Two polls, same timing, different outcomes. Eh?
November 22nd, 2009
How can we explain both MORI and ICM?
One thing you must not do, when you see a shock polling outcome such as the survey for by MORI for the Observer this morning, is immediately to conclude that it must be a rogue or an outlier.
The fact is that we don’t know. You can only label a poll like that with the benefit of hindsight and it might be that when we see further surveys that the poll carried out last weekend but only published today is spot on.
Having said that confidence in the Observer’s coverage of the findings would have been increased if the hugely important detail of the fieldwork timing had been highlighted - in fact it hardly gets a mention.
For the survey was carried out over precisely the same days as the ICM poll in the Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, that was published on Tuesday. That also showed the same trend of a move to Labour but on nothing like the same scale of MORI.
The importance of poll timings was underlined during the conference season when YouGov produced its daily, 1,000 sample, tracker poll for Sky News. Each new poll brought dramatic swings and at one point Labour’s deficit dropped to just seven points. This all changed once the spotlight moved on from Brighton and polling settled down at the pre-conference season levels.
And a key factor at the start of the fieldwork period for last weekend’s ICM and MORI polls was Labour’s stunning victory in the Glasgow North East by election which was topping the bulletins just as the fieldwork was starting.
This is what wrote here BEFORE seeing either survey “….generally polls that are undertaken in the immediate aftermath of by elections give the winner a boost if only because of the extra exposure in the media…Theoretically at least this should be more marked in polls like ICM and MORI with heavy “certainty to vote” weightings. Supporters feel more encouraged and give a higher rating to the “how certain are you” question. MORI, of course, only includes the “100% certains” in its headline figures.”
One of the findings that will ease some of the Tory jitters is that Cameron’s personal satisfaction ratings with MORI are at their second highest since May. They stand at 48% satisfied to 35% dissatisfied. At the start of the year it was 44 - 38 and in September it was 45 - 39.
Mike Smithson
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First?
Oneth?
1. Oh poo! I was slowed down by reading the article…
I’m not convinced many people were even aware of Labour’s by-election win in Glasgow.
I think there probably IS a trend towards Labour for deeper reasons although probably not yet on the IPSOS-MORI scale.
The betting industry is based on uncertainty. The people who produced the 37:31 poll were obviously deliberately collectively lying in order to produce a rogue result, specifically for the purpose of creating excitement among the betting community, and to stimulate the odds in the hung parliament options. The real result, if they had actually said how they intend to vote, would have been 57:11.
re 4. It was leading the bulletins for most of a week last Friday and go check back at polls that were carried out after previous by elections.
And I stuck my neck out with a prediction about these two polls before we saw the findings and I was proved right.
5. The same thing will happen during the GE campaign. The Conservative lead in the opinion polls during the 3 weeks of the campaign will gradually diminish from +15 to -5, and then the actual result will be +35. People will want to hurt Labour by giving them a huge kick in the ballots, but also want to make it extra painful by making sure that it is unexpectedly bad. Ed Balls will come fifth in Morley & Outwood, and UKIP will gain Bootle after a recount.
Mike Smithson - Something is not exactly troubling me but is giving me food for thought.
To a certain extent this good poll for Labour was ANTICIPATED by one of the Spread firms and I commented ‘Wow !’ when SPIN flip-flopped with extrabet on Labour Seats.They went from 203-208 to 207-212 at a time extrabet were 205-210.
Trustingly, I believed this was just weight of money.Now I am not so sure. Something to watch in the future and how I miss Spreadfair.
I can’t believe Mori still stick with their silly “only count one hundred percenters ” method.
It’s basically justified in the immediate run up to a (general) election, and at no other time.
I wonder how much of the difference here is coming from the % given to Other.
ICM only has others at 10% while Mori has them at 15%. IIRC ICM prompts for the 3 main parties, but not others, so you’d expect it to get systematically lower numbers.
Until now the lead provided by others-heavy pollsters has tended to move in line with others-light ones, because things like expenses hit both parties at the same time. But in the last few weeks we’ve had the by-election and The Sun overplaying their hand as factors pushing ex-Labour voters back to Brown, and Cameron’s Lisbon announcement potentially pushing some Conservative voters towards the UKIP.
It’s a shame that Mori don’t publish their ‘all naming a party’ poll anymore. It was always heavily biased towards labour but still much better at tracing trend movement than their current silliness.
Although the chances of an early GE have increased, there doesn’t appear to be much value left in Ladbrokes’ 9/2 offering against a March 2010 poll, but wind the calendar forward by just one month and their price of 50/1 against February looks distinctly tasty. Yes, we all know the arguments against a winter poll, but can anyone seriously doubt that Brown would not hesitate in calling such an election should he be confident of achieving a hung Parliament - surely his best realistic expectation and frankly one which would represent an excellent result for Labour after 13 years in office, thereby allowing him to bow out gracefully.
February is a longshot for sure, but I believe it should be much shorter than 50/1, so maybe worth a couple of quid for fun. I’m on!
You have to love the Observer ! If they were posting on my forum I would ban them for ramping.
“Poll boost for PM as confidence in the economy grows.” So that’s it then ? Hung Parliament ? Labour win ?
I don’t think so. This is a time for ‘creative panic’ on the part of sensible Tory Backers but with a view to increase one’s position on a Tory win.
The good factor for Labour is that at least now the battle lines are drawn, with Nice Dave Cameron,the Evil Tories and the even more Evil Sun on one side and Labour, The Beeb and the broadsheet rags on the other.
Good shot with Feb at 50-1 PfP. One of the few shots left in the Labour locker is to wrong foot the Opposition with the timing of the GE.
I did my creative panic yesterday with a Back of LAB Seats 201-250 at 7-4 with PP.Maybe I wasn’t creative enough.
Also I have fully arbed my 5-1 Back of Tory Seats 400+ with antifrank at 100-30 give or take a decimal place.
12. “thereby allowing him to bow out gracefully”
If Brown managed, Houdini-like, to cling on to power as leader of the largest party in a hung parliament, I find it hard to believe he’d be stepping down soon, and the pressure on him to do so would ease considerably. On the other hand, if he simply prevented an incoming Tory government from having an outright majority, that would be an ideal moment for him to step down with a bit of credibility restored.
13 “…..and Labour, The Beeb and the broadsheet rags on the other.”
URW - a few assumptions there I fancy:
The Times for Labour …………I doubt it.
The Sunday Times for Labour……I doubt it.
The Daily Telegraph for Labour…I doubt it.
The Sunday Telegraph for Labour..I doubt it.
The Observer……………….. Will it survive?
The Daily/Sunday Indie………. Will they survive?
The Financial Times for Labour…No.
The Guardian for Labour……….Yes
16. PfP. The Telegraph and the pink one are not rags ! I meant the Obsever/Guardian/Indie mob.
At least we are living in exciting times.
15 James - I was assuming the latter of the two alternatives referred to in your post
URW - I think I may have been behind the SPIN spread move to Labour. As noted above I anticipated this poll move and began buying Labour at the 207 level
14 URW 7/4 with PP against Labour winning 201-250 seats looks great value, especially if you were one of the many PBers who took Hills’ charity bet of 4/1 against Labour winning 150-199 seats.
The nearly equivalent bet is PP’s 6/4 odds against the Tories failing to achieve a 50 seat majority. In other words on them winning 0-349 seats.
6. No Mike. It registered next to nothing amongst the masses south of the border. It’s hard for people like you, immersed as you are in the high-brow febrile Westminster atmosphere, to comprehend that only the most seismic national political stories shake their way through to the consciouness of the masses. Jedward et.al. are of far more interest to the red-top rag n’ tag, and what moves people are factors (ho ho) closer to home.
With regard to your self-congratulation about by-elections your capacity for self-delusion appears quite remarkable. You have repeatedly been barking up the wrong tree about Labour’s chances in general, and Brown’s position in particular. Thread after thread of arrant nonsense has appeared on here about Brown being replaced.
Labour’s success has, though, coincided with more exposure for Cameron. I have a counter-theory that the more the public see, and particularly hear, the Tory Toff the less they like of him. During his mauling by John Humphreys it amazed me that Dave seems to have made no attempt to ‘do a Tone’ and lose that priviledge plumminess. There’s an obvious link to Dave’s exposure and Labour’s opinion poll improvement. There’s no quantitive proof for that, but if the theory linking the two appears on here it just must be true.
19 OGH.Well done. Now that’s what I call ‘creative panic’ !
A move of four or five points is huge.I guess your name alone might count for a point or two so the jury is out.
SPIN have shut up shop and extrabet won’t take bets out of hours. When they both reopen for business I anticipate 210-215 or vey adjacent.
This would make Lab Seats 200-224 what I call a classic Band and Conservative 350-374 will no longer be a classic Band.
21. Before you are accused of being the devil’s own troll, I’ll grant you that on a non-personal level, Labour’s numbers may rise due to a “Holy Shit! Tories!” vote. These people are quite critical of Labour and probably would not admit to supporting them to friends or family, although they might do with a pollster. However, when the time rolls around, they will pin on a red rosette in the same way that vampire hunters wear garlic or crosses. They sincerely believe that whatever problems they have with Labour, the Tories would just exacerbate. Some may switch a vote back from the BNP.
I have no idea whether there are enough of these people to significantly affect results, just that they are more likely to show up as “certain” as the dreaded time draws near.
21 - Is it not the case, though, that those who are 100% certain vote are mch more likely to notice by-election victories?
The other thing that thsi poll may have captured is the aftermath of the Brown v the Sun affair. That really did dominate the airwaves in the week leading up to the poll.
I would expect that in the medium to long term, this will be seen as a rogue and that even this time next week we will be back to 10 point plus leads for the Tories. However, after all the talk about hung parliaments, this poll will mean that such themes wil continu to be to the fore over te next few days, pushing other more problematic stuff for Labour to the back of the queue.
17 - So in other words, the majority of the printed press will be pro-Tory in the lead up to the election, while most non-swivel eyed folk will accept that the BBC and other broadcasters will cover issues impartially.
The Economy is recovering, and may have been since August (the previous 3 monthly figure masking a bigger fall in July and increases in Aug/Sept)
The Sun’s disgraceful treatment of Gordon Brown was clearly unBritish. We tend to compensate when fair play is done down by scunners.
The UK continue to meet the world with some aplomb, the recent selection of Baroness Ashton another example. Those who try to howl their country down may be acting against their own political interests.
Grounds for Labour confidence, as I have suggested before.
23 - Like you, I would not underestimate the strength of te anti-Tory vote. I think it explains why Labour is not doing even worse than it is. Anti-Tories may not vote in EU and local elections, but they may well do so in the general election.
Cameron has detoxified the Tory brand to an extent, but there are a lot of other Tories out there who can do a lotof good for Labour. If some of the views you read on here, for example, were seen to be shared by mainstream Tory politicians during a general election that could be a problem. Labour will be praying for example, that somehow Daniel Hannan and co can play a role in the next few months.
I am not sure that the BNP will be losing any sleep over a Labour surge though.
27. Do the BNP pick up most of their vote from non-voters or from disaffected voters? People who talk about voting for a small party often bolt back to the big tent in the end.
In any case, I don’t think the BNP will ever do really well until they get rid of Griffin and find someone slightly more appealing. Griffin just looks like he spends his time abusing himself while reading “Mein Kampf.”
21. You tell ‘im John.
I fear that you may be right. I have been wondering these last few months if Our Mighty Host may just be losing his touch.
Mike is a fully paid up member of the PM Dave Fanclub, but just recently I have started to get irked by this Dave “plumminess” that you mention. I wonder, I just wonder, if this may be a key factor behind the failure of the Scottish Tories to make significant advances beyond the 20% level.
It has not gone unnoticed that the Tories have been heavily downplaying their chances in East Renfrewshire (J. Murphy) and Edinburgh South West (A. Darling). The excuse, of course, is the very high MSM profile that both Murphy and Darling have, compared to the Tory PPCs challenging them. But nevertheless, ER and ESW are “must-wins” for the Scottish Tories. If they do not win these seats, then what on earth can they realistically win north of the border? Edinburgh South looks more and more like Ken Mackintosh MP (Lib Dem), Aberdeen South and Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine are starting to look like Tory long-shots. Only DCT and Dumfries & Galloway look “in the bag”.
Will PM Dave be happy if he has less than 5 Scottish MPs, perhaps as few as 2? I very much doubt it. The dangers in such an appalling result would be vast.
The Tories ought to be heavily promoting Goldie, and leaving Cameron out of their ‘on-the-ground’ literature in Scotland, especially in seats where they are fighting Labour (ie. ER and ESW).
I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of oil. It is starting to look very rosy for the Scottish economy. Not so good for the English one.
‘An inflationary spike is not just hot air - it’s a very real threat’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/6624234/An-inflationary-spike-is-not-just-hot-air—its-a-very-real-threat.html
Sunday Times says Mandelson wants the Foreign Secretary job after failing to get Lord Pooh Pah and Balls still wants the Exchequer. Mandy is dripping into Gordon’s ear that it’s too late for a coup now and so he can re-shuffle. Wonder how that would be perceived internationally though - Hilary losing her smart, handsome friend, Ed Balls in full flow with “Investment v Cuts”.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6927006.ece
Did make me consider how a run of single figure Conservative leads and talk of hung Parliaments would impact on the Credit Agencies and others that have been assuming a Tory victory and resulting fiscal tightening?
