One hundred days until the local elections and the most likely date for the General Election: May 6th.
And, whilst blogs, websites, Facebook and the rest of it will play a supporting role, our real battles will be fought on the ground in Liberal Democrat held and target seats up and down the country. It will be fought with leaflets, target mailings, canvassing, posters, phone calls and getting the vote out on polling day. Even email – extremely effective at reaching local audiences in marginal seats – needs that ground work to build up the list of addresses in the first …
The BBC has just published a draft of the internal guidelines for its election coverage. The 14 page document is similar to the guidance at previous elections and includes a set of sensible rules which other media outlets would do well to emulate, including:
There will be no online votes or SMS/text votes attempting to quantify support for a party, a politician or a party political policy issue.
Given the risks of party supporters attempting to pack audience feedback sections, the guidelines also wisely say:
The BBC will not broadcast or publish numbers of e-mails, texts or other communications received on either side of any issue connected to the campaign.
On balance of coverage between the parties, the key criteria is:
Previous electoral support in equivalent elections is the starting point for making judgements about the proportionate levels of coverage between parties.
However, other factors can be taken into account where appropriate, including evidence of variation in levels of support in more recent elections, changed political circumstances (e.g. new parties or party splits) as well as other evidence of current support. The number of candidates a party is standing may also be a factor.
What this does not address head on is that only a minority of seats are now Labour-Conservative contests. The majority either have someone else in first or second, or are three way (or more) contests. Coverage which is dominated by Labour and the Conservatives (which is what the form of words implies) will in fact end up not reflecting the actual contests in the majority of the country.
The expected brevity of reporting is highlighted by the comment that:
Full-length reports (e.g. 3 or 4 minute packages) about specific electoral areas should refer – as a minimum – to an online list of all candidates and parties standing.
When a “full-length” report is only 3 or 4 minutes, this is not going to be an election where we can expect much in the way of in-depth reports from the BBC.
Despite these caveats, the overall tenor of the BBC’s intentions is good – and far better than what is often seen in local newspapers with the idea of “balance” at election time becoming an excuse either to report nothing or only to allow very brief, turgid snippets. Instead, the BBC says:
The intention of these guidelines is to encourage vigorous debate and to give a higher profile to candidates of all parties in general without giving unfair advantage to one candidate or party over another.
The BBC’s draft guidelines also repeat what is now long standing BBC policy of not commissioning opinion polls to ascertain voting intention levels. Although the policy was originally born in large part by doubts over the accuracy of opinion polls and the wisdom of focusing on the horse race nature of politics, it is also now the case that there are so many general voting intention polls (even hitting record levels) that the BBC hardly needs to add to the number.
Freed from the burden which media outlets feel of the need to headline and big up their own polls, the BBC could fill a useful role in reporting polls – and calling out the exaggerated reporting of small shifts as major moves. The guidelines are hopeful on this, saying the BBC’s policy is
to report the findings of voting intentions polls in the context of trend. The trend may consist of the results of all major polls over a period or may be limited to the change in a single pollster’s findings. Poll results which defy trends without convincing explanation should be treated with particular scepticism and caution.
The guidelines cover both the general election and May’s round of local elections. Assuming nothing dramatic happens on the dates for these, the guidelines in their final form will come into force on 29th March.
Forget data sets, interquartile ranges and margin of error. The Guardian recently reported the collective wisdom of the wet-fingers-in-the-air of the UK’s pollsters, who met this past week “to refine their methods ahead of the election, and ended with off-the-cuff predictions for the final result.”
And here’s what they came up with:
Statisticians from most of Britain’s main polling companies attended the session, organised jointly by the British Polling Council and the National Centre for Research Methods.
Four of them were brave enough to come up with predicted vote shares for the main parties. Put together they average a shade under 40%
In the three months since I last blogged at length about the Liberal Democrat general election manifesto process, Danny Alexander (chair of the Manifesto Working Group) has won widespread praise for restoring a sense of peace, sense and order after the events around the party’s autumn conference.
On the two major flash points – mansion tax and tuition fees – hostilities have ceased and proposals been modified to win widespread support within the party. Tuition fees are still due to be scrapped, but over a longer timescale, and mansions are still due to be taxed, but with a narrower definition …
By Iain Roberts
| Mon 18th January 2010 - 10:45 am
A genuinely hard problem, or one the large parties have an interest in not solving?
Whichever the truth is, political activists might find these comments have a ring of familiarity.
A far more serious problem, however, is the lack of any limitation on amounts which can be spent nationally and in the period between elections.
