now)

But their samples then, whilst not large, were somewhat bigger than these two.

They also polled Wakefield (not great: they overestimated both the top two, especially Labour) and Mid Beds (not bad).

Ah yes, forgot it was them who did Mid Beds as well as Opinium.

The orchestrated LibDem rubbishing of those polls really was something to behold

[YL]

Some of Survation's constituency polls at the last GE weren't bad at all, and they called the Hartlepool byelection right as well (though they wrongly had the Tories winning Batley and Spen, which was IIRC their most recent individual seat effort up to now)

But their samples then, whilst not large, were somewhat bigger than these two.

They also polled Wakefield (not great: they overestimated both the top two, especially Labour) and Mid Beds (not bad).

Ah yes, forgot it was them who did Mid Beds as well as Opinium.

The orchestrated LibDem rubbishing of those polls really was something to behold

You mean the idea that a reasonably reputable polling company would conduct a poll of Flitwick and call it a poll of a whole constituency? I never got to the bottom of where that one came from.

[YL]

And today’s prize for bad reporting of polls goes to those who have taken a Survation poll of British Muslims and used its figures with undecided voters included for a comparison with the last General Election.

[Battista Minola 1616]

And today’s prize for bad reporting of polls goes to those who have taken a Survation poll of British Muslims and used its figures with undecided voters included for a comparison with the last General Election.

Let me guess, does this include a Twitter account with the initials SFL?