Would talk of losing AAA rating be another reason to go for a March election? Hoping to squeeze in before Q1 GDP, Budget and international reaction scupper Labour hopes?
FPT 65 “and the certainty factor and work out what has changed both - given the timing you have the negative to Tory afterwash of the EU position (which will affect certainty short term for Europhobes) and for Labour positive you have the by-election and lettergate… snip…ICM versus MORI - all about short term certainty”
I think that’s the point. The different polls are measuring different things. Polls like ICM average a lot of stuff out. I think the polls with the 100% certainty filter give you clues about what is going on underneath in the very recent short term and the ones that ferret out the true latent support for other parties show in which sort of direction voters aren’t satisfied.
Then again it may just be a blip.
94 “Why would eurosceptic voters unhappy with the Lisbon line go to Labour? If the Tories were down by 5 and “others” i.e. UKIP up by 5″
Because that’s not what being measured here. Apart from “Indecisive Dave” voters i doubt anyone ever goes from 100% certain Tory to 100% certain Labour in between the two closest polls. It’s measuring the drop in *certainty* of Tories and the increase in *certainty* of Labour so you’re either looking for two separate reasons (as mentioned in quote above) or one reason that explains both.
I think the Lisbon betrayal could explain both but the Glasgae postal vote triumph may also have geed up a few demoralised Labour bods.
Then again it may just be a blip.
217 “Who said it was a bad idea for the Tories to be seen to block TB’s appointment?”
It was a bad idea if they weren’t stealth europhiles. If they were genuine about not selling democracy out for 30 pieces of euro-silver then helping to get Blair the job just before his reputation was destroyed would have been a great move. What they did was warn Babylon they were about to make a big mistake.
252 “4. The DT story above is big. Its huge and if that doesn’t take off, we are a disgrace who do not deserve the service of our armed forces [but then I have already come to that conclusion anyway].”
There’s been dozens of stories over the lat 12 years that would have destroyed a Tory government starting from the mugging of F1 right at the beginning. It all depends on the BBC and i wouldn’t be at all surprised if they squashed this the same way they’ve been squashing anti-ZNL stories for 12 years by just ignoring them.
The Time’s defence bod mentioned some of this stuff ages ago. One thing that particularly got me was (if i understand it right) the tanks needed 6 months warning to get fitted with their anti-gas gear. The decision to invade was taken months before they said it was and so they had time to get the army to fit the anti-gas gear. Doing that would tip people off they’d already decided when they were still pretending the decision hadn’t been made.
So in a nutshell, either they didn’t believe the WMD stuff was genuine and therefore didn’t think they were putting the tank bods at risk or they did believe the WMD stuff was true but protecting their political arses was more important than a lot of tank bods getting gassed in their tanks.
358 “But when only women are taken into account, the Tories drop three points to 38 per cent, Labour are up four to 27 per cent and the Lib Dems are on 19 per cent.”
As America’s political balkanization began a few decades sooner than ours pollsters over there have got used to dividing people up into more distinct chunks. One aspect of that i read somewhere was how there was a distinct political split between simgle women with kids and married women with the single mothers tending much more to the Demos and the married ones to the Repubs. Could be the same here.
28 - I think they pick up most of their votes from non-voters and racists. The Labour to BNP thing has been vastly overplayed. I think what happens is that the BNP does well in Labour areas because Labour voters no longer turn out because they are completely disillusioned, whereas BNP voters are motivated and so do turn out. I think that’s also what explains the BNP’s failure to hold on to high profile seats - once they are elected, Labour voters are again motivated to vote.
I agree with you about Griffin, but wonder if the far right is capable of producing the kind of charisatic leader you are talking about.
Just tuning in…
6% lead
What fun.
Here is a more sober assessment of Labour’s Glasgow NE performance (compared with the version pedalled by the Labour Party):
http://newsnetscotland.blogspot.com/
http://www.snp.org/node/15872
32 - Putting aside the fact that you have disqualifued yurself from being taken seriously be referring to ZNL, do you think that Sky and ITN will go big on the Telegraph leaks story? If they don’t, will it be because they are also engaged in suppressing material that is problematic to Labour?
34. Jonathan - “6% lead - What fun”
Agreed.
Suddenly, politics just got interesting again.
What fun to see the Tory dissenters beginning to shuffle in their seats. Will there be Tory tears before bedtime? Ooooh… I do hope so!
35 - Hmmm. It may well be a more sober assessment, but it is hardly a disinterested one. There seems to be a pro-SNP spin on many of the stories the site you linked to covers.
Just looking at the charts at UK Polling Report where everyone except YouGov and ICM seems to be getting a few points off the Con share since the Lisbon announcement, presumably to the UKIP.
Like I said at 10, if ICM is prompting for 3 parties but not the UKIP, that would explain why they weren’t getting that shift. Anyone know how YouGov is asking the questions? UK Polling Report says it’s:
“Q: If there were a general election tomorrow, which party would you vote for? Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Scottish Nationalist/Plaid cymru, some other party, would not vote, don’t know.”
…but maybe that’s out-of-date and they now include the UKIP?
34 - Enjoy it while you can. There is nothing I like more than a swivel-eyed squirmer - espcially when they start blaming it all on the BBC and benefits addicts, as they inevitably will. But I can’t help thinking we will be back to normal this time next week. That said, a headline of “It’s the Sun wot lost it” does have immense appeal.
21,29 - I would trust OGH above almost anyone in analysing polls. There was practically wall-to-wall coverage of Glasgow NE at least in the early part of Friday’s news cycle. Now people may not take an active interest in political stories or election stories. However if you have the news fluttering away in the background whilst you potter around the kitchen it possibly filters through in a subconscious way.
There is a poll reported in the Sunday Times Scotland. No v.i. figures, and very the name of the polling firm is omitted! (YouGov are STS’s normal pollster.)
‘Nearly half of voters back Scottish public broadcaster’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6927038.ece
30 Stuart, I flagged the other day the link between high petrol prices and low Labour poll ratings.
Maybe that 50-1 on February looks quite tasty after all…and no Budget too…
39 - I haven’t had a YouGov poll to do for about a month now, but the qusiton you have is the one that I got last time I did.
42 - That’s interesting. I wonder if the SNP is angling for that Scottsh Sun endorsement you were talking about the other day. Their policy seems to be right on the button in terms of doing what James Murdoch would like.
28. The split in activists is probably different to the split in voters with activists coming from both ex-Labour and ex-Tory but the bulk still from previous far right parties i’d guess.
The split in voters will be different because the people paying the price for mass immigration and the multi-cult are in working class areas and therefore are disproportionate ex-Labour, although some will be people who became ex-Labour years ago and had already switched to either voting LD or not voting.
The way it works (imo) is there’s reasons for voting BNP and reasons not and part of the reasons not is loyalty to a previous party. So you could have three people in the same area who all agree with the BNP about the the deliberate destruction of their own little patch of the world but one is dead loyal Labour, one is dead loyal Tory and one was in the middle. The ones in the middle go first.
Eventually the pressure builds on the other two but it can take years because a lot of the sort of people (who vote) who live in those sort of areas put a very high value on loyalty.
Griffin looks like the sort of bloke you could meet down the pub and that’s probably a good thing for his core demographic. Also from his personal point of view it probably makes it less likely he’ll get topped.
a rising oil price can seriously impact on grain prices because of the ethanol industry.do not forget the experience of 2007 when grain prices more than doubled!
Thanks Southam Observer.
Looking at them that way, recent polling seems quite consistent. The differences the polls are getting in the Tory shares are an artifact of how they’re asking the questions, and the differences in the Labour shares (both in absolute terms and as change on a month ago) are margin-of-error stuff.
42 I presume you are a SNP supporter. I cannot see why you would be pleased about a possible Labour recovery in the polls. A Tory government elected on English votes would surely be the dream scenario for your independence agenda.
Isn’t highly revealing that the same suporters of Labour that complain that ‘Dave’ is all PR spin are now advocating he adopts an inauthentic accent in the interests of PR? You guys are all hypocrisy and double standards and I (no matter what other trends are occurring in this mystifying island) will never go back to supporting Labour. I’m also dubious about claims that less women than men support Cameron. I think Cameron has huge appeal to women as previous polls have suggested.
Morning all. What tory jitters? It is Labour which has more to lose by this poll. Any last vestige of a topple Brown rebellion will go so it will be as some of us have predicted all along Brown v Cameron v Clegg at the GE. A mouth watering thought.
Recently a debate with young people got the loudest cheer by far when our country was defended from the negative con sunami. Cameron is being tagged with negativism and his supporters bashing labour in an uneducated and frothing at the mouth way is switching voters back. You can see it speaking to people. The Tories are coming across as unappealing and full of hatred reinforcing their nasty image. Id Say the polls are only going to narrow.
36 “do you think that Sky and ITN will go big on the Telegraph leaks story? If they don’t, will it be because they are also engaged in suppressing material that is problematic to Labour?”
For whatever reason Guardianistas are attracted to working in television the same way they’re not attracted to working on building sites. This distorts the political output. At a guess i’d say 90% of the distortion is unconscious but if the F1 story had happened with a Tory PM the BBC would have destroyed them - im my opinion.
I think ITV are slightly different partly because they’re struggling and making themselves a bit different from the BBC output helps a bit with that but more importantly i think there is a genuine difference that comes from them being more rooted in the regions so they aren’t insulated inside the London media bubble as much.
I think Sky is probably just as Guardianista as the BBC but their editorial line from above might outweigh that sometimes plus being a bit different from the BBC has a sales angle to it same as ITV.
The reason the BBC is so much more important is one, because it is so dominant and all-pervasive, but more importantly because people are brought up to believe it’s impartial and honest so they don’t discount it the same way as they do with *every* other media organization.
35.
The Bo’ness & Blackness ward is in the Linlithgow & East Falkirk Westminster constituency:
Result - UK GE 2005
Lab (Michael Connarty) 22,121
SNP 10,919
LD 7,100
Con 5,486
SSP 763
… and the Falkirk East Scottish Parliament constituency:
Result - Scottish GE 2007
Lab 13,184
SNP 11,312
Con 3,701
LD 2,136
The SNP need a 12% swing from 2005, but only a 3% swing from 2007, to win the seat. So, Thursday’s 6% swing looks very tasty indeed! Especially when one considers that there are over 13,000 Con/LD/SSP votes ripe for the squeezing!
Interesting emergence of lots of irregular posters this morning, giving us the Labour party line. I remember Quietzapple was one of the Labour rampers very active on the DTs 3 Line Whip before the May elections back in 2008. They all melted away with strange speed straight after the election.
Electoral Calculus gives the following division of seats for the IPSOS/MORI poll
Cons 296 Lab 270 LD 44,
leaving the Conservatives 30 short of a majority.
This may well be minority government territory because of the complex coalitions that would need to be formed to give either of the main parties an overall majority. Labour would need the LDs and either the Northern Ireland MPs or SNP/PC. Assuming the LDs refuse to line up with the Conservatives (as in the Welsh Parliament), the latter would need the NI, PC and SNP MPs to get a majority.
Just when you thought that nothing could possibly get worse for the Scottish Labour Party:
‘Jack McConnell plans a comeback’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6927071.ece
This headline in the Sunday Times will have them in stitches at SNP HQ!
But I would love to be a fly on the wall at John Smith House. Mind your French lads!
57, btw, congrats on your victory over Australia yesterday. ’twas a most exciting finish.
Although England lost, the performance was apparently much improved.
49. Norm
Tory, Labour, Lab-Dim: they are all the same to me Norm. All Unionists.
As long as they are fighting each other like ferrets in a sack, that is fine by me.
I had a fair few guffaws reading last night’s PB thread. Nothing more amusing than The Herd in full denial mode.
I’ve just flicked through the last thread. It was interesting to see the urbane Bob Worcester join the discussion though disappointing that in their anger with his findings some should choose to insult him- one calling him “pompass” (sic).
35 “… far from increasing their support, Labour’s share of the vote actually dropped by over 7%.”
Even more if you take the postal votes into account.
There’s a lot of people out there who are still nominally Labour supporters but who are so disaffected with the current version of the Labour party that their certainty to vote is down to the point where they’d most likely stay at home. What ZNL are doing is pushing those people into being a 100% certain postal voter.
Apparently Cameron and Clegg are both on Andrew Marr.
60 Nice word, “pompass”…
53 - So what you are really saying is that the BBC is not impartial becuase it does not report the news in the way that you would like to see it reported, and that because Sky and ITN report the news in a pretty similar way, they are biased too.
Given this bias, they are all spectacularly bad at it because the Tories have had a consistent and large opinion poll lead for th elast two years, while the country as a whole remains staunchly monarchist, anti-EU and pro-armed forces. None of which (except to some extent the latter) are strong Guardianista positions.
Polly. “*Those who say) Dave’ is all PR spin are now advocating he adopts an inauthentic accent in the interests of PR?”
LOL! Who are advocating that? I’m sure if he’d thought it would help he’d have done it ages ago like Thatcher and Osborne did.
The BBC having Been going big all night on “Gordon Brown orders checks on all Cumbrian bridges”. Why are they reporting it like this? What the hell doe GB know about bridges; he’s a historian? Are we expected to believe that the structural engineers are too stupid to do their job withou his intervention?
