Our editors give their selection of the top stories of the past week:
Lord Ashcroft released his latest constituency polling, highlighting the danger UKIP poses for Labour in four seats: Great Grimsby, Dudley North, Plymouth Moor View and Rother Valley.
On Buzzfeed, Jamie Ross reports on the surge of support for the Green Party amongst 18-24 year olds. Over the last six months, the Greens have seen there support amongst this age group more than double to 19 per cent, and this has come mainly at the expense of Labour. But what proportion of this age bracket will actually turn out on 7 May compared with older voters?
A recent widely cited ComRes poll placed the Conservatives to the right of UKIP when respondents were asked to place the parties on a left-right scale. On the British Election Study site, Phil Cowley analyses different data asking a similar question, finding that “the public as a whole position UKIP and the Conservatives at roughly the same place on the left-right spectrum, with UKIP only very slightly to the right of the Conservatives; moreover, UKIP voters see their party to the left of where Conservatives see their own party and UKIP voters are on average themselves to the left of Conservative voters.”
On the Hansard Society’s Britain Votes blog, Rosie Campbell and Sarah Childs ask, “what potential is there for women – as party leaders, candidates and voters – to play a prominent role in the election and shaping the debate?”
Writing for the New Statesman’s Staggers blog, Tim Bale writes about the new-normal of a multi-party Britain. The electorate’s rejection of the traditional two-party system is underlined by a specially commissioned poll of 40 marginal Conservative-Labour constituencies which show a clear majority prefer a multi-party system.
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(Featured image credit: Jennifer Jane Mills CC BY 2.0)
