Well done for dismissing polices without knowing what they are

Which, exactly, have I dismissed?

Many people will indeed need to vote for “the 2nd worst” if they want to avoid the worst.

Or of course, many people could vote for their preferred option and maybe get they want.

Fptp doesn’t necessitate tactical voting, the inadequacies of the system are exacerbated by it, not improved.

Look at the polices and look at how they are good for the average person. Look at Tory policies and see how they are not as good for the average person.

Yet time after time, Conservative government. One of three things is at play there:
A) You’re wrong about who is average and what’s good for them
B) you’re right, and they’re wrong about what’s good for them
C) Every average person who votes tory does so simply because they like the colour blue

I think perhaps we’re accrediting the bulk of the populace with too much in the way of considered thought.

Over here we’re debating the nuances of policies, parties, politicians, campaigns and the B-word. But my day-to-day experience is that the majority of people who actually bother to vote in the first place will simply vote in the way they always have. Given everything that’s happened in the last three years, how many people have actually changed their minds? Some have for sure, but not many.

I see it with otherwise politically aligned groups of people, even. I’m a member of a Remain echo-chamber group on Facebook. Everyone agrees with everything all the time, until someone mentions a specific party and then it’s all “Iraq war” and “tuition fees” inside of three posts. You could have one party pledging to abolish taxation and another saying they were going to bring about mandatory executions for the over 60s and a lot of folk would still vote for “their” party regardless.

I can’t immediately think of one which isn’t one of those three in a fancy frock.

Well we can start off with how many people actually know what a parties policies are vs how they have been reported in the press.
There are several interesting studies looking at the difference between showing a list of policies to people with just “party a”, “party b” and so on vs the same list with the proper names attached.
They all show a mismatch between the two.

Mostly B I reckon.

Despite all protestations to the contrary most folk still vote with their wallets and believe that tax cuts will benefit them and not disadvantage them in some other way.

Having listened to Grandads speech I can’t disagree with the policies. He’s right about most things. I’d question where the forest of money trees are going to come from to pay for it all, but Joris Bohnson is promising to spray money around like a pissed sailer on shore leave himself.

But, as usual, the presentation was dreadful. And the rhetoric at the end was awful too. He just can’t help himself. Its sixth form level ranting about lefty bogeymen.

The team around Corbyn have got to realise that it may go down a storm on the Momentum Twitter feed, but the BBC World at One opened with reporting of “Jeremy Corbyn’s message of class war…” which is really off-putting for an awful lot of people, and an absolute gift to the Daily Mail et al

If he wants to be taken seriously then all that common room/red flag/chanting stuff needs turning down as its just detracting from policies that should be a no brainer to everybody but the very rich

Again binners… there are two big groups of voters he needs to win over… those that have a quick look through the policies and choose to support Labour based on what they see (this happened in 2017 when the manifesto was ‘released’, so will be a big part of the 2019 campaign)… and those that need a popularist narrative with elite bogeymen (this will be the other part of the 2019 campaign, like it or not). The tricky point will be to prevent this two pronged attack from cancelling itself out with a lot of voters. That may well prove to be impossible, but at this point, with this timetable, and these people, it has to be tried, doesn’t it?

You’d have to be pretty dense to fall for Boris Johnson positioning himself against ‘the Elite’. He’s the dictionary definition of it.

That’s not what he’s trying to do though. His aim is more narrow. The narrative is specifically targeted against an obstructive ‘remainer’ parliament which is standing in the way of the ‘will of the people’.

The self-serving mop’s aim isn’t what Corbyn describes as ‘the elite’ ie wealth and privilidge – of which Johnson is the living embodiement. ‘The Enemy’ is whats envisaged by the daily Mail as some Guardian-reading, socially liberal, pro-immigrant socialist sat around their Islington townhouse eating their organic free-trade hummus, who are standing in the way of Brexit and the ‘will of the people’.

That’s their ‘elite’, and they’re going to be in attack mode with that narrative for the next 6 weeks.

Its a dangerous game, but he doesn’t care about that. It could, hopefully, be countter-productive though by alienating a lot of more moderate Tory voters who’ll probably vote Lib Dem instead. That could lose them a lot of traditional Tory seats in the south where people are more socially liberal.

Answer: Nothing. It was embarrassing.

Well generally the actual answer from all parties is “take large donations from them/give them a job as a special adviser” which is much more embarrassing in an election campaign.

They are not ‘helping Jacob Rees Mogg’, they are just being more appealing to that particular electorate than the labour party, in this instance, in a bid to win the seat from the Tories

Flawed.

Who wants a party that makes a stand to appeal to the electorate?

That’s marketeering.

Come up with your policies, have an ideologically consistent footing and tell it like it is.

Let the electorate decide.

Anyway the tide is turning on the Let’s Blame Corbyn channel – plenty of listeners seeing right through Swindleson and the centrists.

Labour are shifting the debate away from Brexit and people aren’t buying the status quo of other policies from the right.

when you listen to what he says it makes complete sense rather than when you listen to what someone’s version of what he says.

Not what I meant. There are Labour policies I disagree with, but he rightly focused on the right ones to campaign with, in my opinion. He stuck to some “big changes” that are required ASAP and are supported by a broad base of voters.

That’s marketeering.

In different seats different approaches are required to unseat Conservative MPs. Call it “marketeering” if you want, but the LibDems can win over voters in some currently Tory held seats that the current version of the Labour Party (that I am voting for) can not. Leave them to it. Concentrate on Labour target seats.