62. Any bets on how many times Marr will wheel out the phrase ‘cast iron’?
67, not a bet, but my guess would be 4-6.
65.Read the thread Roger. John at 7.13:
During his mauling by John Humphreys it amazed me that Dave seems to have made no attempt to ‘do a Tone’ and lose that priviledge plumminess.
……..meanwhile back at the convenience store, customers are shopping ’til they drop and they all want to buy LABOUR !
LTP on Labour Most Seats was 6.8 from an easy 8.2 yesterday evening.
70, LTP?
Also (entirely academic question) are you using this unexpectedly good poll for Labour as a means to either back the Tories more at longer odds, or to lay Labour at shorter odds? Just curious, as the schoolgirl said to the vicar.
66 ‘A safety review of all 1,800 bridges in Cumbria is being carried out after severe flooding caused extensive damage to homes and roads in the county. Prime Minister Gordon Brown ordered the review during a visit on Saturday, when he pledged £1m for flooded communities.’
Chris A, it’s a good job that he did; I doubt that anyone else would have had the intelligence to do so otherwise.
Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else he can do to help the situation, other than spout platitudes and try and look as if he’s the ‘Iron PM’? He’d better be careful he doesn’t go rusty with all the moisture that’s around.
I agree that there are a lot of people who are anti-Tory and will vote according, but on the other hand, there are very many people who will want rid of this Government by any means. The idea that we will have a hung parliament or that Labour will get back in might well push many more people to vote Tory.
71 MD. LTP=Last Traded Price. My trading idea is to get with Labour for now (started yesterday), with a view to dumping them at a profit later.
66. No, read it: it says “orders checks”. It does not say “conducts checks”. I am baffled by the suggestion that it is primarily the duty of historians to order the inspection of bridges. I know the rules are that the BBC is irrebuttably deemed to be biased and that complaints of bias are not required to be backed up by any comparative data from any other MSM or to show any sign whatever of intelligence on the part of the poster, but even by those standards your post suggests a startling intelligence deficit.
65. Roger. Your logic seems to be that changing their accents helped Margaret Thatcher and George Osborne (I refute the charge by the way), but Cameron is not changing his accent because it wouldn’t help him. Eh?
I know contradictions mean little to the Labour herd, but I’ve noticed recently that ‘Dave’ is now being attacked
a) for being a smarmy PR man
b) for being all too human in his respones (negatively spun as ‘red faced’ and ‘buckling under pressure’) and altogther not smooth enough.
74, ah, right. Cheers for replying.
I did something similar (on a very short timescale) with the next PM market when Purnell resigned. I know am guaranteed 200 of Her Majesty’s finest pence whoever is the next PM.
I do consider increasing my stakes, for F1, but my record is too patchy and I lack the funds. I do find it mildly amusing that I offer F1 tips to expert gamblers whilst playing for less than paper money myself.
65
I remember an interview with Harold Nicholson, saying of Heath, ‘Heath had this dreadful cockney accent’ errr poor old Ted, he came from Kent.
Good, solid interview for Clegg.
Two big things.
First, the Lib Dems probably won’t be advocating withdrawal in Afghanistan.
Second, the Lib Dems will (probably) support the party with “the biggest mandate” in the event of a hung Parliament.
79, the latter is somewhat ambiguous. Is that most votes, or most seats?
37. Stuart Dickson November 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 am
“Will there be Tory tears before bedtime? Ooooh… I do hope so!”
Even though I want to get Labour out, I will confess that it’s funny to see people suddenly reaching for reasons to denounce a pollster after a poll that gives the “wrong” result.
On another note, though, are you hopes for independence not somewhat tied up with a Tory victory. If Labour win, there won’t be the same dissonance between the Holyrood and Westminster results, Labour will devolve more powers, and you’ll end up with the Quebec outcome, no?
80 Morris Dancer
He was deliberately vague, though Marr didn’t push it.
LAB 209-214
CON 350-355
LD 51-54
That is from extrabet who are now open for business. Overnight LAB were 207-212 so a rise of two points. Sporting Index are still asleep.
79/80. But then, Marr didn’t push anything really, giving Clegg a fairly easy ride. I assume that he will be the same for Cameron.
79. What does the “biggest mandate” mean though? Is he talking about seats? Or vote share?
I’ll still be surprised if the Lib Dems actually go into coalition with anybody to be honest. Though I don’t think it;ll ever be an issue because, despite last nights poll, the Tories are going to get a comfortable majority, IMO.
64 I’m saying that if the F1 mugging had taken place under a Tory government the BBC would have harassed the Tory PM over it all the way to the 2001 election.
I’m saying both Osborne and Mandelson were on that yacht - Osborne visiting and Mandelson staying and yet the story was all about Osborne.
I’m saying they kept the expenses scandal quiet because it damaged Labour as much or more than the Tories and when it did break they tried to turn it into a Tory sleaze scandal.
“while the country as a whole remains staunchly monarchist, anti-EU and pro-armed forces.”
Guardianistas are by definition contrary to the general view. The desire to feel morally superior is part of what makes people Guardianistas in the first place and so they take views that go against the grain to the average person.
There’s nothing new in this. There’s always been a “Bohemian set” historically who wanted to feel superior by taking contrary views to what was mainstream opinion at the time but their influence was limited to a small group. (There may even be good evolutionary reasons why a small minority of people have this nature while the majority are naturally conservative). The big difference is that since the invention of television that type of person now has immense unelected influence on the entire population.
It’s in the nature of this newly electronic Bloomsbury set to automatically take positions opposite to the general grain of the population and so even with the power to influence of the BBC it might still take decades to break down people’s natural views and replace them with Guardianista ones.
And even then a lot of people just pay lip service to what they believe is the official consensus and keep their real opinions private.
My instinct is that John at 4 is about right - nobody’s mentioned the by-election to me except for party activists, and I think “Labour wins a seat in Glasgow” sadly gets a so-what response in most of England if they notice at all. But overall the week leading up to the poll was very good for us. The week since hasn’t been, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the lead back at 10 or so in the next poll, but the point is that it shows the lead is not as solid as it looked.
The poll appears to show that Labour’s lost about 1 in 6 of its 2005 voters (which does feel about right) but the Tories have only gained slightly among those *certain* to vote (ditto). The mixed record of local Tory councils is a drag on their score, too. The car crash that the Tories are making of Notts County Council seems anecdotally to be putting off a lot of people - see
http://parishofnottinghamshire.blogspot.com/
for an admittedly biased version which has a huge underground following among the council staff.
Jogging-gate (Wayne will like this one),
Gordon Brown’s jogging mystery
Ever since Gordon Brown was photographed jogging in a London park earlier this month…the paparazzi have been lying in wait
So far, alas, their quarry has eluded them. Just as he had never been seen jogging before the photograph had been taken, he has not been seen since. Some members of the paparazzi are now muttering that the original picture must have been a stunt.
What is more, one tells Mandrake that it is a mystery who took it, as the photo was uncredited.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/6624110/Gordon-Browns-jogging-mystery.html
81 - The SNP is also pinning a lot of faith on the next Tory government being a lot like the last one. The thing is, though, it can’t be, as so much power has been devolved to Edimburgh. The one thing an SNP administraiton can seek to do however is pick fights with the Tories over funding. That’s why the oil price is so important. If the Tories were clever they would transfer the oil tax money to Scotland lock stock and barrel (so to speak). The amount would not be huge as the big earner from the North Sea for the UK government is the Corporaiton Tax the extraction companies pay.
Rawnsley on a ‘hung parliament’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/22/andrew-rawnsley-general-election-hung-parliament
Won’t it be fun, imagine this site it’ll be in melt down, and Mike will be offered megabucks for it. Just remember Mike, we knew you when you were poor.
Is it just me or I am shocked / surprised to wake up this morning to find nothing on BBC or Sky website with regards the Telegraph Iraq story. Seems a massive story to me and fits with the current military under-funded / under-equipped / under-trained narrative.
86 - As I said, your problem with the BBC is that they do not report the news in the way that you want. Funnily enough, if you go to left wing sites, they have exactly the same problem with the BBC.
91 - Is it just me or is anyone else surprised to see an inveterate BBC basher not covering the news today in the way that he would like to see it covered?
Good morning
I’m in the midlands and staying with Tory voting friends - labour voters in 2001 and 1997 - and I think I can explain this poll.
It’s not the by election,it’s the Sun affair and it’s George Osborne.
My friends are visceral haters of Brown, but the Sun softened that, probably temporarily.
They like and respect Cameron, trust on the NHS being a big factor, but, both being in
business, are amazingly dismissive of Osborne and nervous about the chances of a double dip recession with him taking over.
Mike’s article here is spot on. The otherwise silly daily trackers during the conference season performed a very useful service in revealing the potentially massive underlying volatility of polls, and should provide an object lesson to all observers and punters about the danger of reading too much into any single survey.
Another point worth reiterating is that the pollsters are well aware of this potential volatility and by having to flog their stuff in a competitive market there is a real temptation for them to go down the road of playing on that volatility, in order to help the media generate ‘interesting’ copy. Again, punters beware.
Two weeks ago when the Sun printed that stuff about Brown’s handwriting and recorded his phone call we saw a glimpse of what we have waited two years to see. The real Gordon Brown.
But it’s naive to believe that the voters sense of fairplay didn’t include the Sun’s motivation which was to help the Tories. If you attach your wagon to News International’s horse you shouldn’t be surprised if you get splattered in excrement.
93 - Calm down dear, I wasn’t bashing the BBC. I said Sky and BBC, in fact other media outlets, no mention on Times website. This wasn’t a BBC is bias post! They were massively opposed to the Iraq war and given the government massive heat in the past over it.
So you don’t think the Iraq story is newsworthy?
94 - I am not sure that Osborne is a big factor, but I think that what the Sun did certainly is. As you say though, that will probably unwind. If the Sun and the Tories are clever, they will heed the lesson though. Too much playing of the man and not the ball can backfire.
So it was Eric the Red.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6926960.ece
So Eric switched because Wilson’s government did nothing about the Prague invasion, well we could have declared war on the Soviet Union of course.
How unlike the Tories in ‘56 when during the invasion of Hungary, they very cleverly invaded Egypt, splitting the Western alliance at a critical time, now thats what I call, ‘doing something.’
97 - Leaks in themselves are not newsworthy. By their very bature they tend to be partial and intended to suit one point of view. The big story will be when the full inquiry takes place.
The collapsed bridge was inspected last July.
http://tinyurl.com/ya9ou4u
Good solid interview with Cameron too.
The only new thing was a commitment to an emergency budget within 50 days of taking power.
102 - Was expected, but the first time I think I have heard him say that.
88. Nothing on the BBC about the jogging story, I notice, whereas we all know that if this had been a story about Cameron…
(Just filling in and practising my new idiotcunningbot role; the others are obviously busy taking notes on Marr’s disgustingly partisan conduct of the Cammo interview).
Cammo on good form incidentally.
If it is a hung pariament Cameron would be best to sit back, let Labour and the Lib-Dems try and cobble together some deal, wait for the inevitable currency crisis, gilt strike and visit to the IMF that would occur within six months of a Labour victory. And then go on to win the subsequant election that would be called within a year, with a landslide.
Bridge inspections were arranged before GB arrived on the scene.
http://tinyurl.com/y9yv57m
It is beyond my comprehension how Labour are above single figures, so crap are they.
Haven’t been on here much lately, was there much comment about a Danny FInkelstein article a few days ago about the Queen;s speech? Specifically how many people wouldn’t notice or care, and how the VAST majority of people are staggeringly uninterested in politics and political stories. He told an anecdote about the 2001 election campaign where tory polling showed that only 2% of the public had even heard of the tories’ main election pledges on clean hospitals and something else which even I forget now!
It was quite an eye opener, and it makes you wonder how the polls ever move at all, unless by people’s own perceptions of how their own life is going.
Petrol up, but also FTSE
Interest rates still low, but credit still not easy to get
Unemployment up, but not as much as feared
It’s interesting how these things go, and we know the improved economy in 1997 didn’t help John Major, so my conclusion and fervent hope is that this is a rogue poll. But who the hell knows?!
Will there be a flood bounce for Brown? He did inexplicably well simply by praising firemen and expressing sympathy etc last time, which was hardly difficult for him. Mad world.
94. tim November 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 am
They sound similar to myself, though I’m not really worried about Osborne. I understand what they’re getting at, but a double-dip seems very likely to me, regardless.
Lettergate didn’t interest me at all. Trussgate did (or rather Baggegate - heck, I nearly wrote “the Truss/Bagge affair” which would have had writs flying from all directions). It won’t change my vote but it’s damaging for any party to have the weirder elements of its grassroots sounding off in public.
The Tories have said that the reduction in VAT was a big mistake and no one would spend any more money because the saving was so tiny.
Now it’s impossinle to hear any financial news without shop keepers and traders saying business could be severely affected when the VAT is put back on.
Voters notice these sorts of things and it doesn’t make the Tories economic experts sound very knowledgable
96. Roger November 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 am
“The real Gordon Brown.”
To me, the real Gordon Brown is the man that conspired tirelessly to undermine his predecessor so that he could make a mess of a job that the said predecessor was rather good at. That Gordon Brown has never been in hiding. He’s been in plain view since at least the late 90s.
