Tories 4.8% ahead in ConservativeHome's poll of polls

The Tories enjoy a 37.6% to 32.8% lead over Labour in the latest ConservativeHome poll of polls.  The CHPoP incorporates a new ICM survey in The Guardian which gives David Cameron's Conservatives a 5% advantage and Sunday's MORI survey for The Observer which gave the Tories a 41% to 34% lead.

Last night's post on YouGov's daily BrandIndex tracker suggests that Labour may find it difficult to recover from the incompetence of Triple Whammy Wednesday.  It also found that David Cameron's continuing-to-improve ratings may owe more to the 'halo effect' of May 4th's results rather than the huskies-and-cycling strategy.

Comments

[Alexander Drake]

Election result calculators (e.g. Baxter) suggest this would still give Labour more seats than us. If DC is elected I would suggest that the first thing he should do is require the Electoral Commission to do a redrawing of electoral boundaries to more accurately reflect the mood of the nation every 5 or 6 years, based on much more recent and accurate Census results.

[Alexander Drake]

I know this is off-topic Tim (apologies) - but imitation is certainly the sincerest form of flattery, notwithstanding giving you an incorrect surname!

[Yet Another Anon]

If DC is elected I would suggest that the first thing he should do is require the Electoral Commission to do a redrawing of electoral boundaries to more accurately reflect the mood of the nation every 5 or 6 years, based on much more recent and accurate Census results.
The census though is only every 10 years, so if they were to be withdrawn every 5 or 6 years then extrapolation from other data would have to be used - the chaos of boundaries being redrawn every 5 or 6 years would annoy people up and down the country and would lead to people constantly having to re-adjust to dealing with new seats and would probably the government that introduced it more seats than it gained from new boundaries - the boundary changes in Scotland in themselves benefited the Conservative Party not a jot, the reduction in the number of Scottish seats was the only thing that made any noticeable difference and in England & Wales predictions are that Labour will lose 12 seats as a result of the boundary changes - over a 5 or 6 year period any notional improvement would be smaller because demographic factors will have changed less.

Surely it might be fairer to transfer responsibilities for raising local issues to Local Councillors, or transfer it to the 2nd Chamber and have the seats based on a very narrow variation in the size of the electorate and restricting the total number of seats to 250 or less, either that or have multiple member constituencies, the Conservatives problem is the trend of wealthier people in urban areas to move out to areas which are already strongly Conservative as they can afford to do so means that the Conservatives pile up majorities in safe seats.

A national executive with 100 seats elected on a national list system with preferences listed in order of preference and a hefty deposit charged to prevent frivolous entries - £100,000 per entry perhaps? People could be allowed to be on in different groups up to a certain limit of total entries, this would also allow parties to present alternatives - so for example the Conservative Party might offer themselves as an entirety and also might offer entries in which the DUP and UUP figured; electors would then know what balance of parties they were getting if a particular option won - thus even hung executives could be listed as entries and electors could then chose to vote for a hung executive. The Executive would then choose the Prime Minister and could pass legislation against the wishes of parliament so long as no more than say 2/3 of each chamber voted against and they could block legislation passed by parliament so long as no more than 2/3 of each chamber of parliament had backed it. In National Executive Elections if no one got more than 50% then the lowest entry would be removed and votes redistributed and so on until one entry or other had more than 50% support.

Elections could then be fixed term with a recall facility requiring at least 80% of each chamber to vote for a recall to precipitate an election or for a majority of electors across the country to register their desire for an election in lists held by election offices, similar recall facilities could be available to force by elections including in Local Authorities.

[william]

Total adds up to 87% between the 3. That's 1% less than before, which gives the minor parties another 10% gain in a month.

[comstock]

"Total adds up to 87% between the 3. That's 1% less than before, which gives the minor parties another 10% gain in a month"

Anyone know the break down of this? Minor parties could mean anything from BNP to Greens.

[Alexander Drake]

Sounds like an interesting electoral system you propose, YAA - but I suspect voters would be keener to have new, more competitive electoral boundaries if they were told it would make their vote genuinely more valuable.

My primary argument for a more rigorous system to assess the suitability of existing electoral boundaries is driven by a desire to overturn the existing, inbuilt anti-Conservative bias in boundaries which arises from the population shift you correctly identify.

I'm more interested in the effect this has on whether it makes it unfairly hard for our Party to form a government, and if it found to do so, what needs to be done to turn it around.

[Sean Fear]

I've always thought that once the boundary review is completed for a particular county, or for say, North London, it should be implemented immediately, rather than waiting for all the reviews to be completed.

[Cllr Iain Lindley]

We need to stop complaining about the boundary changes and stop worrying about the uniform swing predictors.

The major cause of the "anti-Tory bias" in the system at present is the low turnout in the safest Labour seats compared to the safest Conservative ones. If the turnout rose in Liverpool Wavertree, it would be unlikely to benefit us anyway. This will remain the case regardless of how you redraw the boundaries, so the only logical response if this is your problem is "scrap FPTP".

Secondly, Labour's success in 2001 and (to a lesser extent) 2005 was to keep the swing voters disproportionately onside. If Cameron has convinced the electorate that we need a Conservative government, then we should see a disproportionate swing to us in the marginals as well. You can see this already in the areas most receptive to the Conservative line in 2005 - look at the swings (and the increases in Conservative vote share) compared to the national average in seats like Crawley, Enfield Southgate, Reading East and Harlow.

We are on the right track.

