Well, it looks as though I will have plenty to talk about on the Sky News Paper Revbiew at 10.30 and 11.20pm tonight. The first poll on Gordon Brown since the Northern Rock crisis has just been released by the Telegraph. It shows Brown would get an increased majority if he calls an election.
The YouGov poll findings, published today on Telegraph.co.uk and Telegraph TV, puts Labour on 39 points, the Conservatives on 33 and the Liberal Democrats on 16. It means Labour has dropped just one point and the Tories and the Liberal Democrats stay on the same level as last month.
The Telegraph poll asked who would make the best Prime Minister. Forty two per cent said Mr Brown and only 20 per cent David Cameron. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell impressed only six per cent.
When asked who would run the economy better Labour polls 36 per cent to the Tories’ 28.
I understand that CCHQ is on full election alert, with preparations for an announcement by Gordon Brown on Monday. Yes, you read that right. Monday.
I do not love New Labour, but I hope Gordon calls an election and ****ing crushes the Tories.
ReplyDeleteThat is no more than they deserve.
Then we can work out a way of defeating Gordon.
Labour crushing the Tories will trigger the axing of the God-awful inept Cameron. Hopefully, the Tories, having learned that weakness and being a humble little copy cat never wins battles, will have the sense at last to put someone strong and authoritative in as Leader. This could be Derek Davis or Ann Widdecomb. Someone not only with strong convictions, but the ability and the bottle to robustly defend those convictions. That is Davis or Widdecomb. Redwood is a good man, but Davis and Widdecomb are bruisers and that's what we want.
ReplyDeleteIf Broon called an election Daaave would probably whine about all the extra carbon emissions it will cause.
ReplyDeleteTory all me life etc etc but Daaave, well the sooner he goes the better, but what a waste of another five years
The real difficulty for the Conservative cause is that the parliamentary party just lacks any of the right talent. Certainly the Notting Hill mob are not the answer, but I can't see any better team in the offing.
ReplyDeleteIain,
ReplyDeleteI came across the blogs that you and Guido write just over a year ago.
The postings that both of you made (and the general quality of political comments and debate that followed them) encouraged me to renew my lapsed Conservative membership after a long absence.
I'm sorry to say that pretty much everything that David Cameron has done in the past year has only made me question what party I have re-joined.
This isn't the Conservative party that I have voted for over 30 odd years.
If I wanted to be sold out in the name of cod science, I could have joined the Lib Dems or the Greens. Is there a half-baked bandwagon that "Dave" hasn't jumped onto in the past year, in the hope of attracting votes from God-knows-whom?
My membership renewal arrived in yesterday's post. It went straight in the bin.
I'll re-join when we have a leader I can identify with like David Davis, or his brother, Derek (only joking Verity...)
Tony Blair proved that, these days, people vote for the packaging more than the substance.
Strip away the packaging from "Dave" and what have we got?
Sadly, I suspect, another defeat.
Ken Clarke, the Conservatives so so need you now!!!
ReplyDeleteWaltham Forest Labour councillor Miranda Grell has been found guilty of falsely smearing her Liberal Democrat opponent in the 2006 elections as a paedophile. She has been fined £1,000, ordered to pay £3,000 in costs and banned from public office for three years.
ReplyDeleteJonathan Hemlock, My, what a memory you have!
ReplyDeleteBetter than I feared. There wont be a GE now
ReplyDeleteVerity:
ReplyDeleteMy what a memory we both have!
Hopefully, as natural Conservatives, we'll get a leader that can offer us - and the country - more than just memories, but a future...
Here are my reasons as to why Gordon Brown won’t call an autumn election. My guess is it’ll be late spring next year, and only then if everything’s going OK.
ReplyDeleteI’m feeling that I’m running against the tide on this one. With Iain Dale, the BBC, and others seemingly certain that it’ll be called in a couple of weeks.
Here are just 10 of my reasons why Gordon will wait to 2008, I’m sure I could find more:
1. Gordon Brown is known to be a cautious cove.
2. Gordon is known to be fixated on being Prime Minister - and won’t want to risk losing the position.
3. Gordon knows he’ll compare poorly to David Cameron in TV debates and the like. So, I’m sure he’s a lot of planned actions as yet undelivered, which he believes will demonstrate his competence to counter any lack of charisma.
