Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
The UK general election will be held on July 4. The Guardian’s aggregate of UK national polls has Labour on 42.9% (down 1.1 since my June 9 article), the Conservatives on 22.3% (down 1.1), the far-right Reform on 13.6% (up 1.7), the Liberal Democrats on 10.3% (up 0.6) and the Greens on 5.7% (steady).
In the last two weeks, there has been movement to Reform and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems, and against both Labour and the Conservatives. A recent YouGov poll had Reform in second, one point ahead of the Conservatives, but this has not been repeated in other polls.
Owing to first past the post, these vote shares would mean a massive Labour landslide if they occur at the election, with the Electoral Calculus site on Friday giving Labour 461 of the 650 House of Commons seats, the Conservatives 80, Lib Dems 63 and Scottish National Party 20. Labour is still ahead of the SNP in Scottish polls, which would mean a big swing in Scotland to Labour and against the SNP, and a large seat gain for Scottish Labour.
Snap French parliamentary election likely disaster for Macron
On June 9, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a snap election for the lower house of parliament after dismal European election results for his Ensemble party. This election comes two years into a five-year term.
The 577 MPs are elected in two rounds using a single-member system. The first round will be held June 30, and candidates that finish top two in a seat, or win at least 12.5% of registered voters can continue (this is a high barrier because it factors in turnout). Candidates can withdraw before the July 7 runoffs, at which FPTP applies. The vast majority of seats won’t be decided until the runoffs.
At the 2022 parliamentary election, Ensemble won 245 of the 577 seats, below the 289 needed for a majority. The left-wing NUPES alliance won 131 seats, the far-right National Rally (RN) 89 and the conservative Republicans 64.
Left-wing parties have formed the New Popular Front (NFP) and will run one candidate in each seat. Polls suggest RN is in the low 30s, the NFP in the mid to high 20s, Ensemble below 20%, the Republicans about 8% and another far-right party has about 4%.
If these polls are replicated in the first round, Ensemble won’t make the top two in the large majority of seats, with the majority of runoffs between RN and NFP candidates. Some pollsters have seat projections that suggest RN would be close to a majority. Ensemble is likely to be drastically reduced from its current 248 seats, a disaster for Macron.
Mexican election: landslide for the left in legislature
I previously covered the June 2 Mexican election, in which left-wing candidate Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidency by 61.2-28.1 with invalid votes excluded. For the Chamber of Deputies, 300 seats were elected by FPTP and the remaining 200 by proportional representation. In the Senate, 96 seats (three for each of the 32 states) were elected by giving the strongest party in a state two seats and the runner-up one, with the remaining 32 allocated by PR.
In the Chamber, the left-wing coalition won the FPTP seats by 256-42, on vote shares of 56.8-31.6. They won overall by 373-102 with 24 for a centre-left party. In the Senate, the left won the state seats by 64-30, and won overall by 83-40 with five for the centre-left. The left exceeded the two-thirds majority needed to change the Constitution in the Chamber, but were two seats short in the Senate. At the previous presidential election in 2018, the left won 308 Chamber seats and 69 Senate seats.
South Africa: ANC and DA agree to form coalition
I previously covered the May 29 South African election, in which the African National Congress (ANC) lost the majority it had won at every election since 1994. On Friday, the ANC and pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) agreed to form a governing coalition, and the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected president. At the election, the ANC won 159 of the 400 seats and the DA 87, so the coalition will have 246 seats, easily surpassing the 201 needed for a majority.
In regards to South-Africa the IFP also joined the government of national unity with a few seats.
The Mexican Senate is basic designed not to allow 2/3 be exceeded. 2 seats to the winner and 1 seat to the runner up in each state -Unless the runner up in some states come from the same part of the political spectrum as the winner, nowhere will there be more than 2/3 to the winning side.
There is a lack of benefit in Labour in the UK winning massively compared to winning handsomely. Winning 400 seats gives a new big barrier so that backbench revolts need to be big to cause trouble. But winning 480 seats means 20% more MPs to keep happy and to cause scandals.
