Sounds like everybody except Blairite wing of the Labour party will be happy with these election results. Corbyn safe, Tories happy, Corbyn safe, Maomentum happy.
Alastair is right that these local election results don't provide evidence that Corbyn is voter-repellent, but it would be a mistake to interpret them as evidence that he isn't. These elections were not about Corbyn becoming PM and McDonnell Chancellor.
Congrats to those who bet on the Scottish Tory surge and Scottish NOM. I didn't play in that market, alas.
Not sure the Scottish referendum conclusion necessarily holds firm if the UK votes to leave the EU but Scotland votes Remain. Could whoever becomes UK PM this summer hold out and deny Scots another vote?
Not sure the Scottish referendum conclusion necessarily holds firm if the UK votes to leave the EU but Scotland votes Remain. Could whoever becomes UK PM this summer hold out and deny Scots another vote?
Corbyn's job is lead a party that reaches out beyond its base. There is plenty of evidence that he is failing to do this and that he repels the voters Labour needs in order to challenge for power. You can see it in Scotland, England and Wales.
I have to say I'm very impressed with Mr Meeks. I nipped on site for literally 5 minutes yesterday, picked up on his Scottish NOM Ladbokes recommendation and it looks like I've won a nice little earner this morning. Good stuff.
The problem with the opinion polls and the referendum is that they are producing very different results, depending on whether they are phone or online. The referendum could be very close or Remain could be winning handily. Is there any difference in performance between the phone and online polls in national vote shares?
Regarding Corbyn, the big problem for the party now is that all the alternatives are equally rubbish (like him, they may be marginally less voter-repellent than Ed, but that's the best you can say). So at the moment the Labour right are reduced to arguing that he's going to be an electoral disaster, then failing at each test to gather the necessary evidence in support of that view. Instead of arguing that he's worse than he is, they need to begin to build a plausible vision of how the party can be better, which they can then contrast with his actual (not good enough, but not conclusively disastrous) performance. I think we might be waiting a while unfortunately.
A lesson for tory high command might be that 'operation fear' has severe limitations....???
People need a reason to vote for your guy besides the fear I suspect. Either because fear alone will not convince someone to switch (even if it might cause them to stay at home) or they need the cover of.a better reason. That's one reason I don't give much credence to the view that it was only the fear factor that enabled the Tories to win the GE, and the quality of other messages and persons was irrelevant.
Though of course the scale of Zac's task was hard anyway.
General election here in 3 days time and I have never seen advertising like it! The TV breaks are now about 10 minutes long and about every ten minutes and have 10-15 political adverts in each. Because senators are elected by plurality-at-large voting everyone in the country has to select 12 senators from a list of about 30, all of whom are advertising like crazy on all channels. There is hardly a square millimetre of wall not plastered in political posters, and the big names have hired office blocks at traffic light, and wallpapered the window with posters so motorists have to sit there and look at it for five minutes or more every day in rush hour. Vast numbers of candidates plus no effective campaign finance limits equals an absurd amount of advertising!
Thanks. Khan ahead in Merton, Croydon and South West at the moment. Even with only 20-35% counted.
I can't see anything other than a clear Khan win.
My experience of having been at the count in 2012 and 2008 is that those bar charts fluctuate and change a lot in the early stages (and even in the middle stages). Remember that it's not a random sample of 20% (or whatever) of the votes, but just 20% of the boxes which could be from weird bits of the constituency.
As I said on the other thread I'm pretty content this morning. The "Labour should win 400 seats" call from Continuity New Labour was silly and the other side of their argument - that we'd lose hundreds of seats - hasn't happened. We did better than expected dahn sarf. And it looks like the SNP bubble is starting to deflate.
At my constituency Labour Party meeting tonight the two main items I've put on the agenda are the Anti-Semitism row and election results. I know that a few members had prepared scripts on this, I wonder if they will deploy them regardless of how things have actually gone.
Though point 2 is very relevant I feel. Corbyn, remarkably, is not as repellant as many think he should be. He's not drawing in enough people in the right places to address problems either, but the Labour brand is strong and not going to wither under him to the point of death.
