Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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EU Referendum #4 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 43 Days!

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Rather than celebrating love on Valentine’s day, Parliament chose to use the occasion to emphasise their discord over the EU withdrawal process, 43 days before the UK is due to leave the EU.  Three amendments were voted on and this allows me to update my Brexit voting blocks which I first described in “Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 57 days!”.

This post was updated on 20th February 2019 to take into account the resignations of 8 MPs from the Labour party. and 3 MPs from the Conservative party.

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EU Referendum #3 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 57 days!

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January 2019 has been a month of considerable parliamentary drama in the UK as MPs wrestle over whether to approve the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU.  There is no shortage of political punditry and quotes from politicians and the whole episode is proving to be a classic example of uncertainty.  For statisticians like myself, uncertainty occurs when you cannot properly price the odds of an event happening unlike risk which occurs when you can price the odds.  Since the current state of affairs will ultimately be determined by parliamentary votes one way or the other, is it possible to use parliamentary vote data so far to estimate the odds of certain scenarios?

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UK General Elections #4 – Jeremy Corbyn’s road to Downing Street

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The fevered political climate in the UK at the moment is all about Brexit and possible second referendums and general elections.  Jeremy Corbyn made it clear recently that he wanted a General Election now so that he could take over the Brexit negotiations.  With that in mind, I decided to take a look at what Labour’s target seat strategy could look like based on the results of the 2017 general election.  What I see at the moment is that Labour has many ways of becoming the largest party in Parliament but the road to a working majority is much harder than people realise due to the Brexit realignment in 2016 and the Nationalist realignment in Scotland in 2015.

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UK General Election 2017 #7 – Review of my predictions

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Exactly one month ago, the UK woke up to the news that they had elected a hung parliament for the second time in 3 elections.  For many forecasters including myself, this came as a surprise as I had been predicting a Conservative majority of 100 seats.  In the event, the largest ever polling underestimate of the Labour vote was enough to see the Conservatives lose their majority.

At the beginning of my commentary on election night itself, I defined success for my forecasts as being how close the number of Conservative seats was to my forecast of 375.  I also stated that if the number of seats was in the 340s I would consider this to be a prediction error.  The final outcome was 317 seats so clearly that is a major prediction error.

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UK General Election 2017 #6 – Everything you need to know in one place!

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Over the last 6 weeks I have been making many posts about what is happening and what will happen in 2017.  I thought it would be helpful to have one post which brings everything together in one place.

My official 2017 election forecast summarises what I expect the results to be on June 8th 2017.  This post also includes a link to a spreadsheet containing my seat by seat forecasts which can be found at the bottom of that post.  (EDIT: Weds 7th June @1030AM.  If you downloaded the spreadsheet before 1030 on Weds 7th June, please visit the link and download the spreadsheet again.  The link explains why)

To accompany my forecast, I have created 4 youtube video clips where I dig into the details of how I arrived at that forecast.

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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #4 – My Official Prediction as of 4th June 2017

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My official prediction using my Final Election Model is that the Conservatives will make a net gain of 45 seats resulting in a working majority of 105 seats.

My forecast uses data from my latest UK Opinion Poll Tracker and it is worth reading that post in conjunction with this post.  At the bottom of this post is a spreadsheet containing my prediction for each seat.  I am basing all figures in this forecast on the assumption that Conservatives will have a 9.5% lead over Labour on June 8th.  I arrive at that figure by taking the current CON-LAB lead of 7% in the latest polls and adding an expected 2.5% underestimate in the Conservative lead over Labour based on my analysis of historical polling errors.  A knock-on effect of this assumption is that I expect turnout to be 2pts higher at 68%.

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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #5 – 5 steps to making sense of the latest polls!

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Unlike the 2015 general election when the polls were essentially static (& wrong) throughout the election, the 2017 general election has seen some of the most extraordinary volatility in the polls that I can remember.  If you are a Conservative supporter, the narrowing lead over Labour must be leading to anxiety and changed underwear.  If you are a Labour supporter, you are probably starting to dream “can we? will we?!”  It doesn’t help that your state of mind will depend on which poll you are reading and your memories of the pollsters’ failure in 2015 so how can you make sense of what is going on.  I will show you how in 5 steps and to heighten the drama, I will leave the punchline to the end!

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UK 2017 General Election Forecast #3 – A Description of my Final Model

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For the last 6 weeks, I have been making forecasts of the number of seats that each party will get in the 2017 General Election.  If you have been following my forecasts, you will know that I have developed a variety of prediction models which all predict something different.  With 10 days to go, I decided it was high time to settle on a single Final Model which is described in this post.

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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #2 – Latest Prediction as of 21st May 2017

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Here you can find my latest forecast of the 2017 UK General Election on 8th June.  My forecast uses data from my latest UK Opinion Poll Tracker and it is worth reading that post in conjunction with this post.

My latest prediction using uniform regional swing adjusted for parties standing down is that the Conservatives will make a net gain of 52 seats resulting in a working majority of 119 seats.  If anti-Conservative tactical voting takes place then this has the potential to reduce the Conservatives working majority to 73 seats which I am sure Theresa May would still be very happy with! [Read more…]

UK General Election 2017 Seat Forecast #1 – Bath, South West

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This post was first published on 29th April 2017 and predicted a narrow Conservative Hold.  I updated this post on 21st May 2017 to take into account latest data.

Welcome to the first of my constituency forecasts for the 2017 General Election.  I’ve chosen to start with the seat of Bath currently held by the Conservatives for two reasons.  First, it is where I live so I have a personal interest!  Second, it is the bell-weather seat for the Liberal Democrats when it comes to the success of the anti-Brexit strategy.  Fail to take Bath and they can kiss goodbye to any chance of making the election a success.

MY FORECAST – Lib Dem GAIN but still very marginal

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