Monday, September 28, 2009

The Monday Morning Blog - back on National Express, polls and nuts

A strange feeling of deja vu - it is a Monday morning and I am on a National Express train. No, I'm not heading to London. Actually the reverse, I am heading out of London to Newcastle and home to Sunniside. Amazingly, the train is not cancelled! Stranger things have happened.

I caught the Independent poll on GMTV this morning. Labour and Lib Dems both on 23%. I hoped to pick up a copy of the Indie at Kings Cross but WH Smith must have had a run on them. I ended up getting the details of the poll from the Indie website instead.

What was mentioned in passing, but not given sufficient attention, was the low rating of the Conservatives. At 38%, this is short of the minimum they need if they want to become the majority government after the general election. Think back to 1997 and you will recall the stratospheric support in the polls for Blair and the "new" Labour project (perhaps it should be "Labour" that is in inverted commas). Despite this, Labour fell well short of the shares of the vote predicted by the polls, with about 41% when people went to the polls yet there was a gut feeling amongst the majority of the population that the Tory government had to go and Blair and his team should take over. (It was clearly a long time ago!) Anyway, that same gut feeling just does not exist for Cameron. There is no yearning for a Cameron government.

Polls of course should be taken with a great pinch of salt, especially when they come from ComRes. Nevertheless, they can show trends - and in this instance they continue to show that the Tories are comfortably ahead of Labour only because Labour are so comprehensively behind. And it also show that Eric Pickles and his attempt to lovebomb the Lib Dems have failed. Mind you, the attempt by Eric Pickles to pass himself off as a progressive Liberal is like a drunken alcoholic claiming to be teetotal.

Anyway, my long weekend in London is now over. Some of it was spent in park and woodland in Crystal Palace picking nuts - sweet chestnuts to be precise. They are all packed into a box which is coming up to Sunniside with me on the train. All part of the self-sufficiency drive.
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