"When you move in with me, I'll buy you one more box of chocolates per year than that bastard boyfriend of yours buys you."
"But he doesn't buy me chocolates."
"Thank Christ for that, I'm a bit short on cash anyway."
* * *
Thanks to James on the previous thread for pointing out that Populus have published their first GB-wide poll of the year - in fact it's the first published poll from any firm to have been entirely conducted in 2015. The Scottish subsample figures are : SNP 41%, Labour 28%, Conservatives 15%, Liberal Democrats 8%, Greens 5%, UKIP 2%. Of the firms that poll regularly, Populus have consistently been the most favourable for Scottish Labour, so the SNP lead in this subsample is very much at the upper end of the recent 'normal range' - and that's in spite of the fact that (as usual) respondents who identify with the SNP have been sharply downweighted.
So we've now had two straws in the wind since the New Year - one from Opinium, suggesting a slightly lower SNP vote than usual, and one from Populus, showing the reverse. The mists may clear a little overnight with the first YouGov poll of the year.
"When you move in with me, I'll buy you one more box of chocolates per year than that bastard boyfriend of your"
ReplyDelete" but aren't you short of cash, where would you get the money"
" no problems, I can easily break into my brothers hoose and steal his wages"
"oh Jim, you're such a wee sweetheart, so you are"
It clearly hasn't sunk in yet for the Eggman and little Ed that a great many of the most able and dedicated campaigners for Yes (who then joined the SNP) were ordinary scots who work in the NHS.
ReplyDeleteThey will be only too happy to explain to scottish voters on the doorstep why this is risible stuff even for little Ed.
SNP key figure is 40%+,let's hope 45%+ pulls thru GE 2015
ReplyDeleteJust been polled by telephone by Populus for the first time ever.
ReplyDeleteSuspect it was a Scottish Voting Intention as it asked "What government would you prefer after GE2015 - Con/SNP, Con/LD, Lab/SNP, Lab/LD, Con Maj, Lab Maj and no UKIP nonsense. So hopefully we will get a full analysis of the new year position really soon.
Am I overly suspicious that it did not specify the arrangement? Coalition or Confidence and Supply?
DeleteThat leaves a lot of wiggle room.
Sounds like Ashcroft?
DeleteHe uses populus to do his fieldwork but gets it done by telephone (using both landline and mobile I understand) with his own (fairly standard) weighting system.
Could be his promised Scottish constituency polling under way.
Who is your MP?
Hereditary MP and millionaire "socialist" Anus Sidelined.
DeleteDundee West, Ayrshire North & Arran, Argyll &Bute, Falkirk, Inverness &Strathspey,(D. Alexander's seat) Edinburgh North / Leith, Mundell's seat in the Borders and one of the Glasgow seats have, at least so I've been informed, have been polled.
ReplyDeleteI'd put my money on it being an Ashcroft poll.
Ooh, looking forward to the Danny Alexander polling.
DeleteI'd've thought Glasgow North or East might be more obvious candidates for a poll of "marginals". Not that either of them are marginal, going by the 2010 results, but there are clear factors at play that make them likely more winnable than Glasgow Central.
DeleteWell Glasgow Central is the successor to both Goven and Hillhead which are fairly important historically. Will be interesting to see if the SNP can get around the Sarwar cabal.
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ReplyDeleteLord Ashcroft has tweeted that he'll be putting a full analysis of all the 114 Parliamentary seats that he's polled on Wednesday. Maybe he'll be revealing the Scottish constituency polls at the same time? George Foulkes last month also posted of a "significant polling development", in the new year, specifically mentioning January 7 and I understand that he's pretty cosy with Ashcroft.
ReplyDeleteI wish he'd get a move on. This poll has been hyped for literally months!
DeleteShould we take Foulkes' trailing of it as an ill portent for the SNP?
If Foulkes and/or ScotLab had anything it would have been all over the Internet already.
Delete"Should we take Foulkes' trailing of it as an ill portent for the SNP?"
DeleteThat's the first thought that came into my head, but then if the fieldwork is very recent (As Alasdair Allan suggested), it's difficult to imagine how that could be the case.
Because of Labour's figures in Scotland, they'll be doing better in England and Wales than UNS would suggest. As far as I can remember Ashcroft's polling of Lab-Con marginals backed that up.
DeleteMy experience of Foulkes during the iref was that if he was excited about a poll, could well be good for Yes. He's not a undercover agent or something (I know, you do wonder sometimes what with his rants), just, well, not that bright. Hence why he's making decisions / voting on policy but is unelected; elevated to the Lords by Tony for backing Iraq etc.
