General Election 2017 | Cabinet reshuffle: Hunt re-appointed Health Secretary for record third time

How do you intend to vote in the 2017 General Election if eligible?

  • Conservatives

    Votes: 80 14.5%

  • Labour

    Votes: 322 58.4%

  • Lib Dems

    Votes: 57 10.3%

  • Green

    Votes: 20 3.6%

  • SNP

    Votes: 13 2.4%

  • UKIP

    Votes: 29 5.3%

  • Independent

    Votes: 3 0.5%

  • Plaid Cymru

    Votes: 2 0.4%

  • Sinn Fein

    Votes: 11 2.0%

  • Other (UUP, DUP, BNP, and anyone else I have forgotten)

    Votes: 14 2.5%
  • Total voters
    551
  • Poll closed .
Anecdotal obviously, but spoke to a couple of people today up here who are voting tomorrow, and know they're not voting SNP, but aren't sure which way they'll go. Can imagine there's a decent number of people in that position, will be interesting to see how it swings.
 
Everyone in my social media networks, work, friends, family etc are voting labour. I've seen so much buzz around them but conservatives are favorites... How does this work?
 
PoTMS said:
It seems the whole of social media is voting Labour. Just like they were all voting to remain.
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Yup. Probably worth remembering that there's going to be a lot of young voters who can't vote, people with no relation to the UK and then you have the shy Tory factor.
 
Chorley1974 said:
Indeed it does seem so, and most will be true to their word. Social Media will increasingly be a more accurate reflection of voting intentions. The problem is currently that loads of voters won't pin their colours to the mast, not just a generational thing, but also down to the extreme amount of abuse that many receive when not conforming with the 'norm. on social media. See brexit vote as an example.
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For sure. You'd have to be a very brave person to admit to voting Conservative amongst the groups I run in. You'd genuinely lose friends.
 
Dirty Schwein said:
Everyone in my social media networks, work, friends, family etc are voting labour. I've seen so much buzz around them but conservatives are favorites... How does this work?
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Because Tories are in general older...they're probably not posting on social media, they're not going to be out campaigning actively, and additionally if you live in an urban area you're nowhere near all the rural constituencies voting Tory.
 
Dirty Schwein said:
Everyone in my social media networks, work, friends, family etc are voting labour. I've seen so much buzz around them but conservatives are favorites... How does this work?
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You're in a bubble and this country has 35 million other voters?
 
Dirty Schwein said:
Everyone in my social media networks, work, friends, family etc are voting labour. I've seen so much buzz around them but conservatives are favorites... How does this work?
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You live in a social bubble both physically and online (and so do I)
 
saivet said:
You know what, if the Tories get a small majority and May is ousted (not for one of their meatheads) then I'd come away feeling okay.

Not sure how likely that would be, but I'll find out Friday morning when I wake up for work. Not gonna bring myself misery in the early morning like at the last GE or Brexit ref.
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That's the best case scenario for me. I won't let myself even think about getting my hopes up beyond that.

A reduced majority, May out on her arse and a younger generation starting to take an interest in politics and understand what the left and right stand for.
 
Flying high said:
Well if we're talking fairness...


Good schools for everyone.
Free school meals.
Free job training and further education.
A well funded, free health and social care system that not only offers top level service, but which works on prevention and early treatment of problems.
Availability of affordable housing for all.

These things are more important than whether someone receives an inheritance, imho.

Tinkering at the edges of tax rates is what both main parties have been doing for too long. It's time for a new approach. If that means we 'lose' some billionaires and big businesses then fine. There are plenty of budding entrepreneurs and small businesses that would happily fill the void, when not stiffled by mega corporations who have little regard for their customers or employees.
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If only those were the topics i quoted


Nevertheless, i agree on most points
 
Can see this turning into a meme thread come Thursday night. I'm all for it.
 
Fergies Gum said:
How many points do Conservative need to be ahead by to avoid hung parliament?
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Depends how efficient their vote is in the marginals, but I reckon they could probably do it with about a 4-5 point lead.
 
Chorley1974 said:
Indeed it does seem so, and most will be true to their word. Social Media will increasingly be a more accurate reflection of voting intentions. The problem is currently that loads of voters won't pin their colours to the mast, not just a generational thing, but also down to the extreme amount of abuse that many receive when not conforming with the 'norm. on social media. See brexit vote as an example.
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Even then it'll still largely be limited. Over 60% of people tend to vote in General Elections. Nowhere near that figure are actively engaged and post about/discuss politics online. Plenty either keep their views to themselves or have limited knowledge of politics and plop for whatever choice seems best.
 
Fergies Gum said:
How many points do Conservative need to be ahead by to avoid hung parliament?
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325 I believe. It's linked to Norn Iron though I think and that's assuming Sinn Fein gets 7 seats. If they got none they could have a majority with 318.
 
Ubik said:
Depends how efficient their vote is in the marginals, but I reckon they could probably do it with about a 4-5 point lead.
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Its going to be a bloodbath then if the polls of 10-12 points lead turn out accurate.