These amounts have now begun to dwarf the total sums spent on behalf of all candidates. In the period leading up to the 1959 election it has been estimated that the Conservative Party spent £468,000 on advertising alone, while over three times that amount was spent by business
Tories claim Labour is using taxpayers’ money to fund election advertising campaign – Telegraph, 15.1.10
“The Conservatives accused Labour of “raiding” taxpayers’ money to fund their election campaign. New figures uncovered by the Conservatives show that spending on advertising has increased to £232 million, which is a 39 per cent increase on the previous year.”
A tenth of schools fail to meet GCSE targets – The Guardian, 14.1.10
“One in 10 secondary schools in England failed to meet basic targets for GCSEs last summer and academies were disproportionately represented among the failing institutions, government statistics published today reveal.
The Liberal Democrats today set out plans to bring a quarter of a million empty homes back into use, making homes available for people who need them and creating 65,000 jobs.
There are over 760,000 empty properties across England which are no longer used as homes but can be brought back into use with some investment. People who own these homes will get a grant or a cheap loan to renovate them so they can be used: grants if the home is for social housing, loans for
Political coverage and blogging in the UK has a rather odd love-hate relationship with electoral numbers. On the one hand, the latest opinion poll figures get reported, re-reported and mis-reported at length, with the mere fact that a change in ratings is well within the margin of error not being reason enough to stop a cavalcade of comment.
Yet despite this love of talking electoral numbers, those that are talked about come from a fairly narrow range of sources.
So here instead are three other numbers – all simple in concept, but interesting in implication.
To recap, the four steps to a fairer Britain which Nick Clegg laid out yesterday were:
Fair taxes.
A new, fair start for all children at school.
A rebalanced, green economy.
And clean, open politics.
In terms of what’s there, no huge surprises. After the MPs’ expenses scandal, it’s no great shock (and very welcome to many members) to see political reform back in the list of top issues for the party.
The emphasis on early years education reflects a common theme of Nick Clegg’s speeches before and after becoming party leader. Expect that story about ‘a young child in Sheffield…’ to be said many, many …
On this day in 2001, Sven Goran Eriksson took over as manager of the England football team. On the same day, the carers of eight year old Victoria Climbié, who died after being tortured and fed like a dog, were found guilty of her murder, leading to questions being asked of Haringey Social Services.
Today is the 281st anniversary of the birth of Edmund Burke. It’s also the 59th and 56th birthdays respectively of US radio ‘personalities’ Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.
2 Big Stories
Four steps to a fairer Britain
Yesterday saw Nick Clegg set out the priorities which will be at the heart of the party’s …
Thurrock, if you didn’t already know, is in Essex. Gotta love a place whose Wikipedia History section begins “Mammoths once grazed in the Thurrock area.” Is it the WP equivalent of “First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came…” ?
At the end of January, the LDV team will be meeting to discuss how we cover the general election. As a site launched …
Iain Martin of the Wall Street Journal put in a pithy request to the political parties yesterday, Day -1 of the 2010 general election campaign: Better Slogans, Please.
Iain is equally scathing of Labour’s efforts (‘Come on Labour, wake up, get a move on! Don’t you know there’s an election on?’) and the Tories’ (‘a rather unhappy fudge of a slogan that doesn’t stick in the brain. Fail.’). But he’s also slightly underwhelmed by the Lib Dems’ sloganeering:
The Lib-Dems: The party knows there is no point diving in when the two larger parties are getting all the attention. Instead,
With new polling figures in, the general election prediction model we covered in November has churned out a new prediction for the next general election:
New prediction: Conservative lead of 9% with 315 seats (11 short of an overall majority)
Previous prediction: Conservative lead of 10% with 322 seats (4 short of an overall majority)
Background to prediction
In November Lib Dem Voice published an exclusive general election prediction, based on the work of a group of academics who have analysed polling data (not just party support levels) in the run up to previous British elections:
Their predictive model works on a three-month lagged structure;
On Friday, Nick emailed all members to outline our position on the abolition of tuition fees. It was great to see our position, agreed by both the Federal Policy Committee and the Parliamentary Party, broadly welcomed on LDV and elsewhere.
Saddling students with huge debts as they leave universities, particularly at a time when many are failing to find jobs through no fault of their own, is clearly wrong. And the prospect of such debts putting talented young people off going to university is equally wrong. That is why our plan to scrap tuition fees over 6 years from the election will be one of a very small number of core commitments in our manifesto.
