There are two consistent themes to the polls for as long as I have been following them is that the polls overestimate how many people will actually vote in UK general election and that non-voters do not turn out to vote in the levels they say they will. The only two times in UK elections when that has hasn’t been the case has been the Scottish independence referendum and the Brexit referendum. So my initial thought was to think Reform’s…
I suspect a lot of attention will be on how support from independence increases if Farage becomes Prime Minister but we saw similar polling prior to Brexit and if Boris Johnson became Prime Minister but hypothetical polling has shown in the past it is regularly utterly bobbins. I suspect the next Scottish independence referendum is likely to be at least a decade away. As for the next Holyrood election this could be a bit of a mess, even though the…
June will see the King’s Birthday honours (even though his birthday is in November) and new peers will be created. Unless Starmer breaks the depressing precedent, new peers will include major party donors, loyal backbenchers and party officials, and other people that party leaders like. A Guardian columnist will call for an elected second chamber, which would mean yet more politicians. Some new peers will be good: respected former Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, think tank bosses or policy-oriented academics. But…
33% of the public scare me, this polling is inspired by Justin Trudeau’s footwear faux pas. Only David Tennant’s Doctor looks good wearing trainers with a suit. TSE
As the possibility of Nigel Farage winning the next general election increases the narrative will change on what Farage as PM means. It is interesting that Starmer is following the lead of the Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp who has warned that Farage’s economic policies are ‘Liz Truss on steroids‘ I suspect this is something we will be hearing a lot from the traditional big two parties and it will be interesting to see how this polling moves over time….
There’s been quite a lot of excitement over the latest YouGov poll which has a subsample showing Reform leading in Scotland. This is based on 145 respondents in Scotland, unlike other pollsters YouGov do weight their subsamples but even still the margin of error is just over 8% so nobody should be confident in saying Reform are leading in Scotland. I will need to see full sized Scotland polls from a couple of reputable BPC registered pollsters showing Reform ahead…
This polling reminds me why I am so dubious about hypothetical polling. We often see polls like this showing the public favouring higher taxes but that support evaporates once those taxes are increased. TSE
I detest any form of class warfare and it looks like we’re in for an awful lot of it. I suspect Farage’s spin will fail as will Labour’s class warfare, they tried it against David Cameron and Boris Johnson and it failed although it shows prejudice against the privately educated is the last acceptable prejudice in this country. I am strongly of the opinion that people with class do not talk about class TSE