Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Would you vote tactically? What worries you most about a Tory or Labour government? What would actually happen under Johnson or Corbyn? Week 3 of my General Election Dashboard By  Lord Ashcroft My third general election survey shows the Conservatives still ahead on the fundamentals, but there is some evidence that Labour is managing to firm up its vote among 2017 supporters at the margins, with Labour Leavers showing slightly more reticence about switching to the Tories. When we ask people how likely they are to vote for each party on a scale from zero (definitely not) to 100 (absolutely certain), the Conservatives’ average likelihood score is unchanged at 36. Labour’s is up from 25 last week to 28, the Liberal Democrats’ down from 17 to 15, and the Brexit Party’s (asked of respondents in non-Conservative seats only) down from 11 to 9 . 2017 Conservative Remainers’ likelihood of staying with the Tories is now at 64/100, up from 61 last week and 57 the week be...

The Guardian reported this morning that the 5 winners of the debate were:- Wait for it...... Rebbecca Wrong-Daily, Jo Swineson, Caroline Lucas,  Nicola Sturgeon, and Adam Price. And the losers were:- Surprise surprise, Rushi Sunak and Richard Tice. Now we have established no bias at the leftie Guardian, we'll move onto reality. Generally you determine winners by audience reaction, and of course Labour's fence sitting Brexit position got an incredibly big laugh. The Conservative Brexit position was applauded by the majority of the audience. On the economy, the same was true again, the audience didn't believe Labour's spending plans and it appeared to be largely behind the Conservative position. So on the big two issues of the day, Brexit and the economy, the Tories certainly won. Equally importantly, Richard Tice took on wee Mrs Krankie on quite a few issues and put her back in her box, Swinson was pretty much the same as ever, ineffectual and the r...

If I wasn't against all this climate change drivel before, I certainly was after last night's shambles on Channel 4. Firstly, on the climate change issue, the Vostok ice cores, which covered 500,000 years shows that the climate changes naturally and CO2 varies naturally over about a 100,000 year cycle, with the temperature varying by about 11C from base to peak and CO2 levels, which correlate with the temperature change very highly, varies from a low of 180 ppm to a peak at 270 ppm before both world temperature and CO2 dips shortly afterwards, and very quickly. There's little doubt that we are contributing to atmospheric CO2, but the CO2 level passed 270 pm way back in 1995 and now stands at 408 ppm, well beyond the tipping point. So to me, its not global warming we need to worry about, but global cooling, and at a staggering rate, we may indeed need more fossil fuels and its highly unclear that wind turbines wouldn't ice up and fail in extreme low temper...

Tories set for majority by taking Labour seats in Brexit heartlands Traditional voting intention polls try to measure the share of the vote across Britain as a whole, rather than project the actual seats that would be won in an election. While the national swing can give a crude guide as to how votes may translate into seats, the reality is more complicated than that. Different seats behave in different ways. Parties may do better or worse in different parts of the country, or in areas that are more pro or anti Brexit, or where different parties are in contention. To use the old cliche, a general election is not one contest – it is 650 individual races. MRP is a polling technique aimed at solving that problem, a way of using big samples sizes to project figures onto smaller geographical areas. It works by using an extremely large number of interviews to model people's voting preferences based upon their demographics (age, gender, education, past vote and similar fact...

Labour activists last night slammed Jeremy Corbyn's performance on the Andrew Neil show as 'truly horrific' as they vowed to 'push images and stories with positive messages' to try and deflect from the 'awful' appearance.  During the interview which aired last night on the BBC, Corbyn refused four times to apologise to the UK Jewish community after the Chief Rabbi slammed the party for how it deals with anti-Semitism. The Labour leader was challenged over Ephraim Mirvis's allegation that the party's claims it is doing everything to tackle anti-Jewish racism was a 'mendacious fiction'.  'No, he's not right. Because he would have to produce the evidence to say that's mendacious,' Mr Corbyn replied.  But he floundered when Mr Neil detailed specific cases of anti-Semitism by Labour members who faced little or no sanction. Corbyn was also forced to admit Labour would breach its longstanding promise not to raise taxes on...

