YouGov shows Labour unscathed by Northern Rock
A new YouGov poll in Saturday’s Telegraph has voting intentions (with changes from the poll last weekend) of CON 33%(-1), LAB 39%(nc), LDEM 16%(+1). The previous YouGov poll was largely conducted before Northern Rock, this was conducted between the 19th and 21st of September making it the first full voting intention poll conducted entirely since Northern Rock.
It’s pretty clear that the poll shows no significant change from the Northern Rock affair, the Liberal Democrat conference has also had a minor effect at best, with a rise of a single point. While the leads aren’t hugely different – 8 points as opposed to 6 points – it is actually painting a different picture to ICM – ICM showed the largest Labour lead yet, this poll is still down from the peak of the Brown boost. It’s probably not methodological differences: since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister YouGov have tended to be the pollster who produce the largest Labour leads, certainly they’ve tended to show larger leads than ICM. Perhaps its just because ICM’s poll was conducted at the very height of the crisis and people rallied to Gordon Brown as the strong leader… and now the crisis seems to be over they’ve returned to their previous views.
Specifically on Northern Rock 52% of people thought the government handled it well, with 37% disagreeing. The vast majority of people don’t seem to be worried about the security of their savings, 74% say they are not very worried or not worried at all, and only 3% say they are very worried. The effect of Northern Rock on other underlying scores is negative for Labour, but only marginally so – Brown’s lead as best Prime Minister is down 2 points from the last YouGov poll to ask the question, but that still leaves it at an inpressive 22 points. Labour’s lead on the economy is down 4 points, but that still leaves it at a healthy 8 points.
All things considered, Labour appear to have emerged unscathed from the Northern Rock incident. A six point lead must be on the margin of Brown calling an October election – it doesn’t take much of a Lib Dem campaign recovery at Labour’s expense or a couple of campaign tumbles to move it into majority losing territory. On the other hand, what was previously a very soft Labour lead has now been tested against a banking crisis and survived. Tim Montgomerie and Iain Dale are both reporting that the Conservative party is on red alert for an election announcement as soon as Monday.
Filed under: Voting Intention, YouGov
The London Lite (for what its polling is worth) resported that over 50 % blame the government for Noirthern Rock, and on question time there seemed to be a good many members of the audience who thought the same. Evidently, these people whpo participated on these are all conservatives anyway, r else people blame the government but also aren’t prepared to punish it. I am personally amazed that major damage has not been sustained as a result of this. If the ogvernment can get away with this, one wonders what it will take to damage them, for this is like the 1997-2001 term, where bad news actually tended to make Labour’ss rating go up (even if it was sleaze or that kind of thing like Ecllestone, Sarwr, or Lakmesh Mittal).
As a Conservative I’m not sure which I’d rather see and would be better for the Tories: A collapse in the Lib-Dem vote (or it staying where its polling), or somewhat of a recovery taking votes from Labour.
There are a lot of Lib-Dem seats on the Tory target list and a return to 2-party politics would be better for the Tories I think, but a fall in Labour vote in the polls is obviously needed in order for Cameron to have a change.
Does anyone know if its better for the Conservatives whether non-Conservative voters nationwide tend to go for the Lib-Dems or Labour? A rise in the Lib-Dems 80s-style would probably be best overall I guess.
PHILIP THOMPSON :-
A low Liberal vote is very useful to the Tories – as shown again in this latest POLL that Liberal votes tend to transfer to the Conservatives and vice versa more so than Labour – I believe that most Conservative floaters go to the Liberals before they would go to labour .
Non Conservative voters are never likely to vote Conservative as their voting views and intentions lay left of centre or left 0r extreme left , not centre right or right wing as the Conservatives are – so choosing either Labour or Liberal will always suit them .
Getting the Liberals down to POLLING and voting figures of as low as 15 to 16% is crucial to the Tories and would gain them at least 30 Liberal seats .
Weighted Moving Average remains 34:39:17 – I don’t think people should get to excited. So far Brown has not been tested in parliament and has has a couple of narrow squeaks. He also has the Referendum Problem looming. The show ain’t over yet.
But it is deeply worrying for Conservatives. The reason being, more than any other, that the people have taken an almost irrational liking to Brown.
There are two factos-
1.) The Northern Rock crisis has made him go up in the polls. That is totally counter-intuitive. This was a major economc crisis, and he had been chancellor for 10 years.
2.) That, according to the telegraph apparently if people are asked who they would vote for if there were an election in the next few weeks, Labout then have a 10 point lead.
Both of these factors cast doubt over whether the Tories are actually fighting a battle they can possibly win.
I am very surprised Camrons rating’s have plumetted so badly as a direct result. He was pretty popular before Brown appeared for a long time and now is not just unpopular, but deeply unpopular. What has he done wrong in this time? Not a great deal really when you think about it, although his party have (predictably) started complaining.
In the Telegraph,it states the Labour lead improves not declines when a possibility of a snap election is put to the respondents.This and the fact that the Conservatives have lost a few council bye-elections.One with a 17% swing to Labour.Will this be too much for even a cautious Brown to ignore???
Mike Richardson, why do you capitalise “POLL”? Its like you’re shouting the word.
Lukw: It is not counter-intuitive for a crisis to have an initial impact of boosting the ratings of the sitting PM. The initial impact of any crisis normally is quite often first to “rally around the leader” or “don’t rock the boat” – though it could have more subtle long-term effects especially if people feel the pinch themselves or it keeps happening. If its clearly disastrous or incompetently handled then the ratings may go straight down but that’s different.
I’d be interested to see the “unweighted” FIGURES.
Regarding the effect of Northern Rock on Labour’s poll rating – it’s only seen as counter-intuitive if you assume that when something bad happens the government lose support and the opposition gain support.
If you go back to the 1992 election, the Tories got almost the same percentage of the vote as they did in 1987 even though there was a severe recession; clearly, as with the very much smaller economic tremor of Northern Rock, people either don’t blame the government or don’t believe that the opposition could do any better.
Lukw,
The London Lite poll and the Question Time reaction are probably explained by both being from the South.
Mike,
If you compare this poll to the last election the Tories are the same, Labour are up 3%, and the Lib Dems are down 7%. The increase in the Labour vote is not coming from the Tories but from the Lib Dems and Others. If the Lib Dems were stronger the gap would narrow, and the chance of a hung parliament increase. It could also be explained by pollsters under estimating the Lib Dem numbers.
It is generally the case that poor news, even if not of the government’s own making, will damage them, and thus benefit the opposition to some extent. Certainly, an opposition percieved as strong will more substantially benefit from bad news for a government, a weaker one less so, but it seems very odd that government ratings should rise!
If this is so, surely the government – in a strictly partisan sense – would be wise to deliberatly engineer an econmic downturn, close some hospitals, and get it’s activists to break the law to raise crime figures.
I think it’s more a case that the public are impressed if there is a problem and the government has an apparently painless, quick, easy, solution to it, rather than something like a major recession for which the government
doesn’t have a ready solution for, apart from hoping things will get better in a year or two.
Lukw I disagree, it is quite simply not the case that categorically bad news hurts the government automatically. It is very often the case that in times of bad news the governments numbers rise (whoever they are) because of twin factors.
1: In times of panic people want to be supportive, so ‘rally around’ the government.
2: In times of panic people trust “the devil they know” rather than want a leap into the unknown that may be worse.
Northern Rock has probably helped Labour.
The Tories need to replace George Osborne with someone older and with more gravitas – David Davis, Phillip Hammond, or Dominic Grieve.