Can you predict how someone will vote from their first name?
YouGov has been busy analysing the political preferences of people with 130 different first names. And it seems that if you are called Tim then you are most likely to vote Lib Dem, if you are called Nick you don’t like Labour, and if you are Nigel you are least likely to vote Labour but prefer UKIP.
So far so good. But what about Samantha ? It seems she is very unlikely to vote Conservative and has switched to the Lib Dems.
The Liberal Democrats have produced a series of 20 videos giving snippets of our manifesto in BSL. We are the first major party to do so. The full list is here.
We’ll also put them up on here in batches over the next wee while. If you want to see all our posts, just click on the bsl tag at the bottom of this post.
In this post, you will find Europe, and International and Defence.
We are all sneering – myself included – at Ed Milliband’s decision to inscribe a monolith with 6 election pledges. Even the Labour-supporting Guardian has likened it to Neil Kinnock’s Sheffield Rally.
Preposterous as this seems, I suspect that the intended message – that they are really serious about these pledges – may nonetheless seep through, while politicians and reporters clutch their aching sides, to the wider public.
When Labour bailed out the financial system, it misapplied Keynesian economics. Keynes writes that stimulus should be used to stimulate a depressed economy that isn’t at full employment: what Labour did was use the stimulus money to stabilise a system that was falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
The instant they did that, it committed the UK to paying back the money it had borrowed: it transferred the debt that would have been wiped out by private sector bankruptcy to the state.
While this reduced the loss of value in the economy (public sector debt has prevented private sector bankruptcy to accumulate a negative multiplier effect: the cost of propping up one domino has prevented the others from falling), it means that regardless of who is in charge we need to reduce the deficit to maintain the creditability of the state by which the rest of our economy is guarantored.
We’ll be covering election night live here on Liberal Democrat Voice on Thursday night through to Friday morning.
Over the last week Nick Clegg has been drip-feeding his negotiating red lines. And here they are:
I spotted these two handwritten notes side by side when I was out delivering last week. In case you can’t see this too clearly on your device, they say:
“I will vote for the party who doesn’t waste paper. Give me a leaflet and you’re off the list ..”
“I am undecided. Keep the leaflets coming …”
Ah – a dilemma indeed.
I have seen some consternation amongst Lib Dems today, both in real life and online, about Nick Clegg’s remarks about an EU referendum not being a red line for us. Many party members feel very strongly that we should not agree to something which could be very unsettling and destabilising. Having come through three years of the Scottish referendum, I am more in that camp than in the other group of activists who think we should agree to it or we’ll be seen as anti-democratic.
Before we rush to judgment, let’s have a look at what Nick actually said. From the Guardian:
I am happy to insist on my red lines – they are the ones the Liberal Democratshave put on the front page of our manifesto which are much more important than some of the other red lines other parties have chosen.”
He said he disagreed with the Tory position on the EU and said he was still committed to the act of parliament passed by the coalition which would trigger a referendum if further UK sovereignty was ceded to Brussels. But he declined to rule out rejecting Cameron’s demand for a referendum.
“It’s not my responsibility to try and stare into a crystal ball. The way this works is I set out my priorities, David Cameron sets out his, Ed Miliband sets out his. People then choose. How those red lines are or are not compatible with each other is in part dependent on the mandate that the British people give each of those parties.”
A couple of weeks ago, we featured the Labour candidate in Leeds North West who had a bit of a problem with the, you know, facts. Greg Mulholland rightly called him out for it.
Now Lynne Featherstone’s Labour opponent has told a pretty outrageous untruth about her. They will now have to print and distribute a retraction. From Lynne’s blog:
The letter to residents contained the false statement: “Lynne Featherstone…was even a minister in the Home Office when the disgraceful “Go Home” vans were sent out.”
At the time the vans went out (July 2013), Lynne Featherstone was in the Department for International Development, kick-starting the campaign to end FGM and fighting to protect the aid budget. Lynne Featherstone was a minister at DFID from September 2012 – November 2014.
Labour have been advised to immediately cease delivering the letters, and issue a retraction to all residents who’ve received the letter.
Lynne said:
You might find this hard to believe. I was a little bit shocked by it myself. You have to understand the situation I am in. I live in a seat which is, to all intents and purposes, a battle between the SNP and Labour. With a poll this week suggesting that the SNP could win every single seat in Scotland, the unthinkable had to be thought. Should I, could I vote Labour tactically to try to stop that happening? A large group of SNP MPs primarily motivated by narrow nationalist interests is not something that I think would be healthy for our democracy.
