Poll: The Last Leaders Debate – Live tonight at 2030 BST on BBC One

Who will you vote for?

  • Labour

    Votes: 67 11.8%

  • Conservatives

    Votes: 231 40.7%

  • Liberal Democrats

    Votes: 227 40.0%

  • Other

    Votes: 42 7.4%
  • Total voters
    567
  • Poll closed .
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Hatter The Mad said:
Indeed. I remember a recent poll of Unite voting intentions which showed that only slightly over 50% intended to vote Labour. I cannot find a source for it though... any ideas what I am talking about?
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This one?

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/2032

I’ve had a busy couple of days so have only just caught up with the Populus poll of the Unite trade union members in the Sunday Times. I had assumed the poll was Populus trying out polling Union members ready for a future Labour leadership contest, but actually it was commissioned by the Conservative party, for reasons presumably best known to themselves.

Of course, one should also give polls commissioned by political parties proper scrutiny – they aren’t commissioning them out of the goodness of their hearts because they want you better informed. The full tables though are on Populus’s website and all seems above board.

The poll showed that amongst Unite members voting intentions were CON 31%, LAB 34%, LDEM 19%. The newspaper article compares this with respondents recollection of how they voted at the last election, which suggested a Labour lead then amongst Unite members of 48% to the Conservatives 22% – though as regular readers know, people aren’t actually very good at reporting their past vote accurately and it normally overestimates Labour’s support, so the swing to the Conservatives amongst Unite members probably isn’t quite as large as these figures suggest.
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Was back in 2009 though, can't find a more recent one.
 
Just because a union member doesn't vote Labour doesn't mean that they don't want to support the Labour party financially. A lot of workers rights today are thanks to the Labour party and although the Conservatives would love to get rid of them, they know they can't without alienating a huge portion of the workforce. In short, they may hate the current Labour party but know that it must exist in the future.

If they felt that strongly about not supporting Labour then they can always change union policy, like the RMT and other unions have done.
 
Dolph said:
If that was truly the case, then labour would have nothing to fear from funding reform as all those who currently donate via the union (who automatically opt their members in and are under no obligation to tell them they are donating) would simply donate directly.

The fact that labour oppose the move suggests that Unite should not be treated as a group of individual voluntary donors but as a block donation.
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It's certainly true that Labour wouldn't get as much money if their support wasn't rolled through the unions. However there's an excluded middle between the Union donations perfectly representing the wishes of the members and the union donations representing an arbitary block donation seperate from their representation.

I think it's obvious that the Union donations represent more of Her Majesty's subjects wills than the donations of a single rich businessman who's primary interests lie overseas.
 


Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell has endorsed a campaign by the Daily Mirror to tell people in 71 marginal seats how to vote in order to prevent a Conservative win. She told the BBC: "What this is doing is basically telling you how you can vote tactically. If your overriding aim is to stop the Tories being elected, it's going through all the seats where you could vote against the Tories with the greatest effect."
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WOOOO! DEMOCRACY! **** YEAH!
 
Hatter The Mad said:
Given that it was Brown who wore Blair out and forced him out of No11 in the end, I don't think so.
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Blair was no fool and saw Labour imploding and an increasingly hacked off electorate.

He got out at the right time to hand over a sinking ship to Gordon Brown and I have the feeling that he is privately laughing.

Tony Blair was PM for 10 years before Gordon Brown and should also shoulder his share of responsibility for the mess that the UK is currently in.
 
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Was watching the education debate and my friend pointed out that child poverty went up during thatcher and its still going up. But will cameron do something effective to eradicate child poverty?
 
slambo69 said:
Was watching the education debate and my friend pointed out that child poverty went up during thatcher and its still going up. But will cameron do something effective to eradicate child poverty?
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The problem is child poverty can never really be eliminated because it's defined in such a bizarre way.

A child grows up in poverty if their parent's household income is less than 60% of the median income of the country. no mention about whether they have enough food, somewhere to live, loving parents and so on. Simply, it's based on income.

There is no reason for any child in the UK to live in actual genuine poverty apart from due to very poor parenting.
 
Yes I question the ratings, poverty here is luxury even to middle class in other developing countries. But compared to other developed nations and europe, Britain is pretty low down on the table (21 in the OECD thing iirc).
 
slambo69 said:
Yes I question the ratings, poverty here is luxury even to middle class in other developing countries. But compared to other developed nations and europe, Britain is pretty low down on the table (21 in the OECD thing iirc).
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In the UK the spread between rich and poor is greater, that doesn't mean the poor are necessarily poorer.

Personally, I prefer living in a country where success is rewarded rather than punished, because I aspire to being successful.
 
A philosophy we share, however I also believe that everyone should be given a fair chance at success, something which a lot of people think the conservatives wont offer the poorest of children.
 
slambo69 said:
A philosophy we share, however I also believe that everyone should be given a fair chance at success, something which a lot of people think the conservatives wont offer the poorest of children.
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On the contrary, I do think the conservatives want just that. The thing they differ on is how to achieve it.

Trapping people in benefit dependency, relegating all to substandard schooling based on location, making higher education ever more unaffordable, none of these things help the opportunities of the poorest children, but they are all things that have happened further under Labour.

We've had 60 years of massive, monolithic state attempting to solve these problems, and it hasn't worked at any point. Perhaps the solution lies elsewhere?
 
slambo69 said:
This graph is pretty shocking as I hold much praise for thatcher: http://www.poverty.org.uk/01/a2.png
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But that is a result of a widening income spread, not necessarily a rise in actual poverty. Thatcher cut off a great many overpaid but thoroughly economically unproductive jobs during her time in power, mainly because (as now) they were funded by the state for no readily apparent reason and weren't actually affordable.

This is the problem with the measuring approach.

As an example, if the median household income was £20k, then everyone with a household income of £12.5k is below the poverty level. Assuming (as has been the case for the last 20 years or so) that earnings outstrip inflation, the median income could rise to £30k, and therefore everyone earning £18.75k is suddenly in poverty, and the rate of increase in lower earnings may have been lower than those at higher earnings. It doesn't mean that everyone under that band is worse off than when they were earning £13k and not in 'poverty'.
 
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