There are two polls out this morning in the Telegraph and Times that look horrible for the Conservative Party and brilliant for Labour. As I said earlier in the week, this is the conference bounce, obviously compounded slightly with a Brown bounce.
I would be extremely surprised if the gap doesn't narrow significantly after next Wednesday, much as I would have been extremely surprised if the gap had not widened this week. It's pointless doing polling in conference season really. You're average ordinary doesn't really do politics, so they're far more likely to answer based on the last person they can remember seeing that they didn't feel the urge to vomit at instantly.
In my view the next election will be a funny one. There is no doubt Brown has energised the Labour base. In some respects though I think this will mean that the Labour vote will go up in the places where it is going to win anyway.
The boundary changes and marginals will not follow quite such uniformity and I imagine that we may see a reversal of the last election in the sense that Labour's share of the total vote increases whilst their share of the seats decreases. I could be wrong of course.
5 comments:
The only thing that could make the next election funny would be for Brown to get voted out. If he goes 2 years before he needed to on the basis of opinion polls it would be absolutely hilarious.
What will be even funnier will be the muppets who decided this Brown had nothing to do with the last one, vote him back in, and then start whining when their council tax bills double in the reevaluation that is "not planned"
Dizzy,
I suspect you may be correct, but what fewer are asking is whether a win would actually be good for the Tories. When things go sour, it will become myth that 'If we had only kept faith with Gordon, things would have worked out ok', and the disarray produced by a Cameron victory could split the party (the debate about the future direction of the party will only intensify expontentially if they get their hands on power). A loss would hurt them if they got rid of Cameron too. I see the only beneficial result for them as being a hung-Parliament. Thoughts?
Morus
I think you're right. As long as we poll more than we did at the last election, hopefully as high as 36%, possibly, then we're sure to pick up a few seats in the south and midlands - either from Labour or the Lib Dems. Labour are just stacking up votes in the north and parts of Scotland.
We need to take about 20 from Labour nationally. We can't rely on the Lib Dems to do anything, and the SNP may take 4 or 5, which may be enough to deprive Labour of their majority.
Then we'd have Gordon Brown reeling from one hazard to another, maybe resulting in a Conservative majority next time around.
What thing is for sure - whatever happens Cameron has to stay in place, otherwise we're buggered.
The media have it in for Cameron and the Conservatives. The BBC have set the "isn't Gordon Gorgeous" bandwagon moving, since he became PM, and now they're trying destroy Cameron, like they did Hague, IDS and Howard.
These polls are very dubious, to give Brown a '97 share of the vote is nonsense (as GF poitned out). A couple of weeks ago, the Tories were level, then as conference season approached, Labour suddenly lept ahead, in the middle of the Northern Wreck fiasco! Very conveniently setting up the Pro-Labour, anti-Cameron narrative.
I don't buy the validity of these polls for one moment. But Cameron will get a kicking next week from the BBC, whatever happens at the conference. But I don't believe that McBroon is willing take the fianancial and political risk of an early election.
Agree, I think this could be a good election to lose narrowly. Brown will have to take responsibility for the coming problems and will be constrained by a small majority, can't see him going in with the Lib Dems won't even share with his own Cabinet. Keep Cameron and sit back and watch the fun as Gordon is rumbled as I wish had happened in 1992.
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