I can smell a Kinnock

On the night of the General Election of April 1992 David Dimbleby opened the BBC coverage with 'The BBC is predicting a Labour victory with a 10% swing' by 1am it was clear that this was the worst straw poll prediction ever and the Conservatives stayed in Government.

There's something called the Bradley effect in the US, that people will respond to pollsters in one way and then vote another when confronted with the actual choice on the day.

In the UK it was Labour and possibly the triumphalism of Kinnock that the voters rejected but you'd have been hard pressed to get people to admit that they wouldn't vote Labour ahead of time.

So the softness of the lead that Obama has shouldn't be underestimated and it need not be a race issue. Certainly for some they may be uncomfortable with the idea of Obama's alien background but anyone overtly racist is going to be obvious.

If there is a sudden change at the poll (and there is the expected high turnout), then the reasons will be much more complex. Will voters believe that Obama can represent all or will they suddenly convince themselves that the country will become divided against itself.

I don't seriously think that most people voting for the Presidency consider the Vice President at all. There have been idiot VPs in the past and not just ones that couldn't spell potatoes. So for those voters that are conflicted when they meet the many weird methods that Americans use to vote will the comparison between Biden and Palin matter?

Probably not, whatever voter effect that either was brought on to achieve has already happened. The result of this election again is in the hands of the uncommitted not the dedicated. So, will the undecided vote with the zeitgeist or will they vote for the familiar? The recognisable image of a US President for most people (whatever their background), is a middle aged to old white man with military service.

Just hope his heart keeps going for the next four years...

When Winning Feels Like Losing

Other countries run a first past the post electoral system, most notably the US though in their case it is not for a Parliamentary system and so the distortions that get thrown up are rarely as wild as they can be in the British system.

Labour, with a solidly projected 36% of the popular vote are still going to end up with a 10% majority of the seats. The Tories with 33% get around 50 more seats but that percentage of the vote is exactly the same as it was last time. The Liberal Democrats get a consistent 6-7% (going as high as 17%) swing against Labour and yet only come out with ten or so more seats.

At the same time the exit poll from MORI is pretty much on the button from the get go. Truly God does play dice (not that there is one).

And the Very Reverend looks like he spent the night being pushed against the wall and slapped continuously all the time trying to get in edgeways 'But its an historic third term for Labour'. And so it is but one can't help thinking that its going to be a very very short term for Mr Blair.

We are about to live in interesting times again.

As for the Wyre Forest, the Good Doctor survived a massive drain on his vote and is still our MP. Good old Bert Priest (Monster Raving Loony), got 303 votes including our two which I think was the highest vote they polled last night. In the end it was a vote of considerable high value as it cost me nothing and nothing was changed, though nobody noticed.

Exit Poll Exeunt

The Who Should You Vote For site is running an exit poll on the General Election today but unfortunately demand has precipitated a melt down.

Once they have it back together you can click on the link above and record how you voted in which constituency (possibly an offence against the Representation of the People Act but no one seems bothered about that). Or you can click on the pretty multicoloured button on the left right.

Green Loony All The Way

The die is cast the lot deposited and I can reveal that the whole family (well J and I, S is mortified she can't vote at 11), has decided upon the Monster Raving Loony Party at the General Election.

In the local County Elections, at which we have two votes, I have voted Green for both. That isn't so much because its the Green party but that its the local loose cannon Jim Millington who must be 70 now who has been independant and various other things over the years.

These may all appear to be wasted votes, possibly so. I have rarely ever found myself enthusiastic about voting for any particular candidate and this year I didn't have the opportunity to vote Liberal Democrat which would have probably been my choice.

Misled but Right

I understand the Lib-Dems attack on Blair, that he misled the House that the War was illegal and that the Attorney General's advice should be published in full, after all the public purse paid for it.

But the argument runs a little thin about him misleading the House as the Lib-Dems and a not inconsiderable number of others all voted against the war anyway. Can you be misled and then ignore it and make the right decision?