4. Gordon has accumulated very few friends in Government, and those that are close to him, similarly don’t want to lose their positions. So advice coming from newly acquired ‘friends’ is less likely to be trusted.
5. Polls taken outside an election period are shaky indicators of the final election outcome - remember John Major
6. He’s a canny strategist, and I think is trying to ensure an easy ride at the Labour conference, making sure the boyo’s are predisposed not to rock the boat.
7. Talk of elections unnerves the opposition, and throws into focus their fitness for office, probably causing them to alter course, and the longer he can keep them guessing the likely more trouble he’ll cause for them.
8. The Labour election war chest is empty, whereas the Conservatives is very healthy. So, by giving hints about an election, he’s trying to shake money from the trees into Labour’s coffers, and that’ll take time.
9. Gordon is a known ‘control freak’ and will want as much uncertainty removed as possible.
10. Iraq and Afghanistan can blow up unpredictably, so he’ll want to have had time to create a workable exit strategy, and lance the Iraq boil.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe I’ll pop over to Political Betting and see who’s laying what.
The changes in support (as reported here) are incorrect and have now been corrected on the Telegraph web-site.
ReplyDeleteThe latest YouGov does show the Tories are unchanged this month on 33% (also their General Election figure under Howard). But Labour are DOWN 2% (compared to August) and Lib Dems are UP 2% over the same period.
So the effect of all these Cameron Commissions, Northern Rock etc. is a 2% swing from Labour to Lib Dem according to YouGov.
YouGov gave the Tories 40% just before IDS was ditched, so 33% now cannot be of much comfort to those heading to Blackpool.
The other polling organisations give the Lib Dems a higher share (Populus 18%, ICM 20%) but all three of them show an increase for the Lib Dems on the month of around 2% - 3%.
I do hope there is an autumn election, then the Tory Party can get on with sorting itself out, in five years it might be a party that some people could vote for.
ReplyDeleteYou have to suspect Brown knows about what's heading our way economically. The longer he leaves it the more the risk.
ReplyDeleteHe would start from a very good position - but perhaps that will concentrate Conservative minds.
5 more years of Gordon Brown is a very scary thought.
Election Fever? Still think June 2009. May 2008 maybe to claw back some Town Halls. But 09 more useful in many ways as it can nail the BNP in EU elections which is very important IMO.
ReplyDeleteI agree that we have to go down in flames and a purifying conflagration. This may clear out the One Worlder virus that has been infecting Britain and other sections of the West for the last few years. The multi-culti, diversity, One-Worlder equivalency culture needs a strong stake driven through its heart and perhaps things need to get even worse before people wake up to the fact that they're being blackmailed into believing this festering, toxic garbage.
ReplyDelete"Man made global warming". On whose word? The word of a fat American tobacco plantation owner politician, who is a failed presidential contender and who is also the biggest shareholder in OXY. But has the squillions to make fantasy movies. This is insane.
Cameron's a collaborator, not a man who can defeat the enemy - or even understands why he should. They're all good chaps, after all.
One worlderism has to be sluiced out of the country (and Western society at large)and replaced with conservatism, capitalism and not "a new world order", but order. To replace the chaos of the last 15 years.
Illegal immigrants need to be hosed out of the country with absolutely no regard to other considerations, and those in Britain legally from cultures alien to Western civilisation need to have their "benefits" re-assessed and given a small consideration to go back (as in France). If they're legal and they don't want to go, then they have to be forced to attend assimilation classes - including British history and literature, and including the old hags who hold burqas over their faces by their teeth, and learn English.
The owners of Britain must take our country back, and if there is an election soon, I hope with all my heart that the Tories get slammed against the wall.
Next time, after another wasted five years, if we were merciless enough this next time, we'll be in for 20 or more years and may even defeat the socialism virus forever.
This, five years down the road, could be the permanent turning point in this dark fight.
"CCHQ is on full election alert".
ReplyDeleteNo it isn't. It's panicking. It's peeing its corporate pants. It was betting on an evens favourite that has just been seen limping in the paddock and foaming at the mouth.
Verity et al are sadly right. I am wrong..I was betting on a hung parliament all along and now I have lost my stake. Cameron will bomb. Tories will wring hands and wonder why it happened and all the nice young men at CCHQ will join the dole queue, along with all the recently sacked, lying nobs from the BBC that they probably went to school with.
