And so the first week ends...

This week’s blogs have included what polls aren’t telling you (and why the don’t knows may be crucial). Or when the first time Labour asked its supporters to design a poster (the answer is the distinctly pre-internet 1908). Why the newspapers aren’t powerful in the way everyone thinks (although they might be powerful in other ways). Or why corruption isn’t as electorally damaging as everyone thinks (although it’s harmful in other ways).

Following Sir Michael Caine’s appearance at the Conservatives launch of their youth volunteering scheme (‘Tories, Sir, thousands of ‘em...), we carried a piece on the chequered history of youth engagement. Plus the most rebellious Parliament of the post-war era draws to a close and why the Demos pamphlet calling for votes at 16 was sloppy and disingenuous.

We also carried perhaps the naffest poll of the election so far – snog, marry, avoid: the prime ministerial verdict – but only to draw attention to something much more serious.

This week, coming up amongst other stuff: independent MPs, the prime ministerial debates, party election broadcasts, and much much more. Who said elections are boring?

Professor Philip Cowley

The most rebellious parliament ends

"...the 2005-2010 Parliament easily goes down as the most rebellious in the post-war period..."

The 2005 Parliament which was prorogued this week – formal dissolution comes next week – will probably be remembered as the expenses parliament. But it holds one other distinction: as the most rebellious parliament of the post-war period.

The session that just ended, that of 2009-10, saw a total of 48 Labour rebellions, out of 135 divisions, a rate of 36%. In itself, this is the third highest final session since 1945, beaten only by the 39% achieved in 2004-05 session and the 36% (but marginally higher once you examine the decimals places) of the 1978-9 session.

But when you add those 48 revolts to the 300+ that had occurred in the preceding four sessions, it means that the 2005-2010 Parliament easily goes down as the most rebellious in the post-war period, whether measured in absolute or relative terms. In absolute terms, there were 365 Labour revolts between 2005 and 2010, more than in any other parliament since 1945, and easily more than what had been the record (the 309 between February 1974 and 1979). In relative terms – a more meaningful comparison, given that the parliament was shorter – there were Labour rebellions in some 28% of divisions. Again this easily tops the 21% achieved in the second Blair Parliament, 2001-2005 (and recorded here, in loving detail), which was itself a post-war record. There were also, just for the record, more Labour rebellions in this parliament than in 1997-2001 and 2001-2005 combined.

The most rebellious Labour MP was Jeremy Corbyn (with a total of 216 votes against the party whip). He was also the most rebellious between 1997-2001 and 2001-2005. He was closely followed by John McDonnell (192), Alan Simpson (144) and Kelvin Hopkins (131). More surprising are some of the names at the bottom of the list. The 2009-10 session saw Megg Munn, James Purnell, Eric Joyce and Tom Watson defy their whips, all for the first time. Who would have expected those names? Taken as a whole, 174 Labour MPs rebelled in the Parliament, 142 of them under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Between them, they cast a total of 3318 votes against their whips.

We’ve recorded all of them – plus the thousands in the 1997 and 2001 parliament – as part of a long-running research project, which is now coming to an end. The first ever rebellion of the New Labour era came in November 1997, when Jamie Cann was the only MP to defy the whips, over the Second Reading of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill. A total of 13 years and 719 rebellions later, the last one we monitored came over the Digital Economy Bill, just a day before Parliament prorogued.

Professor Philip Cowley

And now for something serious...

"... just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously..."

We have been told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election, the parenting website whose users are principally affluent, ‘aspirational’ women in their thirties and forties concerned with ‘quality of life’ issues. They are the latest version of the classic ‘swing voter’ who lives in the kind of marginal constituency that now supposedly decide general elections - the Worcester Women for our own times, the British cousin of the American Soccer Mom. Since 1997 many other names have been coined for what is basically the same group of women. In 2005 Labour focused on the School Gate Mum. Last year the Conservatives said they would woo Holby City Woman. More recently Douglas Alexander referred to Take a Break Woman as critical to Labour’s fortunes in 2010.