106 - I did find it bizarre to turn on the news this morning to hear that Gordon had “personally ordered” the inspection of every bridge in Cumbria.
109. Roger November 22nd, 2009 at 10:04 am
Not if the pyschological effect of lowering it was negligible but the effect of raising it again is greater, which I suspect is the case.
Compare the effects of giving someone a £50 a year pay-rise - they’ll be insulted - very reducing their salary by the same amount.
Good Morning Crushingly Victorious Scottish Rugby Voters For Nick Palmer Worldwide
Meanwhile …. very solid interviews by both Cameron and Clegg on the Marr show.
On “that” poll. Remember chap(esses) just one poll. One swallow etc ….
110 - Roger can’t keep a constant opinion on Gordon Brown for more than 24 hours.
Edmund in Tokyo @ 39: Nope, no one includes UKIP in their prompt.
100 - Do you do talk to guff somethings, basically we should ignore because it is a leak. Most of the news is made due to leaks!
Expenses, nope nobody should have reported that as it fits SO’s criteria of a leak and intended to suit one point of view! The media outlets were all over that one, without a second thought.
I don’t think the stuff with The Sun has made any differance at all. That whole letter buisness is not the sort of thing that people would change their votes on - Its a nice theory for lefties because they hate The Sun and are very bitter about The Suns betrayal - But in the end, I think its influence in this improvement is extremely limited.
Labours slight improvement is down to Osbornes Age of Austerity speech and Labours win in Glasgow North-East. IMO.
Gordon did it too!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8372751.stm
104
On the other hand
From Hitchens
Easy ride from the oily BBCGuess which one of the following tough questions a BBC reporter didn’t ask the Opposition leader on Wednesday morning. 1) Why are you so popular,
Mr Cameron? 2) Will the Queen’s Speech really lack substance, Mr Cameron?
3) Can I oil your bike chain for you with my tongue, Mr Cameron?
The answer is, she asked only number two. Here’s my question. When will the people of this country grasp the significance of the Corporation’s love affair with the Tories?
More on the media tail wagging the political dog. Just how grovelling is the relationship between the Tories and the Murdoch empire, which for years supported Mr Blair and Mr Brown?
I hear that a Shadow Cabinet member penned a pamphlet about broadcasting earlier this year, but was told by one of the Cameron inner circle: ‘We have to show it to James Murdoch first.’
No pamphlet seems to have followed. Further details welcome.
109 One can never be certain about these things, but given that the economic contraction was so much worse than the government predicted, the reduction in VAT seems to have little beneficial impact.
118 - We knew that already didn’t we? I think I posted his photo-stream on the night that the Mirror went for Cameron, showing near identical photos.
What we didn’t know (if the Daily Rant is to be believed), is that he only got the photographers in because he found out that Cameron had already done some, so he spent urgent messages during the service to get it set up.
117 - It may not be the sort of thing that people would change their vote on, but it is the sort of thing that might change what people say to a pollster.
Anyway the best way to put this poll into perspective is:
“Conservative share of the vote rises 1% in two months!”
It gets better, after the Turnip Taliban, the ‘Suffolk Swedes’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229926/After-Turnip-Taliban-revolt-rural-Norfolk–Now-Camerons-new-Cutie-falls-foul-Suffolk-Swedes.html
Burn the witch, burn ‘er.
Anthony @115 - just checked and you’re right, there goes that theory. For some reason I didn’t think Mori et al were prompting with party names at all, but UK polling report says they’re prompting for Con / Lib / Lab.
119. Coldy quoting Mad Hitches latest attack on Cameron? Must be a Sunday morning.
I know one thing, another 5 years under NuLabour headed by twichy Gordon Brown and this country is doomed.
1. This land which already is becoming a Socialist prison, where people are encouraged by law to spy on each other, will finally be the place in which a free people will be unable to live.
2. The productive half of the population will be working for the other half on benefits and other payements, and if I know human nature, it will soon be a third of the population working for the other 2/3rds.
3. Buisinesses will finall have had enough of being overtaxed and flee abroad, and that goes for a greater part of the financial sector too.
With Britain finally totally bankrupt, who of the enterprising and go-ahead will wand to stay. A mass migration will start, leaving Britain to the workshy, unemployable, and plain savage.
Any idea how the share for “Others” breaks down, in this poll?
Overall, the Conservatives remain, on average, 12% ahead of Labour, according to the most recent polls published by all six pollsters.
12. Peter from Putney November 22nd, 2009 at 6:17 am
“50/1 against February looks distinctly tasty”
Now 40-1. If both parties are polling in the 30s at the New Year, Labour would be fools to hesitate. Trouble is, both conditions have to be fulfilled for the election to be called: sustained Labour bounce and Gordon does the sensible thing. I suspect that he’d think that if he waited, opinion would move even further in his direction.
Meanwhile …. over at Mrs Dales Dairy the milking parlour is in agreement with the spluttering Roy Hattersley and has a tug at the prospects of a hung parliament. Apparently it all so un-British and unethical. Had you all noticed the highly ethical majority Labour government ??
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2009/11/i-agree-with-roy-hattersley.html
125
It gets better, you don’t think Eric is still a red do you? A mole working to destroy the Tory Party from the inside.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/david-cameron/6623797/David-Cameron-in-new-feud-with-traditional-Tories-over-promotion-of-women.html?
Nah! couldn’t be, could it?
123 - The Mail seems to be defining “cutie” as any woman who isn’t local.
Even Anne Widdicombe would have fallen under that definition in her day!
Does anybody connected with government tell the truth anymore?
UK Borders Agency, “roughly the same” actually equals an increase in 195%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8368709.stm
126. It won’t come to that because within six months of Labour forming the next government (with or without help from the Lib-Dems) we’ll have a currency crisis and a gilt strike. Enter the IMF. The IMF will only bail us out if they get the required cuts that need to made to ensure they get their money back - As soon as Labour try and make said cuts the government would implode and we’d be back to the polls within 12 months, IMO.
Actually this wouldn’t be a bad outcome at all for Cameron. A majority of 20 in 2010? Or 120 in 2011? Hmmmmmmm…..
130. We all have skeletons in our cupboard from our youth Coldy. Look at Mad Hitch. He was communist in his younger days I believe.
133 While I don’t that there would be some such scenario, it would obviously be far more damaging to the public services, than having cuts implemented by a government, elected for that purpose.
It would also indicate that we really had become incapable of self-government, and had become reliant on foreigners to take the difficult decisions that we now shied away from.
102. “The only new thing was a commitment to an emergency budget within 50 days of taking power.”
That does not surprise me at all. I laugh when I read comments about economic recovery. There is an absolute bloodbath awaiting us next year. To take just one area of expenditure such as defence, in the last week or so I’ve read about the RAF proposing, as an early shot in a bidding war, to cut 11,000 members. The Tories planning to disband the BAOR. And it seems the MoD are thinking of flogging one of the two new carriers as soon as it is built.
If these proposals are typical of the sorts of cuts that are going to be required an election victory in 2010 will be a poisoned chalice.
133 - Everyone always talks blithely about “the IMF”. Does the IMF have the resources to bail out the UK?
133 GIN. “It won’t come to that because within six months of Labour forming the next government (with or without help from the Lib-Dems)…..”
Gordon - Five More Years !!!!!!!!!!!
Listening to Simon Weston on R4 - who went big on the Telegraph story and was very critical of Blair and of Brown - it struck me that Gordon cannot help making the worst of his opportunities. Weston was struck by picture of Brown smiling within the devastation of Cockermouth, which was unfair as Gordon had had his serious face on most of the time, but life’s unfair.
Then we had the “I’ve ordered that all bridges are inspected” where “The emergency services and Cumbria Council tell me that all bridges are being inspected” would have served him better - the truth but not putting Gordon in the frame as the Great Leader. His appetite for placing himself at the centre, taking the credit for others work. is an Achilles heel, breeding resentment.
Morning all.
For some reason we’re still waiting for Mark Senior’s traditional exhortation to ignore Mori’s headline numbers. I can’t imagine why that might be…
140 Wait for the detailed tables and the 6-10 voting figures they are ALWAYS more meaningful .
134
PH was a Trot, they hated the, ‘communists’ ‘cos they ice picked Trotsky. It was a bit, Monty Python in those days.
138. I would imagine the IMF would get the funds from the US/China? The UK economy is too important to let it go completely down the pan, surely?
128 If the MORI poll is confirmed by others there really is no logical reason for Gordon to wait. Waiting on to be boxed in next May or June is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing Brown picks up a bit of popularity in late Autumn for it to be lost again in Spring. People feel like a new broom as the days warm and grow longer. There’s probably not time before Christmas but February must be tempting.
109. “The Tories have said that the reduction in VAT was a big mistake and no one would spend any more money because the saving was so tiny.
Now it’s impossinle to hear any financial news without shop keepers and traders saying business could be severely affected when the VAT is put back on.”
It is entirely possible for something to have little effect and have wide support. Do you really think shop keepers would be in favour of any tax rise? Do you think this country is run by people who make rational well thought out fiscal decisions?
“Voters notice these sorts of things and it doesn’t make the Tories economic experts sound very knowledgable”
Roger there are no economic experts. They do not exist. Have the last couple of years not shown us how little the people in charge understand what is going on?
Economic expert is right up there with palm reader or astrologist. Just another bogus pseudo-scientific profession.
142. You’ll have to forive me. I’m not “up” on the differances between Trots and Commies.
140 LS. Perchance it’s that Mark doesn’t spend all and every waking hour waiting to be pounced upon by renegade turnips of team blue ?!?
Insert swede for turnip if you’re from Suffolk.
I suspect that the polls will be impacted more by three letters than anything that has gone on of late. Those three letters are PBR.
141/147 Mark S.
…. peeling veg already !!
137
The IMF has a BIG axe - which is the first thing needed.
148. I’m not actually sure the PBR will move things that much James. It may well be that we’re going to follow the pattern of late year, where Labour ended the year narrowing the gap. And then the gap widens again in January.
Perhaps theres just something about Christmas that makes people more inclined to vote Labour? Perhaps theres something about January that makes people more inclined to vote Tory? Who knows?
146
You’ll have to look it up: let us say, ‘The Life of Brian’ sketch dealing with the, ‘What ‘ave the Romans done for us’ nailed it.
151 - Maybe it is that everyone turns Labour in November and spends money like there’s no tomorrow on nice feel good glittery things then in January they get the credit card bill.
149 Hi Jack , my lady is preparing the veg at this very moment , I am sipping B and C at the computer .
re 140 Mark Senior is dead right there.
I’ve been on to Ben Page, CEO of MORI, (wonderful things these Blackberry phones - you can get top bosses at home on Sunday!) and he assures me that the MORI data tables will be posted on his site today.
151. There was a movement to the Tories in autumn 2007 though? Not sure about this seasonal theory
148 James, it depends upon how much Gordon can spin the line that we are rapidly advancing to the sun-lit uplands of 178% growth, or whatever his latest fantasy is. And whether Darling will go along with it. Every
lietrick in the book will be used to suggest that Britain, last out of recession, will still be forging ahead better than the rest. Which requires a leap of faith that not even Evel Knievel on his rocket-bike would have tried….Anyone know why Ipsos took so long in giving the results of their poll?
154 Mark S. Decadent fellow !! …. enjoy the banter.
Laters PBers ….
141. Mark Senior.
Oh, there you are. I can’t imagine why you had to be prompted twice before grudgingly saying that.
150
The first thing to remember about the last IMF loan, it wasn’t needed.
In the autumn of 1976 the Labour Government under Chancellor Denis Healey was forced to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan to ease the economy through its financial troubles. The conditions attached to the loan included harsh austerity measures such as sharp cuts in public spending, which were highly unpopular with party supporters. This forced the government to abandon much of the radical program which it had adopted in the early 1970s, much to the anger of left wingers such as Tony Benn. It later turned out however that the loan had not been necessary. The error had been caused by incorrect financial estimates by the Treasury which overestimated public borrowing requirements [8] . The government only drew on half of the loan and was able to pay it back in full by 1979.
157 - Q4 growth/shrinkage figures could be interesting too.
153 As you say people are more optimistic in lead up to Christmas, the real world displaced by Santalands and the dark evenings lit up by shiny lights, politics takes a distant place. January and February are grey, dark and drizzling and the bills arrive, utility costs go up and pessimism - a sort of political SAD spreads not particularly good for any parties but worst IMHO for Governments.
117: Did Osborne make an Age of Austerity speech last week? I missed it altogether, if so, which rather goes to prove Finkelstein’s point. I very much doubt that affected the poll much.
134: Hitch used to be a Communist? Starting to get the impression nearly everyone was. I should start a Reds Reunited website.
155. OGH: Mark Senior is dead right there.
I’m not so sure.
Polling firms devise their methodologies in toto with the aim of producing accurate headline numbers. Unilaterally ignoring one part of their methodology is tantamount to saying that the poll isn’t worth having.
66. And his generous £1million to the cumbrian cause. ROFL, £1 million? We have had three bridges washed away, with one of them a main arterial road. The £1million might help towards the pension contributions on all the overtime paid to those in the emergency services over the last few days.
The damage done out in cumbria is of the order of hundreds of millions of pounds.
