Ed Miliband's leadership rating is the worst it has been since January 2012 from yougov and a 19.5% swing
LABOUR to SNP and
92 LABOUR seats under threat from UKIP
The article below comes from
Bruce on politics and puts it all into context
Looking at the raw data of opinion polls is very interesting.
YouGov are especially impressive.
They tell us that LibDem support has collapsed, that UKIP has about
twice their support and that the Conservatives and Labour are running
neck and neck. This is fabulous news for the Conservatives who should be
doing far worse at this stage of the electoral cycle.
However the raw data does not reflect what happens on election day,
for lots of reasons. Firstly the UK is not one homogeneous constituency,
it is 650 separate ones, each with local issues, personalities and
changing demographics. Many people vote tactically.
Then there is the way people balance self interest against tribal loyalty on polling day. And of course there is the inevitable cycle of protest votes and mid term blues that greatly skew by-elections.
So there is a whole science to interpret, understand and discuss what
is really happening below the raw data. This science is called
Psephology. And we are very lucky that
Steve
Fisher, Associate Professor in Political Sociology and the Fellow and
Tutor in Politics at Trinity College, University of Oxford is now
blogging his analysis. You can follow him on on Twitter
@StephenDFisher. His latest blog predicts Con : 337 Lab : 265 LD :
21 Con majority of 24. But that was based on Labour polling 38%. And now they are polling 33/34 %. So Labour are in huge electoral trouble.
But it gets even worse. Over very recent weeks we have seen two huge
shifts away from Labour. Firstly in Scotland, where they have 40 seats.
By gross mismanagement they have become extremely unpopular, nearly as
toxic as the Conservatives in the region. With a huge shift to SNP. This
is not some overnight whim, it is a massive change in public opinion.
For decades you could put a red rosette on a chimpanzee in Scotland and
they would get elected to Westminster, as we have seen many times. At
the 2015 General Election Labour will be very lucky to retain 20 seats,
and this alone could decide the election.
The second slow motion train crash for Labour is the North of
England. Here the metropolitan, middle class Labour party has totally
lost any connection with their traditional blue collar support.
Instead it is now UKIP that resonate best with the politics of a great
swathe of voters and we are seeing it reflected in huge swings to UKIP
at every electoral opportunity.
Events in Rotherham have further alienated these voters,
to many the Labour party has become toxic. The North will now
definitely return UKIP MPs, it is just a question of how many. Anything
from 5 to 50! Whatever, it will take a huge chunk out of Labour’s
capability to get an majority.
If I know this and can write about it then you can be sure that every
Labour MP knows it, so there is a lot of dissatisfaction being voiced
by them in Westminster, often now in public and to the press. There are
reports of open revolt and of plots for a coup d’etat, hardly surprising
when they are just a few months away from electoral meltdown.
So how did Labour get into this disastrous situation at such a
critical time in the electoral cycle? The answer is one man, Ed
Miliband, who is such a disaster that he now receives huge ironic cheers
from Conservative MPs every time he stands up in Parliament. They know
full well that Miliband is ensuring a Conservative election victory.
Miliband became leader against the wishes of party MPs and of party
members in the country. He is a trade union placeman and he owes his
position to the power and patronage of just one man, Len McCluskey of
the Unite union. So if you listen to what Len says on any issue you know
that is what Miliband would deliver if he was Prime Minister. And this
really is not what the vast majority of people want.
Ed Miliband is intellectually very clever, of that there is no doubt,
in fact some would say that he verges onto the autistic spectrum. His
personality seems to be based around control freakery, the condition
known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which is exactly what a
leader does not need. He very quickly alienates other intelligent
people, which is why you won’t find any in the shadow cabinet. Clever
Labour MPs, like Alan Johnson, refuse to work with him. And we end up
with
ineptitudes like Ed Balls in senior positions, further dragging Labour down by being utterly useless at their jobs.
A huge problem for Labour is that they won’t tell us their policies.
Obviously this is because these come from Red Len and will be unpopular.
So we have the amazing sight of rich middle class metropolitan elites
espousing the outdated politics of class warfare instead. The
incongruity is immense. For example Miliband is promising to punish
people who achieve in life with a Mansion Tax, but already he and his
ministers have allocated the proceeds of this to over ten different
areas of spending. It is a shambles and the voters of Britain can see
that it is a shambles.
So Ed Miliband, purely on the strength of his own inability, is
leading the Labour party to electoral oblivion, which has to be a very
good thing for the best interests of Great Britain. In fact if he says
in charge (which we all hope) we could see UKIP emerge as the opposition
party. For all their nastiness, xenophibia and bigotry nobody can deny
that Farage is an incredibly effective politician.