[Sean Fear]

Also encouraging was to see voters switching back to the Lib Dems, who'd voted tactically for Labour, in some of the marginal seats, Iain.

[G-MaN]

Nice to see our high lead is holding out.
When is Cameron going to say "We will keep Peados in Jail rather than society" and suge into the mid-40s?!

[J.W.tozer]

There is no need to indulge in complicated scenarios re seat changes.

At the moment the number of seats are decided on potential voters. This means there are MPs elected often on less than 30,000 votes. Change to actual voters, the minimum being 50,000 votes. If a seat falls below the 50,000 votes, it will be eliminated and amalgameted.

If voters don't turn out to ensure they retain their seat in its present form, It'll be because they dont care enough.

[houndtang]

The Australian system - Alternative vote combined with compulsory voting seems the least worst option. However, whilst in Australia this has benefited the centre-right, in Britain it would more likely benefit Labour and the Lib Dems.

[Yet Another Anon]

If the turnout rose in Liverpool Wavertree, it would be unlikely to benefit us anyway. This will remain the case regardless of how you redraw the boundaries, so the only logical response if this is your problem is "scrap FPTP".
Or have some kind of national single seat First Past the Post System which would mean that the party ending up with the most votes won the General Election.

[Yet Another Anon]

I've always thought that once the boundary review is completed for a particular county, or for say, North London, it should be implemented immediately, rather than waiting for all the reviews to be completed.
The Boundary Review is only a recommendation to parliament, parliament then decides how it is implimented and in fact governments in the past have delayed or brought forward implimentation to suit themselves and even applied them in by election situations.

It doesn't actually amount to much difference in seats though and that does depend still on general voting patterns, the changes are notional only - no one really knows what would have happened in 2005 on what will be the Boundaries in 2009\10, to really have an effect on the results the only way if a geographically based system with seperate seats using boundaries is to be used would be to alter the remit of the Boundary Commission to make all constituencies have very closely the same number of electors and not to take different communities into account and to give extra votes in the House of Commons for candidates winning with a large proportion of those eligible to vote.

Other alternatives would include re-introducing property qualifications restricting voting to householders who owned property.

[eugene]

How about this for a fair system? You allocate seats AFTER the results come in. Count by small wards- as soon as 45000 votes are reached, that is the constituency boundary, the winning party chooses from a list for the (smallish) region and then the next seat boundary starts being determined until a new set of 45 000 votes are in, a new MP is selected and then the third seat starts to be determined...and so on. End of the day, all seats are equal and Parties do not benefit from low turn out or are not punished by high turn out as should be the case. It also allows for talented people (e.g. Chris Patten, Shirley Williams, Stephen Twigg) to probably not lose their seat (working from a list)and we will have less dorks and Blair babes elected.

Obviously some rules applying to the order of ward count would have to be determined beforehand.

[Richard]

Good to see the Lib Dems stuck on 18%. What exactly do they stand for at the moment? They've got rid of the 50% top rate of tax plan which suggests a shift to the right. Or a shift towards desperation.

[Paul Dymond]

The article says the Lib Dems are on 21%

[Yet Another Anon]

True, it does appear to say 21%, I don't really think opinion polls are particularily useful and frequently have huge distortions, at best they can be at most a very hazy snapshot with a wide margin of error that can come from who answers and who refuses to participate and how much they say something because of how they think others react to it, it's never going to be the same as the result you would get when people actually go into a polling booth or fill in a postal voting form simply because people know that they are then actually involved in really choosing who will be their Councillor\MP or whatever for years to come.

[Yet Another Anon]

Then again people especially the Liberal Democrats persist in quoting the National Aggregated numbers for the Local Elections that early on showed the Conservatives getting 40% of the vote in the English Local Elections and the Liberal Democrats getting 27% which would have been 1% ahead of Labour, it then turned out that actually it had been based on only a small number of results because the BBC were eager to rush out percentage figures and the Sunday Times later calculated that actually the Liberal Democrats had only got 25% and come 1% behind Labour and the Conservatives had got slightly under 40% of the vote.

[Ted]

Yet another anon

As I understand it (I'm sure the polsters who visit could confirm) the BBC results are weighted to try to give a national voting share from the local results (which are skewed as not all areas have elections).

So in actual votes the shares were more like 39:26:25 but extrapolated to a national election scenario they were more like 40:27:26.

[Anthony]

YAA and Ted. Both the Rallings&Thrasher figures in the Sunday Times and the BBC figures were extrapolations as to how the country as a whole would have voted based on key wards, as opposed to actual shares of the vote. The difference was that Rallings&Thrasher used a larger number of wards than the BBC, so should be more accurate.

[Yet Another Anon]

The figures given didn't include Scotland, Wales or Ulster - so far as I'm aware they involved no assessment of areas not voting because there would of course be no data in those areas that could be used to give any figures towards such an extrapolation, in some areas of England no one was voting, in others it was a third of the council seats up for election, no doubt there were a few council by elections at the same time and in some areas all the seats were up for election.

So the actual figures merely indicated how the balance between the 3 main parties might have been if people had voted the same way, except that they were voting in Local Government and Labour had similar results in the 2001-05 parliament and the Conservatives have had since 1997 results that were almost as high, of course naturally both in List Systems and in the small constituencies used in Local Elections the main 2 party vote goes down and the other parties vote tends to be a fair bit higher, 25% for the Liberal Democrats has been for 25 years a fairly typical result for them in Local Elections so they certainly have no reason to get all that excited about it.