Obviously a terrible poll for labour, but I do find the lead hard to believe. When labour won their landslide in 1997, it was hard to find someone who voted Tory and there was such an overwhelming desire for change. While there is little love for labour, I really don’t sense that same surge of positivity for the opposition (this forum aside!).

I’ll be interested to see what actually happens.

Over to The Oracle, then.

Watching the NUT strike today was a disaster for Labour.One of the NUT interviewed on ITN looked like a 70’s pop star after the drugs bust. Does anyone remember the NUS marching through London in 1977?
If Cameron hasn’t marked the NUT as the new ‘enemy within’he will now.

A massive lead - yes!

But, in view of the rapid rise in food and oil prices and the banking uncertainties, look no further for the reasons!

Obviously, as a Tory I would like to believe this poll.

It goes against ICM in its trend. However, Populus showed a large Tory lead, up on its previous lead only a matter of days before ICM and therefore ICM is the one going in the ‘opposite’ direction.

Having said that I would be surprised if this size of lead is maintained.

The good news for the Tories is whilst the lead goes up and recedes, it keeps breaking new boundaries.

Clearly either this poll or the ICM one are plain wrong. Perhaps indeed they both are. I suspect that as with so many things in life the truth lies somewhere in between.

The problem with this poll is that it raises huge expectations of a win for Boris in London and big gains in the local elections. Maybe the Tories will win in Enfield and Haringey if this poll is anything to go by.

18 points? Whew, talk about meltdown! Of course I really doubt that the Tories will achieve anything like this in the general election. There’s a 13 point difference between the lead in this poll and the ICM one, but even if you split the difference, the Tory lead is still in double figures and easily enough for a clear majority. Labour activists must be feeling totally shellshocked at the minute.

look out for big seat gains by the conservatives in all areas maybe even the NE of england, it’s time for some real change in this country not just patch up jobs, given that labour is heading for a melt down next week, i think we should start wrighting the script for the next GE, i can just see the paper reports now: LABOUR SLUMP TO WORST POLL DEFEAT IN POST WAR HISTORY, another would be: LABOUR WHAT LABOUR. on this poll labour would finish on 191 seats, the conservatives on 398 seats and the lib dems on 31 seats, thats a commons majority of 146 seats.

Coming so soon after the ICM poll this is a real stunner but to me it is believable.

Big Teacher’s strike today and there were also 100,000 civil servants on strike today.

Food prices are up by £15 a week according to newspapers and the cost of fuel continues to go through the roof and will be higher still at the forecourts in a week or two. (For those that say that the Government can’t control the price of petrol/diesel just remember that 75% of the price is tax)

Nothing but bad news about for the Government at the moment and this poll can only add to it. May 1 is going to be very interesting.

“Labour activists must be feeling totally shellshocked at the minute.”

Any Labour activist worth their salt will have kept the local election campaign local,local,local for months and therefore insulate themselves from any major national effect.It’ll be the Labour candidates and activists who bang on about the ‘Labour government’ who will get a kicking. As for the poll, quite impressive, although it is almost certainly to do with rising prices,credit crunch etc than any move to Cameron.That said I certainly wouldn’t discount lasting damage from the past month or two.The message is quite clear, you can hit as many banana skins at you like, let the economy start to drift and you’re in big trouble….the government deserve a kick up the pants, and I’m a Labour supporter.

Neil Kinnock was 18 points of Margaret Thatcher in the polls -just a year before he was defeated in the general election. Dont go by mid term polls

Labour has very seldom been lower than 26%. Indeed one has to go back to the 1981-1983 period to see the like.

I am waiting for the poll with the negative percentage figure for Labour Yougov daily poll

Conservative 120% Labour -37% lib dem 17% (NC)

I am very pleased with this latest poll. However there is a long way to go yet but this is a nice little thing to get all Conservative Party members extra motivated to deliver big wins next Thursday and Friday.

