Tomsk79

It's been heartening to see that the  softening of Labour's Brexit position over the summer has not led to a decline in its polling figures, and may even be driving them up a little. Labour's change was apparently motivated at least in part by the fear that a new "centrist" party would emerge that would hurt them more than the Tories . Certainly, there's been much talk recently of such a party, despite or perhaps because of the lacklustre performance of the existing centrist party, the Lib Dems, in the snap election. The belief that a new centrist party would sweep all before it is based on the idea that if Labour moves left while the Tories move right, a great yawning gap of homeless voters will appear in the middle. Assuming voters are normally distributed across the political spectrum, the picture looks something like this: Which is fine as far as it goes, but the label "centrist" bugs me, both as a tag for the potential new party and in i

So it turns out the method of counting window posters is scientific, with Jeff Smith crushing all before him: Party Votes % +/- % Jeff Smith Labour 38,424 71.7 +18.0 John Leech Liberal Democrat 8,549 15.9 -8.0 Sarah Heald Conservative 5,530 10.3 +0.6 Laura Bannister Green 865 1.6 -6.5 Sally Carr Women’s Equality 234 0.4 Far from being a marginal, Withington must now be one of the safest seats in the country. The Lib Dems remain in second place but will surely now turn their attention to more winnable targets. The Greens' collapse mirrors their poor performance nationally, while the Tories have benefitted only marginally from the disappearance of UKIP. What a turnaround we've seen since the start of the campaign, and even the local elections, when it seemed like Big Andy would be the only Labour politi