Latest news with #firstpastthepost
Telegraph
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
This is why Reform is on the cusp of victory
New polling by Ipsos-Mori has Reform on 34 points, currently heading for a working majority in Parliament at the next election. If this came to pass, it would mark the most extraordinary result in British politics in at least a century. Can we really trust polls like these? Let us consider reasons to be sceptical. The first is that all polls like this – standard, nationally representative surveys of a few thousand voters – only capture national vote share. They do not project the corresponding outcome of seats. While we can make rudimentary assumptions of a party's likely representation in Parliament, they are still assumptions. A 34 per cent vote share would return a huge number of seats, but we cannot know whether the spread of votes would be broad enough to secure the number of seats implied by this poll. A party might receive 34 per cent of the vote share, but their support might be concentrated in small geographical areas. In such circumstances, Britain's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system would limit them to a small number of seats. We know Reform will get little support in the big cities; this will artificially inflate Labour's seats next time and limit Reform's. The second reason to be sceptical of these polls is that, this far out from an election, they cannot be treated seriously as predictions. Polls are merely snapshots of public opinion at an exact moment in time. Things were different three months ago; they will be different in three months from now. Sometimes, with polls like this, there is a third reason to be sceptical: you get 'rogue' polls which put one party in an unusually high or low position. Sometimes polls randomly tap into a sample which is out-of-line with public opinion for some reason. This is why you must consider the average of all polls of a given period, and also consider whether polls reflect trends. In considering this specific point, let us now flip the analysis back over. Let us consider why this poll should be taken seriously: there are several reasons to do so. You cannot credibly write this poll off as 'rogue'. This result of 34 per cent broadly reflects other polls coming out at the moment. While it is a little higher, it is not much higher, and it confirms a clear trend that Reform is on the march. It obviously also reflects recent election results. At the mix of national and local elections in May, Reform secured a new MP, a new Mayor and a raft of new councillors across the country. They received 31 per cent of the vote share in the local elections. Ipsos-Mori's poll merely puts Reform on a slightly higher vote share than they secured several weeks ago in real elections. You must always take polls seriously if they reflect what is coming out in focus groups at the same time. Ed Shackle, Public First's head of qualitative research, confirms this to be the case. All the current momentum is with Reform. He notes that, while you used to get some hesitation from voters about admitting they were considering a Reform vote, this is gone now. People increasingly sense that Reform is surging, and it is exciting to get on the bandwagon. While Reform is surging in less-affluent areas on the coast and in towns and small cities across provincial England, their support is up across the board in the focus groups. They are currently hoovering-up most of the votes of disaffected people across the country. This recent polling result has also come after a wave of stories on issues where Reform is strong: immigration and crime, most notably. For the last few weeks, the media has been awash with stories of grooming gangs, serious crimes alleged to have been committed by asylum-seekers, the continued arrival of small boats, and all the rest. This cannot but help Reform's standing in the polls. While I am personally sceptical of anyone's ability to make a judgement on the national mood based on their own personal, random conversations, when these conversations are entirely in line with the polls, you have to wonder. And the conversations I have with ordinary people in my own personal life confirms that huge numbers of people are seriously thinking about voting for Reform. Overall, then, we should take this poll seriously; Reform is very obviously the most popular party in the country at this moment. But we still have four more years before the next election and an awful lot will change. Above all, given their recent record, it is reasonable to assume Reform will blow themselves up with internal rows and blatant incompetence. If they can make it through to the end of this year in a similar polling position but without a terrible internal trauma, it will be worth taking them very seriously.
Daily Mail
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
ANDREW PIERCE: Is a Reform row brewing over voting changes?
Even though he's forging ahead in the polls, Nigel Farage remains committed to ending the first past the post voting system. 'It's unfair,' says Farage, whose Reform UK had five MPs elected last year on 14 per cent of the vote, compared to the Lib Dems ' 72 MPs on 12 per cent. But it seems, there is a split in Reform UK. Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, is adamant they should abandon reforming the voting system. 'I firmly believe – and I'm speaking personally here – I think if PR was ever instituted in this country, we will end up in a state of gridlock. We will not be able to do the frankly quite ambitious, and in some cases radical, things by the time we get to 2029 that we're going to need to do to unshackle the British economy from crazy over-regulation.' He's changed his tune. He derided the outcome of the last election as 'the second most disproportionate result of any advanced democracy in history'. I-spy: Locked in conversation at a Westminster reception, Michael Portillo, once the golden boy of the Conservative Party, and Ethan Thoburn, who is Nigel Farage's chief of staff at Reform UK. Portillo would be quite the catch for Reform. Maggie's still standing in the West End Sir Elton John 's hit I'm Still Standing is reinvented as a stand-up row between Bob Geldof and Margaret Thatcher in a new West End musical about Live Aid called Just One Day. The row was over the Treasury's refusal to reimburse VAT costs to the charity. Geldof says: 'There was an argument between Thatcher and myself and it's central to the show, so the scene needed a real dynamism. 'I thought it should be Gilbert and Sullivan meets Hamilton.' The confrontation ends in a hip-hop 'dance off' – though in real life, Mrs Thatcher succumbed and agreed to stump up. Bulbous-nosed bumbler Lord Foulkes laid into parliamentary sketch writers and political columnists last week for being 'all over the place' and for making factual errors. Labour's Foulkes then made a howler himself, complaining that journalist Allison Pearson 'lives in Dubai'. Wrong! She resides in fair Essex. Just for clarity, Foulkes committed the mistake before lunch. Labour-run Camden council forecasts a deficit of around £40 million, meaning millions of pounds of cuts. They could start with slashing the £230,000 salary of new chief executive Jon Rowney. Camden MP Sir Keir Starmer is paid £172,000 as Prime Minister. Political observation of the week: Former Tory MP Sir Michael Fabricant notes: 'How strange, all the fish in the English Channel belong to the EU. All the humans found in the English Channel belong to the UK!' The EU handed out photos of the signing of the PM's surrender deal with a caption referring to Rodney Starmer. Rodney happens to be the Prime Minister's middle name. A GUTSY PERFORMANCE The annual Festival of the London Welsh Chorale has dedicated a young musician's prize in memory of Glenys Kinnock. Her widower Neil, the former Labour leader, said she always admired the bravery of young solo performers. 'She knew about that in her childhood and early teens,' he wrote in the New Statesman. 'Overcoming terror to give angelic voice to religious and folk songs. All that came before she gathered the supreme courage to tell her family she was a humanist and would no longer perform. 'That took real guts.'
