Everything to play for
In a couple of days it will be just five months to the 2015 General Election. Which is looking like the closest and most difficult to call of my adult lifetime.
I agree with very little that Nigel Farage has said in the past few weeks, but when he said that nobody knows what is going to happen in the election he was pretty much right.
Mike Smithson wrote yesterday on his Political Betting blog that "Until we can get a clearer fix on Labour in Scotland GE15 is almost impossible to call."
He might as well have left out the first eleven of those words and stuck with the last six.
It is overwhelmingly likely that either David Cameron or Ed Miliband will be Prime Minister for the early part of the next parliament and that is about as much as we can confidently predict.
If people who would otherwise have voted Conservative turn to UKIP that will help both UKIP and Labour at the expense of the Conservatives and could potentially put Ed Miliband into Downing Street - indeed, Miliband has appeared to be following a 35% strategy which counted on UKIP to damage the Conservatives.
Hence the "Go to bed with Nigel and you may wake up with Ed" line is true as long as you don't leave out the "may" part.
The more astute political commentators are now waking up to the fact that fixed-term parliaments have changed politics in Britain rather more than most people originally expected. Personally I think the fact that we no longer play the "Will he-won't he" game about whether a PM might call a snap election has done far more good than harm. I don't for a moment regret that the media didn't spend half of Spring 2014 wondering whether there might be a General Election in May, and half the Summer speculating about the prospects for one in the autumn. But one consequence has been that the knowledge that a general election is coming up is much less in the public consciousness. It doesn't FEEL like we're five months from a general election - which in turn means that many voters may be much less likely to have decided how to vote.
Put these three things together - the closeness of the election, the fact that nobody can be certain how votes for a multiplicity of parties including UKIP, Greens, and SNP will play out, and the fact that people are making up their minds later - and we have a degree of uncertainty which, to employ a greatly over-used expression when it genuinely applies, is completely unprecedented.
What that means is that every party has everything to play for.
I agree with very little that Nigel Farage has said in the past few weeks, but when he said that nobody knows what is going to happen in the election he was pretty much right.
Mike Smithson wrote yesterday on his Political Betting blog that "Until we can get a clearer fix on Labour in Scotland GE15 is almost impossible to call."
He might as well have left out the first eleven of those words and stuck with the last six.
It is overwhelmingly likely that either David Cameron or Ed Miliband will be Prime Minister for the early part of the next parliament and that is about as much as we can confidently predict.
If people who would otherwise have voted Conservative turn to UKIP that will help both UKIP and Labour at the expense of the Conservatives and could potentially put Ed Miliband into Downing Street - indeed, Miliband has appeared to be following a 35% strategy which counted on UKIP to damage the Conservatives.
Hence the "Go to bed with Nigel and you may wake up with Ed" line is true as long as you don't leave out the "may" part.
The more astute political commentators are now waking up to the fact that fixed-term parliaments have changed politics in Britain rather more than most people originally expected. Personally I think the fact that we no longer play the "Will he-won't he" game about whether a PM might call a snap election has done far more good than harm. I don't for a moment regret that the media didn't spend half of Spring 2014 wondering whether there might be a General Election in May, and half the Summer speculating about the prospects for one in the autumn. But one consequence has been that the knowledge that a general election is coming up is much less in the public consciousness. It doesn't FEEL like we're five months from a general election - which in turn means that many voters may be much less likely to have decided how to vote.
Put these three things together - the closeness of the election, the fact that nobody can be certain how votes for a multiplicity of parties including UKIP, Greens, and SNP will play out, and the fact that people are making up their minds later - and we have a degree of uncertainty which, to employ a greatly over-used expression when it genuinely applies, is completely unprecedented.
What that means is that every party has everything to play for.
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