“given that labour is heading for a melt down next week”

I doubt that’ll happen, given that these are the seats from 2004 when Labour performed poorly (but won a general election 10 months later), and Labour has been around 27% in previous local elections, I’d be surprised if it came to a meltdown.

I would imagine the truth is somewhere between the two recent polls. What happens to opinion when people realise that global trends are likely to mean permanently higher food and oil prices I don’t know. Scope for some interesting new Tory policies here perhaps–10p off fuel duty and subsidies on staple foods all funded by higher taxes on the very rich!

Paul Smith
Thats what they are waiting for on Tory Home

Weighted Moving Average: 41:30:18. CLead 11.3 This is a new high for the C Lead which peaked at 10.6 on 11/4/08 and previously at 10.5 on 19/12/07.

I persist in my theory that the net-literate are now more anti-Labour than the population as a whole. But these may be opinion-formers. And on any reading of events the last few days have been a disaster for Brown. It is hard to find a single serious commentator who thinks he has much credibility left. Almost no-one in Labour likes, or liked, Brown, they backed him because “he was going to win”. They now know that he will back down when faced with a serious challenge, but in the most damaging way having tried to shout and bluster out of it first (his behaviour to the lobby on the way back from the US was, apparently, appalling). So I think the WMA will move to 43:28:18 before too long.

Quite good for “others” too. Presumably they are doing well at Labour’s expense here. Seems like we’ll be seeing some people elected belonging to some unusual parties in the next two years. And lots and lots of Conservatives.

WilliamJohn, Cameron is no Kinnock and Brown is certainly no Thatcher.

I seem to recall a poll in about September 1983 that read Conservative 44% Lib-SDP Alliance 29%
Labour 24%.

For a brief moment it really appeared that the old Alliance would replace Labour as the main alternative, but Labour quickly regained second place.

Why does the Telegraph say it would give the Tories only a 50 seat majority?

This is a non-consensus view, but Brown will stage a “it’s not as bad as everyone said” come-back attempt.

If he’s achieved the 1.6-1.8% growth that the IMF or CBI expect then he’s probably going to get a boost and rub Cameron’s nose in it, if we go into recession then Brown’s probably doomed.

Which of course says a lot about the fact that apart from economic-competance we’ve never really rated Brown that much.

News Elephant. What economic competence? Tax and borrow and overspend - over a period of 10 years - is not repeat not economic competence. We are all now going to pay the bill.

With Others at 13% it will be interesting to see what the SNP score is.

Given the poll in the Scottish Mail, we could well be ahead of Labour for Westminster. Maybe Alex Salmond was closer to the truth than I thought with calling for us to get 20 seats.

I think this poll probably overstates the Tory lead by between 3 and 5 points and I can’t see Labour polling below 30%. Having said that maybe the the true price of triangulation is redundancy, if your just like them then they are as good as you and your replaceable.

It will be interesting to see what Brown and Darlings rating are like for Scotland as up until now people up here have remained (stubbornly) loyal.

Peter.

I don’t think Labour have done themselves any favours over this 10p rate. People say there has been a U turn - in fact it’s been a very unwilling and vague retreat, with many Ministers insisting various groups are still better off when they are plainly not.

But I still strongly suspect the Mayoral election is on a knife-edge, and think the share of the Labour vote in the local elections could be a bit above that in 2004 and 2007, but with the Tories higher.

Just think, come the Olympics we could get to see Gordon Browns face at the closing ceremony as the Flame is handed to; Boris….

Peter.

Peter - You have again hit the nail on the head.

For Labour triangulation helped ensure a decade of dominating power. But achieved what?

The problem now is that it has also made them redundant and means that they can go very low indeed. For those comparing these polls to those back in 1987 or even as far back as 83/84, don’t forget how much the polling methodologies have improved/changed since then!

The danger for Labour is what now is their ‘core vote’. When the Tories collapsed, they still had their core vote. Eventually culminating in us electing Cameron we started moving out of that, but that core vote was always there.

