Armchair experts ‘just as good as opinion polls’

Barry, a self styled election expert and caricature pub bore, reckons that opinion polls are over-rated. The error, as he sees it, is wasting time asking people what they think. The latest opinion poll about the UK political parties puts the Conservatives on 29% and Barry wonders how much time was wasted on that poll and how much the pollsters charged.

In Barry’s view, the arithmetic is pretty obvious, as he explains:

‘No-one on an NHS waiting list and no unpaid carer will vote Tory. That’s 12.7m votes gone straight away.

No-one in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland is going to vote for London-centric Tories. That’s another 7.9m votes gone.

Lots of Northerners are cheesed off about HS2. I’m estimating that as the population of Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. That’s 3.6m.

Then you’ve got 4.6m renters with private landlords, who’ve been screwed by interest rates, and 1.6m people on minimum wage. They ain’t voting Tory. And you’ve got pissed-off workers who are striking for more pay and getting nowhere – rail workers, NHS, teachers and college lectures – 2.6m. No blue wall there.

That’s a grand total of 33 million people who aren’t voting Tory out of an electorate of 46.6m. Which gives a Tory vote of 29.2%. Boom. Take that, pollsters. I did that in less than an hour. You can thank me later. I’m as good as an opinion poll every time. Ask me another.’

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Policies to be redacted from Party manifestos

‘We want people to be able to make their decision unencumbered by anything too practical,’ said Kate Jones of the Politics Institute. ‘And anyway – who cares?’

Politicians for both Parties welcomed the move. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ said one Labour MP. ‘I thought we were going to have to come up with ideas.' Conservatives were equally positive: ‘Well, the few policies we’ve come up with so far have gone down about as well as a turd in a swimming pool. Which was, actually, one of our policy ideas.'

Other political parties are rumoured to exist, some of them much heavier on policy and lighter on tribalism than the main parties – but that’s probably why you haven’t heard of them.

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English polling stations to bring in extra staff

Extra staff are being brought in to act as "Greeters" at polling stations. The government says the staff are needed to ensure voters have the required I.D. and has denied rumours that a contract to supply the extra staff was given to the Wagner Group PMC.

The Minister for Corrupt Elections explained that Wagner Group employees are fully committed in Russia for the foreseeable future, so wouldn't have been able to supply the extra staff; then went on to lament the demise of the Met's Special Patrol Group who would have discovered whether voters had the required I.D. by strip searching them.

Instead the government is proposing to offer other hardened criminals shorter sentences if they sign up to do the work and meet the government's targets.

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