Sunny,

Perhaps your analysis is right. Perhaps folk are completely disgusted with politics as is?

I know I am.

I think you’re quite right, adn this is something we’ve been saying in the marginal seat I campaign in since before the debate.

The danger for us (Labour) is that there’ll be a chunk of people who wanted to vote LibDem but never did because it was a waste will now feel they can. (Despite the fact that in my seat, the Lib Dem would have to more than DOUBLE his vote on the notional 2005 result to win…)

Rumours of another poll showing the Lib Dems six points ahead of the Tories and Labour a long way behind in third.

Angus Reid’s poll claims that in these Lab:Tory marginals they have found Con 32 Lab 30 LD 28. Now that’s only one poll and they’re beginning to go all over the place (they usually do at this stage of a campaign) but if it’s anything like true and the LDs can actually campaign in these seats then 2010 is going to make 1983 and 1997 look like “status quo” elections.

Cleggmania is completely understandable from a not very savvy, not very connected, electorate.

That is the problem.

Folk are more disgusted with the moat ponds and the like than you, Westminster orientated folk seem to believe.

I think Nick Clegg has all to play for. I think that politics, as is, is a busted flush.

@2 ralasdair

All the more reason then for Labour to have shown they might actually have some principles, and committed to electoral reform before now? Deathbed conversions are rarely all that convincing.

I live in a seat where the only way to unseat the Tory would be for Labour to give the LD a free run. That kind of co-operation obviously wasn’t going to happen, not least because both Labour and the LD’s maintained the fiction they could win on their own.

There is little point for the Labour party to complain at this late stage, when it looks like the electorate might have decided to take matters into their own hands and deliver a hung parliament.

Gallen 10,

My bet is on the Cleggomania continuing and bouncing to the GE. If that were to be right, and the odds are stacked against it, I’d say that your seat was up for grabs.

Galen 10,

Apologies for the double l !

@ 6 douglas

From your lips to God’s ears!

It’s certainly achievable. Last election the Tory got around 25,000, LD 14,000 and Labour 10,000 with UKIP on 3,000. If enough blimpish nutters still vote UKIP, and there is a big enough swing to the LD’s from the others, who knows?

What a sweet result that would be!

Galen 10,

OK, that is on the fringes of possibility. It needs a lot of previously Tory voters to switch. And your Tory may be as clean as the driven snow. Which would be his defence, and legitimately so.

I wonder however whether local beats national?

I don’t know, and I suspect you don’t either.

This is a storm brewing, whether tradittional politicians like it or not.

To what extent it extends is another matter….

@9 douglas uy can dream tho

Yeah, I realise it’s pretty unlikely.. a guy can dream tho, right?

As Tories go I don’t think he’s that bad (damning with faint praise, I know).. and it is a pretty true blue part of the world. It’s possible that the UKIPers might take fright and vote Tory again to keep the LD out of course.

As you say, it would take a pretty big earthquake to change things here, and the Cleggomania may not last that long, or be big enough on the Richter scale to change things here. Whether it it will be big enough in extent is indeed the $64,000 question.

Clegg is a former lobbyist and Eurocrat pretending to be an ‘anti-politics’ candidate.

He claimed close to maximum allowable expenses – including gardening and …oops…. charged the taxpayer for his overseas private phone calls – and yet presents himself as Honest John, untainted by the expenses scandal.

It ain’t sustainable.

I’m starting to wonder if metropolitan guardianista lefties are actively trying to destroy the Labour Party.

Ps, the latest Comres was C 35, L 26, LD 26. Labour have been in the mid 20s in virtually every single poll since the weekend and in third place in most.

Tip: if you want to have some idea what will happen when the votes are split like this look at 1983 and the 1920s. There’s a book called ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ that may need a 21st century makeover to explain what happened to Labour and why its supporters cheered its death.

And if you want poll analysis from people who know what they are talking about try politicalbetting and ukpollingreport.