Labour has lost the ’soft Tories’, they are losing their middle ground, but over the past decade have picked repeated fights with and isolated their core. Stereotypically under Blair but this 10p fiasco is just the same and all of Brown’s making. Who is going to vote Labour in 2010 (it won’t be any earlier) - and why?

I don’t see how low the floor is for Labour, but I suspect even with this poll it hasn’t been reached yet. That’s not to say they’ll poll this low on election day, but in the next 2 years of opinion polling, worst at some point is quite probable - despite the modern polling adjustments.

….again, I just cannot believe the way these polls go all over the place. The methodologies surely, surely can’t be terribly reliable…otherwise millions of people are just continually changing their minds…

Lukw-yes -again I agree with you. The trends in the last YouGov % ICM Polls are in opposite directions.

This feels more like a periodic Lucky Dip than reliable Political Analysis at present.

May 1st will provide an opportunity to review Pollsters & their accuracy.

Colin,

“May 1st will provide an opportunity to review Pollsters & their accuracy.”

No necessarily, as Anthony has repeatedly said polls only give a snap shot of what would happen if there was an election today when there won’t be.

If we really are in a period of voter volatility then that may be what the polls are showing.

One pollster will be closer than the others come 1st May, but that doesn’t mean that if the poll was held a week earlier or later the result would be the same or they would be the most accurate.

If I am right about triangulation, then what we may be seeing is that for Labour and the Tories their core support may have dropped from 40% each when combined they had 90% of the vote to closer to half of that, with them only accounting for 75% of the vote in an election.

That means that in theory the floating vote (total less all the Party’s core votes) has gone from about 15% to 45% or so, leading to the possibility of swings from Tory to Labour and back of over 100 seats an election.

Peter.

Anthony,

Just out of interest as you quote 190 Labour seats and 154 seat majority for the Tories, what are the actual figures for all the parties on that prediction… are we anywhere near 20 seats in Scotland?

Peter.

Just think, come the Olympics we could get to see Gordon Browns face at the closing ceremony as the Flame is handed to; Boris….

Peter.

As the Olympics are after the last possible election-date (seven-year option not applicable), surely you mean David Cameron’s face as the torch is handed to Boris? Or do you really think the polls are that far-out…?

If I am right about triangulation, then what we may be seeing is that for Labour and the Tories their core support may have dropped from 40% each when combined they had 90% of the vote to closer to half of that, with them only accounting for 75% of the vote in an election.

That means that in theory the floating vote (total less all the Party’s core votes) has gone from about 15% to 45% or so, leading to the possibility of swings from Tory to Labour and back of over 100 seats an election.

Could not understand your premise: The Tories core-vote is approx 32%, Labour approx 27%, LibDem’s approx 15%, and nationalists approx 5%. With my wasted generation, gawd bless you guv’ education that leaves 21% up for grabs. [I don’t see UKIP/BNP/Greens/Socialist-wotzitz as a credible force within our Parliamentary system.]

So the scope of floating voters is more 15-20%. Still a respectable number, but a more manageable one for either two major parties to win, don’t you agree?

As the two point movement away from Labour hasn’t gone to either of the other main parties I wonder who it has gone to.

The difficulty of predicting actual results from these polls is that, in a General Election say 1997, sometimes the mood was against the ruling party. The next election might see voters tryingt to get the Labour MP out. Hence they vote for the most likely candidate to do that. In Scotland it may be to the benefit of the SNP. Just a thought!

It will look bad for Boris Johnson if he fails, however narrowly, to win the majoralty when his party has an 18 point lead in the polls, (a poll which of course includes places like Scotland, Wales and Merseyside so the Tory lead should be higher than 18 points in London itself).

Does anyone have an information on the last time polls were fluctuating this wildly?

Is there a precident for this sort of thing? One week the gap is closing, the next it’s the biggest yet?

Is it just a sign that the numbers are soft and that many people aren’t really convinced one way or another at the moment or something else?