I am amazed how these results are somehow being spun as positive for Labour. On national issues at a general election, they will be slaughtered. Oh well - as long as the members are happy.
General election here in 3 days time and I have never seen advertising like it! The TV breaks are now about 10 minutes long and about every ten minutes and have 10-15 political adverts in each. Because senators are elected by plurality-at-large voting everyone in the country has to select 12 senators from a list of about 30, all of whom are advertising like crazy on all channels. There is hardly a square millimetre of wall not plastered in political posters, and the big names have hired office blocks at traffic light, and wallpapered the window with posters so motorists have to sit there and look at it for five minutes or more every day in rush hour. Vast numbers of candidates plus no effective campaign finance limits equals an absurd amount of advertising!
Thank god we don't have that level of TV advertising it sounds exhausting.
But, while I don't think these results are disastrous for Labour in England & Wales, they're still a long way short of where they need to be if they're to be serious contenders in 2020.
OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country. If they are REALLY gong to run with this-the posters almost design themselves-then we are going to face a very unpleasant two months. I fear that someone like Lawson wouldn't have said that in those terms if he hadn't been given the go ahead
Very good summary. One thing missing, in my view. What has happened to the Scottish Conservatives is utterly stunning. If anyone doubted Ruth Davidson's skills as a political operator, they should revise their opinions now. She has worked with the most unpromising materials - a party that looked to be heading towards extinction and a brand that could genuinely be described as toxic - and doubled their vote share!
On Thread: However, turnout is way down with 30+% an increasingly rare bird. This might mean that the Labour core voted en mass, while the Tory core have turned apathetic and the don't knows stayed away in droves.
I am amazed how these results are somehow being spun as positive for Labour. On national issues at a general election, they will be slaughtered. Oh well - as long as the members are happy.
I have read that in marginals labour's vote has been further eroded. For example there's a tweet out there the tories would have won West Wirral, based on the vote there.
OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country. If they are REALLY gong to run with this-the posters almost design themselves-then we are going to face a very unpleasant two months. I fear that someone like Lawson wouldn't have said that in those terms if he hadn't been given the go ahead
77 million Turks. And they're MUSLIMS. And as we know from the Tories campaign in London MUSLIMS are TERRORISTS. Good job that Labour are the racists, would hate to see what racist Tories look like...
Neck and neck (at Assembly level) in Havering and Redbridge, where a big vote for UKIP could cost the Conservatives a seat. Also neck and neck in Barnet and Camden, the reverse Coleman effect.
Regarding Corbyn, the big problem for the party now is that all the alternatives are equally rubbish (like him, they may be marginally less voter-repellent than Ed, but that's the best you can say). So at the moment the Labour right are reduced to arguing that he's going to be an electoral disaster, then failing at each test to gather the necessary evidence in support of that view. Instead of arguing that he's worse than he is, they need to begin to build a plausible vision of how the party can be better, which they can then contrast with his actual (not good enough, but not conclusively disastrous) performance. I think we might be waiting a while unfortunately.
I mostly agree with this. The failure of the Labour centre and right to argue a positive case is depressing. The problem with Corbyn and McDonnell more than anything else is the baggage they bring. They are more to the left of me economically, but I can live with that. What I just cannot live with is the positions they have taken over the last 30 years on a wide range of foreign policy issues, as well as those who they have cosied up to. That means that on a personal level I cannot vote for Labour with them in charge. That's as maybe and is in no great loss to Labour. But I think that it also means that Labour cannot get close to power because most voters are closer to my outlook on such things than they are to the way Labour members regard them.
OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country. If they are REALLY gong to run with this-the posters almost design themselves-then we are going to face a very unpleasant two months. I fear that someone like Lawson wouldn't have said that in those terms if he hadn't been given the go ahead
77 million Turks. And they're MUSLIMS. And as we know from the Tories campaign in London MUSLIMS are TERRORISTS. Good job that Labour are the racists, would hate to see what racist Tories look like...
