Indeed - and an insurgent third party was polling at 50% in 1981. New governments quite often struggle in the polls, including landslide governments. New Labour's long poll leads are very much the exception, but we've come to think of them as the rule. - ThreadSky

robertsaunders.bsky.social • 24 days ago

Indeed - and an insurgent third party was polling at 50% in 1981.

New governments quite often struggle in the polls, including landslide governments.

New Labour's long poll leads are very much the exception, but we've come to think of them as the rule.

Reposted from Jim Pickard

not saying polls are meaningless but in December 1980 the Labour party had a 24-point lead over Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives

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jezmrogers.bsky.social•24 days ago

And for that matter the Conservatives were already behind in the very first poll taken after the 1979 election, only 6 weeks or so later.

kitkowol.bsky.social•23 days ago

Indeed the whole 1990s have somehow been coded as “normal” when in so many ways they are the exception not the rule (you could say the same about the 50s too I think)

robertsaunders.bsky.social•23 days ago

Such a good point (& lovely to hear from you!).

This was striking in 2016, too: while there's obviously a much longer tradition of Euroscepticism, so many of the architects of the Leave campaign were formed intellectually in the 90s, & took for granted conditions that have now all but vanished.

kitkowol.bsky.social•23 days ago

Nice. Could you say the same about Remain - free movement of people and capital seen as an unalloyed good / inevitability not to mention the failure to articulate a positive nationalistic case for staying in?

robertsaunders.bsky.social•23 days ago

I think the case against Remain is different: it failed to update its case in the 90s, which is why it spent the next 20 years in headlong retreat, & why it found it so hard to articulate a case in 2016. It's striking that a pro-European (rather than anti-Eurosceptic) case only re-emerged post-2016.

mwhoyle96.bsky.social•23 days ago

The economy was in the toilet in 1980 and 1981 (recession, double digit inflation and interest rates) but accelerated strongly from the start of 1982. I’m not sure that is going to happen for Starmer.

alunephraim.bsky.social•24 days ago

What does bemuse me slightly is the obvious absurdity of e.g. weekly polling when a GE is a distant speck beyond the horizon in political terms.

georgeperetzkc.bsky.social•23 days ago

Not a landslide of course, but I think Wilson’s government was struggling in the polls, and bye-elections, after 1964 (before winning handsomely in 1966).

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