Jon,

Looking back at the polls before the 97 election we have:-

Gallup/Telegraph 31/05/93 25 49 23 -24
MORI/Times 24/05/93 28 44 24 -16
ICM/Guardian 08/05/93 32 38 24 -6
Gallup/Telegraph 03/05/93 30 47 17.5 -17
MORI/Times 26/04/93 32 46 20 -14
ICM/Guardian 10/04/93 34 39 21 -5

So the results at the moment aren’t that odd.

Steve

Andy,

A party can be 18 points ahead overall and still neck and neck or even behind in certain areas. London looks (bar YouGov’s results) close on the first round, and a tie on the second round.

Also I’ve noticed with YouGov that they tend to produce the largest gaps (not always).

Answering my own question…

Plotting the last 20 years data and doing a moving average and standard deviation for it (which if my memory of statistics holds should indicate roughly how wildly the data is moving - am I correct on that), the standard deviation at present is actually about average - if anything slightly low.

Fluffy Thoughts (E.D.P.),

No; The closing ceremony will be in China this summer, that’s when the London Mayor receives the flame…..

Also I think the core votes are lower. Certainly I wouldn’t put the Tories or Labour above 25% and I’d have the Libdems on 10%. In addition I think that much of the LibDem and others vote is essentially floating. The fact that none have actually polled that doesn’t mean they can’t.

With the end of ideology and a long trend to less long term support I don’t think we can believe that even current lows of under 30% for labour represent the bottom of the curve.

Scottish figures from this poll are;

Labour 28%, Tory 22%, SNP 35%, LibDem 12%, Others 3%. if accurate that would be a terrible result for Labour and a good one for the Tories. Hell another swing next month and the Tories might even beat Labour in Scotland……

Given it’s only 186 of a sample I think all we can determine is that labour have declined and that the SNP and Tories have benefited with the LibDems static.

Having said that the questions on Brown v Cameron still show him well ahead in Scotland, although when they ask about things like the 10p rate he doesn’t turn out much better.

Somewhat oddly it seems that Scots are backing Brown and Labour even though they don’t think he is doing very well or in touch, almost certainly a case of;

” He may not be very good but at least he’s not a Tory”.

Again although 35% to 28% looks great for the SNP I just can’t see it at a Westminster election, unless the polls show that The Tories are a dead cert and as with Blair and Thatcher people desert the party they think will lose for the third choice.

As an aside at FM Questions in Holyrood yesterday but almost universal acclaim in the press Alex salmond got the mood just right over Grangemouth and Wendy had another disaster.

Peter.

Peter - I think you’re right on the he’s not a Tory thing. Anecdotally my view on things up here is that the disillusioned Labour voters are going to the SNP rather than the Tories.

How that works with Westminister when push comes to shove I don’t know though, particularly with the threat of a Tory government. Gut feel is that there would be a lot of grudging tactical Labour voting and your predictions about the SNP performing below poll levels would be right.

A big Tory lead in the polls gives heart to many people who are suffering from the economic mismanagement of this Government. It took longer than many of us expected but they have brought the economy crahing down. From the raids on pension funds to the huge tax hikes all of the chickens are coming home to roost. These polls really do confirm what many Tory supporters knew along; election victory was only really possible once the economy had begun to deteriorate. We are only at the start of the troubles so double digit Tory leads look set to remain

It may just be me…. but doesn’t it seem to be the case that the larger the sample polled, the larger the Conservative lead… this YouGov poll was 2000+. Some of the other polls showing smaller Conservative leads seemed to have smaller samples… from memory. Correct me if I’m wrong somebody. YouGov seem very consistent of late as have their sample sizes… but with all the maths etc. does this actually mean they are more accurate than polls done with smaller samples?????

Can I remind everyone that these are meant to be non-partisan comments? It’s rather boring wading through rants from either side to get to dicussion about the polls!

