Forecasting – Page 2

UK General Election 2024 #2 – My Forecasting Model

June 22, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

My UK General Election 2024 forecasting model will be a top down version which I last used in 2010. Top down approaches first predict how many seats each party will win in total before seeking to identify which seats each party wins. This differs from the bottom-up approach I used in 2017 & 2019 where I forecast the outcome for each seat first and then aggregated the forecasts.

Here I explain how my 2024 forecast will be made but it finishes with a warning that I may have to dump my 2024 model in favour of the forecasting approach I used for the 2015 general election.

UK General Election 2024 #1 – Going beyond the swing

February 18, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

Labour is on course for a crushing landslide later this year… or are they? Many parallels with 1997 are being drawn at the moment but it’s too early to be making detailed forecasts. Instead, I want to lay the foundations for my election forecast later this year by looking at what 100 years of UK electoral history is telling me. I tell this story by assigning probabilities to 10 specific outcomes of interest and finish by explaining why 2024 is more likely to be a repeat of 2001 than 1997.

I remind you I was deemed the most accurate forecaster of the 2019 general election. This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles which lead me to hold on to that accolade!

Pay Gap Trends #7 – UK Ethnicity Pay Gap 2012 to 2022

January 3, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

In November 2023, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resumed publishing estimates of the UK Ethnicity Pay Gap after a 3 year hiatus for the Covid19 pandemic. I have organised this data into a user-friendly (hopefully!) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which allows you to see how the median hourly pay has changed between 2012 & 2022 for a variety of ethnicities & other categories. This article explains how you can use this spreadsheet and why you must look at ethnicity pay gap data in a different way than you would for gender pay gap data.

Voice Referendum #2 – My Forecast Reviewed

November 5, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Australians rejected the proposed constitutional amendment known as The Voice in a referendum on 14^th October 2023. NO won the national vote by 20.1 percentage points and the state count 6-0 but the more important question is was my forecast right?

Voice Referendum #1 – My Forecast Explained

October 13, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Australians will reject the proposed constitutional amendment known as The Voice in a referendum on 14^th October 2023. My forecast is for NO to win the national vote by 17 percentage points and win the state count 6-0.

This article was first published on 11th October 2023. My forecast then was for NO to win 16 points and the state count 6-0.

Pay Gap Trends #6 – Are we there yet?

May 10, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Has 6 years of mandatory gender pay gap reporting (GPGR) made a dent in the UK’s gender pay gap? According to a recent BBC article, not one bit at all. Unfortunately, too many people on social media have been taken in by this misleading article and I will be submitting a formal complaint to the BBC soon to get it amended. I rebutted this at the time with this LinkedIn post and I will now expand on that here to show what the true trend is and whether or not mandatory pay gap reporting has had an impact.

UK Economy Tracker #10 – 2022 Q3

November 16, 2022 By Nigel Marriott

UK Inflation has risen sharply since the start of 2022 and dominates the media and politics today. It is now having knock on effects, most notably on wage rises which are lagging behind inflation. The aftermath of the COVID19 induced recession continues to be considerable economic uncertainty.

Pay Gap Trends #4 – Did the UK gender pay gap narrow in 2020?

September 5, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

This article was last updated using data submitted as of 4th September 2021.

In February 2021, the EHRC confirmed that all employers with a headcount of 250 employees or more would have to submit their gender pay gaps based on the 2020 snapshot date. Due to the lateness of this confirmation, they also stated that no enforcement action would be taken prior to the end of September 2021. As result, fewer employers than expected have reported 2020 data so far so I have used two methods of imputation to estimate that the median gender pay gap among these employers narrowed by 0.2 to 0.3 pence in the pound in 2020.

UK Local Elections #1 – My West England Metro Mayor 2021 Election Forecast

May 2, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

It will be close but I am predicting that the Conservatives will hold onto the West England Combined Authority Metropolitan Mayoralty on 6th May 2021. By rights, they should not be winning but the 3 parties opposing them do not seem to understand the subtleties of the Supplementary Vote (SV) that is used in this election and they will end up splitting their votes to their detriment.

UK General Elections #6 – Keir Starmer’s train to Downing Street

March 21, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

Keir Starmer has to match what Clement Attlee did in 1945 and beat what Tony Blair did in 1997 if he wants to form a Labour government at the next election. To arrive at Downing Street by the end of 2024, Starmer must get his party to board an InterCity 125 train and spend the next 3 years following the tracks I lay out in this article. As I will show, whichever track they take has to go through 125 English Conservative seats, most of which are in between cities. Hence InterCity 125 becomes the easy to remember name of Labour’s list of target seats.