Westminstenders: "They are ahead in the polls"

[RedToothBrush]

The nominations are in!

A reminder about polling...

... And its significance in this election.

In 2017 YouGov got it right. They did two types of poll. One was a general poll which was done on regional polling. Early versions of this during the campaign discounted the don't knows. Later ones guesstimated how the don't knows would vote. This polling turned out to be close to the result but not exact.

The other poll you Gov did was on a constituency level. It was right before the election and it proved to be the most accurate of all, until we saw John Curtice's exit poll (which was spot on).

This time around YouGov have just switched to a constituency version of their polling because its much more complex this time with various pacts in action. They will be promoting respondents on the basis of who is standing in their constituency.

I'm not aware of other pollsters and their methodology but YouGov is interesting because of how close they were to the result last time.

This time around we are also seeing the active use of polling to lead voters, rather than necessarily reflect it. The Lib Dems and Remain have done a lot in what they see as key marginals to aid their credibility as realistic challengers. It's a more sophisticated version of their infamous, 'Only the LDs can beat X here' barcharts of shame. But it's unlikely they will be the only ones to try and use the technique. They probably will just be a little more transparent about it.

John Curtice has gone on record as saying there are only two realistic outcomes for the election: A Tory Majority or a Hung Parliament.

For the Tories to win they need a significant lead in the polls. To be sure probably 10% lead because of the regionality and constituency anomalies. Anything less than 6 or 7 percentage ahead and it tips to a hung parliament. YouGov currently have them on 13pt lead... BUT that's without fully accounting for the 1/5 of voters who are currently undecided. Last time around those who decided at the last moment tipped heavily in favour of Labour rather than the Conservatives.

Who stays at home, or who spoils a ballot could have particular significance this time around as disenchanted voters are made up of a higher number of voters who do usually vote than usual and a broken tribalism. Thus making it more difficult to predict than ever before.

So be a bit wary of polls and what they show - and what they don't show...

Thanks for pointing out the difference @Mistigri . I would never have seen it without you. My point is that it is not properly costed. HS2 is important national infrastructure. Also not properly costed.
State run stuff is a race to the bottom of quality and invariably hard to update.

we asked our defence unions for advice and they said we could not refuse to work, and lack of staffing was not an excuse that would stand up in any court

I imagine it gets to the point where people's only option is to call in sick.

It all sounds horribly unsafe, both for patients and for staff.

Completely agree Frankie.

Can we stop with the broadband now?

Labour manifesto Thursday apparently:

mobile.twitter.com/danbloom1/status/1195662529009213445

Bellini, a lot of work has been done (by government) on costing upgrades to broadband. You can argue about those estimates, and in particular about the cost of competition in this market (which the Labour plan appears to include as a net gain versus the cost of how things are done at present), but you can't really call them uncosted.

Inability to properly cost big infrastructure projects is a wider problem and not specifically a Labour issue. The private sector can also be quite bad at this.

Mistigirl : is someone paid to do this, or is it a robot doing it?

I find the disruption of conversation irritating, but it is totally ineffective in changing my mind. In fact it has the reverse effect.

Hospital staffing, especially at night, has already caused fatality, anyone else remember Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba? The price she paid was appalling, scapegoated for systemic failure.

I find the disruption of conversation irritating, but it is totally ineffective in changing my mind. In fact it has the reverse effect.

It's not aimed at you. It's aimed at preventing people who might be reading this thread from hearing people like Squid and maybe being influenced by them. And more generally it's intended to make people give up and stop talking about it. And it works. I nearly deleted the MN app off my iPad yesterday.

Hospital staffing, especially at night, has already caused fatality, anyone else remember Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba? The price she paid was appalling, scapegoated for systemic failure.

I'm sure that all HCPs in hospitals remember this (especially ones with non-British names, because her ethnicity was almost certainly also a factor in the case).

Bearbehind
"Still haven't seen anyone posting about what the Tories are going to be doing after the election assuming they win it."
FGS - can’t you see that those who vote for them don’t give a shit about anything other than leaving the EU right now.

Well, I can't. Many of those who vote Conservative actually don't want to leave the EU right now, or indeed ever; they just will not vote for
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, see no point in the Liberal Democrats or greens, and don't realistically have anyone else to vote for who has the slightest chance of making any difference to anything. (102 votes is not helpful except in depriving someone else of 102 votes.)

What are the Conservatives going to be doing after the election apart from forcing through Brexit, anyone? I have no information on that, and nor do any of the people I know who are planning to vote Conservative -- with whom I am discussing this, very very carefully so as not to frighten them into thinking me a dangerous communist agitator or an anarchist or something. Fighting with them about it would do no good; asking faux-naive questions makes them think, rather more than having an excuse to get angry would do. Maybe one or two might even decide not to vote after all, and any loss to the hard-line ERGer in the seat at present is a gain for common-sense.

"Can we stop with the broadband now?"