Only 9 points between Labour and the Lib Dems. Given that the Lib Dems will almost certainly beat Labour into a very poor third place on the 1st of May - and probably receive a poll boost from that - can anyone else foresee a situation whereby the anti-Tory vote drifts further away from Labour and gravitates towards the Lib Dems? The closer those parties’ poll results get, the more interesting the situation could become.

Peter -
Yes I accept the caveats re GE.( 7.46am)
What I had in mind was the ability to compare the Mayoral result with the last Polls.That surely will be some measure of accuracy.

RE “core vote”-I hear what you say. To me it’s just another of those concepts which are postulated but not really measured with any accuracy.

RE “end of ideology” and triangulation.I think as the latter unravels for NuLab , the former may in fact begin to reassert itself.The different philosophies on the role & size of The State;on the nature of personal resonsibility, on the role & purpose of personal taxation;liberty of the individual vs security of the state etc etc. These are all debates which are re-emerging after a long period of purdah. I happen to believe that is a good thing.

RE- “voter volatility” , I accept that with old allegiances to Labour breaking down, but new ones to the Conservatives just beginning to emerge there will be some degree of volatility.There are probably a goodly number of people who want to continue supporting Labour, and who will do so in any period of calm for GB-but who, as & when the next reminder of his faults appears, give up the ghost ( again).

But what I find impossible to reconcile with any reasonable degree of volatility is You Gov saying Cons stable at 44% 11th to 23 April & ICM saying Tories fall 43% to 39% 4th to 20th April….or even worse YouGov having Labour fall 2 points, and ICM having them gaining 2 points over the same dates.

I just can’t believe that “volatility” explains that.Seems to me they just came up with different answers-and they can’t both be right.

Peter-just a follow up to the last YouGov & ICM Polls & their disparity.

MS on politicalbetting attributes it to timing-ICM good news for Labour ( USA trip)-YouGov bad news for Labour ( 10p row)….so maybe it is that volatile & there are a large number of people clinging onto their Labour faith like crazy-but who can be persuaded to abandon it at the drop of another GB clanger.

That would appear to be better news for GB than DC-provided the clangers stop.

Ha! What next? Lib Dems overtake Labour?

I must have been one of the last to hear about this 18% gap for the Tories - how unlike me . Obviously there are more and more red faces - especially the doubters of my predictions way back in September last year when i predicted these massive POLL gains for the Tories.

I also contradicted someone on here - i believe it was T.JONES who said that the core Labour vote was 34% - i said then that the true Labour core vote was nearer 26% - mmmm.

PETER CAIRNS - Looks like you are even starting to see that an 11 seat gain in Scotland for the Tories is looking more and more likely !!

The news of the petrol shortages and queues at petrol stations - even though not a government mess - they will get the blame and the POLLS will show an even lower POLL rating for Labour just prior and during the elections on 1st May -

CUT AND PASTE this

Boris and Ken are fighting in London. It will be dissappointing if Boris loses but London has a regional charactistics as much as parts of Yorkshire or Scotland etc. London has been regarded as Labour’s territory.
Think that’s why Maggie wanted to rid herself of the GLC years ago.

Matthew. Good question about the Telgraph. People ask if the Tories have really changed. The Telegraph clearly think they have. And they don’t like it. They have form for spinning polls AGAINST Cameron.
They will support him the way the Unions supported Blair - through gritted teeth.

peter c- the con’s +6 (7) Lab -16 (25) this total includs the speaker LD -3 (8) SNP +13 (19), so if repeated at the election your party would be near to caursing a hung parliment on it’s own along with the conservatives in scotland, if it happens a pat on the back would be due not only to the SNP but conservatives as well.

Thanks as always for your objective analysis. You say projected Tory lead of over 100. Antony King in the Telegraph says Tory lead of 50 on these figures. Can you help with the different projections please?

G Humphries - no idea what the Telegraph are on about. My figures are just a simple uniform swing - you can use my calculator here