Pexbo said:
325 I believe. It's linked to Norn Iron though I think and that's assuming Sinn Fein gets 7 seats. If they got none they could have a majority with 318.
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I meant points in terms of percentage of the vote.
 
ThierryHenry said:
I don't believe it but the streets near me are full of Lib Dem posters and signs. My flat is one LD, two Labour if that means anything. :p
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Either show them Kate Hoey's vote history on fox hunting or lock them in a cupboard!
 
Snowjoe said:
For sure. You'd have to be a very brave person to admit to voting Conservative amongst the groups I run in. You'd genuinely lose friends.
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Brexit was amazing in that respect, sudden abuse by a load of economics, legal, and political experts :lol: It's fair to say that the left has the market cornered in the online world.

I really can't call it though, both are fecking hideous options.
 
Prediction for tomorrow: @Ubik will cave and vote Labour, but it'll be balanced out since @Jippy will cave and vote Tory.
 
Peter Kellner on polling error in the 2015 General Election, and why late-stage polls shouldn't be banned
The signs were there. Indeed, they were widely reported: how David Cameron trounced Ed Miliband as the public’s preferred Prime Minister; how economic optimism was returning, and reinforcing the Conservatives’ reputation. One YouGov poll five weeks ago generated the Sunday Times front page headline: “Tories best for workers, say voters”.

And, to a degree, I pointed out these signs, predicting week after week that the Tories would gain votes as election day approached. On the final Sunday of the campaign, I forecast that the Conservatives would beat Labour by 35-32% – not far from the 37-31% result.

Indeed, if I wanted, I could construct a defensive barricade against criticisms of YouGov and other pollsters. I could point out that our final poll, showing 34-34%, was only three points out per party, and so within the bounds of normal sampling error, and that we correctly foretold the SNP tsunami in Scotland and Labour’s big gains in London.

That, though, would be to evade the truth and insult the readers of this blog. We got the election wrong. So did the other ten polling companies who produced eve-of-election voting intentions: we all said the race was too-close-to-call. Only by admitting that we are all at fault can we start the journey to finding out why.

That journey’s first stop is 1992. The final polls predicted a Labour victory. Instead, John Major’s Conservatives won more votes than any party in British history – a record that still stands. At the time, I was a journalist, not a pollster. I merely reported their findings. Even so, I felt I was implicated in their error. I came to the conclusion that this error had three components: a very late swing to the Conservatives; “shy Tories” who did not want to admit how they would vote; and, biggest of all, systematic sampling errors.

The last matters for, although things have changed, one of the questions after last week is plainly whether the polls have, once again, screwed up their sampling methods.

In retrospect, the 1992 election came just a few weeks too soon for the pollsters. Shortly after Major’s victory, the key findings of the 1991 census were published. These showed that Britain had changed since the previous, 1981, census far more than anybody – well, any social scientist – had realised.

In that Thatcher decade, there had been a sharp reduction in the Labour-inclined working classes and faster growth in the mainly-Tory middle classes. Pollsters all used much the same sampling design, and failed to take adequate account of all this. Had they known what was in the 1991 census, their election figures would not have led them, or us, so far astray. (In retrospect, the 1987 election should have flashed warning signals. The Eighties economic and social revolution was under way, and most polls understated Tory support, probably because the pollsters’ social mix had started to diverge from reality.)

Since then, all pollsters have spruced up the way they match their samples to the general population. Our methods slightly vary – one of the problems in 1992 was they were virtually identical, and so identically wrong. Obviously, the independent inquiry that the British Polling Council has established into last week’s errors must revisit this matter. Maybe our various sample designs have somehow led us to make the same mistakes. But I would be surprised if that turns out to be a major factor.

The second possibility is that there was, indeed, a last-minute shift to the Tories, just as I had predicted in these pages. I wish I could say this was so and that I was right all along, sort of. But I can’t. On Thursday, YouGov repeated an exercise that had enabled us to predict accurately the final outcome of the Scottish referendum last September. Then we found there was, indeed, an on-the-day shift that added two per cent to the “no” vote. Our final prediction, on the night of the referendum, was that “no” would win by 54-46% - just one point adrift of the 55-45% result.

Last Thursday we reinterviewed 6,000 people that we had polled online earlier in the week. We found that 5% changed their vote. However, each party gained and lost support in equal measure. The overall Conservative-Labour division remained 34-34%. So late swing doesn’t seem to explain what happened.

Some people have suggested that the problem lies with online research. Naturally I have a vested interest in challenging this view. I make just two points in response. The first is that YouGov’s online methods have outperformed telephone polls in the past. One example was last May’s European Parliament elections; another was the London mayoral election in 2008. All the telephone polls showed Ken Livingstone ahead. YouGov’s final poll said Boris Johnson would win by 53-47%. Boris won, and by precisely the margin we predicted.

In any event, whatever caused last week’s errors was no respecter of polling methods. Online and telephone polls were equally wide of the mark.