Get it straight, you twenty-something berks..there is such a thing as truth, sincerity and principles, and until you learn what that means, you have no part in British politics. For God's sake, we have just endured ten years of porkies, and they were experts at it - you are not.
So go back to your PR firms and prepare for ignominy.
Mr Ken Clarke,
ReplyDeleteMR KEN CLARKE
please report to the front desk immediately
that's MR KEN CLARKE........
ps
anyone, well any newspaper proprietor, with those photos of you know who and a line of coke please release them now, if you love England, please release them now.
PLEASE, PLEASE RELEASE THEM NOW
I sincerely hope that Comrade Brown and his Marxist government crash at the next general election.
ReplyDeleteThese Communists in Capitalists clothing are tax-guzzlers who punish the hard-working and thrifty, and reward the lazy and feckless. And we must stem the flood of impoverished immigrants crowding into this tiny island.
Part of the problem with the Conservatives is they are failing to hold this Marxist maladministration to account. And they are failing to point out the inadequacies of Comrade Brown et al.
Jill, London
Iain
ReplyDeleteThank goodness your back (hope you had a nice time).
In your absence there has been the most incompetently handled banking crisis which resulted in the first full blown Run in England for 100 years.
Worse, this open goal of economic incompetence caused solely by a banking regulatory system designed and implemented by our not so prudent after all PM, has been ignored by the cache that now pretends to run the Torry party.
The Notting Hill set are clearly too thick to understand the banking sector, or indeed open goals.
Meantime Prudence has used the line from MASH the movie "its GOD'S will or Somebody Else's fault" and got the BBC to blame poor old Mervyn King.
What should be done?
Guido's Blog makes clear that the Northern Rock management is part of the NuLab inner circle, with them making donations to think tanks close to Prudence, and employing Hope-less.
None of this shit has been directed at Brown, let alone been made to stick, by the Not Intellectual twats who seem to have got themselves to the top of England's GOP.
The only people who've made the effort are Mr John Redwood (5 stars) and Mr Ken Clarke (5 stars).
They are the Dowding and Churchill of our time.
Jill says: "Part of the problem with the Conservatives is they are failing to hold this Marxist maladministration to account."
ReplyDeleteJill, the problem is, they don't understand what is "accountable".
They don't understand what's wrong. They don't have any passionately held ideals. They just think it's their turn and that's their most passionately held belief.
They're no good. Other than Redwood, Davis and Widdecombe, they are rootless. Cameron wants to be PM and feels it's jolly well his turn if the other chaps are sporting.
"Global warming", extra tax on luxury cars, extra tax on airline flights for ordinary people who can afford a weekend break, "understanding" shitty, violent little criminals - he is toeing the line. What more can a chap do?
I loathe Blair and all the slithy toves around him, and all the stench of corruption that surrounds him wherever he walks, but he knew the score.
Dave doesn't know the score. He thinks he does, but he doesn't know what the British are thinking because he's frightened and uneasy around us. He puts on a face but fears to engage with us. Because he doesn't understand us. He has this constant patronising, speaking down, barrier.
Cue the huskies.
Aarff, aarff!
So all you Conservative voters have given up? What callow youths your are.
ReplyDeleteAll this election fever has got you rattled. Stay calm. Listen. Don't react and Monday at Bournemouth will pass without anything actually happening. Trust me - I'm never wrong. Well, sometimes I don't get it quite right but that's because other people have other opinions which are usually wrong but sometimes they get it right.....
The Telegraph says 65% of households have broadband, (therefor a PC) which means 35% don't. If that 35% is analysed, you will find that three quarters of them are over 55 years of age, and it is this proportion of the population that regularily vote in elections....but only ever get their biased news from radio, TV and newspapers...and not from blogs.
ReplyDeleteIf I were Labour I wouldn't count my chickens just yet. The result will be closer than they think.
ReplyDeleteThey've got a lot of sitting MPs retiring. They have some fairly useless MPS in key marginals and some good Tory candidates(with local connections) that have been placed there by Cameron who are making an impact under the radar of the left biased MSM. Cameron might not be the one with "egg on his face" if Gordon screws up the courage to go to the country particularly as the IGC would fall right in the middle of a campaign and he's vulnerable on the referendum issue.
And as the saying goes "Events ! Dear Boy ! Events !" have a way of screwing the pollsters predictions that and the great British Electorate who take great delight in not always voting as expected on the actual polling day.