160 Prompted twice ?
149. You must do another JARHEAD JackW, where Brown is returned to power and half the PBers will be reaching for their revolvers.
Or the other way, where Cameron gainhs power with a large majority; revolvrs then in other hands.
164
A Trotskyite, they used to get really, really upset if you called them communists, the IMG and SWP ditto.
by coldstone November 22nd, 2009 at 10:11 am
Rest easy in the knowledge that you are two flaps of a white coat short of a full Hitchens.
165 Polls are always worth having but with most polls there is more useful information in the data tables than in the headline results .
158. Probably no buyers.
172 I would surmise that the Observer bought it very early in the week .
168 I’m loving the idea that half of the pb.com-ers have a “revolver”.
I didn’t really see them as Beatles fans. Although it may be quite apposite, what with track 1 being “Taxman”….
170
I’ve got a soft spot for Pete, at least you know where you stand with him. Hitchens doesn’t switch his beliefs to suit anyone, same with Heffer. You may not agree with them, but you know where you stand.
175 That is so. You know that every Conservative leader will be a traitor as far as each of them is concerned.
re 173. If they bought it at all. It might be that MORI gave it away in the hope that the Observer would give it the biggest coverage.
169. coldstone November 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
“they used to get really, really upset”
Bizarrely, as they were communists. It’s not as if they were being called Stalinists.
173 Agreed - its a valuable poll because it shows a different picture. Imagine Ipsos Mori would have offered it first to their regular media client, the Observer, then tried to ensure it didn’t leak.
O/T Mandrake in the Telegraph points to a mystery - the Gordon Brown jogging picture (released IIRC during the furore over Gordon’s health). Paparazzi have been staking out since to get another but no show from our fitness fanatic. Then it appears that no-one know who took the original pic or exactly how it came into the public domain. Odd.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/6624110/Gordon-Browns-jogging-mystery.html
After a bit of unsuccessful Googling, can anyone put me out of my misery and tell me when the Q4 2009 GDP number comes out? I can’t see Gordon going for a snap poll if the country is still in recession, but coming out of recession will be his fanfare for “Look! I was right. Britain, best placed to….(why are they laughing at the back?)”
So, basic betting-related question: is there time to call an election after the GDP number comes out - and still hold that election on February 25th? If not, the February option would require Gordon to have been given “a cast eye-ron guarantee” by the ONS that recession was over. Even then, he would still have to be braver than we have come to expect.
175. It is possible to know where you stand with someone who doesn’t talk out of his arse though.
145 “Economic expert is right up there with palm reader or astrologist. Just another bogus pseudo-scientific profession.”
I think it’s more like weather forecasting. There is some underlying science to it and some people do have a grasp of that science but the overall system is too complex to be modelled anywhere near accurate.
175 - The problem with Hitchens and Heffer is that even if they said something vaguely sensible it would get lost in the welter of their profound wrongness.
BTW, have we had any further culinary updates from SeanT, along the lines of “to my palate, panda tastes very much like gorilla”?
165 - The flaw in that is that there are good reasons for thinking that Mori’s approach should work very well in the immediate run-up to a General Election. This also happens to be the acid test on whether the methodology is sound. However immediately pre-election, when people are pretty much decided how and if they will vote, they will produce very different numbers out of election periods.
In contrast methodologies treating “6-10s” equally are likely to see much less variance in and out of election periods.
181. Perhaps it’s most similar to climate change modelling.
179. Marquee Mark November 22nd, 2009 at 11:07 am
According to the ONS website the first estimate of GDP for Q4 will be published on 26 Jan:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/release-calendar/index.html?newquery=*&lday=0&lmonth=0&lyear=0&title=Gross+Domestic+Product%3A+Preliminary+Estimate&pagetype=calendar-entry
179 - I think the GDP figures are released on the last Friday of the month following the Quarter just ended so Q4 I think woudl be released on January 29th. I believe for a Feb 25th election that they would need to announce it either on that day or 1st Feb and it might look just a tad too cynical. Also remember February this year with the snow, would they want to gamble on a repeat around polling day to depress turnout?
Although there would be a meterological irony in a government that claimed to be as pure as the driven snow losing office because the driven snow prevented their voters from voting.
Thinking again about PtP’s February GE. (see 12)
I can imagine queues of unemployed, shirkers, just registered immigrants and their vast families, and all the rest of the hoi polloi, standing in line in a winters mist just aching to vote for their Keepers.
At 50/w I’m on.
187. Well, if it is 26 Jan as the ONS calendar states, then they could delay calling the election for a day or two, for respectability? (Also, does the appearance of cynicism really matter?)
Should Labour worry about snow? I would have thought the probability of severe weather affecting a given day, even in February, is quite low. I think we could figure that out from the Met Office website actually.
Is there any proofreading at all on the BBC website?
The standards of spelling and grammar are terrible.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8372839.stm
186-87 - More immediately, the first revision to the 3Q GDP figures are due this week. Highly unlikely, but still possible, that these may be sharply revised upwards from the original -0.4% estimates. Wonder what the political impact would be if they actually showed growth had taken place!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229912/Speakers-wife-lost-job-Oxford-degree-wasnt.html
Ivan Cameron died on 25th February 2009.
A big factor next year is going to be rapidly rising inflation. Even if the BoE manage to convince that it is a “temporary” phenomenom, that isn’t going to convince with public pay settlements looming.
191. John O November 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am
“Wonder what the political impact would be if they actually showed growth had taken place”
Make Labour regret the existence of Christmas?
I think it’s unlikely. There might be an upward revision, but not by that much (surely)?
177
I think they equated the two, communists=Stalinists. I shared a house with some SWP/IMG types in South London they were amazingly pedantic over titles.
Of course the whole thing was blown apart when the, ‘Big Boss’ (a bald Eric Pickles) Gerry Healey was outed as a serial sexual predator.
Oh! happy days.
Just thinking about Cameron’s budget within 50 days comment today. I’m wondering if it is even possible to achieve a budget in that timescale. Assuming the Election is 6th May as seems most likely. On the timetable laid out that woudl mean a budget by the week ending 25th June. Given that the Queen’s Speech will likely occur in the week beginning 17th May and that you couldn’t really interrupt the debate on that for a budget you are looking at only really a few potential dates in June for it to occur. Given that there has to be time to prepare such a document and given the backdrop it has to stand up to scrutiny that would push it back further. I suspect that any such budget would occur on the limit of the 50 day period so would if it were on a Wednesday as budgets have been of late then 23rd June seems more likely than any other date assuming the election is on 6th May.
194. A recent CBI survey suggested 47% of firms are planning to freeze pay next year.
197 - the only real purpose of a budget is to raise taxes. You don’t need a budget to cut public spending.
198 - Bully for them.
It doesn’t snow anymore anyway because of global warming (or if does it’s gone in a day). Feb - Mar would at least look like the Gov’t were taking the initiative : May/Jun its merely hanging on to grim death waiting for something to turn up (which it won’t) and boxing yourself in.
201 - It wasn’t gone in a day in February there were multiple days of chaos.
“It doesn’t snow anymore anyway because of global warming (or if does it’s gone in a day). ”
I take it you were abroad Feb this year……
I may be reading too much into this Pickles revelation - but it does strike me as a ‘I was once Labour, but changed my mind - it’s okay’. Ditto Gove on a picket-line.
Re Cameron on Marr - good performance, liked the contrition - wonder if this will become another Brown dragged into doing the same? It’s very silly stuff from all sides.
Thought Clegg did a good turn as well - can’t remember what he said but came across as more serious that I can recall.
Not at all concerned about the poll - there’s nothing that would shift votes like this that I’ve spotted.
If it helps to galvanise Tories good, if it makes the argy-bargy more vigourous good - Labour need to be challenged on their fiscal plans and if its a blip - so what.
200
Emergency budget, dangerous waters, like errr 79/81 big jump in VAT, big jump in interest rates, will it be in the manifesto, a sort of Tory Tax Bombshell?
181. “145 “Economic expert is right up there with palm reader or astrologist. Just another bogus pseudo-scientific profession.”
I think it’s more like weather forecasting. There is some underlying science to it and some people do have a grasp of that science but the overall system is too complex to be modelled anywhere near accurate.”
I certainly think economics is useful for trying to understand what happened to markets and economies in much the same way that history is useful for studying the past. For forecasting economics appears to be absolutely bloody useless, pointing to the few who broadly got it right highlights how the bulk of experts got it wrong.
If markets and economies were easily predicted economic experts would be too busy sipping drinks on the beaches of their private islands, bought with the proceeds of their successful investments, to waste their time letting us know what was going to happen.
206
Bang on!!
My dad always used to say, ‘The only difference between an expert and the rest of us, when an expert gets it wrong, they’ve got better excuses’
193. ” she had left Keble College after two years after falling behind with her studies and rowing with her tutors.”
Too much time spent on the river? So often a watery graveyard for Oxonian aspirations.
202 I think you’ll find that was January/first couple of days of Feb and anyway it was the first proper snow in London for nearly 2 decades.
205. coldstone November 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
“will it be in the manifesto, a sort of Tory Tax Bombshell?”
That can cut both ways, of course. The Tories would try to manoeuvre Brown into guaranteeing that he wouldn’t raise the basic rate of income tax, NI, VAT, fuel duty - heck, anything else they can bring into play. Then they’ll aim to make Brown’s pledges look non-credible.
205. “Emergency budget, dangerous waters, like errr 79/81 big jump in VAT, big jump in interest rates, will it be in the manifesto, a sort of Tory Tax Bombshell?”
The next general election will be a choice between a Labour Tax Bombshell, a Tory Tax Bombshell or a Liberal Democrat Tax Bombshell. Whoever wins its spending cuts and tax rises like we’ve never seen before.
145. I’m sorry, but this disdain of experts on such simple grounds is really very silly. The fact that experts get it wrong from time to time, doesn’t mean they’re not right far more often than the rest of us. Of course, economics, as a social science, is nowhere near as scientific as the natural sciences, but the experts still understand it far more than the rest of us.
The current criticism of the profession seems to come from the fact that they didn’t predict the recession several years out. Seeing as the recession was caused by chains of collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps, traded off exchanges and kept of financial institution’s balance sheets, how the hell were people supposed to predict it? Economists on the whole have been making complaints for years about levels of public and private debt, as well as over inflated housing bubbles, but its not their fault they couldn’t see the match which lit the explosives when banks had hidden them away. As soon as it became apparent, economists started predicting the mother of all recessions, while the public had their heads in the sand.
It’s also worth pointing out that the findings of the profession have prevented us from having another Great Depression, thanks to the policy action recommended.
The Cameron interview was pretty boring and a waste of time. Marr was pathetic.
The best moment from the programme was when Samantha Bond pointed out to Trevor Kavanagh that the tories lead had shrunk since The Sun started supporting them. Very good and very true.
187 Thanks for that.
194 Gabble, that is a good spot… Would that be a factor though in preventing Gordon from calling an election for that date? or might it play into some sympathy narrative: “A year ago today, he was mourning the loss of his son; today he stands on the threshold of power. A year of emotional extremes in the life of David Cameron…”
212. Socrates - that’s well argued.
Here is an alternatve theory:
The Observer headline is misleading: it isn’t Poll boost for PM, it is Poll boost for Labour, PM still loathed. It might therefore make Brown’s position less secure. At the moment no one wants to depose him just for the chance of leading Labour to a crushing defeat, but say there is a chance of a hung parliament and another GE late next year then the chance for any Brown successor to get an overall majority in that second GE is not nil. Add to the mix that Mandelson still obsessively wants to be Foreign Secretary (and will do a deal with anyone who will offer him that job). If another poll confirms this one as far as voting intention goes and also shows even a very slim possibilty that another leader would do better with the voters than Brown he starts to look seriously insecure, surely.
211
I’m not convinced, we are obsessing about debt now as we once obsessed about the balance of payments. Back in the 60/70’s everyone said get the BOP right everything else will be right. No one mentions the BOP now, its of very little interest.
As someone upthread said the Sun and Cameron might play the ball more and attacking the man less.
Even some hardened Brown haters I know, felt the personal attacks over the letters were way over the top.The media coverage over this issue may explain the movement in the poll.
Browns resilience in difficult times,might be looked at by some in a different context, because of the massive publicity.
I think the differences between the two polls at a very similar time suggest a possible outlier. I can’t see any massive issue that would trigger such a huge shift. That’s my honest feeling. I think there may be some small shift downwards in the Conservative lead which is slightly evident across a variety of polls, say from the 42% level to the 40% level with the odd dip to 39%. However that too does not surprise me as Cameron has not be as regularly in the media and the message has not been as coherent as normal. I had put this down to a save Brown tactic but maybe I’m cynical.
209. Rob C: I think you’ll find that was January/first couple of days of Feb and anyway it was the first proper snow in London for nearly 2 decades.
It was indeed the start of February, not the end, but the last “proper snow” (assuming by that you mean snow that severely affects travel) was in 2003.
217 Well maybe we should have worried more about the BoP in the last 15 years. It might have stopped us exporting our manufacturing industry abroad.
Just watched last night’s “The Thick of It” - an absolute classic.
