2020 UK General Election Forecast

Lord Whitcroft

I am audaciously attempting to forecast the next General Election in the UK. By using current opinion polls and historical trends for each party.

Effectively, similar positions faced by the mainstream parties are repeats of scenarios they have already faced historically, by analysing their result in the subsequent election and the recent opinion poll errors and turnout bias, we will hopefully be left with an accurate forecast.

The forecast is view-able here.

Forecast popular vote (31/01/16)

Conservative: 41.3% (+4.5%)
Labour: 28.3% (-2.2%)
UKIP: 11.7% (-1.0%)
Lib Dems: 7.3% (-0.6%)
SNP: 4.5% (-0.2%)
Green: 3.2% (-0.6%)

Forecast seats (31/01/16)

Conservative: 353 (+23)
Labour: 210 (-22)
SNP: 53 (-3)
Lib Dems: 10 (+2)
DUP: 9 (+1)
Sinn Fein: 4 (NC)
Plaid Cymru: 3 (NC)
UUP: 2 (NC)
SDLP: 2 (–1)
UKIP: 1 (NC)
Green: 1 (NC)
Others: 2 (NC)

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2020 UK General Election Forecast

Source: 2020 UK General Election Forecast

Macclesfield’s Grosvenor Shopping Centre Has Banned Customers In Wheelchairs And Mobility Scooters

Same Difference

This is unbelievable. It is blatant disability discrimination. Turn the lifts off if you have to but make other access arrangements or adjustments. There is absolutely no excuse for banning disabled customers. If the centre is not safe for wheelchair users, it’s not safe for anyone and should be closed to everyone until it is safe again.

Please, readers, please, share this post as widely as possible. I’ll be sharing it with every media outlet I can think of.

Wheelchair users have been banned from entering the Grosvenor shopping centre after orders from fire chiefs.

On Thursday security guards are stopping people in wheelchairs and mobility scooters from entering the premises.

And those accessing the ground-level indoor market have been given escorts to prevent them entering shops.

It follows a safety inspection by Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service.

But the move has provoked upset and anger from bewildered customers.

Diane…

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Defensive Reactions: How Labour Treats Diagnosis with Suspicion

Defensive Reactions: How Labour Treats Diagnosis with Suspicion

Source: Defensive Reactions: How Labour Treats Diagnosis with Suspicion

Please #Corbyn4PM sign petition to release all reports & supplementary data relating to Labour’s defeat

Last week Labour released its official post mortem of the 2015 General Election defeat, the ‘Learning the Lessons from Defeat Taskforce Report’: known to all as the Beckett Report.

When commissioning the report interim leader Harriet Harman MP promised that ‘no stone would be left unturned’, and yet it appears that information essential to enable Labour to move forward to victory in 2020 remains undisclosed.

In their authoritative book ‘The British General Election of 2015’ authors and academics Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh assert a second report was produced entitled ‘What Happened?’ providing the Labour leadership with a warts and all dissection of the reasons for the party’s defeat.

Renowned pollster Deborah Mattinson has disclosed that she was tasked with conducting focus groups in constituencies where Labour had suffered particularly bad defeats. She asserts that the bulk of evidence from those swing voter focus groups is not present in the Beckett Report.

An assessment of the 2015 General Election defeat cannot simply provide evidence which is palatable to the current direction of the party. An assessment must be both transparent and objective.

In order that all members of the Labour Party can move forward in support of the leadership we respectfully call upon Jeremy Corbyn to release all reports and supplementary data commissioned by the party in the wake of May 7th which seek to evaluate the reasons for defeat.

Please sign the petition!

Disabled People Against Cuts Needs Volunteers to Speak to the Press to Help with Campaigns!

Disabled People Against Cuts need people who would be willing to speak to the press:

• People who are in the Employment and Support Allowance Work Related Activity Group, willing to talk about the £30 a week cut to funding which is being proposed and how this would affect them personally.

• Disabled People Against Cuts also need to hear from people living in Supported Housing, who will be affected by the cuts to Housing Benefit.  Cuts that will mean that the amount allowed will be restricted to Local Housing Allowance rates.

If you would be willing to help with either of these requests then please email Disabled People Against Cuts at mail@dpac.uk.net

Source: Volunteers to speak to the press needed please

 

Amoral communication

Source: Amoral communication

Amoral communication

Jade Azim

The Left sees narrative construction as amoral. It either doesn’t get that you don’t have to say what you think and intend to do or it’s decided that omission is wrong. And thus that politics for a millennia is and has been wrong.

Take Ed Miliband. I think -and the election, of course, backs me up- that his narrative was a bad one. Namely, he didn’t challenge the overspending myth early on and found himself in a spiral of trying to out-Tory the Tories. But this didn’t, believe it or not, actually make him a Tory. The Left continuously took what he said at face value. When he talked about fiscal responsibility, we gasped at his betrayal. Journalists on the English Left were appalled. The Frankie Boyles and George Monbiots lazily wrote about how Labour were only offering austerity Lite. Look! Ed Miliband talked about the Thing! Let’s pounce on…

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Nothing to lose but their chains?

Jade Azim

The Beckett Report makes for dire yet inevitable reading for Labour. None of the diagnoses can be quelled with simple solutions. Assumptions, however, should be easier to mend. And the number one assumption we have to scrap, that we should have scrapped long ago, is that we can win by assuming those in troubled times -as many have felt these past 5 years under a deeply unfair government- will vote en masse for change.

Beckett shows that we lost out among private sector and, significantly, self-employed workers. The very workers we thought we championed because of the inherently insecure nature of their livelihoods. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Fortunately for this blog, unfortunately for you and all those that despise wonks, my dissertation reading has progressed and has provided some convenient citations for me to use here on this theme at jadeazim.wordpress.com.

Ian Shapiro, writing ‘why the poor…

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