A massive majority would also cause trouble when attempting electoral reform as basically you asking people to vote themselves out of a job. That is unless with the reform they increase the size of the Commons to say 900 MPs whilst bring in PR or something.
@B.S. Fairman
I agree with that. If what seems inevitable occurs and Labour gets 450+ seats, whoever becomes the next Conservative leader is at least a little bit effective and brings it down to something like 350-400 and not be a dud like William Hague was from 1997-2001*. Following that, it would be wise for Labour to bring in electoral reform, preferential voting could do well in the UK, since it would be palatable for all sides in most situations. Also I’m personally curious how preferences would flow in UK politics.
(*Hague pretty much mainly got the position because the most likely successor at the time Michael Portillo lost his seat in 1997 and was out of the contest).
Then again, what Nigel Farage does next may be significant. Most of the right over there love him and would be delighted for a Reform-Conservative merger with him as leader.
So the plan is that the party that absolutely smashes it with FPTP voluntarily decides to try out preferential voting to see how that might work out for them.
Intuitively… not likely!
This would only be attractive to losers like the Greens.
@Boerwar at 4:48pm
Yeah, that was my point. There’s no way a Labour government with 450+ seats would change the system that got them that much.
But one with a lesser majority might consider it. Who knows how closer elections like 2010 and 2017 might have turned out with preferential voting?
Also while Reform is biting a massive chunk out of the Conservatives, the UK Greens are starting to chew somewhat out of Labour. And there’s also the Liberal Democrats, the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales to consider.
That is why I was suggesting they could rid themselves of FPTP with some form of PR or MMP or STV and not lose too many people if they increased the size of the House of Commons.
Seems like their manifesto contains a lot about House of Lords reform but little about House of Commons.
Polling from JL Partners released on 13 June has Rishi Sunak’s approval rating among 2019 Conservative voters falling from +20 to +8, while Nigel Farage’s has improved from +12 to +15.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-poll-nigel-farage-rishi-sunak-d-day-conservatives-tories-reform-b1163619.html
Also reported in the article that only 40% of 2019 Tory voters intend to vote the same way in 2024, with 20% intending to vote Reform and 15% swinging to Labour.
Labour would be pretty silly if they did not realise that a pendulum swings. Sure they will struggle to lose the next two UK elections – but 10 years is a long time in politics. They would be better off getting rid of FPTP now while they can and securing long term reform – assuming they want to.
Of course that lets minor parties in….. Labour and the Tories may be happy to just weather the storm in their mutual benefit.
(I seem to recall Laborites assuring themselves the ALP primary would never fall below 40% – and yet here we are in mid June mid 2024 and the ALP can produce a little better than a 50/50, 2pp result with a notional primary of just 28%. The worm always turns – you have to reform and govern while you can.)
Those pesky Greens (losers according to Boerwar at 4.48pm) have somehow managed to split the left of centre vote 2/3 to 1/3!
@Boerwar:
“This would only be attractive to losers like the Greens.”
Or, y’know, people who looked at the past 4 election results and noted that the Tories got two near-majorities and two majorities despite never getting even nearly 50% of the votes. Indeed, who realise that the last time a “majority” Government actually won the approval of a majority of UK voters was 1931.
Or, for that matter, people who actually believe that Parliament’s composition should reflect the will of the nation. I know that believing in something beyond “power for the sake of power” is anathema to modern Labor politicos, but it used to be rather a fad if I recall correctly.
There is a possibility (probably pretty slim) that Ed Davey could be the first Liberal / Liberal Democrat leader of the opposition since 1922.
Redfield & Wilton Strategies@RedfieldWilton
Labour leads by 25%.
Tied-lowest Conservative % (worse than Truss).
