12 Comments
User's avatar
Quincel's avatar

Is there a way to check our full entry? I've already forgotten what I put for most of it.

Edrith's avatar

Sadly not. Google Forms only allows you to choose a 'send people a copy of their response' if you make it mandatory to give an email address, which I don't want to do as it would put a lot of people off.

I'm open to suggestions of alternative platforms that would have this functionality.

Bryan Pready's avatar

Something wrong when I zoom in on the tables -- the image doesn't have the column on the right with the percentages.

Edrith's avatar

I have just tried and the same for me. Very weird!

I will try to fix it this evening - apologies.

Edrith's avatar

In the meantime, zooming in in the email does appear to work.

Bryan Pready's avatar

Thanks. I've unsubscribed from Substack emails because my inbox can't cope. Keeping it manageable is an ongoing battle :-(

Edrith's avatar

I've fixed it now - not sure what was going wrong, but have now created the tables in Datawrapper and that has solved the problem. Thank you for pointing it out!

Nick O'Connor's avatar

Nick O'Connor here - social worker. I'd love to believe that I'm great at forecasting, but I suspect I did well because a) I got lucky, and b) I took the Brier scoring seriously - where I didn't know I put 50%, where I had a view but not much evidence to back it up I bumped that up to 60%ish.

Ironically, I may have done better as a result of following the news much less closely than I used to - I knew how ignorant I was compared to my past self, which might have given me a more accurate estimate of how ignorant I was in general.

Edrith's avatar

Knowing the limits of your own knowledge is much more valuable than gung-ho overconfidence - whether you're deciding on an investment portfolio or whether to invade Russia in the wintertime!

Rachael's avatar

I wonder what effect Restore Britain will have on questions 6-15: after about a week they're already bigger than the Lib Dems in terms of both membership and bookies' odds of winning the next GE (aggregated on oddschecker). I don't know whether they'll plateau here or continue this trajectory; but either way it's another surprise that probably nobody's predictions accounted for, in an already unusual political landscape.

Quincel's avatar

Got to say I think the bookies are getting way ahead of themselves (or responding to punters who are). Restore's policies and vibes/language from key supporters is much more like the BNP than Reform. They have no well known members, with Lowe their best and he's a little known MP. No national network with any record (LDs have shown they can blanket council areas and byeletions and get their vote out. I see no evidence the Restore 'membership' (which may not even exist beyond an email list) can do the same). I'd be very surprised if they even got 3% at a general election, my guess is under 1% and Lowe losing his seat.

Edrith's avatar

I'm with Quincel here - I think they'll be a flash in the pan, 1-2% at most (and probably won't field many candidates). Could deny Reform a few seats at most.

We've had quite a few of these sort of parties ('Reclaim UK' with Lawrence Fox, the new post-Farage UKIP) and they'll find it hard to get traction. There's not much space to the right of Reform for an openly ethno-nationalist party, plus it's genuinely hard to create a new party and get enough traction for people to vote for you (thinking here of ChangeUK which had a much more compelling offer).