Sending cameron to eton just goes to prove you cant polish a turd.Brown is an easy target on so many issues from pensions to imigration to the nhs and more and what does davy boy do? nowt I could do a better job.Brown must laugh every day at the utter incompetence of the opposition as for me was tory voter now poss ukip or go to the pub instead.
ReplyDeleteSo let me get this right ?
ReplyDeleteThe way to guarantee election success is to arrange a run on a bank for the first time in living memory [though depositors at BCCI may beg to differ] - this is rather surreal.
That said, my opinion is still that he will wait to the spring - seems unlikely to have a General Election not held in British Summer Time ??
Brown should do the decent thing and call an election.
ReplyDeleteThe poor boy doesn't even know when to chuck the spade out of the hole.
Do the lad a favour and go to the country.
When Dave said that Brown "Should bring it on" - not so long ago, I wrote here that he should be careful that he does not get what he asked for.
ReplyDeleteI shall vote Conservative, as I have always done, but with no real sense of victory in sight. Nothing would persuade me to vote for the Labour Cabal that has distorted the truth for over 10 years, daily and indeed hourly.
When we have been soundly defeated then perhaps we get on with the Phoenix concept - burn the rubbish out and arise again as a party which knows right from wrong [and from Left].
Who should lead is beyond me at present - please let it be an Englishman - but cometh the hour, cometh the Man.
Victor
This is just a Labour tactic to discombobulate Cameron into rushing his policy review, and thereby risk 'reverting to type' - with the danger he might actually implement some old style Tory policies. Once he has done this his chances of election are then totally neutralised, and New Labour can govern for the next ten years.
ReplyDeleteCameron has got Brown spooked - and he knows that if he waits a while, Dave will get his 'ducks in a row' and wipe out Labour at the polls.
If these polls are accurate, and I doubt they are, it merely shows the power of the BBC/Sky, but mainly the BBC's influence, on the floating vote. They spin every story exactly the way Labour want it to be spun. Northern Rock fiasco is "nothing to do with the government and nothing bent about Labour's connections at NR and that promising Tax payers money to underwrite reckless financial businesses is a great thing, and it's all Mervyn King's fault anyway"
ReplyDeleteFlooding "heroic Gordon making pledges for help" instead of telling people about the money that he didn't give for flood defences when he was asked for it a few years ago.
Foot Mouth "so well handled by Gordon" not that Defra was utterly useless in it's organisation or oops! It wasn't under control after all.
Tory proposals are slagged off and ridiculed like Redwood's.ect. ect.
A very large part of the floating vote, are only influenced by TV when it comes to current affairs or possibly tabloid newspapers as well. The Conservative Party don't have any friends in these areas, or anywhere really, in the MSM. There may be "right-wing" papers but they don't bang Cameron's drum and spend a lot of time trying to undermine him. Hardly surprising, with Brownite propaganda everywhere, that they are behind in the polls. But the polls often reflect fashion, that can change when people actually have to vote and think of all the government failure of the last 10 years. In recent elections, the Labour share of vote slips considerably to what the polls suggest and/or Tory vote increases. Labour strategists know that and as Gordon has a very good majority a present why have the expense and risk of an election. Things will be getting worse in the next couple of years, but he'll have the BBC spinning furiously in his favour to try and bulls**t the electorate on his behalf.
Oddly, Brown's spinning is more effective than Blair's, which a lot of people assumed wouldn't be the case, because of the difference in charisma.
Blair was given lots of airtime to spin himself with his histrionic performances, but that was viewed with suspicion by a lot of people because it was coming directly from a politician.
Brown cannot spin himself too well, so it's the "trusted" third party's, like the BBC or Sky correspondents who tell everyone how "great" he is and what a "good" job he's doing. I think that the 3rd party spin is actually more effective, even though Brown is thieving Scottish socialist with wobbly jaw, and the looks like a cross between an ageing chimpanzee and Richard Nixon.
Gordon is hoping that Dave will screw up by panicking at the polls, and drop the 'if we don't evolve, we can't survive' shtick, and revert to non-environmentally sound, non-prudent economic policies and reject the centre ground to appeal to a 'core vote' consisting of verity, and half a dozen rabid mouth-foamers from Guido Fawkes.
ReplyDeleteRather than a consensus of modern, liberal intelligentsia like Iain Dale and the majority of his readers, a goodly swathe of Guardian readers, and a significant portion of the Telegraph reading demographic.
