3. Lehman's changes everything, which New Labour has yet to understand.
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The reason I mention NewLabour was that Mr Archer seemed to be one of those embittered Blairites yet again blubbering that their man lost last September. But a bit of research shows Mr Archer is a mere over-confident Tory.

Not 40% in the polls, not 40% in a national election for two decades. You need to look to your own man. The press onside, an unelectable adversary in Brown, the biggest postwar recession, high unemployment, all the money for the campaign. What they Hell else did you need to only get 36%?

Last year I met some Northern colleagues at a press conference. They told me that the Tories hadn't a chance. They were hated in the North. I said unfortunately, Brown and NewLabour are so unpopular in the south, people are even ready to vote the Tories back. Labour looks tired- which it was. But my colleague was right.

There are long memories. And millions of middle-aged middle class northerners brought up in the 80s just won't vote Tory. For all the talk of the importance of the South, I wonder if this is not a more significant hurdle for the Tories than is understood.

'No one cares how Labour chooses its shadow cabinet. They've already chosen a man who will never be prime minister'. Got to agree! Ed Milliband was elected with the full backing of the public sector unions, but those that pay the bills aren't that impressed. Ed only represents his north London gang. He's already lost Scotland, talked bullocks in Wales will achieve very little in southern England outside London.
elrob!! is quite wrong when he says ' middle class northerners brought up in the 80s just won't vote Tory'
the problem elrob is many working-class northerners brought up in the 80s just can't bring themselves to vote Labour after year's of betrayal.

Gerry
The Lib Dems have WRITTEN OFF attracting centre-left anti Labour Votes, cant you see?
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Yes, I have seen it Gerry, and it is a bloody mess.
Compo Clegg aligned his Orange Book Lib Dems with the Tories for a go at electoral reform.
But as Toriers would vote against reform, and LibDems for, the result was dependent on Labour voters.
Labour voters looked at the LibDems. What did they see?

Not only were LDs cosying up to the Tories in govt in a pragmatic way, but echoing all their p-ropoganda, blamiong the Left for everythibng, and what did those Labour voters do? Blew a big raspberry at the LDs and voted aginst.

Intelligent LDs have seen this and blsame Clegg for losing their once in a generation chance of electoral reform affording them power on a fairly regular basis.

My guess is they won't forget or forgive. Clegg has been a disaster for the LDs. And movements against Clegg were already happening within days (Huhne), and the NHS (Williams etal).

I do not take the centre-right realignment seriously.

We'll see. I reckon it'll be dead in the water.

Oh and Marcus,
Could you help me on something? How is deregulated financial markets socialist? I missed that one.

Graeme - you are spot on! Ed comes over like an eager to please public schoolboy - which I know he isn't, but he doesn't even have the "charisma" of Tony Blair to pull it off...

Even today in 2011, in the latest Times poll, 50% of the voters backed the Cons (38%) or Lib Dems (12%), and Cameron/Clegg have been busy this and last year realigning their parties so that a right/Thatcherish "sensible" bloc of Cons and Lib Dems can rule the centre ground.

Miliband and Labour are dead in the water if this right realignment works, and Tory voters back Lib Dem MPs and Lib Dem candidates in seats where Libs are second to Labour.

They nearly pulled this off at the Oldham by election, and I think in 2015 the Lib Dems can retain nearly all their English seats by this strategy.

Since 1979 at virtually every general election Lib Dems (or Alliance or Liberals) and Cons have together gained well over 50% of the vote - it will be no different in 2015!

elrob you put to much faith in polls, it's a few years before we put x in the box. By then, boundaries will have changed, the economy out of the doldrums. unemployment falling, public sector reformed, public sector workers rejoining the real world. Who the hell would wish to return to Labours years of tax and squander.

I agree completely - Ed Miliband will ever be Prime Minister. That much is for certain.

I doubt his brother will be either, although if he waits it out until after the next election he might well stand more of a chance.

The country is going to be in a wealth generation cycle for the next 7-8 years whilst we sort the mess made by the last generation of socialists. Wealth distribution is off the agenda, gone, forgotten, therefore socialism and the Labour Party is irrelevant to the middle classes.

The cycle is but starting so strap yourself in its going to be like the early 80's again........ but Cameron is no Thatcher so the outcome is still unknown. Will we pull through? No idea.

If and when we are all rich again then socialism will rear it head and we can all worry about the poor once more.

Sad, but true.

gerry,

Can you provide us with a link to the poll you keep quoting?

The most recent poll I can find for The Times group is poll for the Sunday Times, which has topline figures of CON 36%, LAB 43%, LDEM 9%.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/3670

Governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them. Hague would have won in 2010. Smith would have won in 1997.

Ok, I agree, IDS was so completely pathetic, so creepily embarassing. He would have lost any election, ever. But you cannot compare him with Ed M.

If the coalition carries on as it has been, Labour won't have to do anything at all.
More importantly, Miliband won't have to do anything at all.

You may well be right about Ed Miliband. He does not look or sound like a PM in waiting.

The thing is, though, there is no sign that more than 36% of the population is willing to vote for the Tories. This is not because people are unconvinced by Cameron as a 'modernizer', or even because they are apprehensive about the cuts (though that is an issue). The reason is that the Tories are no longer a national party able to reach enough of the country to win elections outright. They are resented and despised in the northern and inner city constituencies where they must win to form a government.

So there is very formidible natural anti-Tory vote which is no longer split between two parties following the halving of LibDem support. Through in the austerity measures and Labour is going to find it very easy to mobilise the 40% to 50% of the electorate who hate the Tories (so polls suggest) and whose main priority will be to get rid of them.