At the risk of sounding post-modern, all these groups are obviously made up; they only matter because the parties (and journalists) think they matter. Those who study elections are sceptical that any one group holds the key to a general election: when support shifts from one party to the other it is pretty much the same across social groups. The real significance of these groups of phantom women lies in what they say about how the parties think about the electorate, about who is important (and who is not important) to them - and why.

Alexander’s invocation of Take a Break Woman is in this regard really interesting, if only because he got it so wrong. Those who read Take a Break are not the affluent, early middle aged women whose votes he is trying to chase. The kinds of women who read that august weekly have, in fact, long been disregarded – and continue to be ignored - by Britain’s political class.

Let me declare an interest. I was commissioned (by a drinks company whose name will soon become obvious) to write a report on the politics of women in their twenties and early thirties in the social groups C1/2 and D, many of whom work in part-time jobs, all of whom are on below average incomes and a significant number of whom have to juggle their work with caring for pre-school or young school age children. When asked in a survey that accompanied the writing of the report what were the biggest issues affecting their everyday lives, the top answer – at 58% - was ‘money worries’. We gave these women a name, and because it had to alliterate we called them the ‘Lambrini Ladies’. The report is out now.

These women are a ‘lost political generation’. They are amongst the most disengaged from formal politics, and the most likely not to vote – even before the campaign began many had already decided that it was not for them. This has always been the case – young women on lower incomes have long seen politics as something that men do, and have failed to connect their everyday lives with Westminster where middle aged, middle class men (and a few women) get together and shout at one another. They are, we suggest disengaged at least partly because the parties have failed to engage with them.

Our report points to a problem shared by all the main parties. But it also gestures to - as they say in cheesy management manuals –an opportunity. Our findings very much accord with a recent Observer poll of Netmums users. Now, those who go on the Netmums site – not to be confused with the more middle class Mumsnet (do keep up) – are very much in the same mould as those we talk about. The Observer poll revealed that while Labour had lost ground with such younger, lower income women the Conservatives had failed to make a strongly convincing alternative case. Their votes are up for grabs. But no-one is talking about them, even in a campaign that looks like it will lead to a hung Parliament.

Why? One answer is that they live in the wrong constituencies – too many are in safe Labour seats – although how ‘safe’ some of those are now might be questioned. In any case, we estimate that there are about four million Lambrini Ladies, and they are everywhere, even in the marginals where just a few votes can determine who becomes an MP. Of course their very disengagement plays against them – the parties only talk to those who they think will vote, like affluent middle-aged women. But if the parties started to address the kinds of issues that these women consider important, then they might make a difference. For what the Lambrini Ladies want are concrete, specific policies that plausibly promise to make their lives a little bit easier. What they do not want is politics as soap opera – they might watch East Enders but that does not mean they want the leaders’ wives gushing on about how their husbands are wonderful fathers who make the coffee in the morning. Pictures of David Cameron holding a baby will not wash – these women know what a baby looks like. In the accompanying survey they were asked if they were proposing to vote because politics was like a soap opera – only 6 % said so. The rest had more serious reasons, although many of them were negative, it seems that – if nothing else - it is dislike of Labour (25%), the Conservatives (18%) and even the Liberal Democrats (9%) will get many Lambrini Ladies into the polling booth.

In a few weeks what can be done? That is very much up to the parties. It is also up to the women themselves. One reason why we are told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election is because the kind of women who use the site demand to be heard. Young women on lower incomes who find making ends meet a daily problem do not tend to be that kind of woman. They do not have the cultural resources which many of those once referred to as Worcester Women simply take for granted. There are lots of deeply embedded issues that need to be overcome here, but just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously.

