The Guardian has this morning published an ICM poll which makes good reading for the Conservatives nationally, as well as in Kingston & Surbiton. ICM does not normally show Tory leads (last time was during the fuel crisis in 2000) but this one is a good lead that widens were Gordon Brown PM. The really bad news is for the Lib Dems. I quote an extract below:
“ICM finds that a majority (63%) of Lib Dem voters see Mr Cameron as a potential prime minister who could change the way they feel about the Tories - and almost half (46%) might consider voting for him.”
It also finds that:
“With Mr Brown in charge of Labour, the Tory lead widens to 41% to 36% with the Lib Dems on 18% as they lose votes back to Tory candidates.”
Clearly we should not get carried away as some of this is the inevitable bounce of a new leader. However, the temperature has changed. People of all parties are very much more disposed to the Conservatives than I can remember.
Were the results above to happen at a General Election the result in Kingston & Surbiton would be very interesting. Using Antony Little’s election prediction website, based on a universal swing, the results nationally and for Kingston & Surbiton are detailed above. The only seats in the South, home counties and the South West that the Lib Dems would hold are Southwark and Cambridge. It really does show just a small % of very soft Lib Dem votes moving to us would change the landscape. No wonder their MP’s are panicking! The amazing thing, of course, is that even with this result we are still not the largest party. However, as I said, this result is based on a universal swing across the country and we should not get carried away.
5 comments:
"I have lived in Kingston and Surbiton my entire life."
Well, you ought to get out more then. Especially if you believe in UNS.
UNS?
'The amazing thing, of course, is that even with this result we are still not the largest party'
Glad to see you're coming round to supporting proportional representation...
Not convinced by PR I am afraid.
Do believe that something needs to be done about creating more evenly sized constituencies.
Of course what the calculator does not do is also take into account the new boundaries which Peter Kellner reckons, on the current Parliament, will add about a dozen mopre seats to the conservatives.
Evenly sized constituencies wouldn't actually change the position that much. There are about 67,000 voters in Labour seats and about 73,000 in yours (in between for Lib Dems as usual!). Correcting that (which is more or less what the review does) would give you a two seat lead which is paltry in the face of what would be a huge opinion poll lead. In fact I suspect seats like Kingston would not in fact fall due to incumbancy so you probably wouldn't have a lead at all - but of course I may be wrong and we shall see.
In that context, I really think the Tories ought to be giving serious thought to PR. The idea that seat population is your difficulty is basically an urban myth among Conservatives and your real problem is distribution of votes - the fact that you stack up decent votes in hopeless seats whereas Labour, even in government are down at the 10% mark in many Tory/Lib marginals.
As an established supporter of PR, I would obviously say that your focus on disparities in seat size which is on average pretty trivial is odd when the really big disparity is simply in the number of Libs, Labs and Tories it took to elect a Lib, Lab or Tory MP. But even if you reject that, which I am sure you do, the fact that FPTP has an in-built imbalance against you even ignoring the population issue is cause for concern.
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