The Times’s Danny Finkelstein has a good perspective on the issue today:
“In every election I have been involved in, there has been a last-minute rumour about an early poll date. And every one has involved a mad dash to get things ready, all those little practical details that you were going to get round to but hadn’t. Followed by anticlimax.”
Quite.
It’s sensible to err on the side of caution and be prepared (who has ever regretted being prepared in …
I’m pretty sceptical of the chatter about Gordon Brown calling an early general election*. Here’s one the reasons which hasn’t been much talked about.
Imagine we have an early election. Imagine too that Labour manages what is probably the limit of its hopes – largest party in a hung Parliament. (Witness Labour MPs going round telling Liberal Democrats how much they now love voting reform.)
Labour then hangs on to power.
But in May along comes a round of local elections, in which Labour will – almost certainly – suffer massive losses. If you’ve got experience of a no overall majority council, you’ll …
By Peter Welch
| Sat 12th December 2009 - 11:20 am
Let’s start with a health warning. My first-hand knowledge of Derby amounts to changing trains there once a decade ago. But the press are keen to help us find out more. Derby North qualifies as a three-way marginal (Lab 39.5%, Lib Dem 30.6% and Tories 25.9% according to Antony Wells). And not one but two national papers descended on the seat to find out how the public saw the PBR.
Slightly bizarrely, they both report on the seat as a Conservative prospect. (It is number 130 on the Tory hit list, number 30 on the Liberal Democrat list of targets.) …
By Stephen Tall
| Tue 8th December 2009 - 12:20 pm
One of the first publications from Iain Dale’s new Biteback publishing imprint dedicated to political books, The Total Politics Guide to the 2010 General Election (Eds, Greg Callus and Iain Dale) weighs in at just under 300 pages divided into two (unequal) sections: the first is a series of 14 articles examining different aspects of the coming election; the second non-half comprises over 200 pages of regional and constuency profiles. As you might guess, this is a for-geeks-only book. But, then, if you’re reading this review that label probably applies.
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 7th December 2009 - 10:15 am
Mark Hunter, Lib Dem MP for the Cheshire seat of Cheadle since 2005, could be forgiven for smiling like his county’s proverbial cat this morning.
Today’s Times reports that the Tories are scaling back their expectations of election victory in the light of a slew of polls showing the party’s support dipping:
The Conservatives are digging in for a six-week election campaign and are quietly withdrawing resources from some “landslide” seats to maximise David Cameron’s chances of winning a workable majority.
The well-sourced article highlights just one example of a constituency where the Tories are giving up the fight:
The 1997 general election turned out to be a once in a generation opportunity for many local Liberal Democrat campaign teams to gain a Parliamentary seat from the Conservatives. At the tail end of a by then deeply unpopular Conservative Government, the election saw unprecedented numbers of seats falling to the party. A few seats that were not quite gained from the Conservatives in 1997 did subsequently fall in 2001 and 2005, but it was the 1997 election with the Conservatives in government that was the main opportunity. Nearly every campaign that missed then did not subsequently win.
Election forecasting, that is the using data such as party standings, leader ratings and economic indicators to predict the result of the next general election, is still in its infancy. The combination of general elections only every four years or so with the relatively recent innovation of regular detailed polling figures means that there has often been a shortage of data and election results with which to create and test models.
However, as each general election passes the volume of data accumulates and predictive models get more sophisticated. Of course, this begs the question about how well you can predict an …
By Iain Roberts
| Sun 15th November 2009 - 7:56 pm
The BNP are holding their party conference – in a gym on the edge of an industrial estate near Wigan, with no journalists allowed – and the big news there is Nick Griffin’s plan to stand for Parliament in Barking next year.
Keen students of geography may notice that Barking is some way from the constituency that Mr Griffin currently represents in the European Parliament – the North West of England. Clearly, whatever other objectives Nick Griffin might have, actually doing the job he was elected to do in June isn’t one of them.
PoliticsHome has today published its YouGov survey of some 240 marginal seats, with a sample of around 35,000 voters, providing the most complete picture of regional polling trends, and likely constituency results. The results are fascinating – but, as with any polls, it comes with health warnings.
The most important is that, even with the large sample size, the number of people in each individual seat is not high enough to give reliable voting intention figures for individual constituencies. This is an especially relevant consideration when looking at Lib Dem MPs and target seats, as the ability of a local party to organise an effective ‘ground-war’ campaign often marks the difference between a successful hold / gain and a near-miss.