On the other hand Blair's bleating about his integrity being attacked and that he should be left alone now, because he was the one that had to make the decision and good or bad he made the decision, and in his judgement the right one, is the weakest I've heard him on the subject. That coming after the Paxman interview has him looking vulnerable.

Yes he was the one who had to make the decision but he dissembles, the decision wasn't made with the backing of the House, it was made months before, before even September. There is the lie, all the others were necessary because of that Big Lie.

When being strangled relax, don't kick

The Tories are giving their impression of the man with the noose round his neck, the trapdoor just having opened. This morning they plan on announcing cancelling the revaluation of housing for the purposes of Council Tax. Previously they said they'd close the National College for School Leadership and when it was pointed out to them that this was the only institution that could grant the qualification that all headteachers need in order to work they said they'd abolish the qualification as well.

I had thought the Tories would survive this campaign without imploding, the last one was marked by the pointless campaign on saving the pound, which was never in danger. This one is going to be remembered for the complete lack of interest that the electorate have in the Tories regardless of how they try and dog whistle support from any dark and squalid corner.

Respect disses Salam Pax

There's a kind of spoiled glow of charisma, I've always felt, around George Galloway. It isn't so much his associating with Saddam Hussein, after all everyone associated with him at one time or another if they could, Rumsfeld included. It is more the absolutism combined with a love of personal luxury that gives me this whiff of tainted goods.

So, it was without surprise that I read this morning of the confrontation of Salam Pax and Gorgeous George. Salam Pax always appears such a nice person. He is, in his own small way, untouchable much as a Mandela. So for Galloway to immediately leap onto the defensive claiming that he couldn't possibly give him an interview because Pax supported the war and such and so just emphasises that the George Galloways of the world aren't interested in their stated aims, they're interested in being right. Dialog is not something they respect.

A dose of Andrew in the morning

Not Seltzer, but Andrew Marr the current Political Editor at the BBC (rumoured to be evacuating that post to become Frost's sucessor). This morning at the end of the Today Programme on Radio 4 there was a little roundup interview with him about the state of play for the Tories.

The morning papers are concentrating on how the Tories are stuck on 31-33% and that their immigration pitch is frightening more away than its sucking in. No complicated analysis that, the point of the immigration policy is to remove UKIP as a threat to their vote (no mention of the EU at all in this election from anyone, notice) and their taxation, or reduction of it, is a bribe to wavering Labour voters.

It isn't so much that the immigration policy is frightening them away (labour voters can be bigots too), as that Howard just isn't believed on taxes, the Tories have no Gordon Brown.

Anyway, I was talking about Andrew Marr. At the end of his summation he said that senior Tories were in a bit of a state as they hadn't made any inroads at all and that there were some difficult tactics they had to decide on as to breaking the deadlock. If they pursued the immigration policy further and emphasised social unrest and disorder then the liberal media would be nailing them day after day and if they brought out the argument that another Labour landslide or large majority would be bad for the country (which it undoubtedly would), then it would appear that they were capitulating.

Immediately after this I watched the Tory morning Press Conference on the Parliament channel and, after a few questions zonking them in the gut about their lack of performance and how the immigration policy isn't working with Murdoch from the other journalists, Andrew Marr asked 'What can you say about, as appears to be the case with the state of the polls, another large Labour majority?'.

Which Howard dealt with reasonably well without stepping into the trap of seeming to capitulate but basically repeated the Tory message of the day which is 'Do you want more just talk from Tony Blair'.

And that prompted me to think, was Andrew Marr actually laying an early trap, heightening the idea that there will be a large majority, or offering an easy ball to Howard to give him the opportunity to show that there really is some fight in the election?

I can't tell and in truth it might be a lot simpler than that and that it was just what occurred to him during the summation he made on the radio just two minutes before.

Should I Vote or Should I Go?

I still haven't decided but I have been nudged in a direction and that's solely because at the same time as the General Election we have two local councillors to vote for and I suppose I should vote in that at least.