As I said on the other thread I'm pretty content this morning. The "Labour should win 400 seats" call from Continuity New Labour was silly and the other side of their argument - that we'd lose hundreds of seats - hasn't happened. We did better than expected dahn sarf. And it looks like the SNP bubble is starting to deflate.
At my constituency Labour Party meeting tonight the two main items I've put on the agenda are the Anti-Semitism row and election results. I know that a few members had prepared scripts on this, I wonder if they will deploy them regardless of how things have actually gone.
Unless you believe this is a popular government, then of course Labour should be gaining seats from the Tories. Being content to drift towards heavy defeat in 2020 just proves my point, I think. Most Labour members believe it is more important to defeat the "Blairites" than it is to remove the Tories from power. Good for them, but - please - no pretending to care about helping the people that Labour is supposed to help and whose lives significantly improved under the last Labour administration.
Nearly choked on my cornflakes at the suggestion that Labour are thinking of putting up Andy Burnham for Manchester Combined Authority Mayor.
A Scouser? Well known Liverpool fan?
Standing in MANCHESTER?
Seriously, Labour? Seriously?
As a "Greater Manchester" (urgh) voter, I find the idea risible. But if you want to go for it Labour, then be my guest....!
I imagine Tony Lloyd, a longstanding Manchester MP and the Labour Party's "interim Mayor" won't give up his presumptive shot at it without a fight. Although I'm a Tory, I always thought Lloyd fairly sensible, moderate and someone with the best interests of Manchester at heart, being a local chap.
The problem with the opinion polls and the referendum is that they are producing very different results, depending on whether they are phone or online. The referendum could be very close or Remain could be winning handily. Is there any difference in performance between the phone and online polls in national vote shares?
First, it should be said that the polls at GE2015 were out but not *massively* out. It just looked that way because of a notional tie in the forecasts (plus the herding around it) that occurred in the final polls. The result was only 3-4% out either way for Labour and Conservative. That looks huge but it isn't really.
So the referendum spread should take that into account accordingly: we could have a small Leave lead of 4%, or a clear Remain lead of around 15%.
IIRC the inquiry found an underrepresentation of Conservative and overrepresentation of Labour in the samples, and the phone polls were closer, and online polls didn't pick up enough over 75s.
For the EU ref the phone polls have been picking up relatively low levels of undecideds, which doesn't compute with how torn I've heard people whilst out and about, but higher remain leads.
We just don't know. Personally, I think the truth is something between the two: online polls are probably still under-sampling over 75s (unless the method has been tweaked for all, but even then I suspect a lot of upweighting is occurring) and phone polls are underestimating undecideds and overestimating remain at the moment, possibly because people just don't want to admit on the phone they don't have a view yet. But those undecideds may all break remain in the final two weeks.
So I think we have a true position of a Remain lead of 4-8% and are heading for that at the moment.
saw on twitter that if you look at the source code for the London elects page you can see the %s.
Sadiq Aman KHAN Labour Party 46% Zac GOLDSMITH The Conservative Party Candidate 34% Sian Rebecca BERRY Green Party 6% Caroline Valerie PIDGEON London Liberal Democrats 4% Peter Robin WHITTLE UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4% Sophie WALKER Women's Equality Party 2% George GALLOWAY Respect (George Galloway) 1% Paul GOLDING Britain First - Putting British people first 1% Lee Eli HARRIS Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol 1% Prince ZYLINSKI Independent 1% David FURNESS British National Party 1% Ankit LOVE One Love Party 0%
And on the subject of northern Mayors, I saw Joe Anderson, Labour's re-elected Liverpool Mayor being interviewed on the telly.
He always comes across well, and what I find particularly likeable, is the way he always seems to talk about Liverpool "standing on its own two feet", "doing our own thing", "balancing the books", "not relying on handouts from London" etc.
Good lad, Joe. It's great that Liverpool elected as Mayor someone with such evidently Toryish (nay, Thatcherite) instincts, and then re-elected him with over 50% of the vote. Good on you, Scousers....
