If a UK general election were to be held tomorrow...

Plantagenet.

The Tories still poll more than the LibDems because despite Hague, despite IDS, there is a sizeable and pretty much irreducible conservative contingent out there who would vote Tory even if they were killing new-born babies and eating them for breakfast. We know this because Hague did his darndest to whittle the Tory vote down to that core and nothing else in 2001.

I think there's a similar Labour core as well, although possible weakened hugely by Blair, but we won't know the full extent until they lose an election once again. As far as I can see, there isn't really one for the LibDems that can compare - so the most effecitve strategy for that party IS as a repository for discontented voters.

also the age of cores is being whittled by time itself

Also, part of the legacy of Thatcherism is a huge increase in floating voters (in that the Thatch essentially weaned much of the electorate away from historical socio-political allegiences, only to be shafted by quite how fickle they'd become). I think the LibDems and NewLab both realise this far more than the Conservatives themselves in this day and age.

(x-post with Mark)

Thatch essentially weaned much of the electorate away from historical socio-political allegiences

Surely Thatcher was a symptom of this change, tho she and her cronies gave it a definite flavour. The Labour movement was weakened because its industrial base declined, which comes down to big global shifts. Of course, we didn't have to go Thatcher's way...

The Lib Dems core is about 8-9%, i.e. what they collapsed to after the Alliance fell apart and they were being led by Robert Thingummy.

I'll probably vote Lib Dem at the next election. They seem closest to what I believe in. I like Kennedy and I like the idea of him as an Opposition Leader even more: I think he has a chance of achieving this, and that the "decapitation strategy" is a sound one. If I was in a constituency where there was a tight Labour-Tory race and the LDs were in third, though, I'd vote Labour.

yeah im very much leaning towards the lib dems. kennedy is really starting to look like a true leader now

Lib dem, green or spoilt ballot paper

NB I don't agree with a lot of Green policy, they are very very wrong on europe but voting green is the same as spoiling one ballot paper under the current electoral system.

Lib Dem. I wish it required more thought.

i'd probably 'abstein'

The question is good.

Green or Lib Dem, I think.

Blair will have to be a long time gone before I can even think about voting Labour again. I voted Lib Dem last time to make sure that the Tories (Toby Jessel!) were kicked out and they were. Vincent Cable seems a decent MP so I will probably do so again. The Lib Dems are the best of a bad lot nationally - totally wrong about Europe but some decent ideas about other areas. If the Tories ever got a decent leader I might even vote for them.

Voted LibDem in 2001... but it seems a big climb-down. Didn't people once have big ideas about how things would be? About you know, the classless society? And not that long ago? So, Workers Revolutionary Party next time, oh hang on, now that can't be right...

Despite everything, I will most likey still vote for my Labour MP - she's lovely. The socialist alliance candidate that stood against her last time was a total cock.

Sort of ditto, my local LibDem guy is a good one, Evan Harris, who is often on the news about health. It's just that many of them seem awful.

Liberal Democrat. Please god let the Lib Dems become the 2nd party, then in 2010 they can win. Please?

Anyone who doesn't vote is a dick.

IMHO.

Why do you think that, incidentally Mark?

(I used to think that as well, quite passionately, now I'm not so sure)

if you don't like your candidates you should spoil your ballot paper or run against them, not voting is abrogating ones responsibility. Even if you don't like the system its the only one we've got until we change it.

Green or Conservative.

Because it's everyone's personal and societal responsibility to care about the country and its government. There can't be anyone who, if they gave it 5 minutes thought, would have NO feelings either way about political matters. Wherever there's a danger that apathy could lead to people you disagree with getting power, you should use your vote to try and stop that.

Apparently, for the Lib Dems to become the opposition party, Labour's percentage of the vote needs to fall under 30%.

Can anyone confirm or deny this? I think I heard it on one of those Andrew Neill programmes.

ER, you mean the Torys, then yeah. If the Torys and Labour are over a third, then there's less than a third left for everyone else => Lib Dems can't beat the Torys

"you mean" = "if you mean"

except we don't have a PR system, lib dems could have a third of seats without having a third of the vote.

Labour (but only under duress because this seat is so marginal)

'lib dems could have a third of seats without having a third of the vote'

That's why the Lib Dems wd like PR. My theory is that ver Dems belong to the pre-party machine era, which is why their policy making seems hopelessly incoherent. No toeing the party line for these guys! Might not be such a bad thing.