211
Further too that.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5560913/not-his-best-performance-but-camerons-emphasis-on-growth-is-welcome.thtml
So its growth that will solve our problems. Isn’t it strange how history repeats itself, Reggie Maudling’s, ‘Dash for Growth’ led to the balance of payments problems, which led to, ‘13 years of Tory mis-rule; which led too Harold Wilson, which was where I came in.
212 I’m not so sure about that. Economists, far more than natural scientists, are prone to wishful thinking, ignoring evidence that conflicts with their theories, and peddling ideas that are simply ridiculous.
Obviously, there are good economists who do offer valuable insights into the way economies work.
223 - Are you Roy Hattersley?
Economists’ strengths lie more in explaining than predicting.
221 Actually, this country’s balance of payments deficit is pretty modest. It’s excessive debt that is the problem, now.
51 - True Easteross.
Much as I want Labour heavily punished and whilst we need them gone to start repairing the damage I must admit I would find it darkly amusing if they did hang on to power and had to face the anger of the public whilst begining to cut services / raise taxes.
“no more boom and bust” and “investement not cuts” indeed
219.
OGH and Mark Senior have got this right. You need to look at Mori’s detailed ‘intention to vote’ figures.
I would imagine that a comparion of the ‘6/10 likely to vote or over’ category, between this and the last poll, will reveal a far lower movement, almost certainly within the MoE.
201. My God, is that the most ignorant post of the week? Do all Global Alarmists jsut make it up as they go along?
229. Not sure. I thought LondonStatto made a good point at 165. If MORI quote only the 100%-certain figures then that fact probably informs the whole design of their surveys. By favouring the 6/10 figures we are using their data in a way they may not have intended and (possibly) don’t warrant as being meaningful.
Maybe Bob Worcester could comment if he’s still reading.
209 London is much warmer than any other part of the country, because of so many people and buildings concentrated there, so snow rarely sticks around for long.
In the Chilterns, OTOH, the snow stuck around for ages. Further North, I don’t doubt it was even heavier.
201. Where I live snow remained on the ground for two weeks in February and at its deepest there was over 20cm.
Cooper being asked about Ashton, appointed by a unelected PM, not a good advert for democracy. Of course she avoids a direct answer to the question.
201 Thanks for that I’m not a global alarmist - just a weather observer in my spare time. Fact is we have not had a truly severe winter since 1987 (although Feb 1991 was pretty cold). Only Jan was below average last winter and was not truly cold compared to winter of the 1979 -87 period.
73 - Its true there are people who will hate parties. Lets face it the deeds of Labour are fresher so the hate for them should be fresher and more real, indeed a number of voters will have trouble rembering the last Tory Government.
In my lifetime I have hated the tories, now I hate Labour and will vote Tory to help kick out this vile lot from power.
227. It’s only modest because of the huge surplus we get in the finance sector.
212. “Economists on the whole have been making complaints for years about levels of public and private debt, as well as over inflated housing bubbles, but its not their fault they couldn’t see the match which lit the explosives when banks had hidden them away. As soon as it became apparent, economists started predicting the mother of all recessions, while the public had their heads in the sand.”
Some economists certainly did warn, but there were a lot of ‘this time is different’ cries from other economists until it was too late. Though I would say that generally the academics appear to have been better than their commercial and government counter-parts.
The point is that it’s not possible to distinguish who is right before events unfold, so separating the few who got it right early on from the nay-sayers or the late comers is extremely difficult, and so forecasting provides little useful input into policy decisions. The good are drowned out by the bad. The longer a boom continues the more people start believe that it is sustainable even if they can’t explain why.
“It’s also worth pointing out that the findings of the profession have prevented us from having another Great Depression, thanks to the policy action recommended.”
But is that forecasting or simply avoiding previous mistakes? I do believe economics is useful for studying the past, so economists may have helped us with their historic study, but they did little to prevent the boom with their forecasting. If an economist spotted what was going to go wrong back in say 2002 they deserve a pat on the back, those who telling us we might avoid recession in 2007 should be shown the door. Either way the forecasting didn’t help avoid the crash. Again, as I said I think academics have done a better job than their counterparts, perhaps companies and governments prefer glass half-full economists?
231 The data tables which are now up on the Ipsos Mori website give a full range of voting intentions from 6-10 through to 10/10 plus all those surveyed . Woth 6-10 the Conservative lead is just 2 poimts 35/33/16
Really awful news for Workington - engineers reckon Calva Bridge is beyond fixing - it’s a 90mile trip to get to the other side.
What a nightmare for the poor folks there.
239. Which illustrates even better what garbage MORI polls are.
239. Oh.
I can’t believe that Yvette has claimed that the Tories would push unemployment to 4 or 5 million - hilarious.
Smithson’s Law that a rogue poll is one you disagree with has long been the least percipient of them.
People may dismiss a poll as “rogue” because they dislike the result implied, but most people deem a poll to be rogue because it is out of whack with all other polls.
Hence the MORI was a rogue poll. But if it cheers up Labour and takes the pressure off MacSporran (till the next poll), that’s excellent news.
I’d like to propose a replacement Smithson’s Law:
Any poll which strengthens Gordon Brown’s position is a good poll for the Tories.
241 I wouldn’t say that. They aren’t past vote weighted, so their base figures will always appear far too flattering to Labour. Their turnout filter attempts to do what past vote weighting does with other pollsters. As they don’t regard their base figures as being in any way definitive, it’s unfair to criticse them over them.
I think that causes their polls to be very volatile (eg Conservatives going from 36% in September, to 43% in October, and back to 37% in November) and as alex says, is better suited for general election polling.
Much to my surprise, Brown’s approval rating is far better than that of the government as a whole (or at any rate, much less bad) so there may not be much point in Labour trying to get rid of him.
RobC
The election, in common with the real world, happens outside London as well you annoying metro-centric twunt
Grrrr I hate people who think only London matters.
244. I think Mike includes a caveat to that rule, namely that you can identify a poll as rogue but only in hindsight (i.e. after other later polls have come in). Since this one is late it’s a bit of a special case.
From PB 24 Sept 2009:
Asked on BBC Radio 5 Live whether he might quit for health reasons, the Prime Minister replied: “I am healthy and I am very fit. I run a lot to keep fit and I will continue to keep fit. I keep going.
88. It is shocking, therefore, to read the following upthread:
Ever since Gordon Brown was photographed jogging in a London park earlier this month…the paparazzi have been lying in wait.
So far, alas, their quarry has eluded them. Just as he had never been seen jogging before the photograph had been taken, he has not been seen since. Some members of the paparazzi are now muttering that the original picture must have been a stunt.
This is a shocking suggestion, it is very clear simply by looking at him that Brown has lost around two stones in weight as a result of his regular jogging programme. Simply compare the lithe picture of him running in the park with the image of him as often and somewhat cruelly featured by Mike, in besuited, tongue-lolling, Puffing Billy mode.
245. My point Sean is precisely that - the harsh turnout filter is an arbitrary bolt-on extra used to adjust for the fact that the base figures are so badly skewed. One distortion to try to cover up another, i.e. garbage.
238. Predicting recession in 2002? Do you seriously expect people to predict a bubble bursting before the bubble even begins? Governments play a huge part in the economy, so economists would also be required to predict electoral outcomes in a dozen or so major economies several years out, along with their policies. Who on here would like to predict the economic policies of the UK Government of 2016?
Would you also care to explain how an economist was expected to predict the outcome of chains of complex financial derivatives, of unknown lengths or volumes, several years before some of them were designed?
As for the “this time is different” crowd, which serious economists actually claimed that? You have a fair few idiots in the financial press and among sell-side analysts, but they obviously have some very suspicious incentives at work. I don’t know anyone at a major forecasting house or a serious name in academia that claimed such a thing.
240. I was almost trapped there last night. The police closed the A595, there was no way to get east, either through the a596 at workington (all roads blocked) or through the a595 off the a66. The only way to escape the hell hole that is west cumbria (on a good day) was to take the a66 to the M6 to Penrith. Parts of the a6 to penrith however, i would suggest are going to need replacing, the road at a couple of points did not appear safe.
“GOR Regions”:
North 28-42-10
Midlands 41-30-17
South 34-31-21
London 27-46-16
Eh?
Obviously Brown won’t call the election in for February, but if the polls continue to be not too bad for Labour through January, I could see the chances of a March 25th election increasing, which would mean Brown goes to the Palace sometime late mid to late Feb.
239: The ‘party mentioned last time was IIRC a 40-32 Tory lead, so that would make it Con -5, Lab +1, not as dramatic as the 10-out-of-10 figures but still a substantial shift. The underlying story, if it’s confirmed by other polls, appears to be substantial doubts emerging about the Tories, some of which are leading to a drift back to Labour. Since we’ve all been clear for some time that the Tory vote was primarily a get-Labour-out vote rather than positive enthusiasm, this is a mirror image effect. It’s a pity that so many people vote negatively, but the sad truth is that lots of people - epsecially floating voters - think we’re all rubbish, and the task is to choose the least evil.
Two notes:
1 - Even if a poll is an outlier, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I seem to recall that Harris, in the runup to the 1992 election, got a series of outliers that suggested the Tories would win a majority, but these were either ignored as obviously outliers or suppressed out of embarrassment.
2 - If there was an election today with scores of 40/30/18, both ICM and MORI would claim accuracy within the MoE.
Percentage of 6-10 likelihood to vote that are absolutely certain to vote:
PC 100
LD 73
C 70
UKIP 63
Lab 62
BNP 60
Grn 52
SNP 45
Other 18
252. Is that from MORI? Those figures are extraordinary!!!!!
252: Is that ‘Labour/Com/Lib’ or ‘Con/Lab/Lib’ Either way theres some odd figures there.
255. Andy Cooke: If there was an election today with scores of 40/30/18, both ICM and MORI would claim accuracy within the MoE.
Good point.
And Cameron would have a majority.
252:Midlands 41-30-17
South 34-31-21
Assuming thats ‘Con/Lab/Lib’ theres no way thats right.
255. Correct of course. How many of the ‘rogue/outlier’ polls of the last two years have come from MORI or ComRes?
239. Wow. That’s bad for the tories - far worse than I thought.
Mori shows a big change in the voting intentions of men, especially:
October:
CON 43%
LAB 30%
November:
CON 33%
LAB 33%
252 Those are not the correct regional figures based on the headline figures , you shoild be looking at Table 4
North 31-43-8
Midlands 41-27-19
South 40-22-26
London 31-38-20
England only 41-32-17
257. GIN.
Yes.
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Polls/poll_Monitor_Nov09web.pdf
I have to say I find those figures truly remarkable. We will only find out if there has been a dramatic shift if we see more polls. I expect someone will be comissioning one right now.
Correction to 256: “Other” also 100%. Misread my numbers…
I’ll repeat what I said before the London poll and the last election and everything since Bob Worcester called 2004 for Kerry in his smug manner on the abysmal ITV News channel…
IT’S MORI
261, MORI does tend to have a rather greater volatility than the others. I do tend towards ICM rather than any of the others, which may be a somewhat unfair stance to take.
However, the 6-10 figures do look rather startling. I’m personally witholding judgement until we’ve had at least two more polls - my instinct is that this poll could be an “overshoot” (due to volatility - but the 6-10 numbers make that less certain) of a genuine small change in public opinion towards Brown.
254 - Nick. “Since we’ve all been clear for some time that the Tory vote was primarily a get-Labour-out vote rather than positive enthusiasm,”
Who’s “we”? There may be a lack of enthusiasm about a Tory Govt, but that is a lack of enthusiasm in the same way that nobody is enthusiastic about having an operation to remove a brain tumour.
I also think the “lack of enthusiasm” manifests itself in those who don’t say they will vote Conservative (thereby limiting them to scores around 40%) more than those who do.
269 (con) - furthermore it is understandable if every so often people think “well maybe it isn’t that bad” and briefly flirt with going back, but then the next set of bad news appears and they revert.
It just shows that the gap is closing - to be expected really and no surprise given Cameron’s poor performance on the Andrew Marr programme.
254 Nick P MP
“It’s a pity that so many people vote negatively…”
No it’s not. The UK is supposed to be a democracy. I, the voter, am king. I may vote whatsoever way, and with whatsoever motivation, I choose. If it is more important to me to vote against a political party, than for a particular one, that is my absolute prerogative.
I am sure that if Griffin wins Barking next year, then you and others would encourage tactical voting to get him out in 2014 or ‘15.
I enjoy your posts because they are often perceptive, and it is nice to have a view from within the PLP. However, you are fond of posting things like this which show that you get the voter/politician master/servant relationship entirely the wrong way round.
Projected turnout 75%.
IMO the big story at the next election is not going to be errors in the polling percentages, but is going to be the total inadequacy of the standard seat predictor models.
246 Lol just because I refer to London’s weather doesn’t mean I live there (people do jump to conclusions on these boards at times). I just happen to thing Brown will be better served by going asap and not playing the Tories game - as someone pointed out in a previous thread his control of election timing is the only real surprise weapon left to him.
268. The ComRes poll of May 31 which had the Tories on 30% i.e. lower than at the 2005 GE looked startling as well. But it was rubbish of course.
252 Are MORI really reporting a 46%/27% Labour/Conservative lead in London, an even higher rating for Brown & Co. than in the North? If so, this would be a truly jaw-dropping finding.
Equally surprising is the suggestion that there appears to be only a 10% level of support for the LibDems in the North.