Regarding Corbyn, the big problem for the party now is that all the alternatives are equally rubbish (like him, they may be marginally less voter-repellent than Ed, but that's the best you can say). So at the moment the Labour right are reduced to arguing that he's going to be an electoral disaster, then failing at each test to gather the necessary evidence in support of that view. Instead of arguing that he's worse than he is, they need to begin to build a plausible vision of how the party can be better, which they can then contrast with his actual (not good enough, but not conclusively disastrous) performance. I think we might be waiting a while unfortunately.
I mostly agree with this. The failure of the Labour centre and right to argue a positive case is depressing. The problem with Corbyn and McDonnell more than anything else is the baggage they bring. They are more to the left of me economically, but I can live with that. What I just cannot live with is the positions they have taken over the last 30 years on a wide range of foreign policy issues, as well as those who they have cosied up to. That means that on a personal level I cannot vote for Labour with them in charge. That's as maybe and is in no great loss to Labour. But I think that it also means that Labour cannot get close to power because most voters are closer to my outlook on such things than they are to the way Labour members regard them.
I posted on the previous thread something to the effect that Labour members are interested in winning, and they see Blairite Tory-mimicking as more voter-repellent than Jezza's foreign policy views.
We haven't yet seen much in the way of electoral evidence that his views are a big deal. Certainly the anti-semitism affair appears to have had rather less impact than many were predicting and I wonder if that might be an indicator of how salient these things are (for avoidance of doubt, given the mood on these threads lately, I need to point out that the anti-semitism problem still needs to be addressed regardless of the electoral calculus).
Nevertheless I'd have to agree with you that it's a risk going into an election and if there was a way of getting a leadership without that potential liability then it's a no-brainer - unless the alternatives come with their own serious liabilities/negatives. Which, of course, is where we are now.
Corbyn's job is lead a party that reaches out beyond its base. There is plenty of evidence that he is failing to do this and that he repels the voters Labour needs in order to challenge for power. You can see it in Scotland, England and Wales.
There is some evidence of that, but these results don't add to it. You can't see it at all in England, and what has happened in Scotland and Wales has had very little at all to do with Corbyn.
The English seats contested in 2016 were almost all last contested in 2012. 2012 represented Labour's best local election results since 1996 i.e. at any time in the last 20 years. On the Guardian's latest updated seat count, Lab have won 680 council seats in England, a net loss of just 8 compared to 2012. London is still to come.
@SophyRidgeSky: Some in Labour pointing out they're doing worse than Ed Miliband did four years ago, which wasn't good enough to win the general election
And on the subject of northern Mayors, I saw Joe Anderson, Labour's re-elected Liverpool Mayor being interviewed on the telly.
He always comes across well, and what I find particularly likeable, is the way he always seems to talk about Liverpool "standing on its own two feet", "doing our own thing", "balancing the books", "not relying on handouts from London" etc.
Good lad, Joe. It's great that Liverpool elected as Mayor someone with such evidently Toryish (nay, Thatcherite) instincts, and then re-elected him with over 50% of the vote. Good on you, Scousers....
:-)
Yeh well words are cheap. See the popular tory press for the data on how six of the top ten benefits guzzlers are on Merseyside.
saw on twitter that if you look at the source code for the London elects page you can see the %s.
Sadiq Aman KHAN Labour Party 46% Zac GOLDSMITH The Conservative Party Candidate 34% Sian Rebecca BERRY Green Party 6% Caroline Valerie PIDGEON London Liberal Democrats 4% Peter Robin WHITTLE UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4% Sophie WALKER Women's Equality Party 2% George GALLOWAY Respect (George Galloway) 1% Paul GOLDING Britain First - Putting British people first 1% Lee Eli HARRIS Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol 1% Prince ZYLINSKI Independent 1% David FURNESS British National Party 1% Ankit LOVE One Love Party 0%
Too close to call. Sniggers. Not a good result for Crosby, Stills and Nash. Maybe Brois was just a good candidate and Ken past his sell by date. And ed really was crap. Or maybe it was electoral genius and use of Facebook.
"OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country."
It's a battle to see who can make the daftest claim.
And what's wrong with 77 million Turks coming? Think of the boost to GDP and the millions of jobs created. I hope you're not a racist.
