Lord Ashcroft Polls

By Lord Ashcroft

Imagine becoming Chancellor at a time of record public borrowing. The country’s banking industry is engulfed by gargantuan losses, and our European trading partners are flat on their backs because of their failed single currency. The energy infrastructure needs the biggest ever investment in new power plants. The population is ageing rapidly, and the nation’s already overtaxed workers and businesses face growing burdens. Meanwhile, a group of new economies is emerging, each educating more engineers, mathematicians and scientists than Britain and able to produce more at a lower price.

George Osborne doesn’t have to imagine.

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By Lord Ashcroft

The budget deficit remains the central fact of British politics. The deficit constrains everything the government does, or can plan to do. Restoring the country’s finances remains the coalition’s priority, and rightly so, but this is proving harder than it hoped or expected.

One reason for this is that while Conservatives favour public spending cuts in principle, they often oppose them in practice. Ministers are evidently fighting to protect their own territory. MPs and activists call for spending to fall faster, but to rise in their own favoured areas. Vested interests and lobby groups protest, but that is their job – just as it is the Chancellor’s job to make decisions.

None of those decisions is easy. But one is overdue, and has the unusual advantage of being both popular and helping the Chancellor achieve his fiscal goals.

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By Lord Ashcroft

Marginal constituencies decide the outcome of elections. In 2010, though the Conservatives did not achieve the national vote share they wanted, the party’s targeting strategy meant it won 23 more Labour seats and 9 more Liberal Democrat seats than it would have done on a uniform swing. Had it not been for the Conservative performance in the marginals, Labour would have been the largest parliament and would have continued in government.

The voters in marginal seats receive, no doubt to their delight, a great deal more attention from the parties than anyone else. But not all marginal seats are the same. Not only are they contested by different parties, they are home to different kinds of people and face a variety of different circumstances. Not only can the state of play in the marginals look rather different from the national polls, different kinds of marginal seat can look rather different from each other.

Now that we are past the midway point in the parliament – and now that it’s clear that the constituency boundaries will not be changing before the next election – I decided it was time for a proper look at the marginal territory where it will be decided who enters 10 Downing Street on 8 May 2015 and whether or not they have an overall majority at their command.

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By Lord Ashcroft

The mood at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference this weekend will perhaps be more cheerful than at any such gathering since the start of the coalition. The Eastleigh by-election apparently vindicates Nick Clegg’s approach to government, and his party’s approach to campaigning.

His activists will be relieved to think that pavement politics is back; that despite the polls, strong local government and an invincible leaflet-dropping network will see many or even most of their incumbent MPs safely back to Westminster in two years’ time. Certainly the Eastleigh victory was a considerable achievement for the Liberal Democrats, and there is no doubt, as my research has suggested for some time, that the party remains stronger as a local force that the national numbers suggest.

But that is not the whole story.

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By Lord Ashcroft

The day after a by-election it rarely helps to panic. Neither does it help to speculate about who voted for whom, or why. To avoid the need to do so, yesterday I polled people in the Eastleigh constituency after they had cast their vote. The sample of 760 is inevitably smaller than usual, given the time constraint, and though it is not politically weighted in the usual way it is a fair representation of those who voted. This is what I found.

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