@12 hamlet

I think the comres poll is probably an outlier: doesn’t seem to be in sync with many others.

Reports of the death of the Labour party may be exaggerated, but if it does get a bit of a kicking from the electorate, who would be to blame?!

I don’t think the situation is the same as 1983 – here’s hoping it’s not anyway. I don’t think it’s so much a matter of Labour supporters cheering it’s death, I think many have just decided that it isn’t worth fighting for.

@11 flowerpower

Meh… so what? Most of the newly converted aren’t voting for Clegg or the LD’s because they think they are wonderful, neither are they incapable of seeing that the LD’s were part of the archaic, corrupt, 19th century system running the country.

Time will tell if it’s sustainable or not. It will be fun watching the Tories and Labour panicking for the next 3 weeks tho.

I’ve believed for some time that what the country needed was a good kick up the rear in constitutional terms – who knows, after previous false dawns, maybe now is the time the electorate are going to deliver it?

13

The situation isn’t the same, for a start ‘others’ are on more than then, but there are similarities. If there is a big Lab to Con and a big Lab to LD swing, Labour will find itself losing seats it never dreamed possible to lose.

It will be barely represented south of the Midlands, with a few outposts in London and Birmingham. It will start to lose seats to the LDs in its northern heartlands, a complete nightmare scenario as such trends can becoming reinforcing. Look what happened to the tories after 97. Labour will even be looking at going from 1st to 4th in places like Brighton and Norwich, a position they will never recover from.

I’m just stunned at the reaction. Perhaps it is shock, perhaps the implications aren’t being appreciated. I know some tories who thought in 1997 it wouldn’t be that bad, they found out the hard way.

This is an appalling piece of Labour propaganda. Your conclusions don’t follow from the premises. The problem with your logic about “taking voters away” is that it isn’t clear (or, seemingly, consistent) what your starting point is.

If the “previously Tory voters” you’re talking about are the ones from the last election, then the LibDem surge is academic, and yes Lab would still win a marginal. On the other hand, if they are the ones polled *since* the last election, then they are most likely ex-Labour voters from the last count, which means that your analysis simply doesn’t hold water.

#4 if calling the LibDem surgers disparaging names is the best argument you’ve got, then you’ve kind of already lost it.

Encouraging people to vote on the basis of some heavily-spun notion of how you claim others are going to vote is a pernicious anathema to the notion of democracy and voting with conscience. Vote-tampering by another name. You should be ashamed.

@16 Clarice

“Encouraging people to vote on the basis of some heavily-spun notion of how you claim others are going to vote is a pernicious anathema to the notion of democracy and voting with conscience. Vote-tampering by another name. You should be ashamed.”

I’ve rarely seen such sententious nonsense posted..and with so little apparent cause! People (particularly in this election) don’t vote after inhaling drafts of democratic purity. Voting (or abstaining) can be for a whole host of reasons. I can easily see situations where I’d vote not according to my conscience, but to achieve a particular result.

I’ll vote LD not because I’m a huge fan, but because in my constituency they are the only ones who could possibly defeat the Tory incumbent. Wake up and smell the coffee Clarice.. things have changed!

On a similar theme I wrote this

The whole essence of Sunny’s piece is correct. The surge is about the electorate knowing there is a credible alternative – why that hasn’t been the case for several years will have to be mulled over later – this is where Sunny and I diverge, he believes that what the papers/media have to say doesn’t mean much, I do.

You have to add to that; that, again just my humble opinion from living and being around the general unwashed masses, a lot in the election is down to who the leaders are. My belief is that this started around Thatcher’s time – people looked for the conservative box and X’ed it.

Cameron was, as I have said before, expecting a cake-walk into power because of the anti-New Labour sentiment, he didn’t, in a million years, expect Clegg to do so well at all – neither did Brown.

This election could bring about a crisis constitutionally if the LibDems do get a massive vote and still cannot take power – the nerd in me is really excited about what will happen next.