Scotland will be on a currency “journey” if it votes to leave the UK, Nicola Sturgeon has said in a TV grilling on the economics of independence. In a punishing interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, the First Minister also admitted voters might not know Scotland’s trading relationship with the rest of the UK until after Indyref2. She was also challenged over a catalog of problems in the Scottish NHS, including missed A&E and treatment time targets, record drug deaths and hospital building scandals. Mr Neil put it to her: “You’ve called for legislation to protect the NHS from Donald Trump. Maybe the NHS needs legislation to protect it from Nicola Sturgeon?” She replied: “Obviously I don’t think that’s the case.” The SNP leader was quizzed at length on her plans for Scotland to create its own currency after independence, subject to six economic tests, which her advisers say could take a decade to meet. Ms Sturgeon said Scotland could rejoin the EU on a “relatively...

I had to laugh yesterday as the Tory Manifesto was launched, not just at Boris's jokes and delivery, but at the manifesto itself. Boris has been campaigning on spending pledge after spending pledge, tax cuts for those between 50,000 and 80,000 and several other campaign pledges that had the IFS worried about the achievablity of the Tory spending plans with regards to fiscal discipline. What Boris has actually done is talked up a lot of spending and frightened both Labour and the Limp Dims that this is all about spending, and spending big and both Labour and the Limp Dim's have bought that bluff and have believed that the only way to beat the Tories was to outspend them, and outspend them by a clear margin. Yesterday's announcement by Labour of 58bn of additional borrowing to compensate WASPIE women was because their manifesto hadn't landed and they were terrified that they needed something else to both "wow" the voters and hope to upstage the Tory m...

What happened last time means that the Tories are extremely nervous about their manifesto launch tomorrow. As I say in The Sun this morning, the Tories have had teams poring over it to see what might blow up in it. One of the many problems with the 2017 document was that it failed to understand the shift in the public’s mood when it came to austerity. This manifesto gets that change. I understand that it will bring back a version of the nurses’ bursary, which helped with the costs of training to be a nurse, that George Osborne abolished in 2015. This was widely regarded by the public as a cut too far. The Tories hope that a maintenance grant for nurses will show both their commitment to the NHS and their pragmatism, the abolition of the nurses bursary has been blamed for a shortfall in the number of people training to be a nurse. One senior campaign figure is unapologetic about unpicking decisions taken while the Tories have been in power. This source tells me ‘we are not defe...

The leaders of the four main political parties were grilled on BBC One tonight in a special edition of Question Time. Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon, Jo Swinson and Boris Johnson took it in turns to answer questions from a studio audience in Sheffield. Topics included Brexit, the NHS, trust in politics and a report into Russian interference in British elections that some claim Mr Johnson has buried. Each candidate was given half an hour on stage facing the public and chair Fiona Bruce. Below are the candidates best and worst moments. Jeremy Corbyn Best Jeremy Corbyn's climate change plans for a Green Industrial Revolution were well received by the audience. He said that a Labour government on the international stage would work with others to get to net-zero carbon emissions - but did not specify a date. Worst Audience members groaned as Mr Corbyn failed to say whether he would support Leave or Remain in a second referendum, instead saying he would adopt a ne...

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday doubled down on plans to raise taxes and unleash a huge public spending drive, sparking fears across corporate Britain of a return to 1970s state intervention. Mr Corbyn’s new manifesto eclipsed his radical plans from the last general election in 2017 by shifting even further to the left with almost double the scale of additional taxation and borrowing. Paul Johnson, director for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, told the BBC the manifesto would produce “just about the most punitive corporate tax regime in the world”.  The IFS calculated that the plans would push the UK’s tax burden to its highest levels since the second world war. Labour has ramped up its extra borrowing plans since 2017 from £250bn to £400bn over a single parliamentary term in order to fund 1m new council homes, oversee a “green industrial revolution” and upgrade the UK’s infrastructure. The party stepped up its plans for extra taxation from £48.6bn ...