On Saturday 9 September 2006, Dr Roger Mortimore (Ipsos's Senior Political Analyst) spoke at the EPOP Conference in Nottingham*, on "Ethnic Minority Voters and Non-Voters at the 2005 British General Election", delivering a paper by himself and Kully Kaur-Ballagan (Ipsos Head of Ethnic Minority Research). The paper, which draws on Ipsos research conducted for the Electoral Commission after last year's election, explores the turnout and votes of Britain's various Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. Turnout is strongly associated with a positive attitude to elections in general, as might be expected; but there is also some evidence of a strong community effect, with those who live in areas with many other BME residents disproportionately likely to have voted. Surprisingly, there is no evidence that attitudes to the government's policy in Iraq had any significant effect. The findings also illustrate how a high quality research design, including respondents from...
Some commentators have noted in recent months that Ipsos's voting intention figures are "more volatile" than those of the other companies, which in one sense is true; but they have also assumed that this implies they are less accurate, which is not necessarily the case, and some of them have clearly not understood why our figures sometimes move more dramatically than those in other polls.
The 2006 local elections represent a clear and embarrassing defeat for Labour. The party was relegated to third place in terms of the "estimated national equivalent vote share", (the generally accepted measure of the major parties' local election performance), with only 26% of the vote. It made a net loss of more than three hundred seats, and controls 18 fewer councils than it did before the elections. While this was not, as some had predicted beforehand, Labour's worst-ever local election performance — in fact, the 26% share was the same as in 2004 — it was a very poor one.
Once again, for sixth time, John Browne, Lord Browne of Madingley, has been voted by his corporate peers as the most impressive business person in Britain. This puts John Browne back in pole position, after last year losing out to Tesco's Chairman Sir Terry Leahy.
BRITAIN'S business leaders are bracing themselves for a tough 2006, with two thirds expecting the economy to deteriorate over the next 12 months, according to a recent MORI survey.
The support of Roman Catholic voters that gave Tony Blair the edge in Labour's narrow defeat of the Conservatives in terms of votes cast at the general election, MORI surveys conducted for The Tablet throughout the election campaign show.
It was women voters who last Thursday delivered a comfortable majority for Tony Blair. That is the clear message from a detailed analysis of nearly 18,000 MORI interviewees weighted to the final result.