I have voted either SDP or Liberal Democrat in every election since I turned 18 bar two. The first was in the 90s when there was no Lib Dem candidate in my council ward. There wasn’t even an independent. My choice was Tory or Labour. There was no way I could ever in a million years vote Tory, so I had to click my heels three times, cross my fingers behind my back and put my cross next to the Labour candidate. The second was the 1997 election when I didn’t vote at all. When I had headed over to Chesterfield on the Friday before polling day, I rather suspected I might get home before 10pm on polling day. It wasn’t to be. I don’t think Mrs Pankhurst would have minded too much, though, because I was working my backside of in one of the most fantastic campaigns I have ever worked on.
The thought of Scotland sending a contingent of 100% of nationalist MPs elected on barely half the vote was something that deeply disturbed me. they would then claim that they spoke for Scotland, dismissing those who didn’t support them. Don’t get me wrong, there are some issues where I have a lot of common ground with them. However, their nationalism and quest for independence aside, they have a strong authoritarian, illiberal streak which goes against all my instincts. If Labour were the only ones likely to be able to beat them, shouldn’t I hold my nose and just vote Labour?
The first promise on Ed Miliband’s eight foot limestone slab is:
1. A strong economic foundation
People say that the election in Scotland is pretty hostile. They are right a lot of the time, but in Edinburgh West, where Mike Crockart’s campaign HQ is next door to the SNP base, things are much more civilised, as this Twitter exchange between Mike’s campaign manager and the SNP candidate Michelle Thompson shows:
@MichelleThomson running a campaign based entirely around one photo! Bold. Yet strikingly coordinated. #libdemhold pic.twitter.com/sJnhydaJ8c
— Alex Cole-Hamilton (@agcolehamilton) May 1, 2015
@agcolehamilton brand awareness. It's working…#snpwin
— Michelle Thomson (@MichelleThomson) May 1, 2015
@MichelleThomson certainly aware of your taste in knitwear, which is actually quite elegant. See you at the count #muchcloserthanyouthink
— Alex Cole-Hamilton (@agcolehamilton) May 1, 2015
There’s a new app about which purports to be able to guess your age from a photo. Journalists with nothing better to do have been putting politicians’ photos through it.
Buzzfeed has the UK leaders. Nick Clegg and David Cameron were born weeks apart, yet this app has Cameron at 56 and Clegg at 52. They are both 48. Whoops. 45 year old Ed Miliband will be happy that he was determined to be 38.
The Scottish leaders were assessed by the Scotsman. Ruth Davidson, the Tory leader, will be delighted to have lost 9 years and to be judged …
A little while back, like many candidates, I responded to an email from simplepolitics.co.uk and made a 30 second video to encourage people to vote for me as a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate. It mentioned a few policy headlines, not least that we were the only party committing to provide the additional £8Bn the NHS is predicted to need by the end of the next parliament.
In seemingly no time at all, the Tories made the same promise (I am spinning this as a Liberal Democrat policy victory even before the vote). Then The Economist ran a provocative article about how the Conservatives were seeming to appeal to workers and Labour to business, in a way that showed how confused the campaign was getting. I began to have some sympathy for people I was canvassing who said they couldn’t make up their minds “because all politicians are saying the same thing”. On that logic it is especially difficult for us as we are most likely to be delivering our manifesto commitments in coalition with another party, so things that are highly distinctive are also things we might struggle to get into a coalition agreement (as happened with tuition fees last time).
I’ve found myself moving from what we will do that is different, to what are the core values that animate us. That’s not to wriggle away from policy, but is to articulate something quite fundamental that we will bring to the process of forming a new government, from which the policy ideas flow.
In the Sunday Times (£ – Phwah!), Peter Kellner predicts 32 seats for the Lib Dems, which is in line with Stephen Tall’s long-standing projection.
But the overall seat projection from Kellner puts us in rather different waters than other projections. The Guardian’s projection, for example, has pointed almost constantly to a Labour minority government with SNP support.
On the last Sunday before the election, here’s a quick selection of the must-reads from the Sunday papers. Five years ago on this Sunday, we woke up to favourable comments in the Observer and Scotland on Sunday. Would anyone recommend voting for us today or would the papers revert tot type?
The Observer, presumably for its own reasons, has a very unbalanced look at coalition options after the election for the Liberal Democrats. The article barely even looks at a deal with Labour and has a number of sitting MPs, including David Ward, saying that the coalition with the Tories might continue. They might have done well to look at my article on the party’s processes so that they didn’t assume that it was all in the MPs’ gift. Oh, and a member of the LDV team gets quoted.
