Close
Close

Bonds, BNP, Bets

John Lanchester

Just snippets today.

1. The bond market doesn’t care who wins, as long as somebody does. Nine out of ten funds questioned by the FT said that there was no difference between the Tories and Labour. But they don’t like the idea of a hung Parliament, because they think it’ll make it harder to tackle the deficit.

2. According to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, there is no correlation between levels of immigration and support for the BNP. Of the ten local authorities with the highest levels of BNP support, nine have levels of immigration lower than the national average. (The exception is Barking, which has the highest level of BNP support of anywhere in the UK, and where ethnic minorities have gone from being 5 per cent of the population to 35 per cent in a decade.)

3. Ladbrokes were offering 50-1 that one of the three party leaders will say the word Eyjafjallajökull in the second debate – but that was yesterday, and the odds have now tightened to 20-1. A lot of vulcanologist money must have poured in.


Comments


  • 20 April 2010 at 12:25pm
    Christian Perfect says:
    Not just no correlation, negative correlation - areas with higher immigration have lower BNP support.

    I'm enough of a statistician to make that pedantic point, but not enough to say whether the authors of the report accounted for the fact that immigrants are very unlikely to support the BNP (and so bring down the numbers)

  • 20 April 2010 at 12:56pm
    SarahK says:
    Surely the correlation is curved. It rises with immigration, until immigrant population starts to dominate the voting population and supporting others?

    Is it possible to pull up odds for individual seats?

    Also, its pretty well known parly researchers and activists pump ££ into the betting markets to cause momentum and garner good press. Its their money to burn I suppose.