Highest Reform %
Labour 43% (+1)
Reform UK 18% (+1)
Conservative 18% (–)
Lib Dem 12% (-1)
Green 5% (–)
SNP 3% (–)
Other 1% (–)
14/6-17/6, Changes +/- 12/6-13/6
PS The Redfield and Wilton is their regular ‘mega poll’, n=10,000
Two other polls today
MoreInCommon has Lab 41, Con 25, Rfm 14, LDem 11
JLPartners has Lab 40, Con 23, Rfm 18, LDem 9
One more poll today
DeltaPoll has Lab 46, Con 19, Rfm 16, LDem 10
Thnx for polls, Ray.
Ray(UK)
Is this true?
Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
• In short: The second-largest city in the United Kingdom is in heavy debt, with childhood poverty near 50 per cent.
• The city is turning out street lights at night and only collecting
https://amp-abc-net-au.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/103965704?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQGsAEggAID#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17186389937518&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F2024-06-17%2Fbirmingham-uk-bankrupt-cutting-public-services%2F103965704
“Once nicknamed “the workshop of the world”, Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse in the 18th and 19th centuries.
It’s where William Murdoch invented the first gas lantern, a technology later used to light streets across the world.
But today the UK’s second-largest city can no longer afford to keep its own streets brightly lit.
In September Birmingham City Council issued a 114 notice, effectively declaring it was bankrupt.
To claw back $600 million over the next two years, the council has approved a range of unprecedented budget cuts that will see streetlights dimmed and rubbish collected only once a fortnight.
A pile of rubbish on a footpath.
Rubbish collection has been reduced to once every two weeks.(ABC News: Adrian Wilson)
“It’s like we’re living in the Dickens era, where the streets are going to be littered with rubbish and the lights are going to be off … it’s like this kind of dystopian nightmare,” Birmingham mother of three Ramandeep Kaur told 7.30.
“There’s nothing to look forward to … it’s quite a frightening time.”
Ms Kaur and her family will be hit harder than most by the city’s sweeping cuts.
Her 17-year-old son Harry has Down syndrome and has relied on a council-funded school taxi service since he was four years old. From September that service will stop.
“Birmingham is one of the youngest cities in Europe, with nearly 40 per cent of its residents under 25 years old, according to both government and university studies.
Many in the city feel young people will be the worst affected by the cuts to frontline and preventative services.
“This is the second-largest city in the sixth-richest country in the world and we have rampant poverty … children are growing up below the poverty line,” Birmingham youth mental health worker Nina Barbosa said.
Ms Barbosa works for England’s National Health Service (NHS) and says pressure on the system is “past crisis point”.
“We get about 70 to 80 referrals a day into our services of which, on a good day, we’ll take on about 20. On a bad day it’ll be far less,” she said.
“What we are already starting to see, as a consequence of what’s happening in the council, there are even bigger increases in the number of people who are being referred through to us, and those young people are even more unwell than they were before.”
Tom Crewe in the LRB laid out exactly how much of a failure the Tories have been. Birmingham (and many others) are victims of massive cuts to local government funding – without corresponding reductions in mandated services. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/tom-crewe/carnival-of-self-harm
It was always going to be a car crash for the conservatives after BoJo was made PM and had time to mess things up. But then the amazingly bad Truss prime ministership, where we observed political self-combustion, followed by the woefully inept Sunak regime has made what would have been a bad result into fight for survival.
It is still possible that they might come out of things with 140 MPs but at the same time they could be reduced to an epically low 40 seat. If they manage over 100 seats, there will be conservative celebrations despite the result being the lowest result on record – 131 in 1906 was their lowest number of seats and 30.7% in 1997 was the lowest precent of the vote.
If post election they decide that they need to move further to the right and merge with Reform then they might be in wilderness for a decade or more. Especially if there is a “SDP” type break away by members who feel that this a wrong move – For Context, in the early 80s, a bunch of Labour MPs left the party that felt was moving to far to the Left and formed the SDP which then formed an alliance with the Liberals and that in the end become the Liberal Democrats.
Wonder what the current polling would look like in a 2pp preferential voting environment. If you assume as 70/30% split of prefs to con/lab from Reform & LD and the reverse for Green/SNP/Plaid C you get a 57%/43% Con/Lab split at 2019 and a 43%/57% on current polling.
