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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