Professor Steven Fielding

Snog, marry, avoid

It’s one of the key questions of the election so far. So we’re happy to clarify the position of women aged 25-34 in social groups C1/2 and D - the ‘Lambrini Ladies’ – in regard to the vital political question of Snog, Marry or Avoid?


Gordon Brown

Avoid 85%

Snog 9%

Marry 4%

Don’t know who he is: 3%


David Cameron

Avoid 68%

Snog 15%

Marry 16%

Don’t know who he is: 2%


Nick Clegg

Avoid 66%

Snog 16%

Marry 7%

Don’t know who he is: 11%

So: Nick Clegg is the most snoggable. David Cameron is the one to marry. And the Prime Minister is the one to avoid.

The absolute figures for Nick Clegg are somewhat lower, given that just over 10 percent of respondents didn’t know who he was. Mind you, there was also some 3% who didn’t know who the Prime Minister was either...

There is a more serious side to this – honest, there is – and it’ll follow shortly.

The survey was carried out by Opinion Matters, 24/3/10-6/4/10, who spoke to 1416 women in C1, C2 and D social groups; the data reported here come from the 430 in the 25-34 age group.

Professor Philip Cowley

Targeting youth engagement - again

"From this perspective, the Conservatives' new proposals suddenly seem significantly less radical..."

If the Conservatives’ plans for a National Youth Service and support for marginalised young people reveal anything it’s that politics has no memory. In this case not even a short-term memory. If it did then the Conservative party would recognise that intensive investment for youth engagement initiatives and preventing the social exclusion of young people are already parts of government strategy, under the combined package of the New Deal for Young People (NDYP), the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Aiming high: a ten-year strategy for positive activities and the Cabinet Office’s Youth Taskforce Action Plan. Each of these programmes, due to outlive the election, make explicit their aims to make young people aware of their social responsibilities, prevent marginalising young people from policy-making, stimulate youth employment through welfare-to-work, and ensure that young people are drawn towards active participation in political decision-making. From this perspective, the Conservative’s new proposals suddenly seem significantly less radical.
More worryingly Cameron’s statement and the good response it received could also indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of youth work. As commentators such as Bernard Davies have argued voluntary youth organisations are driven by the aim to give young people real influence in decision-making, regardless of whether this will lead to visible social improvement. The purpose is to put young people in control within a setting where they can have real influence over what an organisation does, not to impress upon them the importance of political and civic engagement. It is the diversity of activities and potential to adapt to the needs and requirements of young people that give youth work its power, not its ability to bring together communities or imbue young people with a sense of social responsibility. The Conservatives' plans for a standardised format of volunteering and engagement overlooks this and promotes an organisational ideology which youth work does not fit into.

From a more cynical perspective, the electoral nod to the problem of youth apathy and marginalisation could be just that, a nod to a perennial problem which requires recognition but may never be resolved. Despite the amount of investment that youth support and engagement programmes have received – the NDYP for example is the largest of the New Deal programmes for social improvement – young people still remain socially marginalised and disengaged from formal politics. Cameron’s pledge to introduce further programmes to involve young people, while seemingly positive, could also be interpreted as tokenism and unlikely to reach young people whose interests do not conform with the Conservatives' model of voluntarism. Cameron’s National Youth Service, while only for short periods of time, operates along a particular model of community engagement. Such as singular approaches belies the diversity of the voluntary sector and the fact that the activities youth organisations engage in are responsive to what young people want to do. This situation is not necessarily something that will come as a surprise to members of the current youth service. Elections are a time when parties seek to promote themselves as capable of producing tangible goals and youth work does not necessarily do this. Although 250,000 young people have moved from Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) to NDYP welfare-to-work schemes since the programme was introduced in 1998, it is still unclear whether the implementation of these schemes has had any real effect on youth unemployment considering that of the 470,400 18-24 year olds currently claiming JSA, 50,000 made their first claim in the last year. In terms of reaching targets, programmes such as NDYP have failed but that does not mean they have not supported thousands of young people who would have otherwise been ignored or excluded from the labour market.