Which brings us back to “shy Tories”. Were there people who decided to vote Conservative, while telling pollsters they would vote for a change of government? This seems to be the likeliest explanation, but it does create difficulties for online companies. This is because the conventional theory suggests that the problem lies with interviewer-administered surveys. A small minority of voters, so the argument runs, don’t want to admit to a stranger that they hold a view that they fear might cause offence.

In America this is known as “social satisficing”. There is a mountain of evidence that some questions are best asked wholly anonymously, without a human interviewer. Examples include sex, drugs and greed. One of virtues of online research is, or should be, that it allows respondents to submit their views with complete anonymity, as there is no stranger watching over them or listening to their answer.

So, if we were all – online and telephone pollsters alike – tripped up by “shy Tories”, how come? And how was it that the exit poll conducted for the BBC, ITV and Sky News came so much closer to the result?

This is likely to be one line of investigation for the BPC inquiry. Obviously I can’t be certain what it will find: if I was, I hope I would have acted to avoid the error in the first place. Here, though, is my initial, tentative suggestion.

It comes down to human psychology. Voting is a different exercise from answering a poll. It is a choice with consequences, not just an expression of a view. This year, as in 1992, the Tories have a weak image. They are widely thought to be out of touch and for the rich. But, at the margin, there may be some people who both have a poor view of the party but nevertheless think it will run the economy better than Labour. They are “shy Tories” not because they are unwilling to admit their choice of party to a stranger but because they really would like to support someone else but, faced with a ballot paper in the privacy of the polling booth, simply can’t.

Last Thursday 22,000 voters responded to the broadcasters’ exit poll. They were given a replica ballot paper and asked to complete it, fold the paper and drop it in a replica ballot box. Most “shy Tories” were unwilling to “lie” at that moment by putting their cross against a different candidate; so the exit poll came closer to the result.

However, I suspect that even here, a few people did change their “vote”. After all, although the exit poll did well, it still understated the Conservative performance – just as the 1992 exit poll had done.

Either way, when voters got back home, they were back in “polling” rather than “voting” mode, and 3% of them reverted to their wish to express their dislike of the Tories. It’s a small number, relating to a specific event that occurs only sporadically. But in our voting system, such small numbers make a huge difference to political outcomes. In most of Europe, a three point error on a party winning 37% would make far less difference: the “winning” party would still need to build a coalition to govern the country.

Of course, this would all be irrelevant if polls were banned in the final stages of elections, as some people have proposed. From a commercial point of view, I would be delighted. France used to have a seven-day ban on published polls. But the law can’t easily outlaw the asking of questions, only the reporting of results. So French pollsters used to charge a fortune for private polls for rich clients who wanted information that the wider public was denied.

So it’s not to protect YouGov’s revenues that I oppose a ban. My objection is more fundamental. Polls, for all their faults, provide the most scientific way to listen to what voters think. Democracy needs communication between politicians and voters. There are many channels of such communication. Without polls, people with bad views and deep pockets would have one less check on their malevolence; and politicians would be more likely to exaggerate support for their views. To adapt what Churchill famously said about democracy, opinion polls are the worst way to find out what voters think - except for all the others.
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https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/05/11/we-got-it-wrong-why/
 
rcoobc said:
Not even sure what that means. (Or rather, what you want).

The tories cut the additional income rate from 50% to 45%.

They also cut corporation tax from like 28% to 19%.

They also introduced an allowance on capital gains tax

They also introduced a dividend tax allowance.

They also upped the amount you can put into an isa to £20k a year.

So....
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Did they improve public services?
 
Cheesy said:
Even then it'll still largely be limited. Over 60% of people tend to vote in General Elections. Nowhere near that figure are actively engaged and post about/discuss politics online. Plenty either keep their views to themselves or have limited knowledge of politics and plop for whatever choice seems best.
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I mean over a very long time line as online engagement becomes more linear with the general voting population. From what I see on social media a massive left and remain slant, as that online population gets older it will shift to the right.
 
Fergies Gum said:
I meant points in terms of percentage of the vote.
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Depends on the spread. Labour could get a large amount of votes in safe areas and lose seats to small margins and end up being absolutely annihilated. Or they might win marginally all over the country and end up with a reasonable amount of seats with a lower percentage.
 
Stanley Road said:
Did they improve public services?
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Of course they fecking didn't

They've cut the NHS (whilst pretending to fund it)

Cut 20,000 police officers

Cut the number of Fire fighters

Cut income for local government

Turned schools into private academies.

And so on
 
Dobba said:
Iain Dale is what would happen if Peter Lord had a complete breakdown and remade Morph out of his own shit.
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He's not wrong though, with regard to the media interaction. If memory serves, we had a dedicated debate just for the Chancellor and Shadow Chancellor during the 2015 campaign. Here, those two individuals have been mostly MIA.
 
Pexbo said:
Depends on the spread. Labour could get a large amount of votes in safe areas and lose seats to small margins and end up being absolutely annihilated. Or they might win marginally all over the country and end up with a reasonable amount of seats with a lower percentage.
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My fear is also too much Labour support in the safe areas and it not spreading out.
 
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