Stick to your guns Dave - your policies may not guarantee victory but we are as f*cked as Marks and Sparks nearly was a couple of years back without them..
Wrinkled Weasel said...
ReplyDelete"I am wrong..I was betting on a hung parliament all along and now I have lost my stake."
Yes, but don't feel too badly. A hung parliament was easily the most likely outcome until daveboy set out to absolutely prove that he and the tories are unfit for government. Nobody could have foreseen how he would be quite so determined to show that.
Good news is that now the tories can be smashed, as they will be. All the English people I know think it hilarious that everything has gone wrong since Brown took over, but they still won't vote for the useless tories. Then it should be possible to get the sane, humane but seriously right-wing party that the English actually want.
Is Brown considering the results of internal polls in Scotland? After all the last poll (10th Aug) had SNP on 48%! Labour in Scotland would be much smaller if that occurred in the general. And Brown might have to campaign hard in his own constituency.
ReplyDeleteweasel--"cchq on full election alert"---bit like Titanic on iceberg watch!
ReplyDeleteIf Cameron does start to adopt the stance and policies we all want to see surely the media will push the 'lurch to the right' line.
ReplyDeleteIn addition could it not also be presented that Brown has forced Cameron to take this line and it is he rather than Cameron that is dictating Tory policy. Cameron is in a no win situation and regrettably I agree with most of the posters here who want a quick election so that we can lose, change leadership and rebuild with the direction the party wants and the country needs.
Ironically Camerons weakness might be a good reason for Gordon not to go for an election soon. The longer he holds off the more potential for the Tories to really go into meltdown i.e. win this one but lose the next versus win the next two or three while the Tories indulge in more navel gazing
As a potential tory voter I read with incredulity the garbage that is posted from died in the wool tories. Denying global warming and harking back to previous battles that were won in a different era just makes the party look stupid and unelectable. The only reason Cameron looks weak is that the perpetual reactionary back stabbers keeping sniping at him. There's not long left to expose Gordon Brown for what he is. waiting to lose the election in the hope of getting another leader has been tried before. Cameron is the tories best hope.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 1:19 - What is "died in the wool"? Was it too hot and the Tories keeled over wearing heavy jumpers?
ReplyDeleteYou didn't read anything with "incredulity",by the way, unless you have been living down a cave for the last 10 years or are very, very slow at discerning the political mood. You are saying you feel incredulous and shakey all over because a large tranche of voters are sufficiently educated to know some history and be aware that we have gone through warming and cooling cycles over the past two thousand years that we know of. I'm sure an educated- although easily surprised - chap like you knows that they used to have rolling vineyards north of York? And that when the Romans occupied England, people were swanking about in togas?
Then we went through a cooling cycle -the "little Ice Age" for a few hundred years. Then slowly things began to warm up again. It's still not as hot as it was 2,000 years ago, though.
Global warming, which is definitely happening, although very, very slowly, is caused by activity on the surface of the sun, which is a large, powerful ball of fire that gives us all life. Currently, Mars is also having slight global warming and it's doing it without the benefit of messy people leaving "carbon footprints" all over the shop.
Remember in the Eighties when they warned uf of "global cooling"? Global warming and cooling cycles take centuries, but that's not fast enough for today's dynamic environmentalist! They want action NOW! As do today's dynamic environmental tycoons, like Al Gore! (He's the biggest shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, BTW, but I'm sure you knew that.)
Spare us creating policies around fantasies. We had enough of that when everyone was supposed to believe Tony Blair had "charisma".
BTW,Anonymous, you are not a "potential Tory voter". You're a pedestrian, boring, socialist troll.
Message for Verity in response to mine. Yes, it would appear Cameron's Conservatives don't understand what "accountable" means. Yet many of us non-Parliamentarians could supply them with a list!
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is Cameron scored an "own goal" by announcing he would withdraw from 'Punch and Judy' politics. Yet Parliament is an adversarial system, and he's left the way free for Comrade Brown's 'clunking fist' - and he's hell bent on destroying the Conservatives. [Totalitarians are so undemocratic!]
Finally - thanks to the Neo-Coms [aka the Labour Party - the political arm of the Trades Union Movement, their paymasters and raison d'etre] - the Conservatives have been pushed into reverting to that dreadful, damaging Butskelism. Sad to think that Lady T banished Butskelism in 1979 and now - like Dracula - it's revivified.