Some “light Friday afternoon reading” flagged up by alittlecon: a blog post on the LSE website, with analysis of four electoral records that could be broken in May.
As flagged by refitman, here’s a third poll for the day, this one by Populus.
Latest Populus VI: Lab 35 (-2), Con 32 (-), LD 9 (-1), UKIP 14 (+1), Oth 10 (+2). Tables here: http://t.co/jeqDvXl6QG
— Populus (@PopulusPolls) January 16, 2015
Labour has claimed more than a million voters have dropped off the electoral roll in the past year. My colleague Aisia Ghani has put together this explainer.
Are you registered to vote? Some commenters below the line has been discussing the registration process.
We did register in the end but it was an unduly faffy process, with three different versions of the same form being sent to us and our returned form not being processed etc etc (apparently caused by us requesting postal votes for the last Euro elections(??)).
Its lucky me & my girlfriend both work near the council offices in Liverpool as we could go in and actually explain the situation - if you had no way of doing taht I could imagine even well-intentioned people getting fed-up of the faceless back and forth of pre-printed letters and saying (especially here) 'oh sod it, it will eb Labour anyway'. Which is kind of the opposite of democracy, but hey ho.
Its amazing how bad these people tend to be at communicating/interacting with people (we also got three printed/posted letters thanking us for signing up to online, paperless billing....)
Anyone willing to admit to not being registerd yet?
The letter from the local authority I had was so confusing I had to use the Mirror link to double check I was registered.
I think they got everyone to re-register the old way just before the system changed then automatically transferred everyone. All local authorities are doing things differently however and there has been no national campaign to promote the online registration service which I find very strange.
Mind you, informing people of important changes has been very poor under this government in general. I ended up with an untaxed car by accident because I didn't know about tax no longer being transferred with the car. If there was a national information campaign I didn't see it (the lady in the PO who helped me sort it out was excellent, the DVLAs tiny slip of paper which should have informed me but was hidden inside my registration document was useless).
Some polls, courtesy of refitman.
Morning. 3 polls out today. Of the first 2 published, Yougov have Labour & Tories level and TNS-BMRB have Labour with a 7 point lead:
Britain Elects @britainelects 16 mins16 minutes ago
Latest YouGov poll (14 - 15 Jan):
CON: 32% (-)
LAB: 32% (-2)
UKIP: 16% (+1)
GRN: 8% (+1)
LDEM: 6% (-)
Populus due later.Mike Smithson @MSmithsonPB 26m26 minutes ago
New poll from TNS-BMRB just published has LAB retaining its 7% lead
LAB 35%=
CON 28%=
UKIP 18%-1
LD 6%+1
GRN 5%-2
OTH 9%+3
Last night's YouGov poll; Labour and the Conservatives level pegging. (14 - 15 Jan) pic.twitter.com/SOq98AA59K
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) January 16, 2015
Latest TNS-BMRB poll; Labour retains seven point lead. pic.twitter.com/qmzu1zlVp8
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) January 16, 2015
Andrew is not writing his usual Politics Live blog today but, as an alternative, here’s Politics Live: readers’ edition. It’s intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.
Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day’s political stories - just as you do during the daily blog. It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments - breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting.
As we’re now in a general election year, there’s plenty to talk about. With this in mind, we are going to update the readers’ edition throughout the day, with polls, talking points and material flagged up by readers.
All today’s Guardian politics stories are here, and all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here.
I (re-)registered when I didn't even need to. So woefully written was the information on the gov.uk website it wasn't remotely clear (a) why you need to, (b) who needs to and (c) who doesn't need to attempt to register that I did so just to be sure.