Seems like getting rid of FPP would, at this point in time, favour the right.
Ven
Just a note that dimming of street lights at night has been common in many areas for years now, my area does it to some extent. We also have fortnightly bin collections and have had for years
Incidentally, watching some of those ABC reports in your link – with particular focus on the 2010-onwards austerity under Cameron/Osborne – reminds me of the Lib Dems complicity in all of this
PS Good to see you back 🙂
Election Maps UK@ElectionMapsUK
The gap between the Conservatives and Reform has fallen from 12.5% to just 5.5% since the start of the campaign.
CON: 21.0% (-2.9)
RFM: 15.5% (+4.5)
http://electionmaps.uk/polling
Ifop poll for the French election, now that campaigning has officially started on 17 June. I note that the table has changed substantially on Wikipedia, I’m guessing because parties have to be formally reported rather than the loose political alliances that were the thing before the official campaign started.
RN: 33% (-2)
NFP: 28% (+2)
ENS: 18% (-1)
LR: 9% (+2) (divided 5% Anti-RN, 4% Pro-RN)
Other: 12% (-2)
No seat estimations provided.
Work To Rule says:
Tuesday, June 18, 2024 at 11:15 am
Wonder what the current polling would look like in a 2pp preferential voting environment. If you assume as 70/30% split of prefs to con/lab from Reform & LD and the reverse for Green/SNP/Plaid C you get a 57%/43% Con/Lab split at 2019 and a 43%/57% on current polling.
Seems like getting rid of FPP would, at this point in time, favour the right.
_______________________________________
It would be very brave of Labour to bring in PR as opposed to FPTP – it would currently favour the Conservatives – that is true.
It is still the right thing to do. (They might want to think about mandatory voting too!)
If only the USA could adopt some electoral reform.
I read today that by 2040, 32% of the US population would elect 60% of the parliamentarians in the US. Half the population live in 8 seats. The Electoral College is grossly malapportioned already. It is only going to get worse.
The uneducated rural white men are going to become even more influential. At this point in time that lot have defected to the MAGA world.
US democracy is dead. And Trump is such a pathetic loser – imagine if they had a real strong man!
Thank you Ray (UK) and Adrian Beaumont! Keep the good stuff coming. All hail WB!
Work to Rule / MABWM
Doesn’t make much difference overall but I’d reverse the 2nd pref numbers for the Lib Dems in your calculation, it’s always been said the LD voters favour Labour over the Tories overall
I seem to remember back around 2010 when the coalition started there was some polling and it was 60/40 Lab/Con for the Lib Dems
Evidence from Mayoral elections past when we used the Supplementary Vote backs this up
Ven
Birmingham is quite a hellhole – my wife lived and worked there for years.
That said, it is quietly becoming the high tech capital of the UK – probably partly explaining the youthful age of the population – replacing the centre of industry it once was (a long long time ago).
@MABWM
In the USA they are bringing in some reform, albeit slowly.
They currently have preferential voting (they call it “Ranked Choice Voting” but it’s effectively the same as Optional Preferential Voting) in Maine and Alaska, and also in local New York City elections.
Over the coming years, unless they decide to become the Autocratic Yankreich under Trump and Project 2025, more states may bring in electoral reform like this.
BS Fairman
Making Bojo PM wasn’t a car crash.
His own party deposing him in 2022 was a car crash.
I have no doubt that they would be winning this election had he still been PM. I’ve gone over before what the polls were showing until the manufactured scandal got the headlines and his own party jumped on the bandwagon, and the calamitous drop in the polls THEREAFTER (though starting before his actual forced resignation, but then getting much worse afterwards).
And with Sunak being the chief back-stabber on the crucial day of resignations that left Bojo no choice but to resign, there is definitely karma in this result coming up – not that that’s much comfort to Conservatives who were loyal to Boris, now getting wiped out.
Regarding possible splits/mergers, Canada 1994 onwards might be a better comparison for Conservative / Reform, than what happened with the Liberals and moderate Labourites in the 1980s.
