Medway Council.

[Brian Morrison]

We'll see won't we, the margin of error is only applicable to current conditions, if the percentages shift then who knows.

I'll be looking forward to spoiling my ballot in any case.

[Spike]

A Labour win at the next GE seems unlikely at present, as Labour have not made a sufficient advance to indicate that. For a past-the-mid-term vote on this scale, Labour is not doing well.

[Rod Speed]

The polls didnt predict the most recent GE landslide.

We'll see...

And it wouldnt be suprising if stupid voters binned the govt that happened to be the govt when inflation spiked, even when that was not produced by the govt.

[Bernie]

Cobblers, Burt.

[Colin Bignell]

The bookies are offering 1/4 for a Labour win, 18/5 for a Conservative win. If you don't trust the polls, you can trust that the bookies don't plan to make a loss.

[Rambo]

Bit Strange.... dtd you not claim to live in Derbyshire?

[Brian]

Where do you suggest bookies get their ‘special information’ from to base their calculations from?

I’ve no particular faith in polls, even less in pundits / political ‘experts’ etc, which is where the predictions the Media publish come from but what makes you think bookies have a special source?

Labour didn’t so much win the seats yesterday as the faux conservatives lost them - it wasn’t a vote of confidence in Labour - they just aren’t Sunak who is destroying the economy.

Had Reform got their act together, the results would have been very different.

[Colin Bignell]

I didn't claim they do. However, it is their business to know how to calculate odds and they do so dispassionately. They can get it wrong, but wouldn't stay in business if they made a habit of it.

They have been given slightly better odds of winning than the LibDems

100/1 v 120/1

[Roger Hayter]

Is not a major factor in a bookie's odds the money going on the various possibilities? I suspect a crowd-sourced assessment is as likely to be right as any prediction method.

[Rod Speed]

But the bookies have f***ed up spectacularly before and the odds change radically as election day approaches.

[Brian]

In simple terms, there are two elements to arriving at the odds bookies use. The base information used to base the calculation on and the calculation. The latter is, essentially, deterministic. Keep putting the same data in and you will get the same answer.

The problem is the first part- collecting voting intentions, allowing for last minute changes, people giving misleading answers, voting fraud, …….

I don’t doubt the bookies aim is to make money- that is something I taught my pupils, along with being skeptical of statistics used by politicians and the media ( much to the amusement of an Ofsted inspector ! ) but that doesn’t change the integrity of the base data.

Odds are perhaps the crudest of mathematical models - garbage in, garbage out, just as any other model.

[Spike]

The analysis this morning on BBC R4 Today programme was that if Labour want to form the next government, they have (quote) ‘an absolute mountain to climb’ (unquote).

And that’s from the pro-socialist BBC.

[Joe]

"A week is a long time in politics."

[Rod Speed]

That's overstated with who is going to win the next GE

[Brian]

While the faux conservatives have variously failed to prevent the insidious ‘growth’ of things like drag artists going into schools, address extremism, etc the Left actively support it. I fully support teaching tolerance - be it for race, religion, gender, orientation …. but there is a difference between teaching tolerance and promoting - let alone convincing impressionable youngsters there is a magical solution to their normal problems by changing gender.

That is before we even consider the economy. Boris & Sunak really screwed the economy - not to mention sabotaging BREXIT ( remember, Boris was a Remainer, he changed sides when he realised the way the vote would go). But, Labour always screw up. They closed more coal mines, cut more railways, more school milk, tax burden is always higher. Labour introduced tuition fees, wrecked the University system, ……..George Brown raided pensions.

It is the drift to the left which has wreck the conservatives, it has been down hill since the Great Mrs Thatcher was betrayed.

The results on Thursday show people wanted to send Sunak a message, not that they like Labour.

[Brian Gaff]

Yeah, move if he has an issue. Brian

[Roger Hayter]

I can't say I really see the appeal of drag myself, but I thought the whole point of drag artistes is that they *didn't* change gender. They keep their male gender while performing a sort of parody of femaleness. So I don't see how they promote gender change so much as show that men can perform a female pastiche if they want to without changing gender!

(snip rather different issue)

[David Woolley]

Surely you only need voting intentions before the bets come in. Once you have bets coming in, I would have thought the odds would change based on which way the bets were going, so reflect the punters' view of the likely result rather than the real best estimate.

I would have thought the only time the bookie was at great risk was if a large, high odds, bet came in late in the process. I don't know whether odds are an invitation to treat or a quotation, or whether bookies can refuse large high odds bets.

[Colin Bignell]

The problem, at least for some on here, with accepting that the bookies (or pollsters) know what they are doing is that would mean having to accept the possibility that the Conservatives won't be in power for ever.

[Brian]