United Kingdom General Elections: December 12th, 2019

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Johnson's approvals are also very poor for an incumbent PM, and the direction of travel is horrific. So this is a rather strange and curious situation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Johnson's approvals are also very poor for an incumbent PM, and the direction of travel is horrific. So this is a rather strange and curious situation.

You sure about that? BoJo's kept treading water between a small positive and negative, arguably very good for a polarizing time. Not as good as May's honeymoon, but the honeymoon is over for both at this comparitive time. Corbyn needs no introduction. Johnson's only good attribute is that he's a master at crafting a persona that gets people to like him.

Ipsos-MORI's today has him dropping to -20, down from +2 in like a month. That's not great.

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https://mobile.twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1203004409304821760

Essentially stable on last week, of course. Swing of up to 3.5 on 2017.*

_{*'Up to' because the Conservative percentage landed on the 43.4: a pollster's 43% but which could easily be a pollsters 44%.}

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Jewish voting patterns in Britain are a real mess to understand because the community is very small and very fragmented; there isn't even really a 'mainstream' in the sense that there is in the USA for instance. There is a major division between Secular and Orthodox, and (of course) a high proportion of the latter are Hasidic and have to be seen as a separate grouping; there are also very important regional differences - London Jewry is different to Manchester Jewry which is very different to Hertfordshire Jewry etc. Surveys over the years have often shown wildly different results depending on their method (broadly speaking: when a very tight definition that is basically religious in character is used, you get a heavily Conservative result, when a broader definition is used this is generally very much not the case. There's no reason to assume that both 'types' of survey are incompatible, but, please, for God's sake try only to compare like with like). The electoral system also confuses things, as there is (in a General Election at least) never a party ballot or single nationwide candidate to vote for and as all British minorities are much more conditional in their support for any party than the majority population: the right candidate can change preferences easily, as can the wrong candidate.

What makes it all even more of a mess is that we do not have much in the way of local breakdown of results here. Data lower than ward level is never collected (let alone published) and ward level information mostly only exists from local elections (some ward results were released from some local authorities at the last General Election; the only one relevant to this discussion was Camden, which includes Hampstead). The small size of the community becomes an issue again, as does the fact that the different parts of it have different geographies (the usual pattern: the Secular tend to disperse, the Orthodox concentrate).

Anyway, it's fairly clear that at least a plurality of Jewish voters in 1997 and 2001 went with Labour (quite probably, and very unusually, with a higher share in 2001 than 1997) and that things would have been rather tight in 2005.* In 2010 it is unlikely that the Jewish electorate was much worse for Labour than the national electorate. Since then relations have obviously deteriorated significantly. A notable thing is that while wards with large Orthodox populations are often strongly Conservative they usually give strikingly low shares of the poll to other parties of the political Right. Historically it was also the case that very affluent wards with large Orthodox populations often elected Liberal councillors or sometimes came close to doing so; this largely died out over the past twenty years, but maybe we'll see a return to form. It seems that ChangeUK did quite well with Jewish voters in the Mickey Mouse European elections this summer, presumably because Berger was a member at the time.

_{*A curiosity is that on neither occasion when a major party's candidate for Prime Minister happened to be Jewish (Howard in 2005, Miliband in 2015) did that party appear to benefit particularly or at all with Jewish voters. Of course Howard's links to the wider community have always been weak (and he spent his career emphaising his minority status as a Welshman rather than as a Jew), while Miliband is from a secular academic-Left part of the community that is quite distant from the rest of it these days.}

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Basically two polls with different methodologies by the same polling firm, in part (though not totally) conducted over the same period of time. A bit weird, but I suppose not unuseful.

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Most constituency polls this election have been commissioned by clients with obvious agendas. I shall say no more.

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Looking over the general weekend glut there does appear to be some (relatively mild) herding going on, with a couple of exceptions. A general consensus on a swing somewhere in the region of 3.0 to 4.5. Of course this useless electoral system means in terms of seats that's quite a wide region. And they may be wrong, and things may move in the week. Who knows.

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Note that this was done around the same time as the rest of the weekend poll glut, even if it has been published later. It's actually quite interesting that there has been no consistent pattern of movement across said poll glut this weekend. Put them all together and we have swings of 2.5 to 6.5, with the overwhelming majority (as previously noted) towards the middle of that.

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You can read too much into this sort of thing, but from the tone of some of their tweets and the little summary article they put together, Survation don't seem to be particularly happy with the sample for that poll. A lot of emphasis put on it being 'just a snapshot' and so on - familiar euphemisms. Such things do, of course, happen - they are even statistically unavoidable.

Of course the very odd and abnormal nature of so much of this election means that it technically isn't impossible that a sample that seems to stink isn't bad. Who knows.

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How much damage can the Brexit Party do to Labour?

No one really knows what their impact will be, in any sense.

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Given that the poll suggests a swing of around 6pts and most of the seats in question have 2017 majorities that would fall at pretty much that exact point, I'm not sure how you get to 'this poll suggests no chance at holding any' from that?

Anyway, Welsh polling is historically very volatile - it can sometimes be about right, but it can also be quite badly off and in all potential directions.

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So this happened today.