Every poll of the last few days has shown an increase for Reform compared to the previous poll for the same organisation.
Their ‘Contract’ (“manifestos are lies”) launch yesterday in Wales won’t have done them any harm either. The location and messaging was a smart move due to the failed Welsh Labour government who have been in power for 25 years, and who preside over higher spending and longer NHS waiting lists and various other poor measures Farage itemised.
Their simple messaging is so much easier for Joe Public to understand than the other parties, whether you agree with the messages or not.
Reform are very active on Tiktok, and are joint 2nd in the 18-24 age bracket with Green Party – albeit a long way behind Labour in this age group still.
I think Reform will start hitting 20% + in polls that usually give them higher numbers, this week. Tories will remain stagnated / static at best, whilst Labour’s numbers will continue to show a modest decline on average. Lib Dems probably won’t go up much more this week but will maintain their gains in the polls.
You heard it here first. 🙂
@BTSays at 10:04pm
I can’t help but suspect that the falling out between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings was more significant behind the scenes than it seems. Once Cummings was kicked out, things just seemed to get worse and worse for old BoJo.
Kirsdarke
Interesting. It’s hard to say.
But Boris was the magnet for many voters, regardless of any perceived chaos or anything else around him.
But yes, Cummings may be a visionary person but clearly is also a very vindictive egotistic individual and chose to ‘expose’ bad things about the Tories at every point he could once Carrie Johnson manoeuvred to get rid of him.
If the Tories somehow manage to ‘save the furniture’ this election, it will be through fear of an unusually ‘difficult to work out’ Labour party in waiting, not through some great attraction to the PM or other personalities at the top.
Postal voting has begun in earnest in the UK, and there is nothing to suggest anything other than a large Labour landslide.
These days, if the turnaround (if there is one at all) is too late in the campaign then there’s fewer voters left to turn round – with the caveat that those posting their votes early in the campaign are probably, overall, the least likely voters to change their minds anyway and many voters only decide in the last week.
A record 632,863 people enrolled to vote in final 24 hours of enrolment yesterday in the UK. There is talk of an enthusiasm gap but the figures don’t necessarily suggest that.
BoJo had been behind in the polls ever since Partygate broke in December 2021. The conservatives have not lead a poll since then. And then the polling results just before his resignation announcement in early July had him being absolutely belted for the Pincher scandal (Chris Pincher was appointed Deputy Chief Whip despite BoJo having knowledge of sexual assault allegations against him). Plus the economy was already struggling due to weight of Brexit. He would have been toasted – playing the fool only works for so long.
@BS Fairman
That’s not necessarily 600k new voters in the last day or so.
There will be a proportion of new voters in that but there will also be a large number of people registered but have moved so are updating their address (and a lot of those will still be within the same constituency) and a large number of people who are registered but aren’t sure if they are so filled in the online form anyway just to make sure.
That’s that happened in previous elections.
The government who runs the “register to vote” website has no idea of the breakdown as they aren’t responsible for processing the registrations but act as a clearing house sending details to local councils to process so it will take some time to get the actual numbers collated.
BS Fairman – that’s very selective reading of the polls, and not really borne out by the facts.
I have looked at it carefully multiple times since to be sure I didn’t make a mistake on that assertion re the polls for Tories before, during and after Boris’s ‘scandal’.
Re the economy, you need to understand that a lot of the feeling on how it’s doing is pyschological in addition to the actual numbers and what people are observing in their own lives.
Trump was the master of proclaiming ‘amazing numbers’ whilst president – whilst these were stock market numbers or overall economy numbers due to his tax cuts on higher earnings, they were not helping the little guys at all. Yet these are the ones who proclaim most loudly that Trump was better for them financially than Biden is – although Biden’s the one who has taken actual concrete measures to help them through. (Of course the inflation also confuses everything, and Trump didn’t have that to contend with)
Boris would not have led a country feeling so negative about the economy in any case, nor would he have precipitated a big crash like Liz Truss did.