267. I’m thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of the turkeys kidding themselves that Christmas doesn’t necessarily involve lunch because Bob “It’s Kerry” Worcester says so.
They’re going to look quite stupid when the next few polls come through with the usual 13-point Tory leads.
Allowing for 3 points MoE, anything between 10 and 16 points is plausible.
On the Garden of Remembrance fuss: I really do not understand this.
Why should anyone need to get Westminster Abbey’s approval to visit its (public) Garden of Remembrance and to have his photo taken?
271. David from Ealing: “…Cameron’s poor performance on the Andrew Marr programme”
I agree. Both interviewer and interviewee conspired to make it a completely pointless exercise.
Cameron looked defeated - just going through the motions.
275. RobC.
If you don’t live in London you shouldn’t be pontificating about when London last had “proper snow”.
263 “England only 41-32-17″
I suspect that even this split would be enough to get the Tories to a workable majority - assuming thr Tories are still doing betterin the marginals.
Nothing by way of good cheer for the LibDems at 17%…
Government satisfaction -42 (certain to vote -46, 6-10 likelihood -43).
271 I laughed at loud at that, David, but not in a good way. The Andrew Marr programme? Are you kidding?
The MORI polls shows a 10-point switch away from the Tories. That would mean that ~5 people in a hundred watched Andrew Marr and changed their voting intention.
5% of the electorate doesn’t watch Andrew Marr, David.
Brown satisfaction -25 (-34, -29).
On the basis of those numbers, Brown stays.
Looking at the regional splits Im reminded of the ComRes poll this time last year in the wake of the PBR which had a 1% Tory lead. That also had a very high score for Labour in the South East and the view was that ComRes had been unlucky and the random sample had picked up a disproptionately high number of Labour voters in that region.
The same may have happened here but we need other polls to show evidence.
272.254 Nick P MP
“It’s a pity that so many people vote negatively…”
That will be a consequence of your party giving them nothing positive to vote for…
254 Nick’s party has tried to push this “they are all as bad as each other” for the past 12 years as they reason that if people won’t vote for Labour(which they won’t) the best chance is to stop them voting for anyone. So every now and again we get some spun lament from Nick about turnout or negative voting etc.
On the poll it really is beginning to look dodgy, not only is the fieldwork over a week old, these regional figures just look ridiculous.
It’s good news. The Labour turkeys are already starting to strut and all thought of ditching Broon has evaporated. The window of opportunity in which they can ditch the bum thereby gets shorter.
Someone upthread suggested that this poll had been released to aid Labour. If this poll has been published tactically at anyone’s behest, er, it would at the Tories’ - and it’s working.
The Mori Poll for the Observer is good for the Tories.
A hung parliament is good for the Tories.
“Why?” I hear you ask.
Because with a hung parliament David Cameron cannot be blamed for all the things that go wrong whilst he is Prime Minister, and most things will go wrong. He can then go into the next election pleading, as Nasty Brown has done, that it was somebody else’s fault.
And Britain will continue to slide beneath the waves and the Tory toadies and NuLabour toadies will continue to blame the other lot whilst the vast majority of the British people will continue with their loudly chant “A plague on both your houses.”
This scenario, will, of course, be good for the Tories.
222.”Just watched last night’s “The Thick of It” - an absolute classic.”
It just seems to get better and better this time around. The face off between Malcolm Tucker and his Tory opposite was a classic. Is he meant to be a send up of Hilton?
85 - ” despite last nights poll, the Tories are going to get a comfortable majority, IMO.”
Agreed
Tiny sample but it made me laugh.
Greens 14 voters, of which in 2005 1 voted Labour, 1 voted LD, 5 voted Tory.
Yeah, right.
290.
Malcolm’s tedious idiotic bleatings are good for the Tories.
271/280. People upthread were saying Cameron on Marr was good. Who knows?
OT does anyone find that all the YouGov polls they’re invited to get you not cash, but an entry to one of their supposed prize draws?
I got £50 out of them after about 3 years, but I’ve now been stuck on about £35 for almost as long. I cannot remember the last paid poll I was invited to.
Anyone else experienced this?
280 Gabble agreed it was a lacklustre performance by both men.
Cameron and Marr looked like men who had just got out of bed on a sunday morning after a heavy session, and couldn`t be bothered.
86 - Probably the most idiotic post that I’ve seen on here for ages, and that’s saying something. it’s a shame that it wasn’t seen in the green pen that it deserves. I don’t like the Guardian myself but the ideas in that post are positively imbecilic.
Ironically it’s people like that that are Cameron’s biggest problem and their sheer inability to see that does nothing to offset the fact that they would be the ones responsible for Brown getting anywhere near being re-elected.
Dear me. One swallow really does not make a summer. I cannot believe the flap people are getting into over one opinion poll. If anything this is no bad thing - it checks the unbridled enthusiasm of certain Tories. If the Tories are going to turn out the vote then they need it look like more of a contest. Not that I believe Labour are only 6 points behind nationally - or 12 points ahead in the North. It’s nonsense.
For everyone who thinks “Cameron’s not doing very well on Marr”, at least one other person thinks “Marr always lets the lefties off a lot lighter than this,” and another 10,000 people aren’t even watching.
The only way an interview is going to alter the game is if something significant is said in it that gets reported more widely. The nature of the subsequent reporting is usually what alters the game, not the interview.
Marr nodded and let Broon off over the non-election but it destroyed Broon.
“Nick Clegg has made clear the Liberal Democrats will only support the largest party in the Commons in the event of a hung Parliament, which would put David Cameron in Downing Street according to the latest polls.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6927353.ece
I’m not sure he did say that. He actually said:
“Whichever party have the strongest mandate [?] from the British people, it seems to me that they have the first right to try and govern, either on their own or with others.”
What if Labour have more seats but the tories have more votes?
Also, if Labour had fewer seats but offered a referendum on PR, could the LibDems turn them down?
Marr was utterly useless this morning. Grovelling at the feet of Trevor Kavanagh and then conducting two soft and pointless interviews with the opposition leaders. He should have pinned Clegg down on some of these points.
296 John R - I got an invite this morning for the first time in about a month and when I clicked on it [within 6hrs of the timestamp] - it came back as poll closed ?!!?
91 - its on Sky now.
Cumbria is taking top billing today
302. Yes and when I tried again the screen timed out. Invite at 08.59, poll buggered with 4 hours.
I am determined to get to £50 again. How often can you get free money out of lefties, if you’re middle class, British and self employed?
Coldstone - “Hitchens doesn’t switch his beliefs to suit anyone, same with Heffer. You may not agree with them, but you know where you stand.”
Yes, as far away from them as possible!
281 Ok I’ll let you bore people with your stats instead.
I’m pleased to see that Clegg is noticeably improving - good on why the Queens speech should have been scrapped, much better parliamentary performances and impressive on Marr today. As a former Huhne supporter I’m being converted
290. I thought this poll was bad for the Tories Malcolm, but each to their own I suppose….
301. “What if Labour have more seats but the tories have more votes?”
He’ll have to clarify that before the election.
“if Labour had fewer seats but offered a referendum on PR, could the LibDems turn them down?”
He’s just ruled that out. If Labour have fewer seats then they’ll have many fewer votes, so in no sense could they be said to have the strongest mandate.
Herald - Salmond ‘coached like a child’ to learn how to be a nice guy
‘Chief whip reveals penny game stopped SNP sniping’
“Alex Salmond and other SNP politicians had to be coached like children to stop them being negative during the last Scottish election, one of the first minister’s senior aides has revealed.
In one “game”, MSPs were given bags of pennies, then forced to hand over a penny each time they moaned and said something bad about a rival.
Brian Adam, the SNP’s chief whip at Holyrood, said that Salmond found changing his behaviour a “major challenge”, as his instinct is to attack opponents with stinging one-liners.
“He is not known as Smart Alec for no reason,” he told a group of American students.
Adam also admitted that the SNP might not have won in 2007 without calling itself “Alex Salmond for First Minister” on the regional ballot paper and coming first in alphabetical order.
The “voter management strategy” was thought to have given the party a 1% edge.
“Had it been ‘Scottish National Party’ we might have struggled,” he revealed.
The name change will not be allowed in 2011.
The emergence of the remarks comes as the SNP holds an internal debate on whether to return to negative campaigning in the wake of its defeat in the Glasgow North East by-election.
At last month’s party conference in Inverness, former leader Gordon Wilson said the SNP had to learn from Labour’s use of negative campaigning and be more “streetwise”.
After being out-polled three-to-one by labour in Glasgow North East, SNP activists have also been urging the party hierarchy to go negative.”
I am so tempted….
91 - It was covered at 10:30 on Sky during paper review, all seemed to think this will really affect the government in a bad way, especially so as there seem to the same equipment shortages now as then, and the man who held the purse strings during Iraq is now in the top job and is hoping to be re-elected as PM.
301. Mark Senior will explode with rage if Clegg props up Cam. :O
296 It’s taking me a while to get to £50 as well. Only getting very occasional paid polls and most of those are the awful BrandIndex ones.
I’m also slightly dubious about the change from money to “points” - I’m sure at some point 1 point will cease to equal 1 pence
296 I seem to have had a post put into moderation for the first time ever (I don’t post much), but I’m having exactly the same happen to me with YouGov - lots of draws only
301 - A mandate is given by votes, Clegg knows full well that lib dems are against the FPTP system whereby votes don’t translate into seats.
Cold comfort for you there Gabble.
250. “238. Predicting recession in 2002? Do you seriously expect people to predict a bubble bursting before the bubble even begins?”
There were articles in the Economist before 2002 warning about levels of corporate and personal debt, and housing market prices, warning that it could result in a crash and recession.
So some people must have seen clouds on the horizon, but we had a lot of rubbish from supposed economists at banks, building societies and others about houses being a one-way bet, and don’t worry about the amount of debt we are all taking on it is sustainable.
“Governments play a huge part in the economy, so economists would also be required to predict electoral outcomes in a dozen or so major economies several years out, along with their policies.”
Indeed they do play a big part, but surely if I accept your argument that points to the folly of long term forecasting?
“Would you also care to explain how an economist was expected to predict the outcome of chains of complex financial derivatives, of unknown lengths or volumes, several years before some of them were designed?”
First of all I don’t think you can blame the crash on over the counter trading, it played a part in bursting the bubble, but it was the debt and leverage that are the real problem. It’s an excuse that governments like to push as it allows them to claim regulation rather than a rebalancing of the economy will heal our wounds, I do not believe that.
But if economists are unaware of such trading or ignorant about how it operates how can they make reliable forecasts?
I think you’ve highlighted why forecasting is so bad. It’s based upon historic study (the good bit of economics) but the future is not the past; new policies, new types of trading will exist, they can not be factored into forecasts. Forecasting is a fools game, and yet it plays a big part in shaping policy.
But we do know that credit bubbles are bad. When you see signs of a credit bubble developing steer away from it.
311. GIN.
I can’t see it, though - he’d lose control of his parliamentary party as there are too many Seniorites (led by Cable, of course).
308. MichaelK
In truth, any workable coalition has a mandate to govern, by dint of them, jointly, having the most seats.
I can’t believe that Clegg will form a coalition with a party on purely arithmetical grounds, regardless of the policy platform of that party.
If he does mean that, he’s even more shallow than I have given him credit for, so far.
309 Oh dear - loose tongue alert me thinks. Silly Billy if he was so candid and thought it wouldn’t get back.
It reminds me of Asprilla telling a Columbian radio station he had no intention of returning to Newcastle United whilst he was on leave. BBC Monitoring/correspondant heard it and bingo…
312. ukpaul November 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
That makes sense. However, it’s entirely possible that the Tories could be ~3% ahead of Labour in the popular vote but sufficiently far behind Labour in seats that Con+LD would not give a majority, while Lab+LD would.
256 - thanks. Those 6-10 figures show that the same sample would have reduced the lead further if the 6-10 certain range was taken rather than the 10-out-of-10.
John Lilburne: sure, people can vote for whatever reason they like - I’m not suggesting otherwise. But politics in all parties is a mixture of the good and the bad, and we have a political culture which focuses on the latter, so people tend to vote against something rather than for something. I think that’s a pity and damaging to democracy - but not especially the voters’ fault, rather the way politics is covered in the media.
314. I can’t see it either. I suspct the Lib-Dems will agree to nod through Labours first Queens Speech as long as Labour put a bill to introduce PR into said speech.
A more formal alliance would need Brown to quit and be replaced by postie (with Vince as Chancellor?) which I can’t see happening as Brown would cling on like a limpit and claim that by stopping Cameron getting a majority he had infact been given a huge endorsement by the voters.
317 - If that was the case then the system would have well and truly failed and I can imagine Clegg saying that nothing short of a deal on PR and a rerun election would be palatable. There may be very few chances for the lib dems to show how the system is unrepresentative in such a dramatic way and I expect them to make the most out of it if something like that transpires.
316.Plato, there are jitters in the SNP ranks just now, Stuart is a good bellweather poster in that regard. I do wonder if there is some argument behind the scenes about the direction and strategy of the party in the run up to the GE and Holyrood elections. I suspect the older more experienced heads are trying to rein in the hot heads.
The SNP ran a very positive campaign in 2007, and it worked against the very negative Labour one. This time around, they are in power and Labour are in opposition and its going to be interesting to see what happens.
