1) as has been pointed out to you, the comments you disagree with were not written by me. Nothing in the LDV article was misleading or inaccurate.

2) ICM show that Labour were polling c.45-50% in the year leading up to May ’97. The Tories are at 39% in the latest ICM poll. That suggests their support is significantly weaker than Labour’s was in ’96-97.

Your much quoted FT,please see comments below from politicalbetting.com which simply further illustrates how misleading & inaccurate your article and Mr Greaves comments are.

‘For what Ferguson ignored was that the only firm with which you can make valid comparisons is ICM which has operated a consistent methodology since the mid-`1990s. The other firms that were working in that period have either radically changed their approach (MORI) or simply disappeared altogether from UK political polling (Gallup).’

Game,set & match!

Given that absence of information, it is reasonable to assume that current polls suffer from (unintended) selection bias and from Conservative shame (the inability of some people to admit voting Tory).

Conservative shame is probably why all polls differ so much from the ballot box; when questioned today, it is understandable that some people forget how they voted at the last election; but it is bizarre that the Tory vote is consistently underestimated at exit polls when the interview subject put their cross in the box a few minutes previously.

And if you want to analyse voter preference change, Conservative shame makes the process even less meaningful. A switch from a self proclaimed former Conservative voter to another party is distinct, because very few people lie about being a Conservative voter. At the same time, a LibDem or Labour “switcher” may actually be a former Conservative voter. You can only make a guess whether you have a real LibDem or Labour “switcher” in conjunction with the responses to social and economic questions. For an opinion poll, those responses are aggregated such that it is unrealistic to identify who switchers are or what their motives may be.

Polling gets worse really, the more that you think about it. Let us say that you have a really big poll with 5,000 respondents — that is six per constituency. Under FPTP, the majority of those respondents are redundant apart from their contribution to social and economic questions (you’d get some regionality out if them, for example).

Or you could create a series of small polls across marginal seats — LibDem behind Labour, Conservative behind Labour etc — and then you’d get some scary figures.

Has Rennard been found guilty then?

‘The Tories need a consistent
40%+ to get an overall majority and at the moment that is not looking likely.’

For someone with supposedly so much experience you are talking absolute rubbish,if Labour are polling around the mid twenties as they have been for some time now,the Tories do not, repeat not need to be polling above the 40% +,this level is required if Labour are around the mid thirties,which was what they achieved at the last election.

You have a left of centre government with the worst polls in history,the most unpopular government ever and the best the alternative left wing party can get is a spread of 17-20% in the polls,I can understand how frustrating that must be and how much you want to try and deflect attention away from such a poor performance.

I agree about the Tory vote, but given the unpopularity of the government and the mediocre performance of the Tories, surely exactly the opposite is true of the Lib Dem vote.

It’s not remarkable that it’s “holding up” – it’s remarkable that it’s no higher than the upper teens.

Whereas in the past the third party would benefitted from the unpopularity of the other two, now it’s the “Others” who are benefitting from the unpopularity of all three.

As the GE gets closer it is likely on past experience that the gap will narrow. The Tories need a consistent
40%+ to get an overall majority and at the moment that is not looking likely.

I guess that deep inside the Cameron Bunker there is a lot of worried debate going on. I think we have seen some of the knee-jerk results of this in his recent comments on devolution and section 28.

Tony Greaves

You really need to do some homework and catch up before making those sort of off the cuff ill informed comments.
Have a look at a quality blog like politicalbetting.com where you can find out for yourself how over stated the pre 97 polls were for Labour and how polling methodology has been so significantly changed since then;how the Labour bias was further accentuated by the dissproportinate amount of public sector workers used in the polling and the failure to ask and adjust findings for the ‘certainty to vote’ question.

I know you always want to put an anti Tory spin on everything but if you got the basic facts right you would be taken more seriously.

You mention:

‘we appear not to have been too badly hit by the relatively minor expenses indiscretions of a handful of our MPs.’

No mention of Lord Rennard?
Clegg said he was going to come down on expense abusers ‘like a ton of bricks’ and yet we have heard zero about whether or not Lord Rennard is going to repay the £41,000 of second home claims.
We know that Rennard has resigned but is the taxpayer going to be reimburesd?