So he would not have been ‘toasted’ on the economy eventually like you say. The North would be toasting (in a positive way) his levelling up efforts in fact, IMO.
Oh, and by the way any economy struggles are not due, overall if at all, to Brexit. The UK is performing better than Germany, for example, not that that’s the point – the point is the lack of (or very selective) evidence that any struggles are related to Brexit rather than to global causes and a general loss of confidence as well.
@BTSays at 7:44pm
So if Boris was so great, why did he quit parliament? Mid-term, no less, resulting in a by-election that the Tories had to spend a lot of effort to retain?
Even Theresa May remained in parliament as the MP for Maidenhead after she resigned as Prime Minister, only quitting politics 5 years later now in 2024.
Kirsdarke
I’ve no idea, but when he’s not running the place – or even in the cabinet – he would get bored quite easily.
Plus he’s got 3 very small children with his current wife, so might as well spend more time with them whilst he’s taking a break from leading the government – looks like that break will last a few more years yet mind. . .
We could do with 2-3 more polls to confirm, but contrary to what I thought would happen (see higher up) the very latest polls show a further Conservative drop and Labour holding onto their share or even increasing it.
IF the other pollsters show the same trend, that feels like a big landslide now finally baked in to me.
The bit i got right is Reform still going up – about 3% in each of them – either bringing these pollsters somewhat more into line with YouGov and Redfield & Wilton, or meaning that one of these pollsters will soon show Reform with 20% +.
YouGov (MRP) poll from Sky News with a sample of about 40,000, survey period 11-18 June
Labour: 39%
Conservative: 22%
Reform: 15%
Lib Dem: 12%
Green: 7%
SNP: 3%
Survation poll from Good Morning Britain, sample about 1,000, survey period 14-18 June, (difference from previous poll taken from 5-11 June)
Labour: 41% (0)
Conservative: 20% (-3)
Reform: 15% (+3)
Lib Dem: 12% (+2)
Green: 6% (0)
SNP: 2% (-1)
Whoa, bombshell PeoplePolling poll from GB News, sample size 1,228 taken on 18 June (difference from previous 12 June poll)
Labour: 35% (-4)
Reform: 24% (+7)
Conservative: 15% (-4)
Lib Dems: 12% (+2)
Green: 8% (-1)
SNP: 3% (0)
And a couple more polls released that are somewhat less shocking.
Savanta (MRP) poll commissioned by The Telegraph, sample size 17,812 from 7-18 June
Labour: 44%
Conservative: 23%
Reform: 13%
Lib Dem: 12%
Green: 4%
SNP: 3%
Norstat poll, sample size 2,059 from 17-19 June (difference from previous 10-12 June poll)
Labour: 40% (-1)
Conservative: 20% (-1)
Reform: 19% (+2)
Lib Dem: 12% (+1)
Grreen: 5% (-1)
SNP: 3% (0)
Seat projection for that Savanta MRP poll.
The Independent is reporting some voter registration figures
“The deadline to register to vote passed yesterday (18 June), and over 630,000 people applied to register on the final day, Alicja Hagopian reports.
“This marks 2.9m voter registrations since the election was called on 22 May. This figure is down by 1 million from the same period before the 2019 general election (29 October-26 November), when 3.85m people registered to vote.”
I wouldn’t made too much of the 1m fall from the 2019 figures.
Many parts of England had various elections in May so that would have got a lot of registrations. Ditto the more wide spread 22 and 23 elections.
Also as a I wrote above this does not mean 2.9m new registration just the numbers using the .gov website. Once local councils have processed the data they will find not many actual new registrations, a good good number of registered people updating addresses and another swath already registered with no address change but doing belt and braces as there isn’t an easy way to check your registration on line for example.
And a I know a number of schools, colleges and university student bodies were running registration drives prior to the election being called so that’s another slew not included in the 2.9m
In other news my postal vote hit the mat today just as the council said it would.
I also got a ‘reform” leaflet as well. Very generic and clearly not tailored to the constituency or the candidate. It’s one theme – anti immigration.