That reminds me ... was the 3 million jobs lost claim based on the loss of immigration which might occur? If not, Remain have missed a trick. If leaving would cost 77 million more people then they could count in the loss of GDP in their figures.
Regarding Corbyn, the big problem for the party now is that all the alternatives are equally rubbish (like him, they may be marginally less voter-repellent than Ed, but that's the best you can say). So at the moment the Labour right are reduced to arguing that he's going to be an electoral disaster, then failing at each test to gather the necessary evidence in support of that view. Instead of arguing that he's worse than he is, they need to begin to build a plausible vision of how the party can be better, which they can then contrast with his actual (not good enough, but not conclusively disastrous) performance. I think we might be waiting a while unfortunately.
I mostly agree with this. The failure of the Labour centre and right to argue a positive case is depressing. The problem with Corbyn and McDonnell more than anything else is the baggage they bring. They are more to the left of me economically, but I can live with that. What I just cannot live with is the positions they have taken over the last 30 years on a wide range of foreign policy issues, as well as those whom they have cosied up to. That means that on a personal level I cannot vote for Labour with them in charge. That's as maybe and is in no great loss to Labour. But I think that it also means that Labour cannot get close to power because most voters are closer to my outlook on such things than they are to the way Labour members regard them.
The problem has always been (well since 10.01 on May 7) that there is no blood and thunder alternative Labour vision, it was always Tory-lite. Apart from Jezza obvs. There was no articulate, coherent non-austerity programme (surprising given a substantial anti-austerity body of work by sensible economists).
EdM gave the election away in the debate when he refused to apologise for the over-spending but didn't follow up with a credible plan thereafter.
OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country. If they are REALLY gong to run with this-the posters almost design themselves-then we are going to face a very unpleasant two months. I fear that someone like Lawson wouldn't have said that in those terms if he hadn't been given the go ahead
Some of us in the Leave camp have wanted Lawson to retire to France and shut up for a very long time.
saw on twitter that if you look at the source code for the London elects page you can see the %s.
Sadiq Aman KHAN Labour Party 46% Zac GOLDSMITH The Conservative Party Candidate 34% Sian Rebecca BERRY Green Party 6% Caroline Valerie PIDGEON London Liberal Democrats 4% Peter Robin WHITTLE UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4% Sophie WALKER Women's Equality Party 2% George GALLOWAY Respect (George Galloway) 1% Paul GOLDING Britain First - Putting British people first 1% Lee Eli HARRIS Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol 1% Prince ZYLINSKI Independent 1% David FURNESS British National Party 1% Ankit LOVE One Love Party 0%
Too close to call. Sniggers. Not a good result for Crosby, Stills and Nash. Maybe Brois was just a good candidate and Ken past his sell by date. And ed really was crap. Or maybe it was electoral genius and use of Facebook.
Team bash Boris (chairman TSE) really should take a lap. He's a huge vote winner for the tories.
So was the Tory activist and gossip-based media ramping in London just designed to give me a heart condition, then, based on the results coming in? Or an attempt to troll Labour supporters? Even though the polls were so emphatic I couldn't take anything for granted after last year... Speaking as someone who doesn't much like Khan, I still would find it hard to swallow if he didn't make it, nothing to do with a certain 33/1 bet... also the idea that my home city would have fallen for some of the most unpleasant campaigning I've ever seen would be profoundly depressing.
saw on twitter that if you look at the source code for the London elects page you can see the %s.
It's more fun if you use the old-fashioned method of measuring the bars on the screen with a ruler and squinting at them awkwardly to line them up and working out that the total lengths of the bars adds up to 136 millimetres and then dividing by 1.36 to get the percentages.
saw on twitter that if you look at the source code for the London elects page you can see the %s.
Sadiq Aman KHAN Labour Party 46% Zac GOLDSMITH The Conservative Party Candidate 34% Sian Rebecca BERRY Green Party 6% Caroline Valerie PIDGEON London Liberal Democrats 4% Peter Robin WHITTLE UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4% Sophie WALKER Women's Equality Party 2% George GALLOWAY Respect (George Galloway) 1% Paul GOLDING Britain First - Putting British people first 1% Lee Eli HARRIS Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol 1% Prince ZYLINSKI Independent 1% David FURNESS British National Party 1% Ankit LOVE One Love Party 0%
Looks like we're heading for a 57:43 result to Khan to me - just like the polls.
"OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country."
It's a battle to see who can make the daftest claim.
And what's wrong with 77 million Turks coming? Think of the boost to GDP and the millions of jobs created. I hope you're not a racist.
That reminds me ... was the 3 million jobs lost claim based on the loss of immigration which might occur? If not, Remain have missed a trick. If leaving would cost 77 million more people then they could count in the loss of GDP in their figures.
Ah. bless.
What was notable was the applause he got for this loopy claim
I've been watching BBC for over an hour and haven't seen a single Conservative. Is it a Conservative free-zone, or is the BBC just up to their usual tricks?
I see Mr Burnham has managed to get one of his many faces on the news!
Undefined discussion subject.
Comments
when compared to Ed Miliband I suppose that is broadly true...
Excellent summary.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/05/celebrity-sex-injunctions-us-tabloid-vows-to-carry-on-exposing-r/
Looks like [censored] is going to dump a lot of celebs in the doo doo.
http://order-order.com/2016/05/06/ken-creation-of-israel-fundamentally-wrong/
I largely agree with the conclusions, excepting that this hasn't especially been about Corbyn (or, correspondingly, Cameron).
It's back up
Congrats to those who bet on the Scottish Tory surge and Scottish NOM. I didn't play in that market, alas.
Corbyn's job is lead a party that reaches out beyond its base. There is plenty of evidence that he is failing to do this and that he repels the voters Labour needs in order to challenge for power. You can see it in Scotland, England and Wales.
I can't see anything other than a clear Khan win.
Going to be hilarious when the fracking starts
Zac 40s
betfair..
Regarding Corbyn, the big problem for the party now is that all the alternatives are equally rubbish (like him, they may be marginally less voter-repellent than Ed, but that's the best you can say). So at the moment the Labour right are reduced to arguing that he's going to be an electoral disaster, then failing at each test to gather the necessary evidence in support of that view. Instead of arguing that he's worse than he is, they need to begin to build a plausible vision of how the party can be better, which they can then contrast with his actual (not good enough, but not conclusively disastrous) performance. I think we might be waiting a while unfortunately.
Though of course the scale of Zac's task was hard anyway.
At my constituency Labour Party meeting tonight the two main items I've put on the agenda are the Anti-Semitism row and election results. I know that a few members had prepared scripts on this, I wonder if they will deploy them regardless of how things have actually gone.
Though point 2 is very relevant I feel. Corbyn, remarkably, is not as repellant as many think he should be. He's not drawing in enough people in the right places to address problems either, but the Labour brand is strong and not going to wither under him to the point of death.
Where is the space for them in a political arena now starting to resemble that in Northern Ireland? Harder and harder to say.
Constituency clean sweepOverall Majority
IndyRef2
huge boost of confidence
But, while I don't think these results are disastrous for Labour in England & Wales, they're still a long way short of where they need to be if they're to be serious contenders in 2020.
However, turnout is way down with 30+% an increasingly rare bird. This might mean that the Labour core voted en mass, while the Tory core have turned apathetic and the don't knows stayed away in droves.
A Scouser? Well known Liverpool fan?
Standing in MANCHESTER?
Seriously, Labour? Seriously?
As a "Greater Manchester" (urgh) voter, I find the idea risible. But if you want to go for it Labour, then be my guest....!
I imagine Tony Lloyd, a longstanding Manchester MP and the Labour Party's "interim Mayor" won't give up his presumptive shot at it without a fight. Although I'm a Tory, I always thought Lloyd fairly sensible, moderate and someone with the best interests of Manchester at heart, being a local chap.
What a mess Labour is in!
No sign of it so far, although Zoomers are quieter on Twitter, and Wings is having a nervous breakdown. Joyous. And Civic.
So the referendum spread should take that into account accordingly: we could have a small Leave lead of 4%, or a clear Remain lead of around 15%.
