First off, apologies for the long silence, but I’ve had a few problems with Substack. These have now been resolved, so let’s get going!
Not a week goes by without another opinion poll being published. But how reliable are they? Can you trust them? Well, yes and no. But mostly no. Unless you know how to interpret them, that is. And that's what I am here to help you with.
The four main reasons why opinion polls get it wrong are:
An unrepresentative sample, either demographically or geographically;
Dishonest responses (usually “Shy Tories”, but also applies to other demonised parties);
Last-minute switchers who change their mind on election day itself;
Differential turnout, with some supporters more motivated to vote than others.
The fact that opinion polls are highly inaccurate is obvious from the fact that they all give different results, even when they conduct their surveys in the same time period. As I write this, the most recent YouGov poll shows the following result:
Labour: 44%
Conservative: 20%
Reform: 14%
Libdems: 9%
Greens: 7%
Using the standard methodology for translating this into House of Commons seats, this would mean 518 Labour MPs, 42 Conservatives, 49 LibDems, 2 Greens and zero MPs for Reform.
This is, of course, complete nonsense.
Labour will not get over 41% of the vote. In 1997 Tony Blair swept to power against a tired and discredited Conservative government with a record 43.2% of the vote. But he was genuinely popular. He was young. Charismatic. Full of ideas. Personally popular. Dynamic. Motivating.
Starmer is none of these. He is dull and uninspiring. The only reason Labour are ahead is because they are not the Tories. Labour will win the next election, but they will do so by default. And for Starmer this is good enough. So he will continue being cautious and stick to his plan of not frightening the electorate. This will work, but it won't win him the vote share that Blair achieved.
And even Tony Blair only achieved this the first time. At the next election, in 2001, although he was far more popular than the Tories' weak and whiny William Hague, Labour's vote fell to 40.7%. Something in this ballpark is much more likely for Labour in the general election later this year.
As for the Tories, there is no way their vote is evaporating to just 20%. If, again, we look back at their collapse in the 1997 election, even here they garnered 30.7% of the vote. It's true that there was no Reform party back then, scooping up their disaffected right-wing voters, but on the other hand there was the exact converse: a LibDem surge led by the high-profile Paddy Ashdown hoovering up the left-wing Conservative supporters and taking 16.8% of the vote.
So no, this poll is completely unrealistic.
What then about other recent polls? Well, in the last week or so we've had the Conservatives on 18-27%, Labour on 41-46%, Reform on 11-14%, the LibDems on 9-12% and the Greens on 4-7%.
The main oddity that will probably strike you right away is that the range of results is widest for the Conservatives. We'll come back to this later. But you may think that the solution to the spread of results is simply to aggregate the polls. This is precisely what some newspapers and websites do – they produce a 'poll of polls'.
So, are aggregated polls reliable? We can judge how accurate polls are by comparing those taken in the week before an election with the actual result. Let's take a look then at the outcome of the most recent elections.
One of the most notorious recent polling failures was the June 2016 Brexit referendum. In the week before polling day, 13 opinion polls were published. Aggregated, they forecast a comfortable victory for Remain with the Leave vote averaging only 44.5%. Happily, as we all know, Leave won with 51.9% of the vote.
Throughout the six-week 2015 general election campaign, almost all of the 92 polls published showed the Tories and Labour neck-a-neck, and predicted a hung parliament. Even an aggregate of the polls taken in the last week showed the Conservatives and Labour virtually tied at 33.7% and 33.4% respectively. The actual result was Conservatives 37.8% and Labour 31.2% and an overall Tory majority in the Commons of 10 seats. [I should point out that these figures all relate to Great Britain, rather than the UK, as all polls exclude Northern Ireland, since they have a completely different set of parties].
In the 2017 general election the average of the 11 major polls projected that Labour would get 36.2% of the vote – in reality Jeremy Corbyn got 40% and, contrary to expectations, Theresa May failed to win a majority in the Commons.
