United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

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It is worth noting that polling in the runup to the 1997 GE was ruthlessly, brutally accurate on the Conservative vote. The Labour leads were generally too large, but that was because it was difficult at the time to get a handle on the exact balance between Labour and smaller opposition parties, such was the level of tactical voting.

That isn't to say that I think you can take an especially dire poll for the government (as this one is) and declare that the Con vote at the GE will be +/- 2pts of what it shows, it is just that I would be a bit more obviously concerned than we're seeing much of from government MPs or the broadly pro-government bits of the media landscape.

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Plaid on 50% in Ynys Môn, reasonable

No it's not, they've never even got close to that there.

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Oh, BES data. It's, frankly, more than a bit crap and really only carries on because it has for so long, but the general direction of travel is probably about right even if the actual numbers themselves are not to be trusted.

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As I've noted before, the biggest single mystery of this election looks (at present) to be the performance of the Conservatives in Scotland: it is quite plausible that it may be a rare ray of light in an otherwise extremely bleak night, but it is equally plausible that they might get wiped out again, and I'm not sure if we'll get a clear indication either way until the votes start to be counted.

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Different polling firms often show quite different patterns, and (for whatever reason) YouGov's have shown a particularly extreme one for age for quite some time. This may relate to their surveying methods (though, for a complicated set of other reasons, this does not actually invalidate headline polling numbers).

Anyway, what is true regardless is that a certain proportion of people over a certain age (not everyone! Not a majority! Not close to it!) did very well out of now phased-out workplace pension schemes and consequentially swung about a mile to the right on retirement. Government policies have also tended to insulate, again especially better off, pensioners from economic shocks and from the impact of the austerity policies that characterized the first half of the Conservatives now long stint in power.

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Anyway, what is true regardless is that a certain proportion of people over a certain age (not everyone! Not a majority! Not close to it!) did very well out of now phased-out workplace pension schemes and consequentially swung about a mile to the right on retirement.

Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that every British-based poster here will know at least one person like this, and probably multiple.

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I found the Leader of the Opposition rankings fascinating -- Britain didn't have a Watergate, so what caused the enormous decline in trust for political figures in the late 1960s? Up to the 1966 election, all the premiers and opposition leaders (...except Attlee, who set up the NHS) are above water, but then in 1970 Wilson and Heath -- the same candidates as in 1966 -- have net negative approval. Starting with 1970, Britain has had 14 election years, but only four times did an incumbent have positive net approval (Thatcher in '83, Major in '92 -- why was Labour expected to win that one again? -- Blair in '01, and May in '17, which LOL), and only twice did an opposition leader have the approval of the public (Blair in '97 and Cameron in '10, which again LOL).

What changed in the late 1960s which seemed to cause such a dramatic decline in trust in the political class? Or is this just an artifact of the way the data is presented?

There are several issues here and they all need to be understood individually in order to make sense of the whole. The first is that face-to-face polling was the norm in Britain throughout the postwar decades and that, somewhat remarkably, there were still some holdouts in the industry into the 1980s. The second is the decline of deference and - perhaps more importantly in this context - of the perceived need to display deference during this period, a phenomenon that accelerated rapidly in the 1960s. Putting these two factors together without reference even to any other explains rather a lot, but a third factor is also critical: between the early 1950s and the early 1970s there was a continual and very obvious increase in material living standards for people of nearly all social classes in Great Britain, irrespective of the ups and downs of the economy (these often, in any case, deliberately engineered in order to produce pre-election economic booms). This tended to encourage high levels of satisfaction in the political system, though when there were downwards blips they could be oddly, but briefly, savage, perhaps due to the usual issues with face-to-face polling temporarily inverting. This was not the case after the economic shocks of the early and middle 1970s (which convinced many that politics could not solve their problems as the politicians themselves seemed frankly helpless) and this was not the case before the early 1950s. Politics during the late 1940s and early 1950s was incredibly (and for Britain uniquely) polarized, as in straitened circumstances the Attlee government had consistently taken the line that maintaining working class living standards was more important than returning middle class privileges taken away by the War and Austerity, with predictable political consequences in what was very much A Class Society (with all the implications of those capital letters) at the time: there is a reason why Britain managed to have turnouts of over 80% in 1950 and 1951 but never afterwards.

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You can tell that an election is in the offing when smaller parties start to commission constituency polls designed to push a particular local tactical message, lol. I may have a look at the guts later to see if there's anything especially amusing going on there.

I mean in theory those both should be PC seats after a upcoming election IMO.

No obvious reason why Anglesey should: the Plaid vote has been essentially flat there (in both raw and percentage terms) for twenty years now. It goes up a bit, it goes down a bit, but it's never that far from 10,000 votes and 30%. Broadly speaking, it tends to be the Conservative and Labour votes that fluctuate more there these days and there's often direct flow involved (especially on Holy Island and around Valley). Of course a score in that area can be just about enough to win on the Island, but there's no ought or should about anything.