But then if I do vote I'm more than likely to write 'None of the Above' in the General Election which I used to think was the best way out of the conundrum. Now I'm not so sure. Now I'm coming round to the idea of not turning up being a much better measure of how I actually feel.

I have a somewhat peculiar choice to make as the Lib-Dems aren't standing and they are the closest to my actual opinions though I have significant doubts as to how they'd actually perform if elected. But for others who really don't want to vote Labour because of Blair and aren't attracted to anyone else I'd urge them not to turn up at all. A very low turnout would be far more of a blow to Blair than a marginal shift or spoiled ballot papers.

Bad is Good Enough

I emailed the Lib-Dem web site with my complaints about the way they're delivering the manifesto online and all credit to them they've replied quickly.

The reply doesn't really help though. It seems that they think a pdf of the manifesto would have taken longer to download and be slower to page through and navigate around and search than the method they've used which is to deliver pages as images.

There is a common misconception that pdf files are slow and awkward to use but this is mostly because the default settings that Acrobat has loads all the possible plugins and features. If you run the go faster patch which just sets up a minimal configuration file Acrobat sprints and behaves far better. It's true the Lib-Dems can't fix that misconception, especially if they have it themselves but even with a flabby version of Acrobat it would be far faster, far easier for the user than the kludgy interface they've chosen.

The Information Officer makes the point that because the traffic was so high yesterday that it would have been even slower to download and that its quicker to manipulate these images. Unfortunately, he's quite wrong. Even without simple measures such as mirroring (which I'd use anyway), the pdf file would be cached by the web server, it would be read just the once and delivered thousands of times. The images are fetched one at a time and when the individual user demands them, this means that they're far more likely not to be cached or that in cacheing them the rest of the server will be slow.

He also makes the point that the image can be zoomed for those that need to have the text larger and yes you can and I certainly have to, but the sheer ignorance of issues such as accessibility and useability are stunning.

Yes you can get a rich text form file, which has no formatting at all, and yes you can manipulate the text yourself then (and edit it to your heart's content if you wished), but I don't think they've thought that through. Setting the font size of a text file is a mechanically difficult process for many users and given you're working on a live copy of text its very easy to delete sections just by hitting the space bar if you've highlighted a section to resize.

That they've used an American company to deliver and host these images just puts the icing on the cake.

The We Will Do the Daftest Things Party

is not the Monster Raving Loony Party that want to create a 99p coin, but the Lib-Dems in picking a US Software company to publish their manifesto, and do it badly at that.

The Liberal Democrats are such a high profile customer for this company that they don't even bother mentioning that they've been used to publish one of the three major political parties manifesto's in the UK. After all they probably think a manifesto is something Communists do.

The Quite Large Red Book

I'd read originally this morning that the Labour Party Manifesto (the Red Book), wasn't available as a pdf, but just a moment looking on the web site and there it was. Or rather, here it is.

You will need to be patient in getting it though, it took a few minutes for me, no doubt just the hundreds of thousands of people eager to read it. Or perhaps its just all the bloggers.

I can say one thing for certain and that's that it wasn't published for those with an eyesight the far side of 40 years old. I needed to crank up the magnification in Acrobat to 150% to read it comfortably, something a little harder to do with a physical book, but then many with eyesight problems aren't going to be reading it online either.

Blair's blurb at the beginning sounds as if it might come out of any major corporations Annual Report, all bright eyed and bushy tailed.

Moving on into the detail and we get some of the aspirations. On Employment."Our goal is employment opportunity for all – the modern definition of
full employment." Yes, not an actual job just the opportunity for a job. On a day when the unemployment figures went up by 20,000 (let alone Rover and the Longbridge area), which means the overal total topped a million and a half this doesn't seem such a wonderful aspiration.

And Education (Our Number 1 Priority, can't help thinking about United Airlines every time I see that), the aspiration is to "We want
every secondary school to become a specialist school and existing specialist
schools will be able to take on a second specialism. Over time all
specialist schools will become extended schools, with full programmes
of after-school activities."