After each election the polling companies tweak their models to try to be more accurate the next time, and in fairness to them they did pretty well in the 2019 general election, with their main failure being underestimating the Conservative vote and, hence, parliamentary majority.
At this point you might be thinking that the answer to the question 'are opinion polls reliable?' is a resounding 'No!', but in reality it is a much more nuanced: 'it all depends'. It all depends on whether you know how to interpret them.
The first point worth remembering is that accuracy one year is no indicator of accuracy the next time. Just two days before the 2019 polling day, YouGov, one of the few companies to have got it right in 2017, projected that the Tories would win a majority of just 28 Commons seats, as opposed to the actual 80.
This leads us to the second rule: the polls always (well, in recent times anyway, by which I mean in the last 30 years) underestimate the Conservative vote and overestimate the Labour vote.
Err, except in 2017, when the opposite happened – which leads to the third point: opinion polls always fail to predict 'surprising' results – results, that is, that are surprising to those within the Westminster bubble. This itself should not be a surprise, once you know that polling companies do not trust their own results and if these seem out of line they will artificially and arbitrarily change them! And no, that's not some wild speculation or conspiracy theory – it has been openly admitted by polling company insiders!
The far-left demagogue Jeremy Corbyn getting 40% of the vote? How absurd! The populist Brexit rabble beating the establishment-backed Remain? Don't be ridiculous! And yet, and yet …
2017 aside, the two main reasons the pollsters regularly underestimate the Tory vote are, firstly, the so-called 'shy Tories' – those twee, middle-class Conservative voters who are embarrassed to admit that they support the party that their beloved BBC keeps telling them is a bunch of rancid, right-wing racists - and secondly, because Tory voters are disproportionately elderly and difficult to reach; they stay at home, are not on the internet, don't talk to strangers on the phone, etc. Polling companies try to get round these problems by simply adding an arbitrary extra percentage, based on how inaccurate their result was last time round. As you can imagine, this is rather a hit and miss method, and usually a miss!
The final, possibly most important point of all, is that the parties' share of the national vote cannot be easily or accurately translated into parliamentary seats. This is particularly true of the LibDems. Consider this: in 1992 they won 17.8% of the vote and got 20 seats. At the next election, in 1997, while their vote fell slightly to 16.8% they more than doubled their seats and ended up with 46 MPs! On the other hand, in 2017 they won 7.4% of the vote giving them 12 seats, but in 2019, despite increasing their vote share to 11.6% they lost a seat and ended up with just 11 MPs! No wonder they are not fans of the first-past-the-post electoral system! The truth is that the number of MPs the LibDems end up with depends much more on how well the Tories do than on their own performance. A good election for the Conservatives always results in the LibDems doing badly in terms of MPs elected.
In all fairness to the pollsters, the difficulty in translating votes into seats is not really their fault. Regional and local variations in the vote, localised party support, and the practice of tactical voting in some constituencies all mean that seat predictions based on a uniform national vote are never going to get it right. The average Conservative majority predicted in 2019, taking the final polls, was 38 seats, as opposed to the actual 80. If you take the actual result, and input those figures into a seat calculator it estimates the Conservatives should get 384 MPs (the actual number was 365) and Labour 180 (actually 202). To be as fair to the seat calculator algorithm as possible, I should say that this does, quite rightly, use the new constituency boundaries, but a detailed analysis has shown that this would only have given the Tories 6 extra seats and Labour only 3 fewer. So the result would have been Conservatives 371 and Labour 199. The difference between these numbers and those produced by the seat prediction software shows the level of inaccuracy of the algorithm.
So, with all that said and done, what can we forecast from the current polls?
Let's look at the most recent aggregated 'poll of polls':
Labour: 43%
Conservatives: 24%
Reform: 12%
Libdems: 10%
Greens: 5%
To this, we must apply some sensible assumptions and consequent modifications:
The general election will take place in late October or early November. There will be another 'mini-budget' before then, with a few minor tax cuts and other bribes offered, but nothing spectacular as the economy simply could not support this. Inflation will be down to around 2% though, meaning mortgage costs should be falling. This will very slightly increase the Tory vote at the expense of Labour.