318. Its ironic that the way politics is reported in the media began in the mid 90’s when Labour media allies destroyed John Major. Its all very well for you lefites to moan now, but you need to examine the roll playes by people such delightful people as Alistair “John Major tucks his short into his underpants” Campbell.
What you guys did to grab power in the 90’s poisioned politics and political reporting seemingly forever.
318. Its ironic that the way politics is now reported in the media began in the mid 90’s when Labours media allies destroyed John Major. Its all very well for you lefites to moan now, but you need to examine the roll played by such delightful people as Alistair “John Major tucks his short into his underpants” Campbell.
What you guys did to grab power in the 90’s poisioned politics and political reporting seemingly forever.
319. GIN.
On this poll, Wells gives C 288, Lab 286, LD 45.
That would make C+LD 333 or Lab+LD 331. Neither situation would last more than six months. The former case wouldn’t even get a Queen’s Speech passed - the Seniorites would rebel. Even the latter case might struggle. HM might have to ask for a grand coalition!
324 “HM might have to ask for a grand coalition!”
That sounds exciting.
240.Really awful news for Workington - engineers reckon Calva Bridge is beyond fixing - it’s a 90mile trip to get to the other side.
What a nightmare for the poor folks there.
I lived in the town for three years and can assure you that it’s nothing like 90 miles - unless you are assuming that all the bridges over the Derwent are ruined. However the Royal Engineers will no doubt be busy providing Bailey bridges where necessary.
Further thought about hung parliament manoeuvrings.
If Labour have a seat total big enough to form a coaltion government with the LDs - say somewhere above 270 seats - then will they not lose their recently found enthusiasm for PR? That has been mostly based on fear of impending meltdown, and what they’d have seen would be that the fear was exaggerated and that FPTP suits them just fine.
I can see that they might offer AV to Clegg, but then so might the Tories. I don’t see why either party would offer AV+ or STV. What does it entail: abandoning any chance of ever winning a majority again in return for the dubious privilege of heading a coalition government during what is likely to be one of the most difficult years since the war.
326. “Bailey bridges …”
Do they still exist outside A Bridge Too Far? Wow
When you refer to Bailey crap I take it you mean that British-built bridge which is the envy of the civilized world?
ABSOLUTELY HYSTERICAL - that’s what you lot are getting over 1flipping rogue poll!
Calm down all and desist with this over reaction, for the sake of your health!
This poll is a reflection of the increasing arrogance and self-indulgence of parts of the Tory party, and the negative effect that has on floating voters. Recently we have seen the “head-bangers” (as Ken Clarke used to call them) emboldened on several issues - family values; climate-change denial; the EU; etc. Their increasingly frantic and radical rantings in public put the mainstream voters off big-time.
If we continue to see more attacks from the fringe, coupled with interventions from fringe groups like the TPA and disgraceful tabloid antics like “lettergate” the election is still there to be lost by Cameron. I suspect he knows this and I suspect we will see an offensive from him in the next few weeks to put the hard-right back in its box until the election.
#321 ChristanaD (& others)
I remain to be convinced that the SNP should continue to treat Labour with kid gloves. It is not that the Labour party engage in negative campaigning, they engage in something far worse-the BIG LIE.
I believe Labour should be attacked on what my life’s experience has shown me to be the truth about the Labour Party with regard to Scotland.
They resist all additional powers to Scotland unless and until thay are totally convinced that failure to do so will result in them being defeated by the SNP.
Then they suddenly do an about turn (Calman is a good example of this, as Labour were insistent in 2007 that it was ridiculous to even consider any further devolution)) and enact the smallest amount of devolution they can get away with.
They then claim to be the great Home Rule party of Scotland-but who can seriously believe there would ever have been a Scottish parliament if the SNP did not exist?
Labour had many opportunities over a hundred years to have created one but did not do so until under severe SNP threat.
332. “…And that was a Party Political Broadcast by the Sanctimonious Party.”
332. Climate Change denial? LOL, maybe you have been busy this week, or only getting your news from the BBC, the goose has well and truly being cooked on man made global warming, the date and emails have been leaked and showed that the evidence is little more then a pack of lies.
249 I think MORI do actually pick up accurately on day to day changes of public opinion. However, these day to day changes either don’t last, or cancel each other out.
WRT regional splits, the sample sizes are too small (and also unweighted) to tell us anything significant. If the Conservatives finish 9% ahead in England, next time, they’re certainly not going to be 19% behind in London.
329 Much the same thing happened with “wobble Thursday” in the 1987 election, when a poll showing the Conservatives 4% ahead of Labour convinced a lot of people (including Conservatives) that we were going to get a hung Parliament. There will be dozens of polls between now and the next election, and some of them are bound to stand out dramatically from the rest.
Labour are going to win this coming election, i’m pretty sure of that.
There’s just this expectation out there that as the time comes close, several things will happen:
1) The economy will have turned around
2) The city will come to the conclusion that it is better the devil you know
3) The Tories will start to fret about Europe again
4) The public in general will say ‘Oh all right then. Five more years of relative OK’ness is better than risking it all with the new boys, even though that would be quite exciting’.
It probably won’t be a Labour majority, rather a Labour seat victory. I think there are still a few 7/1’s around, but going fast i shouldn’t wonder.
Fill yer boots.
“Their increasingly frantic and radical rantings in public put the mainstream voters off big-time.”
I think you must have been following a different set of news stories to me.
337 Economic growth of 0-1% doesn’t represent the economy turning round.
337. DDS: Five more years of relative OK’ness
Like the last two?!?!?!?????
335 - And you seem to have missed the subsequent realisation that they hadn’t got a clue and had interpreted phrases wrongly and that no smoking gun was there.
Some nasty personal insults which were pretty awful but that’s persoal email exchanges for you.
Evidence for your ’cause’? Zero.
Anyway, that links nicely in to the last few posts about those on the far right of the tories who wrongly believe they are the ‘proper’ conservative party as opposed to the liberal Cameron one. We are seeing much more of them, and their wrong headed view that they are some sort of majority makes them even more of a problem for Cameron and his team. They need to cut off their heads now (metaphorically of course) or this rogue poll may start to be mirrored elsewhere.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8368709.stm
331. Wayne November 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Who’s hysterical?
If it’s just a rogue then we can go back to business-as-usual. If it’s not then we may as well start thinking about the implications now.
343 - Was Wayne being ironic in accusing others of getting hysterical?
341 The right of the Conservative Party have given Cameron a very easy ride, lately. There could have been a huge row over the EU, but there wasn’t.
341. ukpaul: had interpreted phrases wrongly and that no smoking gun was there.
There was certainly convincing evidence of bad faith by some scientists. I don’t recall the exact quote but the gist was “the data doesn’t fit the theory; we need to improve our data collection methods”.
345 - There is a right of the right though who are noisy beyond their small numbers. UKIP helps in filtering some of them away but, in the way that Blair had to disown Benn et al, Cameron needs to keep doing the same. It’s the faltering centre who can easily be swayed by the fear of what those people say and, if they vote labour instead, that’s usually worse than losing a vote to a minor party.
341. Dont forget the bit about manipulating data so that trends that dont support their views are hidden, or the attempt to block sceptical scientists from getting their work published and peer reviewed, by removing the ‘peer’ bit from the only journal that has allowed any work to be published, and trying to get the editor fired.
The worlds climate might be changing, we might have something to do with it, but there is pretty much no evidence to show it, but there is evidence of a AGW industry that is full of dishonesty and outright lies.
Lies, lies, lies, lies lies.
These people should publicly shamed, it is people like yourself who believe in the theocratic man made global warming that should be worried the most. This is the equivalent of the uncovering of emails between the Pope and the archbishop of Canterbury explaining how they know that Jesus wasnt born of a virgin birth, and that he wasnt the Son of God at all.
345 - I think that’s correct (speaking from the party’s ‘moderate’ wing), so I’m not sure how the normally astute Paul at 341 would substantiate his assessment.
“The right of the Conservative Party have given Cameron a very easy ride, lately. There could have been a huge row over the EU, but there wasn’t.”
Are we supposed to be grateful? The sooner they realise they aren’t the be and and end all of Conservatism the better.
335 “emails have been leaked and showed that the evidence is little more then a pack of lies.”
I’m not sure any of the emails provide hard evidence for that - and I’ve read the the lot, they do however show some very dubious practices by the main AGW proponents such as:
- freezing out/smearing those who disagree with their POV
- suggesting/requesting the deletion/obfuscation of data to thwart FOI requests
- manipulating peer review panels in their favour
- manipulating their own authority scores
- being ‘cheered’ by the death of a key rival
- editing trend figures to miss out recent [a decades worth so far] of inconvenient global cooling
- and on and on and on…
What it has done is show what happens when science becomes a religion and winning is more important than getting it right. They have become politicians and funding extraction experts.
A very, very sorry situation for climate scientists who may have lost a great deal of credibility as a result. The peer review system is also badly damaged now we know that the Dir of the most prominent/well funded reseach centre in the UK actively pursued and encouraged the removal of those who disagreed.
It was explicitly stated that this tactic was to make it almost impossible for their papers to be published and therefore made it possible to then say their research was crap and therefore not worthy of publication. Nasty stuff.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/release-of-cru-files-forge-a-new-hockey-stick-reconstruction/
Readers will recognize that even though the endpoint has not been established, the conclusion from the graph is clear. We are living in times of extraordinary data, never before seen. It’s accelerating, and worse than we thought.
OT - more disturbing flood news..
“Rescue teams are searching for a 21-year-old woman, who fell into the River Usk in Powys while crossing a bridge.
A police helicopter, rescue boats and a mountain rescue team have joined the search of a mile-long stretch. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8372834.stm
346 - If anything I thought it showed that they worry too much about the small, as opposed to the full, canvas. Let the full picture tell the story, there are always going to be variables that go a different way.
What it has done is brought the US right out in numbers and that twists the debate out of shape totally.
349 - The ‘normally astute’ ukpaul replies!
348 - I qualified that with my ‘right of the right’ post, the ones who make a noise out of all proportion to their numbers. It’s a cosmetic exercise really but Cameron needs to show their marginalisation either through saying something that gainsays what they claim or repudiating it directly. The climate change stuff as in the last few posts for example, something that goes very much against Cameron’s positioning.
“theocratic man made global warming ”
Sigh….
355 - The 349 should have been for the quote about ‘theocracy’, the first bit is a reply to John O.
348. In 14 of the last 20 years the Central England Temperature has exceeded 10.0 deg C annually. There were only 30 such years in the whole of the previous 330 years covering 1659 - 1988. Incidentally 2009 is also likely to be an above 10C year barring an exceedingly cold December.
You cannot deny the climate is markedly warming - the question is whether it is man-made or natural cycle. (ans probably a bit of both).
New thread - Can Gord now kiss goodbye to a deal with Nick?
341 (and later) – And you (ukpaul) seem to have missed that, although it’s true that the leaks appear to provide no direct evidence of deliberate fraud regarding the science, they do show that scientists at the heart of the “climate change” issue exhibit political activism, arrogance, intolerance of dissent and personal interest – illustrated by attempts to frustrate the FOIA process, avoid outside scrutiny, influence peer review and ensure the world is getting the “correct” message. All this supports the probability of bias in their handling of the science itself. As “the fight against climate change” is being used to impose massive burdens on our already shattered economy and threaten parts of our most beautiful countryside, that, as Plato says, is a very sorry situation.
Yet it’s not mentioned in the mainstream media.
359 - Scientists behave like human beings. Stop the presses!
359 - Also, ’twas ever thus. Here is some correspondance about the new Newtonian physics -
http://carbonfixated.com/newtongate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-renaissance-and-enlightenment-thinking/
“You need not give yourself the trouble of examining all the calculations of the Scholium. Such errors as do not depend upon wrong reasoning can be of no great consequence & may be corrected by the reader.
Newton to Cotes June 15 1710″
“Mr. Raphson has printed off four or five sheets of his History of Fluxions, but being shew’d Sr. Is. Newton (who, it seems, would rather have them write against him, than have a piece done in that manner in his favour), he got a Stop put to it, for some time at least.
Jones to Cotes, 17 September 1711″
etc. Of course, Einstein would prove him incorrect in various ways later but Newton served us well enough for centuries in advancing our understanding of the world around us.
“271 I laughed at loud at that, David, but not in a good way. The Andrew Marr programme? Are you kidding?”
John R - I agree that only a small percentage of the public watch the programme, but snippets from it are often used on later news bulletins and it is the probably the one programme that those who write and broadcast about politics consider a must watch.
Cameron seemed tired and bored - more performances like that and the gap will close further. We’ve only really seen him when he thinks he’s in for a landslide and is smiling from ear to ear. This was something new.
360/361 - Yes, political activism, arrogance, intolerance of dissent and personal interest are all too human. But when - as it seems in this case - they bias the way a scientific matter of massive importance to the world is handled, then the humans involved warrant detailed investigation. After all, our MPs were behaving like human beings when they claimed their expenses. And that did (quite rightly) stop the presses.
Well done Andy Murray!
Hilarious thread! Fantastic entertainment from start to finish!
I hope there are some more polls showing narrow polls on the way.
I can’t wait to log in and see the heads of some more partisan Tory contributers explode!