Tagged with General Election 2017

Why did so many pundits get the general election wrong?

What an amazing night. We’d had hints from the YouGov and Survation polls that things were going to be close, but even those who allowed a few meagre rays of hope into their hearts were haunted by the memories of so many times the pollsters were wrong. And not forgetting that a good chunk of polling opinion still indicated the Tories could look forward to commanding a thumping majority in the House. There are so many things that can be written about the 2017 general election, but more on trying to understand the return of two-party politics, the battering the SNP took in Scotland, and the Tories’ love-in with the Democratic Unionists later. Right now I want to focus on the result itself or, rather, why so many pundits got this election completely wrong. Continue reading →

Jeremy Corbyn and the Left have been completely vindicated

The results of the General Election are in, and they represent a tremendous vindication of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, who have insisted since he was put on the ballot two years ago that Labour can and would make gains running from the left, and that there is a route to power that doesn’t involve triangulating the Tories, or compromising on key issues such as austerity. Jeremy Corbyn stood on a platform of investing in public services, standing up for workers’ rights, moving to a more just and fair foreign policy, and has been rewarded with a quite remarkable turnaround in the Labour vote. Continue reading →

The polls are inconclusive – but they do show a chance of a big upset tomorrow

The story of the General Election for the past few weeks has been twofold: the formerly insurmountable image of “Team May” with the Iron Lady 2.0 gradually stumbling from blunder to blunder, while an insurgent Corbyn slowly becoming that ‘people-powered movement’ we have been building for the past two years. That story has been reflected in a series of opinion polls that show, wherever the starting point, whatever the methodology, the Tories lead has been squeezed.

The unfortunate flip side and stark reality to that story, is that Labour began from an impossibly poor starting point, and that May, even in the most unfavourable of polls, apparently remains popular with a sufficient chunk of the British electorate (especially the chunk that tends to turn out and vote) to give her a sizeable lead going into tomorrow’s vote.  Continue reading →

Saving the NHS: What has improved in Labour’s health policy?

Labour should always be proud of creating the NHS. No less, creating it in “the aftermath of war and national bankruptcy” as our 2017 manifesto states. Labour will always be the party to save the NHS, but in recent elections it has not been able to save the Labour Party.

The Conservatives leading hospitals into deficit and missing target after target doesn’t swing everyone to the left as some might hope.

The Labour Party in recent history has fallen short of  offering the necessary solution of an injection of funding and a long term strategy – allowing the right to offer their own ‘answers’. Right-wing media and UKIP have been able to dominate the debate with ideas of privatisation, while blaming long-term users of the NHS and immigrants. Continue reading →

The IFS: viewing the economy through wrong end of a telescope

Ann Pettifor

Government debt should not be measured in pounds; it should be measured in GDPs. When GDP is high, so are tax revenues, and so is the ability of the government to repay.

– Prof. Roger Farmer, NIESR, November, 2016, Three Facts about Debt and Deficits

Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a review of political manifestos prepared for General Election 2017. Predictably, the respected, and largely independent IFS researchers review the tax and spending proposals of the different parties with little regard for the wider economy. This skews their perspective, and their approach to analysing the economy. It is as if IFS staff consistently peer at the British economy through the wrong end of a telescope, distorting their analysis. In other words, they view the government’s budget in much the same way as a household might assess the impact of income and expenditure on a family’s budget. Continue reading →