On the other hand, the summer Channel invasion will have taken place and the promised Rwanda deterrent will have ignominiously failed. Immigration will therefore be a key issue. It is also possible (though I put it no higher than that) that Nigel Farage will have forsaken his lucrative GB News evening show in order to front up the Reform campaign. This will all serve to boost the Reform vote, mainly at the expense of the Conservatives, especially in the former 'Red Wall' seats. Lee Anderson's recent defection will also strengthen the party in this geographical area.
The opinion polls will continue to show Labour having an unassailable lead. Opinion polls are known to not just reflect voting intentions but also to influence them, which is precisely why so many countries ban them in the days – or even weeks - immediate prior to an election day. Even in Britain, the publication of exit polls is banned on election day until after the polling stations have closed at 10pm. Labour's large lead may induce complacency among those voters who favour them but are not very politically committed. It may also mean less anti-Conservative tactical voting. The effect of these influences will be small, but measurable, particularly given Keir Starmer's soporific effect on the electorate!
The Greens are polling far higher than they have ever actually achieved. I doubt they will really get any more than 2-3%. It is fashionable for younger people to say they will vote Green, but on election day most of these will not bother going to the polls.
The support received by Reform in the opinion polls is interesting. Until recently many journalists were saying that Reform's vote was being overestimated, and that when push came to shove many people who were saying they would vote Reform would either not bother to vote or, if they did, would switch back to the Conservatives. While it is true that their performance in by-election has, until recently, been rather underwhelming, they got 13% of the vote in Wellingborough, showing that with a good campaign, and lots of publicity, they can get their supporters to the voting booths. If we look at the closest previous comparator – the UKIP vote in the 2015 general election – we see that the opinion polls got this pretty much right. There is therefore no reason to disbelieve their estimate of Reform's level of support.
Will George Galloway follow through on his threat to put up 90-or-so candidates under his 'Worker's Party of Britain' banner to stand against Labour? And given that, even if they do, these will mainly stand in safe Labour inner-city seats, would these candidates actually impact the general election result? Probably not.
Taking all these known-unknowns into account, and considering that there may be some unforeseen unknown-unknowns that could crop up between now and election day, I am going to suggest that a more likely vote breakdown would be:
Labour: 41%
Conservative: 27%
Reform: 16%
LibDem: 11%
Greens: 2%
As Harold Wilson famously said, a week is a long time in politics, and who knows what dramatic events might transpire and turn this prediction on its head? Nigel Farage entering the fray could, for instance, lead to a dramatic rise in Reform's support such that they could overtake the Conservative party. This would create a 'tipping point' which could itself lead to a number of Tory MPs switching to Reform, thereby giving them even more credibility and support. If this happens then all bets are off!
However, based on these voting shares, how many MPs would the main parties get?
In order to increase the accuracy of the forecast it is necessary to take into account the different voting pattern in Scotland. So, for the record, I am assuming the following vote shares north of the border:
SNP: 33% (45% in 2019)
Labour: 35% (18.5%)
Conservative: 17% (25%)
LibDems: 8% (9.5%)
Taken with the overall GB vote share, this would lead to the following number of MPs for each of the main parties:
Labour: 418 MPs
Conservative: 148
LibDem: 42
SNP: 18
This would give Labour an overall majority in the House of Commons of 186. Bearing in mind my earlier warnings about the inaccuracy of the seat-calculating algorithm, let's say a Labour lead of between 175 and 195.
There is one final caveat to this prediction: I am assuming that Rishi Sunak leads the Conservatives into the general election. There have been reports that panicking Tory MPs are now seriously considering challenging Sunak's leadership, with Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and even Grant Shapps being named as possible 'unity' candidates acceptable to sufficient Tory MPs so that there would be a 'coronation', with no need for a proper, lengthy leadership election by the party membership.