In news that will surprise nobody, the Observer backs Labour. Unlike its sister paper, though, which advised tactical voting for the Lib Dems in places like the South West, the leader ostentatiously ignores us.
Funnily enough, the Sunday Times (£) talks up Liberal Democrats slating the Tories to try to persuade Tory voters not to vote tactically.
Clegg has said he will deal first with the largest party, but in a sign that a repeat of the coalition may be difficult the Lib Dem Tim Farron last night warned that his party should be prepared to “walk away” if it does not get what it wants, branding Conservative instincts as “wicked”.
He said a Tory government without the Lib Dems would be “a horror story”, creating an “uncivilised” country “that we should be ashamed of”.
Farron said his party would inject “compassion and basic humanity and civilisation into an otherwise wicked Tory administration
In news which will surprise nobody, the paper backs the Tories but urges Tory voters in Lib Dem Labour marginals to vote tactically for the Liberal Democrat.
But Peter Kellner finds room to hope for Liberal Democrats, finding strong recovery in key seats.
We find that Conservative support is holding up better in the party’s key marginal seats than in the rest of the country, and also that the Liberal Democrats are recovering strongly, albeit from a low base, in the seats they are defending.
The upshot is that I have increased the number of seats that I expect the Lib Dems to hold, and reduced the number of seats that Labour is likely to gain from the Conservatives.
Prince William and Nick Clegg have chosen very similar attire today. Quite uncanny.
How Prince William prepared for the birth of #RoyalBaby number two http://t.co/MYycmPXOET pic.twitter.com/t8abK6Z0MM
— The Times of London (@thetimes) May 2, 2015
Alex Salmond must have been too busy with his book signings to actually check his facts. Literature going out in his name in the Gordon constituency makes some interesting, and easily disprovable claims. From the Scotsman:
Free personal care and the Scotland-wide free bus travel pass scheme was brought in by the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition which preceded the current SNP administration at Holyrood. But literature being distributed by Mr Salmond’s campaign team in Gordon claims the SNP “led the way” on this policy.
Even for Salmond that is a cheek, as our candidate Christine Jardine pointed out:
Experience has taught us that Alex Salmond sometimes has problems remembering the fine detail of the actualité, but, even by his standards, these are blatant untruths. It’s typical of the SNP’s attempts to rewrite history, but I’m confident that voters in Gordon will see past these false claims and remember that the Lib Dems have a genuine record of working with like-minded colleagues to deliver real improvements
We thought they’d done well persuading John Cleese to have dinner with a lucky donor to the party. And it’s a miracle that some of us have any cash left. However, now that payday has arrived, they’ve found another cunning plan to entice us to donate even more. Only dinner with Hugh flipping Grant.
Hot on the heels of his tweet endorsing Danny Alexander the other, he’s now offering to have dinner with the lucky winner drawn from those who donate to the party before Monday night.
What would you ask him? One of my favourite scenes in film ever is the fight scene from Bridget Jones’ Diary when he and Colin Firth slugged it out in a restaurant to “It’s Raining Men”. I’d want to ask him about that after, of course, something worthy about Leveson.
In an email to party members, Grant said he was full of admiration for the way Nick Clegg had stood up to the Tories over Leveson:
I am not a Lib Dem, a Tory a Labourite or anything in particular but I recognise political guts when I see it. And I know Nick Clegg was prepared to stand up to the Tories when they wanted to ignore or water down the Leveson Report. For that he gets a lot of abuse in the Tory press. But he was right to do it. And the manifesto is very clear, not only that Leveson should be delivered, but that it should be done while boosting investigative journalism with more protections.
So I am happy to help make this election a fairer fight.
I can bore to death any lucky winner of this draw on the detail of the Leveson Report and effect of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. Or we can just talk about me and all my problems.
If you want to take part in this amazing offer, click here.
An article on the Huffngton Post looks at Nick Clegg’s communications skills. It’s all about the eyebrows, apparently:
Nick Clegg faces a virtual mission impossible in this general election campaign – but if anything can save him and his party from electoral oblivion, it’s his eyebrows.
That’s right. His eyebrows. They’re the key to understanding why, despite being a figure of derision, the deputy prime minister’s communication skills remain some of the most polished out there.
Clegg uses his eyebrows better than any of the other party leaders when he wants to use emphasis to make a point. Raising the eyebrows is a very primitive gesture indicating interest in a particular fact or statement. And Clegg always has a slightly raised eyebrow look which opens his face up.
Compare him to David Cameron, whose face is so tense he can barely muster a convincing smile. The prime minister always seems quite severe, whereas Clegg is more open facially and appears more likable as a result.