Oh, I'm sure that will all change pretty quickly if they get anywhere near having a decent shot at government, Enrique...

Yeah, inevitably. Or 'inevitably'. Ex-Torygraph man Charles Moore supports drugs *and* hunting (not at the same time, chiz) so here's where arch-tory man is more liberal than the lib-dems.
The idea of having differently rated council-income taxes sounds, well, interesting.

I would agonise and wrestle with my conscience then vote Labour (this is what I have done at every election since 1997). I am one of those people who will never vote any other way (except for the London mayoral election). I could be kicked out of da party for this admission.

Well I'm in Streatham, which is solid Labour (Keith Hill is the MP) so doubt that my Lib Dem vote will make any difference, but will use it nevertheless.

Previously: Oxford West & Abingdon, voted for Evan Harris as he is family friend and a good and kind fellow.

Dr C: did you not see "Chelsea Tales" on BBC2 the last few Wednesdays? Or read the average Daily Mail? Good leader or not, if you vote Tory that's whom you'll be standing up for. RESIST THE URGE!!

My seat is a fairly safe Labour seat but it could swing either way so I would vote Labour or LibDem *depending* on which way it was likely to swing.

My local MP is nice enough but utterly anonymous and as far as I can see has expressed no opinions prominently about anything other than "Tories bad" since 1997. I refuse to have a Tory MP (we did until 1992), but if it looked like the LibDems stood a chance I may vote for them (although I am very wary of the "oh, let's vote LibDem in the absence of anything better" attitude). I dunno, not voting Labour still feels like the final admission of defeat, but since the war I don't feel like I'm able to support them at all any more.

[Cross-referencing Robin's blog with his post]

Surely the tactical thing is to get rid of Letwin by voting for the crazies? That way the Tories wd have even less chance of winning in '08 (or whenever). Hold yr nose while voting, but...

**Dr C: did you not see "Chelsea Tales" on BBC2 the last few Wednesdays? Or read the average Daily Mail? Good leader or not, if you vote Tory that's whom you'll be standing up for. RESIST THE URGE!!**

Oh I won't actually do it *this time*, but I've no inbuilt left-of-centre bias that would stop me *even considering* it. There's no fucking way that I'd consider voting for Blair and his arrogant, lying coterie of tw@ts.

Lib Dems. Here in Haringey they have a particularly strong local core, and the lass Lynne Featherstone has been getting nearer each time in 97 and 01.

Any fed up Labour voter who has a liberal mind would be best off going with the LD's - over Europe, crime, transport especially.

I just fear that whereas in the last few years Lib Dems have generally broken up Tory heartlands, they are now about to shatter New Labour in much the same way - and Charlie's Dream of ousting the Conservatives as the true opposition party will fall as he finds that any gains his party makes are merely chipping away at Labour and letting in Les Tories.

SNP again, probably. I hate Labour taking heartlands for granted.

Enrique in case you're confused I don't actually live in Dorset West - I'm in the South of the county, which *feels* very different (much more open, much less agricultural) and is the most marginal Labour seat. there seems to be a loony-right attempt right now to target the area and denounce Letwin, perhaps because although he went to Eton and Cambridge he still comes from a different background (London middle-class Jewish) and set of attitudes (monetarist intellectual rather than bumbling bufferish amateur) to any previous Dorset West MP, his predecessor being the gentleman farmer James Spicer and *his* predecessor being one of the Wingfield-Digbys (a prominent local landed family). what it all comes down to is that, after the party was remarkably unified for the bulk of the 20th Century, the old rural-suburban divides of the Corn Laws era have resurfaced (the Tory consensus was a Tory-Whig hybrid and was always going to be unbalanced when they got a leader who was too much either extreme, which didn't happen until the essentially Manchester Liberal Thatcher came along) and what we have now is a more broken party than Labour were when they split in 1981, with a lot of ancient suspicions of "rootless Jewish capitalists" (I find it psychologically interesting as I always do with desperate men trying to cope with the fact that their world has gone) fighting it out against a younger, more economically and socially liberal, more pure-capitalist generation.

