Month: November 2019

Goodbye secure Tory poll lead, I hardly knew ye

Conservative Party, Elections, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats
11 Comments

A couple of days ago YouGov published the first set of results of their massive Multilevel Regression with Poststratification poll. This was big news, as the equivalent from the last election in 2017 was one of only two polls that came close to the final result. (The other was a conventional poll by Survation.) The YouGov MRP results showed the responses of the hundred thousand strong panel as of 27th November. If this election were a game of The Weakest Link, that would have been the point at which the Tories said “Bank”. The results suggested a sea of red seats turning blue. (Note for American readers: your colour conventions for parties are wrong. Wrong like the spelling “color”.) As ever, though, a poll is a snapshot not a prediction.

There is no bank. Today’s poll from BMG showed the steepest absolute rise for Labour – five percentage points compared to BMG’s last poll – that I have seen so far in this election, and add to that a decline of two percentage points for the Conservatives. Net change -7, giving Con 39%, Lab 33%. One might argue – Tories might pray – that it ain’t as bad as it looks because it was quite a while since the last BMG poll. Or perhaps it is just one of those spasms that all polls are subject to, poor lambs. But however you spin it, a Conservative lead in vote share as small as six points almost certainly means no Tory majority, which means a coalition between Labour and one or more of the other parties, which means a second referendum, which means, given Labour’s plan to allow foreigners the vote, no Brexit.

When the YouGov MRP came out some Conservative campaigners had been saying that they wished it had been tighter, as such a thumping great lead would make their side complacent. They have their wish now.

I assume from Labour being up five and the Lib Dems down five that we are seeing a straight tactical transfer of voting intention from the latter to the former. The Remain vote is consolidating just as the Leave vote did before it.

Doom and gloom

Boris Johnson, Elections, Labour Party
6 Comments

Fraser Nelson in today’s Telegraph:

Let’s not pretend that the Corbyn agenda is dismissed nationwide as a socialist calamity-in-waiting. His plans to nationalise water, railways, electricity and gas are supported by about half of all voters; his idea for British Broadband Corporation is backed by a margin of three to one.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is interviewed by the Spectator.

I remember having conversations with colleagues in the government that came in in 2010 saying I thought austerity was just not the right way forward for the UK.

Anyone wanting to reduce the size of the state has a lot of work in front of them.

Polly put the kettle on

Elections
18 Comments

Tim Shipman, Political Editor of the Sunday Times, tweets:

BREAKING: First big election model seat projection predicts Tory majority of 48

Con 349

Lab 213

LD 14

SNP 49

Plaid 5

Green 1

Speaker 1

Datapraxis ran 270,000 YouGov interviews through their own predictive MRP model (like the ones that predicted the last election) 10:00 PM · Nov 23, 2019

There have been no less than four other voting intention polls published tonight, from Savanta ComRes, Deltapoll, BMG and Opinium.

These four polls showed Tory leads over Labour of 10, 13, 13 and 19 per cent respectively. The average of the four gives a slight increase in the Conservative lead. Meanwhile Lib Dem hopes were getting bounced up and down: Deltapoll showed them up 5, but the other three were down a little or steady.

But the big news was the MRP – Multilevel regression with poststratification – poll. In the previous election YouGov’s MRP poll was one of only two (alongside a conventional poll by Survation) that did well. This one is slightly different, in that YouGov’s data has been used, but the MRP model is not their own but that of an outfit called Datapraxis.

Polls do not foretell the future. Things could still change. They did in 2017. But this is a blow to Labour’s hopes.

This same poll might not be so great for the personal hopes of some Conservative MPs. A subsequent tweet from Tim Shipman adds,

The Datapraxis MRP modelling predicts that 7 big beast Brexiteers are in danger of losing their seats.

Read the whole tweet to find out which MPs they are. Number 6 will worry you.

Making doubly sure Leave cannot win

Brexit, Elections, European Union, Labour Party, Shenanigans, United Kingdom
1 Comment

It was always clear that the “credible Leave option” that the Labour party proposes to pit against Remain in a second referendum is a fake. The plan is for Sir Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry to get together with their EU opposite numbers and, after the least arduous negotiations imaginable, to emerge beaming with a “deal” deliberately designed to be as unattractive as possible.

But if that wasn’t enough, the Labour manifesto plans to make assurance doubly sure, as Macbeth said when deciding to murder Macduff. I quote:

We will oversee the largest extension of the franchise in generations, reducing the voting age to 16, giving full voting rights to all UK residents, making sure everyone who is entitled to vote can do so by introducing a system of automatic voter registration, and abandoning plans to introduce voter ID which has been shown to harm democratic rights.

–“It’s time for real change – The Labour Party Manifesto 2019”

The innocuous phrase “all UK residents” includes non-UK citizens from any country. As it says elsewhere in the manifesto, there are three million EU residents in the UK. They will get to vote on whether the UK remains in the EU. The majority by which Leave won the 2016 referendum was 1.3 million.

I am not going to vote Tory

Boris Johnson, Brexit, Conservative Party
41 Comments

When people tell me “you must vote for Boris’ party or we will never get Brexit” I usually respond with “Because you trust & believe a Tory leader to actually do what he says & are willing to just hand-wave the last 3 years away?”

Well the Tories may be the only game in town in some areas, but decades of voting for the lesser evil is how we ended up with a ‘Conservative’ Party that isn’t conservative. If I thought Boris was actually serious about meaningful Brexit, I might hold my nose and vote Tory one last time. But if ‘No Deal’ really isn’t an option even now, I just don’t believe anything Boris says about truly wanting out of the EU.

Do I want to risk Corbyn getting in? I would rather he doesn’t but I am done voting Tory on the basis they are a slower acting poison than the alternative.