Aw, but Jeremy Hunt has included it in his flyer that just dropped through my letterbox!

Campaigning for superfast broadband
Jeremy grew up in a Surrey village and has campaigned relentlessly on issues that matter to local villages such as access to 4G networks, rural 'not spots' and super fast broadband

Clearly, it's a priority for both Jeremys - Corbyn and Hunt

Haha Tanith it makes me laugh when politicians say they have ‘campaigned relentlessly’ for something. Presumably as a senior Tory he should have had some success then, or has he failed?

If I look at my local politicians, it seems a lot of time is spent locally ‘campaigning relentlessly’ and achieving very little.

Infrastructure spending promises are going to be a big feature of this election.

For eg the CONs yesterday promised "£500 million to reverse the Beeching rail cuts". This is literally a CON but people will fall for it because it sounds like a lot of money (it's not)

£500 million wouldn't even touch the sides. I work in natural resources so I'm familiar with the cost with big civil engineering projects. £500 million wouldn't even build you a new mine, let alone hundreds of miles of new railway.

Mistigirl: thank you that makes sense. Let’s keep reminding people of that. In effect they are not real people so we just ignore them.

It’s so good reading this thread. So so informative. I voted to leave and realised what an idiot I’d been to do that by reading here.

It would be very sad if others were unable to do the same.

I’m still not informed enough to post much on here but love reading others.

I’ll remind us of the fact they’re paid to post/robotic interruptions from time to time.

HesterThrale Oh, he's struggling to get a list of his achievements!

So far, he's managed the Olympic torch running through the area in 2012 (that's at no. 1)
A local hospital campaign that's already livid that he's claiming credit when they've barely seen him
And that broadband quote is at no. 3 though, to be fair, he does say that his relentless campaigning over the past 14 years has made it available in 3 villages so far.

Yep, human I was thinking specifically of the Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba case
A handy WOC scapegoat

The GMC hung her out to dry
calling in sick seems the only way she could have avoided a situation where she couldn't do her duties safely

I’m still not informed enough to post much on here but love reading others.

This doesn't stop the rest of us .

Genuinely, I think that people's personal perspective is valuable and especially that of people who have changed their mind. Most of us haven't so we don't necessarily understand what drives people to move from one strong ideological position to another.

Tanith not really blowing me away! Don’t think I’d vote for for him.

The thread might have moved past broadband issues by now. I catch up when I can because I have dodgy broadband!
I could afford to pay more but the point I want to make is that we in this rural community have already paid for better BB through tax and rates but still haven't got it. BT has been paid a massive amount and still the service is really poor because the job has been done on the cheap. Fibre to the Cabinet means that our BB still has to squeeze itself through old copper cables for a couple of miles and BT has failed to maintain these.

Fibre to the Premises should have been the goal from the beginning but shareholders and executives had to get a cut first.

Reversing Beeching would indeed improve transport, but 50 billion is more like the price tag than 500 million.
Over umpteen years

So there might be better ways of using that money to improve infrastructure and bringing tangible benefits more quickly

50 billion is more like the price tag than 500 million.

Yeah - but for people who do not have regular exposure to big ticket engineering projects, those two numbers might just as well be identical. "£500 million" is big enough for most people's instant reaction to be "that's a lot of money!". (Whereas my instant reaction is "that's nothing, it doesn't even buy you a half-built mine" )

I used to be a fan of HS2 until I looked into it more. Yes, there is a lack of rail capacity in the south east - but other solutions are possible, e.g. building more freight lines to divert some of the traffic. Otherwise, it will just pull people from Birmingham to London. (Now if they moved the HoC to Birmingham it would make more sense.)

What has happened to the promises about improving Northern Railways? They seem to have gone quiet on that. Electrification? Stalled.

Reversing Beeching cuts - yes, nice idea but quite a lot of the land once used for railway lines has been built on, so new land would need to be purchased. It would be possible, I imagine, where lines have just become freight lines.

However, the tide is turning on rail vs. road. The Oxford bus company is going to stop running its X90 service in the New Year. Reasons given are lack of demand, since the rail line from Oxford to Marylebone has been opened taking passengers away, and the increasing congestion in London making the travel times uncompetitive. The Oxford - Marylebone line, was already partly in existence - it just needed more track laying to run it as far as Oxford. It's run by Chiltern Railways i.e. DB.

As for re-nationalising the railways, it's already been said - they just let the franchises lapse.

Dusty many members of my family voted leave and thanks to me reading these threads I was able to talk to them and each and every one has changed their mind completely. I was never able to articulate things before. The posters here are fantastic...so wise and knowledgeable. They blow me away.

That’s great Fading.

My family are mainly in agreement with me, and probably friends, although we hardly talk about it. But recently in a group of friends, half of them said they thought Johnson was attractive and charismatic. They hate his policies, know what he’s like and wouldn’t vote for him, but...

I just don’t get that.