Thsi probably explains the bile aimed at Clegg personally by extreme righ wing trolls like cjcjc and flowerpot brain
“Clegg is a former lobbyist and Eurocrat pretending to be an ‘anti-politics’ candidate”
The venom aimed at Clegg iw worthy of the materaisl chucked at foot and kinnock in the eighties.
Extreme right wing nut jobs such as Chas newkey burden, jonathan hoffmann and the tory scum at HP are really going for the jugular.
You would think Clegg was Arafat,s ADC.
To paraphrase troy parker “They hate Labour but they really hate the lib dems”
Clegg and boys, your have arrived , the blue nosed scum are running scared and they revert to type..
Two predictions.
1.It will get worst.
2. It the next two weeks the other two dishonest tory wing nuts Nick Cohen and Marti9n Bright will be adding their two peneth for the Tories by attacking the lib dems.

@19

I say let them take their best shot. The more hysterical and rattled they look and sound the more it will turn voters off. The electorate can smell fear, and both the Tories and Labour reek of it.

The Tories are in an obvious panic and will soon start turning on each other. The wheels have finally fallen off the New Labour bus, and they are already arguing about whether, and to what extent, to come to terms with the LD’s.

I absolutely agree with astateofdenmark. It is breathtaking to watch the insouciance of some Labour supporters at this devastating turn of events. The consequences for the party could be severe, if not terminal, and we have people focussing on the fact that the rise of the Liberals will deny Cameron a majority. We could with some slightly longer-term thinking.

If anything, a mild Tory recovery to push the Liberals back to third place in vote share would probably be in the long term interests of the party…

@21 Ben

“If anything, a mild Tory recovery to push the Liberals back to third place in vote share would probably be in the long term interests of the party…”

There, in a nutshell, we have one of reasons so many people don’t trust Labour and it’s supporters! They would rather risk a Tory recovery… perhaps even a Tory victory (!?).. becuase that would be in the long term interests of the Labour party.

The arrogance is breathtaking. The faster the electorate drives a stake through the rotten heart of the Labour/Tory duopoly that has misruled us for the past 60 years the better! The terminal condition of the Labour party is self inflicted; the sooner it, and the nauseating “New” Labour project it spawned, is pronounced dead the better.

Galen10, you appear to have something of a bee in your bonnet with respect to the Labour Party.

I would merely point out that it is the only consistently effective engine of progressive reform that this country has seen since probably the 1906 Liberal government and that whether the Lib Dems could sustain that role is an open question. Their stated policies (e.g. that “penny on income tax for education” until they junked it) have displayed a consistent poverty of ambition compared with what Labour has achieved. If we’d had a Lib Dem govt for the last 13 years would we have a minimum wage and doubled spending on education? Not to mention the NHS. I suspect we would be celebrating somewhat smaller progressive achievements.

Depends on your view of the Lib Dems I guess. One thing is certain, there are a heck of a lot of Lib-Tory coalition administrations around the country that have been cutting services for several years…

@23 Ben

Wow…..you must really have fallen for all that New Labour guff hook line and sinker huh? Perhaps if we’d had an LD government, or a Lab/LD coalition, or a radical left of centre grouping of some sort in power over the last 13 years, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now?

No involvement in Iraq, no plans to sped billions on Trident, none of the illiberal anti civil rights legislation, effective regulation of the financial sector, a 50% tax rate for those on more than £100k p.a.

You seem very enamoured of Labour… and with rather less cause than I have to write them off as a shameful principle void in search of a band wagon to jump on. If the Labour movement was actually that progressive, it would have reformed the Lords decades ago, brought in PR, made actual moves towards promoting equality and a fair distribution of wealth… the list is a long one.

If it was ever an engine of progressive change, it lacked horsepower, and in anycase broke down long ago. Let it rest in peace while we actually forge a new future.