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High Peak is mostly old mill towns on the fringe of the Manchester conurbation. Very few people live in the touristy parts.

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I would caution against over-analysing any of the shifts shown in individual constituencies in any of the various MRPs around now - by definition they won't mean much at all except in aggregate.

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Seeing Skinner go down would be a Portillo moment though.

The thing about that was that Portillo was a high profile cabinet minister, widely understood to be on the cusp of launching a leadership bid. He was also thought to be safe enough, that area being very different twenty two years ago (yes we're old) to what it is like today.

Whereas the potential loss of Bolsover has been heavily trailed across the media for months. And, bluntly, while Skinner used to be one of Labour's highest profile backbenchers, on the telly all the time, these days he is not. I suspect that a lot of people would be surprised to find he was still around and still running for election.

But in the end this sort of thing does not matter. Michael Portillo is, I gather, doing fine now. So is Ed Balls.

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Corbyn... I can’t see much contrition coming from him.

None whatsoever, actually.

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A lot them didn't switch to the Tories with Johnson - the Tory vote went up less than 400,000. Many of them just stayed at home.

Or voted for minor parties of various hues. I suspect - well I already have a lot of anecdotal evidence for this - that a lot of people of that political heritage went into the polling booth intending to vote Labour and found they couldn't and just marked a cross elsewhere almost randomly...

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There were clear increases in tory vote

No one is saying otherwise. Do they not teach reading comprehension in Australia?

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1. Sutton & Devonport is a university constituency, while Mercer has been a high profile and unorthodox parliamentarian of the sort that can outperform in good years for his party.

2. Corbyn is hated in most places, of course, but he does seem to be particularly unpopular in the outlying parts of the Midlands. I was about to note that this is ironic as he's actually from an outlying part of the Midlands (East Shropshire), but, of course, that is almost certainly a subconscious reason not an irony. The level of electoral consolidation has been so rapid that one cannot point to any long-term factor, though the Potteries are certainly becoming much more 'normal' economically and socially than they once were. Also worth observing that a lot of these places are notably fertile recruiting grounds for the armed forces - something that is also true of South Yorkshire and the North East, of course.

3. Around ten points, not twenty. But why should, for instance, retired Sikh foundry workers not have the same melancholic feeling that 'Labour is not Labour' as other groups of people who are so similar in all respects but one? British Indian voters are individuals too and have agency.

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Examples of now Tory seats which are at least partly driven by long term demographic change include Bishop Auckland, the S Yorkshire "Valley" seats, and of course the much mythologised Bolsover.

(and this sort of thing is not new - when George Brown lost Belper in 1970, his comment that "its not the Belper I knew anymore" was more than just the sentimentality that he was prone to indulge in)

Though in the case of Bolsover it's mostly demographic change of a different sort and a massive electoral backlash against it. Shirebrook is about a quarter Eastern European by some estimates now.

Of course in all cases these are background factors that lead to increased vulnerability in bad circumstances; it isn't as if any of these issues have emerged over the past two years, or even the past five. Although I'll accept that the intensity of the backlash radiating out from Shirebrook like one of those Cold War fallout maps kind of has increased quite a bit during the latter period.

Mind you, there's no reason why new build areas in some of these places should be so hostile to Labour; they are generally not that affluent. This takes us back to Mr Tony who, of course, based so much of his strategy around the changes he could see in his own constituency (which, ah, yes, right). He's unfashionable now, and that's entirely his own fault, but on that... he had a point.

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Obviously describing a constituency that Labour held by far less than it 'ought' to rather than one lost, but Jarvis's piece here is actually not bad at all. I mean there's a bit of a HE'S RUNNING vibe, but ignore that.

Interesting that he should highlight bad tempers and physical risk to activists, something that we know was an issue up and down the country this time. On this matter I have something optimistic to say. This was the case in the Coupon Election a hundred and one years ago, which was actually also fought in December. Even in South Wales, Labour activists were spat at in the street and beaten up, such was the mood at the time. Four years later many of the people who did the spitting and the beating were voting Labour, one year after that the party formed its first government.

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Ipsos-MORI's breakdowns have arrived. They are far from perfect, but they are generally considered to be more reliable than those produced by other polling firms.

Anyway, here's the link.

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As well as that there has also been a clear structural decline in turnout following the departure of the Wartime generation, which was unusually political for fairly obvious reasons. As well as being much more partisan than subsequent generations, so electoral volatility has increased as well.

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Sometimes we can forget the obvious because it is almost too obvious: Boris Johnson has repeatedly made unpleasant remarks about Liverpool over the years, and this fact is not unknown in the city or the wider region.

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The same factors as everywhere else, but intensified by a couple of local factors: Ian Austin's intervention really cut through in the end,* and there was a lot of outrage about the selections in the West Bromwich seats, particularly East. I also suspect that Labour were simply not prepared for any large scale loss of support from British Indian voters (white tribal Labour voters in the Black Country have always been volatile, of course, even if this was a uniquely terrible performance on that front) and were left completely clueless as to what to do when it became clear that it was happening.

_{*And maybe Gisela Stuart's did as well. Never a Black Country politician,  of course, but she has a high profile throughout the conurbation and was always well-liked.}