For example, the PoliticsHome survey predicts that Chris Huhne’s seat of Eastleigh will be a Tory gain based on the Lib Dem – Tory swing in the south and south-west. However, I will eat my hat (really, I will) if Chris is unseated.
You can find the full survey results here. Let’s have a look at the implications for the Lib Dems.
Fair play to Sky News. It’s a month since the broadcaster upped the ante on a leaders’ debate, with Adam Boulton launching a full-throated campaign – including writing for LDV – for Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron to debate each other in the lead-up to general election day.
The result? The AP tells us a deal has now been reached between the broadcasters:
Broadcasters have written to Britain’s main political parties proposing a series of televised debates before the general election. The BBC, Sky News television, and ITV have written to the leaders of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties with a joint proposal for three live televised debates before the election, which must be called by the middle of next year.
By Adam Boulton
| Wed 16th September 2009 - 3:25 pm
Two weeks ago Sky News’s political editor Adam Boulton launched a campaign to to get the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties to take part in a televised debate at the general election. Lib Dem Voice asked Adam to pitch his arguments in favour to our readers, and he gamely said yes…
Liberal Democrats know what it feels like. You’ve got a brilliant idea, it’s so obvious it just has to be right. But your competitors make patronising noises about your initiative, while trying to work how they can nick it for themselves.
That’s how I feel about Leaders’ Debates at the next General Election. Of course they should happen. Television is still the major mass medium of communication at a time when more and more people feel alienated from politicians – how could our political leaders possibly deny the public the chance to compare them face to face at election time?
A major part of the point of a democratic electoral system is that those elected to public office can be held to account by the public for their actions. The anger we often see over the behaviour of MPs – whether on matters of policy (such as the Iraq war) or on matters of probity (such as MPs’ expenses) – is often aggravated by an underlying lack of belief that MPs will in the normal course of events get held accountable for their actions. Hence the paucity of comments along the lines of “I can’t …
Crikey, there has been quite a response on this and other sites to the launch this morning of a campaign to save election night. Amongst the posts such as Andrew’s and Jonathan’s agreeing with the campaign there have been a range of queries and criticisms, such as Costigan, Darrell, Mark, Nick and Paul.
The issues people have raised over the campaign generally fall into four categories:
Cost: isn’t it more expensive to count on Thursday night? Yes – and no. Yes, in that often councils pay staff for counting on Thursday night (and whether or …
Yesterday’s Sunday Times reported how our traditional general election night is under threat from more and more councils wanting to move their count to a Friday.
Although there are some understandable reasons for this (principally the extra logistical burden of new checks against postal vote fraud), overall losing the drama of Thursday night through to the early hours of Friday morning would be a backwards step because:
By Stephen Tall
| Wed 2nd September 2009 - 11:40 pm
As LDV noted this morning Sky News has decided to lay down the gauntlet, and formally invite the major party leaders to particpate in a televised debate during the general election campaign. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has formally accepted his invitation, issuing the following statement on his website:
Many thanks for your letter of yesterday. It is great to hear that Sky News are taking this important initiative and I would be delighted to accept your invitation.
At a time when trust in politics is at an all-time low in the aftermath of the expenses scandal, we must
24% (116 votes): An increase in % vote and an increase in seats
22% (103): An increase in % vote but a decrease in seats
12% (57): A decrease in % vote but an increase in seats 42% (201): A decrease in % vote and a decrease in seats. Total Votes: 477 Poll ran: 7th-24th August 2009
A fairly pessimistic assessment, you might conclude, with a plurality of readers reckoning the party will go backwards, both in terms of share of the vote and number of seats held. Interestingly, while almost half (46%) of you think the party will increase its share of the vote, barely one-third (36%) think the party might also end up with more MPs as a result.
Peter Hirst One of the more important issues that the electorate care about is how much political parties understand what matters to them. This varies from person to person...
Peter Hirst Inequality must be seen in the round. I appreciate living in the north-west because it gives me easy access to mountains such as in Snowdonia, The Lakes and Der...
Peter Hirst One of the aims of most societies is some sort of redistribution. So fiscal federalism must have a mechanism for the rich regions giving to the poorer. Without ...
Peter Martin The price mechanism is essentially a system of rationing. In wartime it is usually recognised that it isn't the most equitable system! So some better system h...
David Allen A clear, credible, principled strategy from the Yorkists! Makes a welcome change.
Sadly, followed by twenty below-the-line posts, providing nearly twenty ve...
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Brexit and summer holidays
The pine martens of Shropshire
The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Peter Hirst 
Peter Martin 
David Allen 