Now, perhaps I'm just being a little dim but if every school is a specialist and every school should have more than one specialism doesn't that mean they're generalist? I have to be honest the whole idea of school specialisms leaves me cold and with the feeling that if there's a speciality over there then there is a lack of opportunity and provision over here.

All in all Labour seem to have dropped actual promises in favour of aspirations. This might be more honest, but it also means they can say, "But that's what we tried to accomplish we didn't say we would".

Wee Willie Winkie produces Heir

It would be churlish to suppose that Wee Willie Winkie (alternatively known in Scotland as O'or Wille), had planned to produce his very own personal baby to kiss right in the first/second week of the election and congratulations to him and the wife for having qualified for the Brown Baby Bonus (this is considerably more use than a Brucie Bonus).

It would also be foolish to suppose that the Lib-Dems aren't also cock a hoop at the idea of an entirely pointless reason to vote for them.

No picture of the aforesaid child was currently available for publication...

Disenfranchised again...

Last week I sent an email to the Wyre Forest Lib-Dem party asking them why there was no Lib-Dem candidate again this time around and whether there was a pact agreed with the incumbent Dr, or possibly recumbent, or the local Liberal Party. And I was promised a reply from the Chairman.

I haven't had one directly, but there is one on the Lib-Dem Wyre Forest site where Simon Hughes says he was asked to make the decision and that after talking with the good Dr. Taylor was content that he would vote in broad agreement with the Lib-Dems and so for this election only would suggest that Lib-Dem voters support Dr. Taylor.

Which is all very well and nice for the Dr. and I have no real quarrel with his performance in the House and how well he has represented the Wyre Forest, but it also gives spurious support to the Independent Hospital (umm whatever they're called) supporters of which he is the leader and which did have the majority in the council but lost it to the Tories in the last local elections.

Because this group, by and large, is made up of disillusioned Tories and a few disillusioned Labour members and especially in so far as the disillusioned Tories are concerned fairly incompetent.

I'd feel better about this if I'd ever had the opportunity for voting anything other than Labour, Tory or Independent in the past 16 years. But I haven't. I can't feel that I've ever had the opportunity to vote the way I wanted and so for the past few elections I've been writing 'None of the above'. I'd rather have a positive decision to make Mr Hughes.

They Shoot Horses Don't They?

I found on UK Poliblog this plaintive tale of an MP's Wife which rings far truer than the old Alastair Campbell blog. There have been a few infamous cases of bloggers losing their job in industry, mostly IT workers just telling it how it is. It may be a feature of this election that political bloggers get themselves or their spouses fired.

But one thing I'm coming rapidly to understand in this election is that there may be 6 million bloggers out there (including moi), but that almost all the electioning blogs are encapsulated, self centred and whining 'Me, Me, Me' diatribes. Even the BBC blogs are beginning to be more about the ties they're wearing and such than the actual events.

I should not be surprised, listening is a rare commodity and its getting difficult to find anyone to listen to.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

The current Tory tag line of 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?' is of course intended to strike chords with those angry at Blair et al and to fill in whatever thought comes into their head as a result and then connecting it with the Tories thinking the same way.

On the other hand whilst this seeming subtle slight of hand might play in Oz I'm just waiting for the cartoonists to take a free ride on it.

Are you thinking what we're thinking?



• We don't have a chance but we can't do worse than '24 Hours to save the Pound.'


• Yes that Flight guy was right but don't worry you won't suffer from the cuts, you're one of us.


• When did I last feed off real live blood.


• We start building the camps on 6/6/06.


• Thank god Gordon Brown is only chancellor.


• I wonder if I can get a job in TV after the election.

Bank of America backs Tories

Which is a little bizarre from this Anglocentric point of reference. According to Dow Jones Newswires the BoA considers that the Conservatives have re-emerged and that Blair might have to rely more on Brown to win the election which would mean "Such a shift to the left could dim the prospects for serious public sector reforms and further impair the health of the UK's public finances"

The public finances don't seem to have been impaired that much over the past 8 years with Brown as Chancellor. Granted he has his black hole, but he just punts that further into the future each time with no discernable fallout.

