The Independent‘s John Rentoul is scarcely likely to be happy at what the latest poll by Opinium says, but dutifully tweeted it anyway:
Opinium poll for Observer, Cons back to 15-pt lead:
Con 38% +2
Lab 23% -1
Lib Dem 15% -5
Brexit 12% +1
Green 4% +2
2,006 UK adults 3-4 Oct, change since last week
So after all those Remain victories in Parliament and the courts, Boris Johnson’s Tories are slightly more popular and the Liberal Democrats are significantly less popular? How can this be?
Winning is everything both politics and the legal world, but that is only part of the picture. What matters as far as elections are concerned is public opinion and in this respect the Lib Dems may have gained some short term benefit from Remoaners who want to repudiate BRExit and wipe Leavers faces in the faeces.
I doubt that many natural Lib Dems voted Leave (since being Europhile cucks is their raison d’etra), but at least some of them must accept that to protect democracy you must respect the vote even when you lose.
There is also the group identity aspect, if you’re ashamed of what a party is doing then you’re not going to want to be contaminated by that. This is especially true if you are trying attract floating voters.
Jo Swinson is just another in a long line of Lib Dem leaders who will lose the next election by alienating parts of their own voter base.
Good.
I suspect such polls make the LibDems even more unwilling to face an election – and even more convinced that the stupid voters should be ignored. Labour talks of an election “this side of Christmas”, but talk is cheap. Until the circle is broken (may that be soon), cause and effect will continue to follow on one another. Refusing an election will keep them low in the polls, which will keep them opposed to an election.
John Galt,
According to a large scale poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft’s polling company the day after the referendum, a surprisingly high 30% of Liberal Democrats who voted in the referendum voted Leave.
This was very similar to the figure stated in an analysis by Peter Moore of YouGov published four days after the referendum, which gave 32% of Liberal Democrats as voting Leave.
It’s one of those things that seems to have gone down the memory hole.
That’s interesting, since it suggests that once the current window for revoking Article 50 / Repudiating BRExit is over then the Lib Dem support that is being inflated by Remoaners might fall back considerably.
I’m actually happy with where the Lib Dems are at the moment, since they seem to have taken some of the Remoaner vote from Labour. Hopefully, this will continue.
This is actually bad news for Boris.
To get an election he needs some party other than his own to expect to gain from it- not necessarily win, but just gain seats.
He can arrange to lose a VONC, but first someone has to table one.
Which might be why he is keen to get a Queen’s Speech, since passing support for that is a vote of confidence in the government.
JG,
Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, losing a Queen’s Speech is not a trigger for a General Election, only the motion worded in the Act (unless counter-manded within 14 days) or a positive vote of 2/3rd of MPs i.e. 435 votes of ‘Aye’ count. The FTPA ignored the Queen’s Speech as a confidence vote, so we may have the farce of the Queen’s Speech defeated by a House of Commons that has not signified a lack of confidence in the government.
A lacuna in our system is that a new Prime Minister does not need a positive vote of confidence from the House of Commons, any fool could in theory turn up at the Palace and persuade HM that he (or in Mrs May’s case, she) has the confidence of the House of Commons and take the job.
None of this mattered until they showed what ‘schlochs’ they were.