Danny

Tories have a 4% lead in new Opinium poll as Labour's tactic of endlessly prattling on about "economic credibility" reaps dividends. The pattern of there being an inverse relationship between the plaudits they get from the Tory/Blairite political commentariat and their poll ratings continues.

Yup. I still think that a lot of the disillusioned Scottish Labour voters' complaints (that the Tories and Labour are too close together on policy, that Labour doesn't care about the working class anymore, that Miliband is crap) are mostly the same as you get throughout northern England (and, I would assume, in Wales). The only difference is they don't have a party precision-packaged to mop up Labour voters as the SNP.

You're right, i don't disagree with most of what he's been saying on the issues from what I've seen - hilarious and ironic though his conversion to anti-austerity is. Tbh, the main problem is him. He could be a great backroom strategist for all I know, but he just isn't a frontman, even less so than Ed is. His voice and stage presence in interviews is so boring and droning -- it's shallow and unfair, yes, but it's still going to be a deal-breaker for most people whether they even listen to what he's got to say. I really should've bet on whether Labour would even save their deposit in NE Fife rather than them winning it outright... Do you know if your seat voted for independence? (I know Fife as a whole was 55/45 against but don't know how each area broke down.)

A YouGov in March (which I think is the most recent one) put Murphy's net rating on -26. http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumul...312_Website.pdf

Kennedy is only down a couple of points since the last poll -- the SNP have mainly gained from other parties. And saying Jim Murphy has decent ratings "apart from SNP voters" is a bit of a red herring when SNP voters make up half of the bloody electorate :P Even Ed would have decent ratings "among Labour voters" if Labour had haemorraged to a rump of 25% or so. Clearly there's numerous factors causing this, but a negative reaction to Murphy is atleast part of it, especially considering he's apparently regarded even worse than the Scottish Tory leader. Though the immature "if you vote for the SNP then we won't work with them just to spite you" from Labour is probably also a factor.

Yikes. The closer we get to the election, the worse the polling gets for Scottish Labour: They really need to hide Jim Murphy (and keep Miliband south of the border) and wheel out Gordon Brown at any opportunity from now until election day. The Scottish polling has got worse for Labour since Murphy took over, in a timeframe when the UK-wide Labour polling has got slightly better.

Despite the rhetoric on the deficit, Miliband made no new commitments on the subject, save to emphasise that spending in non-protected departments will be cut in each year of the next parliament. Both he and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, brutally slapped down the hopeful suggestion of the Scottish leader Jim Murphy, who argued that the Institute of Fiscal Studies had claimed there might not need to be spending cuts after 2015-16 if Labour put back balancing the current account until late in the parliament. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/a...-no-10-looks-it LMAO, who wouldn't want the deficit reduced if there were no consequences to it? If you asked me in isolation whether I wanted it reduced in an ideal world, even I'd say yes. This is a classic example of one of the "pony polling" things you always rightly decry. But questions which ask whether people want the deficit reduced at the cost of massively reduced spending for public services ALWAYS produce different results.

I've said before that I'm genuinely confused what Labour's economic policies are since different people say completely different things. But earlier this week, Miliband denied that they would stop cutting next year, and said they would be making cuts every year. Was he flat-out lying??

But the point still stands. Cutting housing benefit would increase homelessness -- otherwise, why would those people have been getting housing benefit in the first place? Or do you think benefit fraud makes up a lot of the bill? I'm genuinely not understanding where you're coming from. For there to be all this scope to massively cut back on spending, you must surely believe that a lot of the increased spending the last Labour government introduced was "waste".

Child benefit maybe, but Britain's tourism industry would go up in flames if the streets were suddenly filled with homeless people as a result of scrapping housing benefit. The point is, the logical conclusion of your argument that "it's possible to cut spending without affecting anything that matters" is the logical conclusion is that huge amounts of current spending aren't necessary. Why would those programmes have been set up in the first place if there wasn't a need for them?

The same principle applies to health and welfare, and all the local government funding which indirectly goes into those areas. Though again, I can see we've hit into the ironic definition of "economic credibility" where you can make masses of cuts without somehow affecting anything that matters, all with magical "reforms" no doubt.

"Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you're flying high at first, but it won't take long before you feel the impact." Said not by a raving "TUSCite", but by the president of the socialist hotbed that is the US. The country which has even lower borrowing rates despite not giving a crap about the deficit.

You're right, the real definition of socialism is "cut away the safety net for the poor even more when it's already in tatters".

So you think the last couple of days have gone well for Labour, then?

I actually saw before that they're standing in my seat! I don't like the "hard left" usually because they tend to get obsessed with fringe issues like "nationalising the railways" or "abolishing Trident" (or batshit conspiracy theories about 9/11).

There's been hardly any. I feel like the manifestos the last couple of days will be seen as the turning point of the election. Labour just completely miscalculated: people don't want "credibility", they want HOPE that things are going to get better, and on that score the Tories are now getting the upper-hand (irrespective of whether they'll actually follow through on their promises). People don't want to hear nitpicking about how "realistic" or "costed" things are, they WANT to believe things are going to get better and so will take anything that politicians say at this point pretty much at face value.

Miliband said yesterday that the Tories were going to "spend recklessly". The obvious implication of that is that Labour would spend less.

Does the judging panel really make much difference to how the show does anyway? Back in it's glory days, sure the chemistry or "drama" between the judges was a nice bonus, but surely the main thing that kept people watching was the high standard of the contestants. And it's that that's really fallen off in the last few years.

It's not a serious position, it's a right-wing position which the majority of the public don't agree with, and where in Scotland in particular there's a party tailor-made to pick up the votes of all those people who don't agree.

Miliband is going to get absolutely slaughtered by Nicola in Thursday's debate with his new message of "the Tories' cuts plans don't go far enough".

I'm not sure. Obama had an extra dimension because the US had such a history of racism in the recent past, which made it all the more groundbreaking/remarkable -- I'm not sure a woman president would be seen as such a great groundbreaking move that would in itself be enough to make people enthusiastic about Hillary. It certainly wasn't seen as that in Hillary's 2008 campaign, anyway, the argument was all about her "experience" rather than because she'd be making history as the first female president.

I wasn't being serious :P I do think if Miliband now intends to spend the rest of the election posturing about how tough he'll be on the deficit and bragging about how he'll spend less than the Conservatives, he'll eventually spark another exodus of Labour voters to Green/UKIP/SNP/non-voting, though.

The hilarity of the Tories taking a lead over Labour literally within hours of Labour saying they would spend less than them.

Robert Peston @Peston · 5h 5 hours ago Gripping that @edballsmp refusing to match @George_Osborne unfunded pledge to spend £8bn more on NHS They REALLY don't want to win this election do they.

So, after a week where Labour got a boost by finally attacking the hated fat-cats, they seem to have decided to sabotage themselves again by making the main headline of their manifesto dull and uninspiring wishy-washiness about "no extra borrowing", and attacking the Conservatives for planning to spend too much on the NHS. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32279977