What's puzzling is why the Bank of America would say anything at all.

Original source from I Just Heard

Headline writing

I wonder, do I claim some kind copyright violation by the Daily Telegraph and the Sun for their front page headlines today being the same as my first election blog?

Or, was it so obvious a headline that I should rub my forehead with ashes and attempt no more clever headline picking?

Please sir, can I come back in now?

The fairly peculiar Paul Marsden, who defected to the Liberal Democrats over the Iraqi Invasion, has defected back to the Labour Party saying something about being able to dissent within the Party now and that Labour policies needed to be supported to stop the Tories winning and turning the clock back.

He has a tumour in his shoulder, which is no doubt very sad, and he wasn't planning on standing again. When he defected he claimed that No. Ten spun against him laying stories that he was being paid to do this or that and that he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Even so, he says, we can still feel betrayed over the War and everything else but when push comes to shove there's only one way to support services and that's to vote Labour.

So, I'm a little confused as to why he joined the Liberal Democrats at all, wouldn't they support services, wouldn't they be better than the Tories?

Perhaps his tumour either has a sibling or is located rather nearer his commonsense than his shoulder. Or rather perhaps its another New Labour strategem to encourage/frighten past Labour voters angry at Blair and angry at the Party to come out and vote for them and not either abstain or vote Lib Dem.

I won't be famous then

I had my email from the Deputy Editor at the Today Programme, along with probably thousands of others, regretting that they weren't going to use me as one of their three bloggers.

I shall survive.

As it is the BBC seems to be drowning in a surfeit of bloggers already what with the regular political editorial team and then the separate TV and Radio programmes having their own set as well.

Lib Dem works on two week campaign

The Tories seem to be concentrating their initial message on convincing us that they'll make better hospital cleaners, better school managers and better policemen. Perhaps they think we won't notice that politicians never actually clear up messes they only create them.

Labour is attempting gravitas and using that almost subtle technique of paralepsis (word of the day on Off Topic) in implying the threat that the Conservatives winning would mean going back on all their achievements even though the odds on the Tories getting a majority are very low.

At the same time the Liberal Democrats get an own goal on the first day from Labour as one of their candidates defect to the Lib Dems (Mr Wilkinson former candidate for the Ribble Valley). On their web site they speak to their own pointing out that for those with postal votes they'll be voting in about two and a half weeks and so it seems the Lib Dems aren't going to be taking their foot off the gas pedal in this first week.

Blogging the Dark Side

If the Alistair Campbell blog isn't genuine it's a bit of a poser as to who would spend all that time writing a fey version that really wasn't that interesting.

Apart from a rather quaint use of the word fucking as a synonym for the verb to be it barely says anything at all. Which I suppose is quite convincing in itself.

Given the recent Microsoft pitching for security experts at the Amsterdam Black Hat convention it could well be a strategem aimed at getting the non voting youth to vote. Though as most of the non voting youth are fairly disgusted by the likes of Campbell and the taint of the Iraqi invasion that's not too convincing.

The BBC is awaiting confirmation from A.C as I type, the chances are though that he won't jump either way until he sees the general reaction, if its good he'll claim it as his, if not he'll disown it and it will be dropped or the writer taken down a metaphorical dark alley.

They're off.

The Election is called and all the merry men (and merry maids), will be pounding the pavements and pillorying their opponents. Except they won't, not for the first week as the Pope is dead and somehow its disrespectful, or something.

I'm not entirely sure about that.

Rather it smacks of Labour being able to be dignified and release Government press releases (which have to be free of political cant of course) whilst everyone else sits on their hands.

We shall see.

The quote of the day comes from the man that runs the Lobby correspondents...
Tom Kelly said: "The prime minister has left for Buckingham Palace, which means a general election is under way, and as a civil servant, that means I have to shut up."