IIRC the inquiry found an underrepresentation of Conservative and overrepresentation of Labour in the samples, and the phone polls were closer, and online polls didn't pick up enough over 75s.
For the EU ref the phone polls have been picking up relatively low levels of undecideds, which doesn't compute with how torn I've heard people whilst out and about, but higher remain leads.
We just don't know. Personally, I think the truth is something between the two: online polls are probably still under-sampling over 75s (unless the method has been tweaked for all, but even then I suspect a lot of upweighting is occurring) and phone polls are underestimating undecideds and overestimating remain at the moment, possibly because people just don't want to admit on the phone they don't have a view yet. But those undecideds may all break remain in the final two weeks.
So I think we have a true position of a Remain lead of 4-8% and are heading for that at the moment.
Zac GOLDSMITH The Conservative Party Candidate 34%
Sian Rebecca BERRY Green Party 6%
Caroline Valerie PIDGEON London Liberal Democrats 4%
Peter Robin WHITTLE UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4%
Sophie WALKER Women's Equality Party 2%
George GALLOWAY Respect (George Galloway) 1%
Paul GOLDING Britain First - Putting British people first 1%
Lee Eli HARRIS Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol 1%
Prince ZYLINSKI Independent 1%
David FURNESS British National Party 1%
Ankit LOVE One Love Party 0%
"mmm hmm."
"it's nicola."
"mmm hmm."
"how's tricks."
"fine."
@drcromarty: @euanmccolm
"Look I'm really busy right now, can I call you back?"
"Anytime is fine"
"M'kay, laters"
"Patrick...we still good?"
JohnLoony. If the London bar chart is meaningless at the half way point that's lucky for Zak. I'd guess at the moment it looks about 60/40
He always comes across well, and what I find particularly likeable, is the way he always seems to talk about Liverpool "standing on its own two feet", "doing our own thing", "balancing the books", "not relying on handouts from London" etc.
Good lad, Joe. It's great that Liverpool elected as Mayor someone with such evidently Toryish (nay, Thatcherite) instincts, and then re-elected him with over 50% of the vote. Good on you, Scousers....
:-)
We haven't yet seen much in the way of electoral evidence that his views are a big deal. Certainly the anti-semitism affair appears to have had rather less impact than many were predicting and I wonder if that might be an indicator of how salient these things are (for avoidance of doubt, given the mood on these threads lately, I need to point out that the anti-semitism problem still needs to be addressed regardless of the electoral calculus).
Nevertheless I'd have to agree with you that it's a risk going into an election and if there was a way of getting a leadership without that potential liability then it's a no-brainer - unless the alternatives come with their own serious liabilities/negatives. Which, of course, is where we are now.
The English seats contested in 2016 were almost all last contested in 2012. 2012 represented Labour's best local election results since 1996 i.e. at any time in the last 20 years. On the Guardian's latest updated seat count, Lab have won 680 council seats in England, a net loss of just 8 compared to 2012. London is still to come.
@SophyRidgeSky: Some in Labour pointing out they're doing worse than Ed Miliband did four years ago, which wasn't good enough to win the general election
"OT One of the most significant political events of the last 24 hours was Nigel Lawson's claim on Question Time that a vote for 'Remain' would mean 77 million Turks flooding into this country."
It's a battle to see who can make the daftest claim.
And what's wrong with 77 million Turks coming? Think of the boost to GDP and the millions of jobs created. I hope you're not a racist.
That reminds me ... was the 3 million jobs lost claim based on the loss of immigration which might occur? If not, Remain have missed a trick. If leaving would cost 77 million more people then they could count in the loss of GDP in their figures.
Ah. bless.
EdM gave the election away in the debate when he refused to apologise for the over-spending but didn't follow up with a credible plan thereafter.
Speaking as someone who doesn't much like Khan, I still would find it hard to swallow if he didn't make it, nothing to do with a certain 33/1 bet... also the idea that my home city would have fallen for some of the most unpleasant campaigning I've ever seen would be profoundly depressing.
He is a spectacularly dreadful speaker
I see Mr Burnham has managed to get one of his many faces on the news!