While the general election is the more immediate political event on the horizon, generally expected to take place on 5th May to coincide with the local government elections, the debate on the Euro Constitution referendum in 2006 is already in play.
The American Presidential Election is over… I think. Senator Kerry has conceded to President Bush, but then so did Senator Gore, in 2000. As I write, on 'screaming deadline', there are still three states which haven't been decided, Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico. By 3:30 am on ITN's election night programme I had called Iowa and New Mexico for the President, but Ohio was still too close to call in our view (although Fox, and then NBC, had done so) by the time we went off air at 6:00 am.
Question: The Lib Dems have been polling around 25 per cent consistently for the past year and closely challenging for or winning in by-elections. How well do you think they can do in the general election?
The Labour Party at the 1997 general election was rewarded with the biggest landslide since the War. 419 Labour MPs took their seats in the House of Commons across from just 165 Tories and 46 Liberal Democrats and 29 others including 19 from Northern Ireland, an overall majority of 179. Labour won, going away, with a 44 percent share of the vote to the Conservatives' 32 percent and the Liberal Democrats' 17 percent.
The decline of turnout in British elections in the last few years has created something approaching a panic in the political establishment and has left the Electoral Commission and other interested bodies with an acute problem in political marketing. What has resulted is both the commissioning of research to explore the reasons for non-voting and a rash of suggested solutions. This paper discusses newly-published evidence about the way the public views voting and how this is related to other attitudinal and behavioural characteristics commonly treated collectively as components of "activism" or "good citizenship". It also considers the implications of these and other findings for some of the suggested solutions to the turnout problem.
Michael Howard is struggling to make his mark with the electorate. But failing, so far, to engage floating voters. The election is likely to be called next April, just nine months away, for a 5th May election day.
Eight in 10 (80%) of the adult British population say they are in favour of ID cards, and slightly more (83%) say they would be happy to carry the card at all times — according to a MORI survey carried out for specialist IT consultancy Detica [note 1].
Received political wisdom is that modern governments, especially the present British government, are and will be judged by the public on whether they have "delivered". So "Has New Labour delivered?" will, it is suggested, be the key question on which the outcome of the next general election may turn (assuming, of course, that the opposition has regained a sufficient degree of political credibility for anybody to take them seriously as an alternative). Sir Robert Worcester analyses.
