Shouldn’t the number of Tory voters wanting a snap election be close to 100%? After all, they’ve a very good chance of winning.

I’m interested in the changes between supporting Labour with Blair as leader and intending to support Labour with Brown as leader (and not just academically). Has there been any breakdown polls showing the regions and socio-economic groups which have the biggest changes? The temptation is to assume that Brown gets less support from the southern English, middle class and female voters, while getting more from the northern and Scottish, working class and male voters. Has this been shown or am I just stereotyping people again?

Well also at the risk of stereotyping, David, I would hazard a guess that he gets quite strong support from regular readers of the FT and The Economist. Maybe YouGovs archives hold some evidence, Anthony?

The European Court of Justice has ruled that prisoners should have the right to vote. I assume that prisoners’ votes would be counted in the constituency of the prison, meaning that in constituencies with a prison the prison vote might be quite an important group for parliamentary candidates to court.

Anthony, are there any opinion polls which measure the likely voting behaviour of prisoners ?

“The poll echoed previous findings on whether Gordon Brown should call a general election soon after becoming Prime Minister. 56% of respondents, including 76% of Tory voters and 40% of Labour voters, support having an election soon after the new Labour leader succeeds Tony Blair.”

The only chance of a General Election soon after Blair steps down is if a majority in the House of Commons wants it, i.e. the Conservatives will have to force the necessary votes to secure one. In 1979 Jim Callaghan was defeated on a vote of “No Confidence” and had to call a General Election.

Brown, if it is he, will not call one if he can help it.

Adrian - nope, for several obvious reasons

Prisoners would not necessarily vote in the constituency that contains the prison. Currently those prisoners who can vote (those on remand, or inprisoned for non-payment of fines or for contempt of court) are registered to vote in the constituency where they would be living if they weren’t in prison, and get a postal or proxy vote.

Maybe we could boost electoral turn out by letting prisonsers out to vote.

Peter.

Of quite considerable interest to us in the northern industrial constituencies is the “other” vote. In May there will be some rare scaps between the BNP and especially Labour but also the Tories and even the LibDems in some wards and it would be interesting to see the BNP “share”. No good, of course, on a national basis.

After waiting all those years to become PM, I doubt Gordon Brown will jump into an election he may well lose.

Well, it depends what sort of bounce he gets immediately after his election, doesn’t it? If John Major had gone immediately he took over from Mrs Thatcher he’d probably have won by more than the 21 seats he ended up with in 1992.

Instead he waited to see what the 1991 Council Election results were like with an eye to going in June 1991 but by then Labour had pulled back to neck-and-neck, he’d lost a couple of by-elections including Langbaurgh and he felt he couldn’t risk it.

unsuprising that brown is having a small bounce.he has the luxury of picking interviewers that agree with him,as with marr at the weekend.i bet it will remain the most bias interview throughout the year.
when in power,this will change, as he will have to explain the mess that has been made.

To be pedantic, it is not the European court of Justice )EU Luxembourg) but the European Court of Human Rights (Strabourg). And they didn’t rule that “all prisoners must vote” but that blanket bans on all prisoners voting were not legitimate. So the UK govt can decide (for example) to exclude prisoners who have committed crimes of violence and perjury and comly with the ruling.

Given all we have heard about Home Office records, I wonder how many prisoners are on the electoral register anyway…

“Given all we have heard about Home Office records, I wonder how many prisoners are on the electoral register anyway… ”

Thousands, probably.

[...] Some good news at last, right here - for those of us with an eye on the Home Secretary’s ambitions, at least… Populus suggest that with Reid as leader people would vote CON 44%, LAB 27%, LDEM 20% - a Conservative landslide victory. [...]

well at the risk of being boring, WMA is 37:33:17. This is mainly because of the Communicate poll. These polls under-estimate the C lead by 4%+/-2.6% and if we disregarded them it would be 38:32:18. Not much change then - yet.

Notwithstanding this “lead” in the polls the Conservatives still have convert this lead into firm votes. The longer Tony stays in power the less work we have to do to garner firm votes. David still has to be perceived as a strong leader with “policies” to enable one to feel secure in the knowledge that we will have a new government at the next election.

Chicken Yoghurt » Not now John Says:

January 11th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
[…] Some good news at last, right here - for those of us with an eye on the Home Secretary’s ambitions, at least… Populus suggest that with Reid as leader people would vote CON 44%, LAB 27%, LDEM 20% - a Conservative landslide victory. […]

This is the consequence of the politics of personality. Gordon Brown is perceived as a heavyweight, Dr Reid is not.

What Dr Reid might be like as Prime Minister is totally unknowable one might as well pick someone at random. He is an ex-Catholic and an ex-Communist who will loyally promote any policy his leader tells him to - even if the previous week he was spinning a different line.

As the leader himself, he might well be surprisingly liberal and competent. Indeed that is maybe even likely. It would be foolish and dangerous to take the risk because we have an unsafe constitution in which the last two strong leaders we have had have been able to marginalise parliament’s power to control the executive.

The grave constitutional problem we have is not independence, nor what to do about the House of Lords, the Monarchy or unbalanced devolution.

Some people in Scotland want independence, but they will be joined by others many of whom will not even realise that it is not the Union that they want rid of, but a parliament in which the executive is unaccountable, MP’s are controlled by the party leadership and “NO 10″ (as the papers describe it) can impose its will on the cabinet and on parliament.

It was John Lennon, I think, that said “What we don’t need is leaders”. What we don’t need is alpha males strutting about with their “my Trident is bigger than yours” complexes.

What we need is a modern parliament,

where 40% of the parliamentarians sit down to pee;
which has a purpose built new building and hang the cost;
which has founding principles;
which is elected by PR;
which sits in a horseshoe formation, not as in a monastic church with two choirs a sword’s length apart;
where the parliament is a check on the executive;
where legislation is developed through evidence led analysis in committees;
where everything is on the internet;
which is accessible to the public;
which gives serious consideration to petitions;
which accepts coalition government as normal;
in which minor parties can thrive;
which is inclusive and open to any underprivileged minority you care to name;
which, not least as a consequence of the first item on this list, puts child health, child nutrition and education as the absolute top priority and is gay friendly for the same reason.

and in the long run, what is most important of all,

it reviews the extent to which it has in practice acted in accordance with its founding principles.

My new one is like that.

…. so about the lawnmower we share with our neighbours …..

The neighbours are rather stupid and are fond of the old one which we share with them. They want to keep it just for themselves, even though it is 200 years out of date in many ways it doesn’t work properly. We already have a new one which we have used and works better. If we let the neighbours keep the old one, it will cost us more/less according to who you listen to but nobody really knows or is likely to have got it right, and it might not be that much different.

Some of us are fed up with the neighbours anyway, always having things their own way. Recently they picked a fight with some people which they knew we didn’t want and they went ahead anyway. The people they were fighting with have a lot of very nasty friends and we might get beaten up too if they retaliate. Now they want to hide their weapons at the bottom of our swimming pool. We can’t move away completely, but some of us would like to do that anyway because the neighbours were quite nasty to us in the past and because they think we might be financially better off if we don’t share with them. On the other hand, if they were left on their own they might associate more with a big bully they are influenced by, and keep out of the neighbourhood or be excluded by the neighbours whom we think would be very welcoming to us and share things with us if we were more in our own. Some of the other neighbours are fed up with their posturing too. …

…. I must be dreaming. The Scottish parliament is a funny looking building, but it doesn’t look at all like a lawnmower.