Who wants a party that makes a stand to appeal to the electorate?

This is kinda how democracy works, though. If your policies appeal to enough people, you get to enact them. If they appeal to only a small slice of the electorate, the few rather than the many, to coin a phrase, you don’t.

wearing an NHS branded white coat,

It’s almost as if Boris knows how to win an election. Unless the coat in question was covered in loads of handily placed straps and buckles.

Binners may be right but most of the calls on LBC this aft have been supporting what Corbyn said and saying they will vote Labour, including some Tories. The few anti-voices were a standard Brexit loon that was never going to vote Labour anyway and some confused bloke saying he agreed with what was said but was going to vote Tory because a Corbyn gov would mean he had to leave the country as it would be taken over by raving anti-Semites. He went on to say he didn’t agree with the Tories but a Lid Dem vote would be a waste. Funny old game.

Concentrate on Labour target seats.

You best sit down. Here’s a little reminder that the people around Corbyn are still the same muppets they’re always been. Ahem….

There are no target seats.

Ultra-Corbynite numbskull ‘Chief of Staff’ Karie Murphy was shifted out of Corbyns office after widely being held responsible for the conference debacle of trying to get rid of Tom Watson. She was shifted to somewhere where she couldn’t do any damage – head of electoral strategy.

When she arrived, she let it be known that there would not be specific target seats – for example seats with a narrow Tory majority – but that all seats would be contested equally.

So somewhere in the stockbroker belt in Surrey, where the labour party recieved 12 votes at the last election, will be getting the same staffing and resources as the key marginal with the most wafter thin of Tory majorities

Absolute ****ing genius!

And due to all the reselection/trigger ballot nonsense, some constituancies still don’t have a labour candidate yet.

From Andrew Rawnsley last week:

Jennie Formby, the party’s general secretary, was asked how many constituencies still hadn’t selected a candidate and which ones were on the key seat list. I’m told that she couldn’t answer either question.’

You couldn’t make it up. The Labour party hierarchy have still got that 12-bore aimed sqaurely at their own feet and are getting an itchy trigger finger. Their policies might be potentially popular, but the people around Corbyn are still the same blithering incompetents

Did you miss the 2016 campaign v8? The NHS logo appeared on Leave battle buses

It’s one thing (and bad enough) hijacking the generic NHS logo, quite another to wear the uniform of a specific Trust. It’s suggestive that the NHS organisation supports and endorsed him, which crosses a line in my mind.

Anyone else listen to Corbyn’s speech

Can anyone find the actual text yet (not just a few sound bites) my Googling just returns his conference speech.

Yet the Daily Mail reporter was reasonably positive about Corbyn’s speech. Perhaps it was off-putting if you’re more right wing than the Daily Mail

Oddly the DM also has Labour much closer to the cons in their poll than either ipsos (eve standard) or yougov.

The Labour party hierarchy have still got that 12-bore aimed at their own feet and are getting an itchy trigger finger. Their policies might be potentially popular, but the people around Corbyn are still the same blithering incompetents

You assume close second isn’t the aim. In oposition you can have all the fancy policies you want without having to deliver. So long as corbyn doesn’t loose too badly he’ll likely keep his job as leader. Leave the tories in to shaft the country for a few more years and, when the next election comes around your policy of increasing the ration of smartprice beans for every household sounds very progressive and its actually deliverable.

It’s suggestive that the NHS organisation supports and endorsed him

To me it just suggests he was on one of their sites, no more no less. Same way I’d expect him to be wearing hiviz branded with the main contractor on a building site.

Traditional polls can’t get it right anymore so something is happening

Something I can actually add insight to!

The underlying problems of pre-election polling have always been there. The most significant one is FPTP as a voting system – what this means is that every seat is a separate election, and what happens in Mytown doesn’t affect the result in Yourtown.

For polling, proportional representation is easy: if 35% of Brits vote Tory, Tories will get something related to 35% of seats. You then pick a sample of 2,000 people across the country to survey, controlling for things like age, gender, socio-economics, do some analysis, and have an answer: Tories will win 35% of seats.

FPTP is much more difficult, because to do it right, you have to survey 2,000 people in EACH SEAT, controlling for age, gender etc. Which is basically impossible. Lord Ashcroft has tried, but his sample sizes are too small, and his results no better than the rest.
In the past, polling firms could cover this up by applying various rules of thumb, like landowners vote Tory, young people are more labour-leaning, etc. Politics now has fragmented to such an extent that the Tories aren’t “for those with money”, and Labour isn’t “for those who want redistribution”, but instead candidate personality is a huge factor, and views on Brexit, large-scale renationalisation, racism, anti-Semitism etc all play a part. And you just can’t model that across 400 individual seats.

The best polling companies can do is say “we were right, 35% of people voted Tory!!” – and you then point out “yeah, but that bears no relation to the fact that Lib Dems and Greens now have a majority in parliament, you cretins”.

If you haven’t sworn at the radio today then tune into LBC at 6pm as Nigel Farage drops to his knees and fellates trump for an interview about life, the universe and everything, no doubt the sound quality will experience drop outs as I imagine Farage will be so far up trumps arse he’ll be cosying up to his colon.

I actually think Farage is moderating his polemic as he shapes himself for a broadcast career now.

Less shouty these days.