DeleteIf Blair McDougall tweeted 'looking forward to the new poll' then chances are it was better for BT.
I was thinking along those lines. I never really looked towards Foulkes for clues during the referendum campaign and he always struck me more as a drunken buffoon. Blair McDougall and Kevin Pringle were more my go-to guys.
DeleteI was polled on 5th Jan at 7pm so no chance Foulkes could have any inkling.
DeleteWell Labour's anti-English stance is being reinforced by the southern press.
ReplyDeleteFollowing on from resistance to EVEL, you have to admit they really asked for this one.
Telegraph: Labour Tax on Wealthy English to Fund Scots Nurses
Murphy is turning out worse (or better?) than expected.
About 8.15 this morning there was a quick news flash on Radio 3 that simply said Murphy had pledged more nurses to support the Scottish NHS, but "admitted" these could only be afforded by using tax from wealthy home-owners in England.
DeleteIs the man actually trying to stir up divisive resentment here?
Just let us keep our own assets and wealth, and we'll figure out what we can afford, thankyouverymuch.
Usual bunch of labour lies at a General Election. MP's have no power to hire Health Service staff in Scotland. Will the Smurph have his whopper exposed in the media? Or will we have to wait for every journalist in Scotland to be killed and replaced with a fully functioning human before that happens.
ReplyDeleteIn other news a cretin from darkest bedfordshire is railing against the petit (sic (twonk!)) Nationalism that causes the M74 not to be named the M6. apparently the dildo doesn't know that the our divine masters stopped the M6 several miles short of the border so that when the M74 was complete we still didn't have a motorway connection to the home of our imperial occupiers.
Did Smithson seriously cite the numbering of a motorway (a decision made by the UK government decades ago) as an example of narrow Scottish nationalism? The man is fast turning into a self-parody.
DeleteStill, it won't be long before Jim Murphy decides he wants to rename the A1 stretch between Edinburgh and Berwick as "the Great Patriotic Highway".
YouGov Westminster poll:
ReplyDeleteLabour 34%
Conservatives 31%
Ukip 14%
Greens 8%
Lib Dems 7%
No word on the SNP yet. Lib Dems doing even worse than Greens.
The five listed parties only add up to 94%, which is usually good news for the SNP (unless something odd has happened with the rounding).
DeleteWhatever our political affiliation, and whatever our predictions for the election, at least we can all unite in looking forward to the Cleggocalypse. One Scotland!
DeleteI have mixed feelings about the Lib Dems. Ignoring Clegg himself, the one thing we don't actually have outside of the Lib Dems is a party that stands for socially liberal policies - legalising cannabis, ending the war on drugs, properly regulating prostitution (rather than pushing it under ground), opposing censorship, etc. We also lack a UK-wide party that is openly pro-EU and pro-immigration. Whether people agree with these policies or not, there's a clear space for them in the party system.
DeleteIf the Lib Dems go into meltdown in 2015 then hopefully a party emerges from the ashes that actually stands for these things and is willing to argue for them. The Lib Dems used to be that party but seemed to get sucked into the centre and lose its identity completely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11326547/A-grand-Tory-Labour-coalition-might-be-good-for-British-business.html
ReplyDeleteA grand Tory-Labour coalition might be good for British business
One positive part of a Conservative-Labour coalition would be that the worst excesses of the two main parties might cancel each other out...
Argh, kill me now! Miliband really needs to kibosh these rumours just in case they really end up taking off.
DeleteGrand coalitions have worked fairly well in Austria and Germany. There's zero chance of it actually happening in 2015 here though.
DeleteInteresting comment on YouGov introducing their first GB poll of the year:
ReplyDelete"The first is a rationalisation of our sampling frame to produce a sample that better reflects the distribution of party support around Britain. Our overall demographic targets for Great Britain and the targets we use for our weighting remain unchanged, so these changes should not make any difference to our headline figures. However we are controlling our sampling in London and Scotland more carefully, so anyone who regularly studies our crossbreaks may notice a difference within them. Most importantly, we have started including controls on ethnicity in our London sampling, an important factor in driving voting intention."
Not sure what this means. Adjusting for people born in Eng / Wales / NI but living in Scotland? The bigger news is that they are now prompting for UKIP as a "main party".
Their sub-sample result is fairly typical (SNP 46, Labour 30, Tories 12). SNP + Labour total is a bit higher than normal.