They look at other aspects of his communication skills:
Jonny Smith, the principal character in Stephen King’s ‘The Dead Zone’, awakes from a coma with the power to see into a person’s future by touching them.
It starts in hospital where he forsees a nurse’s house is on fire with her child in it.
His premonition is correct and the child is saved.
He becomes a national celebrity and is able to help the police solve a serious crime in a rural backwater.
However when he turns his attention to politicians, the fun really starts.
The novel was written in the 1970’s, the era of Nixon, Ford and Carter.
Smith encounters candidate Carter on the campaign trail, shakes his hand and sees that the peanut farmer will become President but encounters no feelings of malevolence.
The Liberal Democrats have produced a series of 20 videos giving snippets of our manifesto in BSL. We are the first major party to do so. The full list is here.
We’ll also put them up on here in batches over the next wee while. If you want to see all our posts, just click on the bsl tag at the bottom of this post.
In this post, you will find young people, immigration and housing
Congratulations to George Murray, whose Marauding Fullbacks (2,064 points) continue to top the LibDemVoice Fantasy Football League after Week 34, almost 100 points ahead of Jon Featonby’s What bitey racist (1,966)? They think it’s all over…
But let’s also hear it for three players outside the top 10: Robbie Cowbury’s Resplendent Quetzals had the best week’s performance, with 88 points. Honourable mentions go to Louis Urruty’s Louis’ XI and Henry Compson’s Status:Relegated, both with 86 points.
There are 163 players in total and you can still join the league …
Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day 2015. It’s the tenth annual day for disabled and non-disabled people to blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination (known as disablism or ableism). It aims to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made.
An online acquaintance of mine said he was going to write for #BADD2015 in terms of the political parties’ manifestos. Good Lib Dem that I am, I looked forward to hearing some positive stuff about my party. I know there’s lots to talk about.
The Lib Dems have budgeted the £8 billion a year the NHS will need during the next parliament, which is bound to be relevant to the lives of people with disabilities and other long-term conditions, as many of us do seem to see doctors, nurses and specialists often enough to be on a first-name basis with many of them!
The Lib Dems’ unique dedication to improving mental health care is also relevant to many disabled people, both those whose disability is primarily or entirely a matter of mental illness, and those who experience poor mental health as a result of other disabilities. Mental illnesses are some of the most common, and most “invisible,” disabilities in the UK, and at the moment the mental health care many people receive (or fail to) not only doesn’t help them but can actually make their mental health worse.
As Simon Kelner says in today’s i newspaper, electoral reform has “played absolutely zero part in this election campaign”, though it “goes to the very essence of our democracy”.
In what has been described as a lottery election, we need to be prepared for any of the diverse opportunities for electoral reform that may open up. One thing that does seem almost certain is that the result itself will provide strong evidence of the need for change, with hugely varying seat/vote ratios. Current polls suggest the following: Conservatives and Labour each with only a third of the votes but over 40% of seats; Liberal Democrats with 4% of seats from 8% of the votes while the SNP have the reverse; and UKIP and the Greens with a combined vote of 15-20%, yet less than 1% of seats between them.
What type of negotiations might there be? A key distinction is between any possible long term agreement – that is, for the duration of the parliament – such as a formal coalition, and a short term agreement that allows a minority government to take office, winning the vote on a Queen’s Speech and any ensuing vote of confidence.
For any formal agreement, STV for local government in England and Wales should be a Liberal Democrat red line. With the Conservatives, we could agree on further devolved powers for Scotland and Wales, but their other constitutional manifesto aims, “English Votes for English Laws” and “reduce and equalise constituencies”, are much more problematic because we have very different ideas on both issues. A formal agreement on constitutional reform with Labour should be easier: their constitutional manifesto aims are all ones we can agree with: more devolved powers, a constitutional convention, replacing the House of Lords with an elected senate, and votes for 16 and 17-year olds.
I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the prospect of SNP MPs at Westminster is being treated in the English media.
My fear is that the SNP is being demonised in a way that undermines the future of the United Kingdom by bracketing the SNP and the Scots together and demonising both.
I’ve heard many stories from people in Scotland of the bitter taste left by the Thatcher years, when the Tories foisted the poll tax first on the Scots, smashed industry and caused mass unemployment. All this led to a Tory wipeout in 1997 and they still have only 1 MP in Scotland, although they do have a sizeable contingent at Holyrood due to PR.