BT – I am not sure saying that ever single poll had the Boris lead Conversative behind Labour from the middle of December 2021 when Partygate broke is a selective reading of polls. It is more of a fact.
You seem to be a BoJo fan and there are still a proportion of the UK population with which he is extremely popular. It is just much smaller than numbers that despise the man.
ChrisC – Interesting take on the enrolment figures – Certainly the gap between the Locals and General Elections is much short this time than 2019. I wonder if turnout is going to be down as much as some are suggesting.
Have you been door knocked yet?
BS Fairman
Thanks.
But that’s not what you were saying – you were saying to the effect that they plummeted in the polls when Partygate broke. Which isn’t true.
Of course Conservatives were behind in the polls – prior to and after December 2021 – and I’ve never said otherwise. By a single-digit amount of points, with the occasional one showing them more neck and neck.
If you know about polling in the UK, you will know that being behind by a few points like that mid-term is a very respectable position for the government to be in, and usually presages winning the next election.
What’s indisputable is that the polls got worse as Boris’s own party (the Parliamentary party, not the membership, a lot of whom were fuming with the parliamentary party) turned the heat up on him more, whoever likes divided parties? When he was forced to resign by a whole cascade of ministerial resignations so there was, literally, no government left pretty much, these polls were baked in.
They went down a whole other notch during Liz Truss’s premiership, from which they never recovered under Rishi – people had stopped listening to them by then by and large.
But if they hadn’t got rid of Boris, needless to say Truss’s premiership wouldn’t have happened, the markets wouldn’t have got spooked (hugely helped by the, in hindsight, bizarre media reporting) and the Conservatives would have remained bobbing either side of an 8-point deficit in the polls until things hotted up towards an election. And people not supporting them at that point would have still been open to what they had to say.
Of course the last sentence and a half above is conjecture – but grounded in logic, historical precedent and from an avid studier of politics over 25 years.
Sometimes facts get in the way of a narrative, especially a narrative certain media outlets are keen to persist in until they have succeeding in rewriting history. (The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and BBC – you know who you are. The Telegraph not much better, very old school Tory elements that couldn’t cope with Boris)
Nope, not been door knocked yet. Not been door-knocked since we left our first property in 2012.
We are at least semi-rural where we are now so not surprising, but our last place up to July 2021 was on a very main road where most people lived, albeit in a village not a large town.
Kirksdarke
That PeoplePolling poll is certainly pretty staggering – Tories 9% behind Reform? And Reform ‘only’ 11% behind Labour??
It smells a bit whiffy unless they are just the first to pick up something. Did you get a chance to check the methodology to see if it had changed or anything?
Found it, no change in methodology:
“PeoplePolling
Note: In this week’s poll we see a major uptick in the voting intention table (2b) for Reform UK. There has been no change in methodology for data processing between this poll and previous ones conducted by PeoplePolling. Driving this change is a few factors. Firstly, in the responses to the survey, there has been a notable swing in Reform UK support compared to previous weeks, in the full sample, 18% of respondents say that they would vote for the party, leaving only Labour ahead of them on 25%. To get to final voting intention figures, those with non-definite voting intention are removed from the sample (i.e. answering don’t know, prefer not to say or would not vote to question 2), as are those who say they are less than 6/10 likely to vote in the election for question1. Here, we have seen a decline in the proportion of people with non-definite voting intention. For those voting for the major parties, there has also been a decline in their likelihood of voting – for both Labour and Conservative voters, the proportions who have been excluded from the sample given their lower likelihood to vote roughly doubled compared to last week’s poll, while the proportion for Reform UK voters has remained constant. In all cases, the margins here have been quite small, but these small changes have all added up in Reform UK’s favour.”
@BTSays
Yeah, pretty much no change in the methodology, just a big swing to Reform in this one poll. It could be an outlier, might not be, we’ll have to see how things go with other polls and their trending.
Also I downloaded the data file and the numbers seem legit. This was the info about their methodology.