Ultimately the question is one of purpose. The purpose of initiatives such as the NDYP and the youth service as a whole is to tip the balance of power in the favour of young people, regardless of whether doing this will bring about the type of change policy assumes. Praise-worthy as this may be, it does not fit with the results-focused image the Conservative party seeks to project. Despite the support this morning’s announcement received from supposed advocates of youth engagement, the implementation of a National Youth Service has the potential to undermine youth organisations that do not conform to this model and impose a system which young people have no influence over.

Deirdre Duffy

What election polls do not tell us

"...in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects..."

We can expect a large number of election polls to be published in the next four weeks. Not all polling agencies arrive at their numbers in exactly the same way, and they need to be read with care. And in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects, both of which relate to the difference between ‘hard’ choices and ‘soft’ ones.

First, consider people who respond to opinion pollsters by saying that they do not (yet) know. These respondents are generally deleted from the calculation of the parties’ projected vote shares, which implies that, were they to make up their minds, they would not disproportionally go to any one party. But consider the group of people who hesitate between the Conservatives and UKIP, and who correctly state that they do not yet know for sure which party to support. When they make up their minds, they will not support Labour, or the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Therefore, omitting these ‘don’t know’ responses from the results will (in this case) underestimate the actual level of support for Conservatives and UKIP.

Similarly, when asked about the choice for a party that they intend to make, respondents may name a party and are counted towards that party’s projected share of the vote. Some of these answers come from people who have firmly made up their mind, but for others this hides the fact that they are not yet certain about their choice. The polls that are currently conducted in the UK do not take into account the certainty with which respondents’ give their answers. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of a close race. We are in the dark about the proportions of voters who may still change their stated preference because they like another party almost as much as the one that they said they would vote for.

In a survey conducted by the British Election Study team in February 2010 (file feb10spb.dta), and which contains more detailed information than most election polls, we find that of those who unequivocally state that they will vote Conservative at the next general election, 4.5% actually hesitates between Conservative and Labour, and 7.6% hesitates between Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Of those who claim that they will support Labour 2.1% might still change to Conservative, and 13.8% to the Liberal Democrats. Of the projected Lib Dem support 8.9% might still go Conservative and 26.9% Labour. In all these situations, it will not take much for these voters to still change their vote intention because they are actually quite strongly attracted to two different parties at the same time.

When looking at the “don’t know’s”, we find that 12.7% is actually strongly attracted to the Conservatives, 27% to Labour, and 22.4% to the Liberal Democrats. When prodding the “don’t know’s” to indicate which party they lean to, we find that those leaning to Labour have a much stronger preference for that party than leaning Conservatives have for theirs. In other words, if, as is usually the case during election campaigns, the number of yet undecided voters declines as polling day draws nearer, Labour in particular and the Liberal Democrats to a smaller extent stand to gain more from this than the Conservatives.

The methodology employed here is analogous to that reported in Martin Kroh, Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk ‘Prospects for electoral change’, in Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk, European Elections and Domestic Politics – Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, pp. 209-225).

If we want to gauge the possible dynamics in party support over this election campaign, we have to take into account the differences in the certainty with which respondents state their intended choices. In the current situation, doing so reveals an even closer race than most of the polls suggest.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Avoid, Avoid, Avoid

New research into the political views of a group of women in the 24-35  age group on lower incomes - or the 'Lambrini Ladies' as we call them - has discovered many interesting and serious things (about which more later).

However one of the more amusing findings is that when asked if they would snog, marry or avoid the leaders of our three main political parties 89% wanted to avoid Gordon Brown, 66% would flee
David Cameron and 63% would give Nick Clegg a very wide berth.

As I will reveal later the Lambrini Ladies have more significant reasons for being disengaged from politics but if any of the leaders think they can exploit their sex appeal they had better think again.

Professor Steven Fielding