Although one can never say never, I think this is unlikely, but a particularly bad set of results for the Tories in the May local elections could sufficiently unnerve the party that this becomes possible. But in truth, even if the party leader were to change, yet again, would this make any real difference to either the polls or the governance of the country? No and no.
I know some people are keen on a Tory MP such as Suella Braverman becoming prime minister, but the belief that this would make any difference at all is a delusion. Since the last election, we have had Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in charge and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference. We still have the same policies of failure and betrayal: Stratospheric levels of third-world immigration (both legal and illegal) designed to permanently destroy the country, rising taxes, net zero madness, subservience to the EU, multi-billion pound foreign aid payments, contempt for British manufacturing, a shrinking of our national defences, etc, etc.
No new Conservative PM, whoever it might be, will change the direction of travel. Why is this?
The answer is that the problem with the Tories goes much deeper than who the leader is. The problem is that 80% of their MPs are left-wing traitors. And this will not change, as these left-wing parasites have the safest seats and are constantly reinforced by even more left-wing candidates supported by the left-controlled Conservative central office.
So no party leader can get any genuinely right-wing legislation through parliament. Not leaving the ECHR. Not scrapping the Equalities Act. Not resiling from the UN Convention on Refugees. Not abandoning the lunatic net zero policies. Not reining-in politically-motivated marxist judges. Not rejecting the scientifically-bogus Trans agenda. Not initiating a mass-deportation programme. No, a genuinely nationalist Conservative party leader could achieve nothing. Zilch. Sweet Fanny Adams.
So the best thing that could happen at the net election would be the total annihilation of the vile, treacherous, deceitful, left-wing Conservative party. The party must not just be defeated, it must be permanently killed-off. The Tory party must die.
The current projections do not suggest a sufficiently crushing electoral defeat for the Tories. 148 MPs would still leave them well placed to recover, if not in one parliament then certainly in two. We therefore need to make an effort spread the word: do NOT vote Conservative. The Tories are the enemies of Britain.
What do you think is the most likely outcome of the next election?
Comment with your thoughts below and let's see who gets closest to the right result!
And if you want to convert vote share into parliamentary seats here is the website which you can use: https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html
Thanks for providing a debate framework. Not to disagree but my thoughts have been shifting lately. At the end of '23 I hopefully thought that Starmer had peaked and was bound to slip up. I mean, look at them, it's like the Star Wars bar on Tatooine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPelOnd7Sik
In my imaginary world of politics I hug a fictional character I call the Durham Whistleblower. He or she has evidence Starmer lied about 'that trip'. The MSM are bidding for that story and the kitty mounts up. The BBC to squash it, The Sun to blast it everywhere. Maybe the Tories have paid a private detective and have a red hot Ace up their sleeve.
Not so fast. It would seem a number of Joe Public might prefer the Star Wars bar. At least they know what to expect. Even slower, Joe Public doesn't care if Kneeler had a beer and a curry. They don't care about cake either. They see boats coming ashore, a small contingent compared to the main infux. They see Net Zero, patent bollocks when they see the Chinese and Indian furnaces while they scrutinise their meters and thermostats; rejoicing when a Tesla catches fire. They see Sunak and Starmer so lying through their teeth small children can see it. The strange contradiction that Starmer has any different ideas.
I'm convinced Joe Public is so bored and fed up he she may even be looking at personalities. Galloway, Lee Anderson, Nigel Farage. The bulk of both parties are so wan, so bland as to be two dimensional.
On which subject I'm suffering from boundary change. Unforeseen pain. Both sides old and new are firm Tory.
I approached the Reform candidate. More Tory, more disconnected than the ones we want rid of. I wrote to their HQ. "Give us a fighting chance! Who's this clueless void?
The same day said PPC was gone. I'd like to take credit but...
These substacks. Lonely voices in the wilderness. Not until we direct ourselves to a central hub and elect a voice. I follow Matt Goodwin. He doesn't communicate below the line. He wants my money but what does he intend to do with it? I'm tired of these preachers, there're enough witch doctors in the clergy already.