certainly it's great fun for those of us who never want them back in power again; they're going the best way about it. today's local paper confirms what should be a new political adage; wherever the Conservative Democratic Alliance go, expect the basest and most unedifying ageing-Tory prejudices to be given one last stirring-up, because a week after the CDA opened their Dorchester branch (a pure anti-Letwin measure) a 68-year-old stalwart of the local Tory party is quoted on the front of the paper claiming that the party needs a "strong leader". although he did apparently "praise Letwin", one of the men he cites as "strong leaders" is Adolf Hitler. he also invokes Thatcher, whose vision of the flexible economy is still eating away at this type of Tory's idea of forelock-tugging feudal England, and even more hilariously this old Tory buffer cites the "leadership" of Richard Branson, doubtless blissfully unaware that his record company released that great anthem of respectful patriotic English Conservatism, the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" (I suspect this chap will be thrown out of the local Tory party, although that may not be the way it is officially phrased, and that he will subsequently join the Dorchester CDA). also the Br*t*sh N*tional P*rty have been active in Dorset lately, clearly trying to capitalise on this idea that Letwin is a shadowy "cosmopolitan" type, and I suspect very strongly that certain pseudonymous posts on the CDA forum, claiming that "the yeomen of Wessex" think Letwin is "not right" for "an ancient part of the real England"(but even this mad 68-year-old local Tory has praised Letwin, for fuck's sake!!!) are in fact written by members of this tiny BNP coterie.

you can see why I wouldn't vote for some loony "real Tory" candidate; I'd rather see Letwin remain an MP and even enjoy success as leader than give any sort of endorsement to people who think in these terms, but for self-interested anti-Tory and pro-Lib Dem reasons I'd rather see such a candidate stand and split the vote than see another three-way fight in that constituency (or any other currently very marginal Tory seat). I'd vote Lib Dem if I lived there, absolutely no question. here it has to be reluctant Labour.

Darren - many people (both pro- and anti-Lib Dem) have expressed the same doubts as you, but I genuinely don't think you should fear too much. the core of my argument on the LDs - I posted it previously in the Brent East by-election thread - is that the social situation which would have *historically* prevented a party from advancing in urban, racially-mixed areas *and* in Tory areas at the same time has been largely eroded with the great homogenisation of employment, tastes, attitudes etc, and that the LDs are doing well everywhere precisely because they fit the tone of the new era; they don't have the baggage of voting a certain way unthinkingly (the big post-1980s no-no) "because we always do round here" or "because my father did and my father before him" that Labour and the Tories both have. they are built for this era, a 15-year-old hybrid federation of a long-established rural-individualist axis and a modern urban-based social-democratic progressive left tendency, and with both elements still strong they can make sense in both types of area far more than either of the other two. 20 years ago, at the start of this process, the Liberals gained Bermondsey from Labour and Yeovil from the Tories within a few months of each other - the two MPs elected, Simon Hughes in South London and Paddy Ashdown in Somerset, were obviously both heading for great prominence within the party. now I was born in the Bermondsey area and lived there for my first 14 months, although we'd already moved to Kent by 1983, and members of my immediate family have lived in Yeovil since 1976 (and always voted Liberal / LD). that sort of family connection among the electorate - often leading to broadly similar voting habits, wider preferences etc - is a *much* more widespread force linking areas like Bermondsey with areas like Yeovil than it ever has been before.

certainly the population even in the most conservative shires has been getting younger and more liberal, especially with the decline of agriculture, the rise of teleworking etc etc (good piece on this in the Economist lately, and it's not often I say that) - that's how the Lib Dems have reduced the Tory majority in West Dorset in the first place, and that's why the old fogeys are getting paranoid; they know their time is up. the Tories have been regaining *councils* in their old rural fallback areas lately but that's a different thing; local politics often goes in the opposite direction to national politics, as the Liberal / SDP Alliance found out in 1987 when they abjectly failed to extend their success in the 1985 shire county council elections to the relevant parliamentary seats (that didn't happen until 1992 onwards). I think a lot of the dividing lines that would once have made it impossible for a party to advance in places like Haringey and places like Teignbridge *at the same time* have gradually disappeared, and if anything the more progressive-thinking and non-farming-based people in the rural Tory/LD marginals are more likely to vote Lib Dem because they see the Tories as bound up with a Countryside Alliance image which they don't want to be lumped in with just because of where they live (when the press unearth a dubious elderly Tory character like the one in today's Dorset Echo, it generally boosts Lib Dem leanings among undecided floating voters). Darren, am I right in thinking that you spent much of the 1990s living in Japan? I can understand that you might not have fully twigged the full scale of changes in patterns of living, voting, the urban-rural divide (or the lack of it) in recent times ...