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The Postwar norm was that a standard parliament should be four years with the fifth year as a 'reserve'.

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Remember though, and it is very important that people from countries where better data exists are aware of this, all demographic data on GB elections is pretty sketchy and a lot of it is actively bad.

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My observations would be that a) the genuinely posh make up a very small minority of the population in all age groups and that young ones will still be predominantly Conservative-voting even now, though losses to the LibDems will be significant as well, and that b) so few people will have switched from Labour to the Conservatives since 2019 that by definition they are going to be highly abnormal and unrepresentative in some way or another. I suspect that the bulk would be people who cast an angry protest vote over Brexit and have probably already forgotten that they did.

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How does this translate to a seat count? Tories in low double digits?

'Recount in Richmond (Yorks.) territory, essentially.

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No reason to believe that he's popular locally.

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I don’t see how Labour can win even the revised Montgomeryshire seat absent a total Tory wipeout (certainly the Tories hold it if they hold >100 seats), and while Labour definitely has a shot at the redrawn Brecon seat, it should be fairly three-cornered and could also stay Tory or go LD. Labour has enough targets in Wales that I suspect they will cede it to the LDs, who will definitely be putting all of their Welsh resources there.

Appearances can be deceptive: the area in the new cross-Berwyns horror of a constituency that will be coming in from Clwyd South rather than Montgomery will make up a solid third of its electorate. Labour will normally be well ahead there and will have had at least a small lead even in 2010. It is still a constituency where the Conservatives would only be under pressure in a bad year,¹ but, on paper at least, it isn't bomb-proof.

In - Christ, what do we even call it? B-R-CT? - the critical issue is that while Labour have many targets in Wales, they don't have many in or near South Wales (I'm not counting Bridgend here which, under present circumstances, is at most a tick-box exercise) which is an important distinction: the only other one nearby is the new Carmarthen constituency. It is certainly not guaranteed a win² but there's really no reason why the local party in Pontardawe shouldn't wish to at least give it a go, especially as you can easily campaign in both Pontardawe (and up further into Ystradgynlais) and the Amman Valley (i.e. in the new Carmarthen constituency) in the same day without any bother and especially as one member of the new CLP will be Jeremy Miles.

<sub>1. RIP Montgomery Liberalism, how soon we forget you etc.
2. Even the 1918-83 version of Brecon & Radnor, which included Brynmawr, was never a secure Labour seat, except for the late 1950s and the 1960s and that was entirely down to a monstrously popular incumbent who had the knack for being in favour of the aspects of postwar rural modernization that people liked and against the ones they didn't.</sub>

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Though from a partisan Labour perspective, a strong LibDem effort in the Usk and Wye Valleys would be no bad thing at all, and never was. Saying that, Labour did once have a reasonable vote in Crickhowell of all places, but gentrification has eliminated all traces of that. The socioeconomic differences between the various elements of the constituency are quite extraordinary. A bonus detail is that some places present quite differently to how they really are: e.g. Brecon town strikes visitors as very smart and prosperous, but is actually a rather working class town with a lot of social housing: it's not unlike Abergavenny in that respect.

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There will have been a certain number of retired farm workers (and their wives) who just stuck around in what had been their tied cottages until they died. These would mostly have been in their seventies by 1997 and, the actuarial statistics for that generation being what they were, it would very frequently have been their final election.

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It has been apparent for some time that they should desist with the Welsh polling as they really have no clue at all what they're doing.

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It all seems a little silly. We're only talking of gaining or losing a few months now...

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Food price inflation, however, may have started to rise again by then due to the wiping out of fodder crops in Britain and across Europe in this wretched excuse for a Spring.

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God, can't they just get it over with instead? This is starting to get ridiculous.

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I wonder how long they maintain the delusion of the '20' part. Perhaps it quietly transforms into 'list of seats lost at by-elections in this Parliament', plus Leicester East (sigh).

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We live (for better or worse) in a considerably less politicized society than we used to and those cohorts who were young adults when it was a considerably more politicized society have now died. It is worth noting, as it is illustrative of a lot, that turnout peaked at the General Elections of 1950 and 1951 when there was a fundamental clash between the allocation of resources between large parts of society, the Attlee government having made the choice to maintain working class living standards at a bearable level through the difficult immediate postwar years rather than allow for pre-war middle class privileges to be easily restored. The emergence of 'the affluent society' only a few years later rendered this matter moot.

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The issue wasn't taxation particularly, but rationing and other controls. Things were very difficult after the War: there were shortages of everything, the usual supply chains were completely wrecked for obvious reasons, the cost of the War had crippled the economy and, thanks to the very sharp rightwards swing in American domestic politics immediately after 1945 and the radical right-wing Congress that emerged after the disastrous 1946 elections, American financial support was not as generous as hoped.

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I would be careful about reading overmuch into any single poll and so on, though we can note that it's significant that figures like that can be produced.

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Well, we can actually rule out a snap election because one cannot have a snap election at this stage of a Parliament. The election is now due.