{"id":6291,"date":"2025-12-07T13:20:54","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T13:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=6291"},"modified":"2025-12-07T18:29:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T18:29:19","slug":"uk-general-elections-the-cursed-ratios-52-26-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/uk-general-elections-the-cursed-ratios-52-26-13\/","title":{"rendered":"UK General Elections #10A – The Cursed Ratios of British Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I used to be a commodity trader in the 1990s.\u00a0 This wasn’t my day job, which was to forecast supply & demand, but I had the statistical skills to develop automated trading strategies for the traders I worked with.\u00a0 These were either based on moving averages of futures prices (known as technical trading) or buy\/sell signals based on the underlying supply & demand picture (known as fundamental trading).\u00a0 I don’t trade commodities now but I’ve applied the stats skills I learned then to many time series since including those for elections and voting intentions.<\/p>\n

Another trading strategy I could have used but didn’t was Chartism.\u00a0 I vividly remember the training course I did on this and coming away gobsmacked.\u00a0 How on earth were people being allowed to buy and sell millions using nothing more than astrology, spiritualism, numerology and other superstitions?!\u00a0 I immediately swore of from Chartism and have managed to stay away from it until this year.\u00a0 I hope you understand why it’s taken me many months to build up the courage to publish two articles where I use chartist superstitions instead of statistics to interpret long term trends in the vote shares of the major parties in the UK.<\/p>\n

For this article, I explain why my charts show the Cursed Ratios<\/strong> of British voters are 52 : 26 : 13 : 6.5<\/strong>.\u00a0 For my next article, I will have you fearing for my sanity…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Data used in this article<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n

All charts and tables in this article are based on monthly average vote shares for Great Britain as measured by voting intention polls since 1960.\u00a0 I make no adjustment for house effects by pollster.\u00a0 In some charts I show variation within a month by looking at how the 9-poll rolling average has changed in that month.<\/p>\n

The raw data comes from Mark Pack who has systematically recorded every opinion poll published since 1945<\/a>.\u00a0 Gallup were the only pollster in the 1940s & 1950s but this started to change in the 1960s which is why my analysis starts in January 1960.\u00a0 Since the start of 1962, there has been at least one voting intention poll every month.\u00a0 Between 1960 & 2011, vote share data is only available for the Conservatives<\/span>, Labour <\/span><\/strong>and Liberal Democrats*<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 All other parties are combined into an Other<\/strong> category.\u00a0 From 2012, vote shares for the Greens<\/strong> <\/span>and Reform**<\/strong> <\/span>started to be published separately.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Previous incarnations of the Liberal Democrats* & Reform**<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

For information, the Liberal Democrats<\/strong> <\/span>and Reform<\/strong> <\/span>today used to be known under other names.\u00a0 The following points about the data I will use in this article for these parties should be noted –<\/p>\n