Both the SNP and Plaid Cymru pushed an anti-austerity agenda in the television debates. This chimes in with resentment at austerity across the UK but doesn’t make economic sense: cutting too much chokes (as the Tories propose) off growth, but letting the deficit grow undermines financial stability in a way that is just as dangerous. They both have a purchase on Labour because they chime in with Labour’s left wing.
The sociology seems complex, both within and between the countries of the UK, but short circuiting with cheap shots such as adverts showing Ed Milliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket, can only fuel resentment.
An interesting snippet from the Guardian’s snap ICM poll (22:15) after the Question Time for Leaders last night. They didn’t find ever so many people who’s minds had been changed about how they were going to vote by the event, but of those who were, most were leaning towards Nick Clegg:
Relatively few votes are likely to have been changed by the evening: only 6% of the sample indicated that their mind had been changed by what they saw, as against 87% who said it would make no difference to how they voted. Among this small sub-sample, of 79 respondents, Clegg did the best – with 32% of switchers indicating that they might now lean Lib Dem, as against 25% who said Conservative, and just 20% who said Labour.
The Independent found someone who had been impressed:
“I’ve never considered voting Lib Dem until tonight” says audience member, 25-year-old Matthew Coucill. #bbcqt pic.twitter.com/SlhXB7R3pt
— Indy Politics (@IndyPolitics) April 30, 2015
I had a message from one of Nick Clegg’s sternest critics within the party just after the debate. I have rarely heard this person say a good word about our leader. Their words to me: “Nick Clegg smashed it tonight.” If he can win this person over, the rest of the country should be a doddle.
Cameron is being tipped the winner of the event, but how can he be when he just stonewalled on the issue of welfare cuts. You wouldn’t buy a new house without knowing whether it had central heating or electricity so why would you trust a man who has promised tax cuts for the richest but can’t tell you which of the poorest he’s going to make pay for it. Or won’t.
I am unilaterally declaring this day Celebrate your Lib Dem Organiser Day. It’s 6 days out, most will be surviving on energy drinks and riso ink fumes and there’s still a big push to come.
Not only will they be sorting out the canvassing packs and delivery runs for the weekend, they will be organising polling day, making sure all the committee rooms are well equipped, that there are enough people around to get all the jobs done. Making sure our voters get to the polls is absolutely critical over the next few days. If you haven’t already arranged to do so, make an organiser’s life easier by helping out in one of our target seats so that we can make absolutely sure that we can say at 10pm on Thursday night that we couldn’t possibly have done any more.
Our organisers have been laying the foundation for this campaign for a very long time. It’s not been 38 days at full pelt, it’s been more like 450. They’ve been building the team, recruiting members, leading the door-knocking, keeping the candidates sane, organising the stake boards, designing the literature, meeting all sorts of unreasonable deadlines which require pulling all-nighters. There is a weird law of nature that stipulates that the bigger the delivery that arrives at the office, the fewer people are there to receive it, so when 40,000 tabloids arrive, they often have to lug them all into the office by themselves. And not all offices are on the ground floor. They have eaten, slept, breathed this election with little time for anything else like having a life.
Ed,
Yesterday on Question Time, you said, as you have said many times during this campaign:
There are some people who tell you that the way we succeed as a country is as long as a few people at the top do well and large corporations, that’s what powers the economy…
Here’s a good question, which you’ll be glad I asked you: Who are these people who tell us this? Have we heard of any of them? Are they standing for election? Can you give us a direct quote or two?
If you woke up in the middle of the night, chances are you might have heard in the distance a rhythmic humming heartbeat sound. That would be the risograph* in a Liberal Democrat key seat churning out leaflets with this quote from the Financial Times:
The country would benefit from the countervailing force of Lib Dem moderation at Westminster. In seats where the Lib Dems are the incumbent or the main challenger, we would vote tactically for them.
The paper was far from complimentary about the Tories’ divisive strategy. I guess the last thing they want to do is refer to the fact that the coalition has actually worked well:
Five years ago, the prospect of coalition government attracted dire predictions of instability in markets and gridlock at Westminster. Neither proved true. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has shown European-style cohabitation can work. Curiously, Mr Cameron has not trumpeted its successes. He has preferred to wage a campaign of fear. Labour, he argues, would prove untrustworthy on the economy; and a Labour government would be held hostage by a separatist Scottish National party. The risk of a cross-border leftist alliance is not negligible; but even some Tories worry that its invocation encourages English nationalism.
The FT essentially wants to see a continuation of the current economic strategy which is far from being a Tory-only creation. We all remember what generally happens when the Tories are left in charge during a recession. The 80’s, anyone? In this instance, the Liberal Democrats have ensured a properly national recovery from a massive economic event which could have plunged us into an appalling depression.
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