The Tories hope is that they will be saved by the boundary changes. But research shoes that the boundary changes will not counter the voting patterns that see Labour gain more seats on a lower share of the vote because they cannot prevent Tory votes piling up in their wealthy rural heartland.

So I wouldn't be so sure is all.

I remember Hague becoming Tory leader. I remember his eagerly fighting fot the role of opposition leader. And I rember thinking "what a fool, you should've waited till 2001, you're young enough, and you'll never win in 2001 - no Tory will."

I echo some of the other comments, of the pathetic lack of insight from the NS contributor.

Labour needs just 40 net gains in seats even with boundary changes to become the largest party in Parliament. The Tories needed well over a hundred in 2001. They needed to double their seats to win a majority. It was never gonna happen.

Take this woeful sample of Mr Archer's above: But to imagine that the current opinion poll lead is evidence that no more is required than to wait for the next election, when a grateful electorate will fling off the coalition and flock to Miliband, crying yada yada.

You nincompoop! Mr Eaton did not say that. He merely pointed out a fact: that Miliband is not in the same position as Hague. Where Hague needed a 150 seats, Miliband less than half that. Where Hague never lead for more than a month in the polls, Miliband for several in just the first year.

That does not mean he can turn up to win. It means your analysis is rubbish. And all the straw men you erect is not gonna change that. May I humbly add that you take on people's arguments, not invent them for a banal counter that convinces very few.

1. Labour start 50 seats behind the Tories; not 250.
2. No party is currently popular, including the Tories, which has not scored 40~% in a UK election for nearly 20 years.
3. Lehman's changes everything, which New Labour has yet to understand.
4. In coalition government, in extremely uncertain economic times (nationally and internationally, including still insolvent banks surviving on national patronage), anything is possible over the next four years.
4. Miliband seems (that's all as he has yet to show much of a hand) to know this. The key phrase that for me shows that Miliband is ahead of the curve against other politicians, parties, NewLabour and even you is: naive on markets.

The first top politician since Fukuyama. This is significant. And it is a long game, not this month's polls, not NewLabour sniping, and not weak historical links to Baldies like you or Hague

Man, journos seem desperate to hammer home this 'Ed can never be Prime Minister' narrative, even when he has a 7 point lead.

I knew he was wrong when I first saw him being interview as Climate sec... he never gave off any type of anything. Exactly the type of person you would just switch off when he appeared on TV... But he is just the type of non entity you would pick after a defeat... look how many corpses the Tories tried to resurrect, or the two baldies who were so pathetically useless before picking mr sleeves up and Smiles...

Winning elections is all fine and good, but that's just one noisy signal out of a bunch of other things we should be looking for. We're just beginning to see what Not-Red Ed thinks about things, and some of those thoughts are worrying:

1. Apparently it's obvious to Ed that the innocent should have their DNA held. Whatever your prejudices, we have to hold onto the principle of innocent until proven guilty. It's not a perfect system, but the alternatives are frightening. Labour has a bad record on civil liberties; this doesn't help.

2. He thinks strikes, designed to target the Tories, are a bad idea. Sadiq Khan's position was much more sensible: "It is a failure on both sides when there is strike action ... it's the last, last thing you do and what I'd like to see over the next three or four days is ministers, trade union leaders, speaking and trying to resolve this dispute."

3. This empirical, bottom-up, approach to finding policy is bizarre. The empiricism should be at level of testing the outcomes of theories, not collecting attitudes about theories. For instance, what improves education? There are theories gallore - John Hattie has written about many of them, for instance - and they've also been tested. This sort of evidence is worth collecting and fed back into policy.

Dave C - the poll was an ICM one, 20 June 2011, and published in the Guardian not the Times, my mistake ( I read both papers hence the confusion).. Labour was 39, Cons 37, Libs 12 so it was 49% together!

The week before I saw another poll which gave Cons 39 and Lib Dems 12, so I think yes the coalition parties are still getting 50% of the vote..

My point is that in 2015 I am sure that these 2 coalescing parties will easily get 50% plus of the vote...and that if their strategy works out, their voters can knock Labour out again in nearly all of the South, South West, Midlands and East of England, and keep Lib Dem seats in London, the University towns and the North

The real test will be in Nick Clegg's Sheffield seat, and in Lynne Festherstone's Hornsey seat..in both Tories are nowhere, but if they back the Lib Dem (as I think they overwhelmingly will) then Clegg and Featherstone will, with enough right Lib Dems votes, easily see off the real challenge they face from Labour...

Thanks Gerry,

The ICM poll is as you state. I can't see another poll that gives the Lib Dems as much as 12%, unless you go back to 29 May (Lab 37, Con 37, Lib Dem 12).

I think you underestimate rivalry within the Coalition; I've met few Tories on the ground that particularly like the Lib Dems. I can't see the Tories will go easy on the Lib Dems, particularly as there are many Tory/Lib Dem swing seats.

i think most of the comments here are right.

cameron is failing to poll above 36%, and his personal popularity is now dwindling, and his attacks on people on benefits have perhaps encouraged a few of the sort of voters no one wants to support them, but put off the same number.

i cannot see any circumstances under which labour will do as badly in the next election as they did in the 2010 one. and they don't need that large a swing to them from the conservatives to get a majority.

and the change in parliamentary boundaries will have a very marginal effect.

its a very unexciting scenario, but labour could actually probably win even if cameron keeps the same level of support as he had at the last election. as long as labour regain their 2005 support.

the sad reality is that it will be a vote for the least worst choice, rather than a positive vote.

but take note of the words of the man who came to an untimely end in a toilet in glastonbury, you tories just aren't very appealing people.

its that being nasty habit, you tories just can't kick it.