Poll Showed Labour in Slight Lead over Tories

Well, an election has been set for December 12th, and the papers have been full of stories claiming that Labour is 15 points behind the Tories in the polls. This is quite a reversal from last Friday, 25th October 2019, when that day’s I carried an article by Jane Merrick, ‘New opinion poll shows narrow lead for labour’. This ran

A surprise poll put Labour narrowly ahead of the Conservatives last night, suggesting the possible Christmas election could be as close as 2017.

The ComRes survey has Labour on 27 per cent, on epoint ahead of the Tories on 26 per cent. The Brexit party is on 20 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 18 per cent. 

Recent polls have given Boris Johnson’s party a comfortable lead of as much as 15 points ahead of Labour.

However, the new ComRes poll was not based on a straight question of voting intention but was dependent on whether “the deadline for the UK to leave the EU has been extended beyond 31 October 2019”.

The survey was taken on 16 and 17 October, just as the Prime Minister had reached his Brexit deal with Brussels but before the publication of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill.

The poll suggests Mr Johnson’s latest plan, to call an election and extend Brexit beyond 31 October to allow the Bill to pass through Parliament on 6 November could benefit Labour.

Well, it’s now the 31st, and the Brexit deadline has definitely been extended.

Polls, of course, are notoriously untrustworthy. The polls for the last few elections all claimed to show that Labour would be wiped out. But as many of the polling companies are run by Tories, it isn’t remotely surprising they show Labour behind them. In reality, the party actually made some gains. Much also depends on the implementation of the laws on media impartiality. These come into force at election time for broadcasters, so that the Beeb is prevented from lying quite so flagrantly about Labour and Corbyn. As a result, Labour actually rises in the polls to the point where it overtakes the Tories. My guess is that the same process will begin to kick in the closer we get to an election. 

And as for the standing in the polls of the two party leaders, the last time I looked BoJob had a massive -44, by far the worse polling of any party leader.

Labour in 10 Point Lead Over the Tories

This little snippet from the I might explain why the Sunset Times may be preparing to run more anti-Semitism smears against Labour this Easter Sunday. According to the paper, Labour have a 10 point lead over May’s wretched gang of thugs and profiteers.

The article by Florence Smead in the paper’s edition for 19th April 2019 ran

The Labour Party emerged with a 10 per cent lead from a poll that asked people how they would vote at the next general election.

Jeremy Corbyn’s party would take 33 per cent of the vote if a ballot was held tomorrow, according to the ComRes survey, with the Conservatives trailing on 23 per cent.

The Brexit Party was backed by 14 per cent of respondents, while the newly named Independent Change UK party achieved 9 per cent. The Liberal Democrats were fourth with 7 per cent, ahead of UKIP on 5 per cent and the Scottish National Party and the Greens tied on 3 per cent.

ComRes said its research suggested that just over half (53 per cent) of voters who backed the Tories in 2017 intended to do so again at the next election. However, a quarter of the same group said they planned to vote for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. (p. 9).

The Mail on Sunday last week was trying to panic its readers that Labour were set to win, and ruin their savings and investments, while Pogrund – or Poo Grunt, as I feel he should be called – Kerbaj, or Garbage and another hack ran yet another anti-Semitism smear story in the Sunset Times, a paper with a proud future behind it. The Tories are afraid, and hence the attempts to smear Labour and paint its leader as the reincarnation of Hitler.

But hopefully this is going to have less and less effect as people wake up to the fact that these are baseless smears by an exploitative and entitled media-political elite. With luck, it’ll get worse for the Tories, and we can look forward to a Labour government. 

In the ‘I’ Today: One Fifth of Young People Have Been Homeless

Today’s I newspaper has a truly shocking story: ‘One Fifth of Young People Slept Rough’. This reports the findings of a survey conducted by ComRes for Centrepoint, a charity dealing with homelessness amongst young people, that in a poll of 2,000 15 to 25 year olds, 18 per cent had slept rough. They had been forced to sleep on the streets, in night buses or in cars due to the fact that they had nowhere else to go. A third of this group said that they had been homeless for up to a week. A third of those sampled generally also said that they had been homeless at some point in their lives. The report ends with a quote from the charity’s chief executive, Seyi Obakin, 6that ‘Our poll proves the issue of young people sleeping rough is huge and nobody else is giving an accurate picture of the problem.’

This is chilling, and should frighten everyone concerned with this country’s future. The same newspaper a few pages before that article also reports that today’s young people are far more likely to be ‘downwardly mobile’ due to there being less opportunities available for gaining middle class jobs. That article seems to regard the expansion of the middle classes in the 1960s as a blip that has now decreased as fewer of these jobs are created than lower skilled jobs.

Together these article paint a very bleak future for today’s young people, where there are few well-paid, professional jobs available and a far greater risk of becoming homeless. It’s certainly not the kind of situation that would encourage anyone from a working or lower middle class background to go to university and become saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

The Tories and their Lib Dem collaborators have explicitly advocated their policies of dismantling the welfare state and forcing Britain’s workers to accept pay freezes and cuts on the grounds that this will make Britain better able to compete with the low-paid workers in the Developing World. Unsurprisingly, this is leading to a massive increase in poverty. I wonder how long it will be before we have the same Third World conditions in Britain, complete with mass famine, malnutrition and shanty towns full of the poor and the desperate. We are already like them in having a polarised society with a vast gulf between rich and poor. If this survey can be believed, we may be well on the way to a situation where London is now different from Calcutta, where a vast section of the population lives on the streets, occupying an area about the size of the average school desk.