Another Lib Dem boost from ICM
Following YouGov’s poll yesterday giving the Lib Dems a three point conference boost, a new ICM poll in the News of the World gives them at 4 point increase. The topline figures, with changes from their last poll just before the Lib Dem conference began, are CON 40%(-3), LAB 26%(nc), LDEM 23%(+4).
This is the second highest Lib Dem rating in any poll since 2006 (the highest being that strange ICM poll in May this year that put them in second place on 25%). Of course, ahead of us we now have the Labour conference and – unless things go horribly wrong for them – we should expect to see them receive their own boost next week, followed in due turn by a Conservative boost in the final week. Such is the story of conference season polling – the interesting bit would be any departure from that pattern.
UPDATE: The News of the World report claims their poll shows “Gordon Brown could still win election”, and indeed BBC News 24 reported the poll as showing this in their headlines. Their full report is in the paper tomorrow, and perhaps there will be something in it to justify this. However, from the figures in their report there is nothing whatsoever that can lead to that conclusion. It appears to be based on 59% of respondents saying they think there is at least a slim chance that Labour could still win. This is not, I really shouldn’t need to point out, the same thing.
UPDATE2: Full tables are here.
Filed under: ICM, Voting Intention
I’ve never understood why, in the British system, the conferences are always held in the same order.
As the Conservatives go last, so to speak, they have the last word.
Surely it would be a fairer system if the main parties had their conferences in a random order or, perhaps, if Government had their conference last?
I know the filip from a conference is not necessarily long-lived but it certainly seemed to speed the collapse of the Brown Bounce in 2007.
I think it is true to say that the parties themselves can decide when to hold their conferences – they could hold them all on the same week, but don’t for media purposes. I suppose the order is just a matter of convention – at any rate, I don’t think it makes much difference one way or the other.
I predict that as the truth about Baroness Scotland and more importantly, the implication of Gordon Brown in the Cash for Safe Seats for Harriets husband, sinks in – the LibDems may well find themselves back in second place.
Darling has admitted that on the eve of their conference they have “lost the will to live.”
I’m guessing that Labour will NOT get a post conference boost in the polls, and I won’t be shocked if they receive a decline.
Conferences are generally a bit more well behaved these days, so the advantage of being last has become a bit more obvious.
In the 1980s and early 90s, conferences could quite often be shambolic – usually Labour, but sometimes Conservative or other parties aswell, so there wouldn’t be any advantage in being last.
I’m curious, but does anyone else find it interesting that the lib dem boots all come from a drop in conservative support, and none from labour?
Weighted Moving Average is 41:26:20 so a v slight boost (1 point) for the LibDems. It is possible that the Labour conference will be a disaster for Labour, and the Lab/LibDem gap is “only” 6 points, but this is up from 3 in June.
At present the message is stasis and as I have repeatedly noted this is in some ways even worse for Labour than fluctuations in which the drop. We shall see…
The Labour conference could go either way — it really could be a trainwreck, but expectations are so much in that direction that anything less than that will look relatively good.
Brown had a rare good PR day yesterday in my eyes, a nice piece in the Big Issue, footage of him on the Wake Up Call (climate change direct action) website of him as the only world leader taking their call and saying the right things, and the Obama meeting. More of that could at least keep Labour from slipping further points. If the conference is indeed a diaster, then the Lib Dems stand a chance of catching them in the polls, and in my opinion if that happens the game changes.
The LD supporters on these threads may be disappointed, but I think next week Labour will gain slightly in the polls, and then the week after the Tories will do the same.
By and large, I would expect smaller changes in any direction this year compared to the last two years.
One thing I might add, is in 1978, I think the Tories had quite a difficult conference, following on from Labour’s. But Jim Callaghan had already cancelled the election expected that month.
Even so, if Labour had had a chance to reply to a difficult Tory conference, and added a couple of points I wonder whether they’d have taken the plunge.
Probably not because it’s hypothetical anyway, but Callaghan had already ruled out an election “this year” in his cancellation broadcast.
Auntie busting a gut to find ANYTHING!!! positive to say about Labour, whatever next!!
The important thing for the LDs is to still be on 20% a few weeks after all the conferences have ended. I suspect they may not be but we’ll have to see what happens.
Billy – a few possible reasons from the LibDem boost apparently coming from the Tories
(i) They haven’t been much in the news recently, and Cameron hasn’t been on TV – so the operation of one of Mike Smithson’s laws is that there will be a drop-off in Conservative Opinion Poll ratings.
(ii) We are only just coming to the end of the period where “others” were scoring unnaturally highly, following the expenses scandal and Euro elections. All things being equal I would expect Labour to still be rising. So there could be a disguised fall in the Labour figures – eg they would have gone up 2 points, if there hadn’t been a LibDem conference
(iii) maybe Labour has reached its rock-bottom core vote in a “normal” three party system. It has been lower, but that was earlier in the year when “others” were polling abnormally well.
(iv) Maybe the people switching to the Lib Dems from the Tories are actually former Labour supporters. Maybe they have been grudgingly saying they will vote Tory to get Gordon out… the Lib Dem conference has reminded them that the LDs exist, and the anti-Tory anti-rich rhetoric has temporarily convinced them that the LDs represent their views a bit better than the Tories do.
Too many “maybes” but a few ideas as I found the figures interesting as well.
I think the reason we haven’t seen any further drop in Labour support to the Lib Dems is likely to be that Labour is so far down onto their core vote their is nowhere else anyone is able to go without something really serious happening.
Also recent Lib Dem rhetoric, the mansion tax aside has been strongly targetted at the tories with calls for “savage” cuts and what not and this is most likely I guess to peal away the most marginal conservative support that has jumped ship there from labour.
Seeing the LDs up is only to be expected post conference. They have articulated some clear policies that will appeal to certain groups, and I think AW is right – many voters aren’t interested in the media gossip unless it reaches a certain critical level.
Labour this week will be interesting. It feels like 97, when the governing party effectvely gave up exhausted. Some commentators are already saying Labour is finished for good, given Cameron’s desire to cut MP numbers and the Scottish situation. Never a good idea to write anyone off forever, but as the Liberals know, sometimes epoch changing swings do happen. If so, Labour has only itself to blame.
Does anyone else agree with me that Cameron’s proposals on MP numbers are just blatant political opportunism? Apart from the corruption, one thing the expenses scandal showed was that MPs do a shockingly bad job of i) Understanding the public, and ii) Scrutinising legislation. Reduced numbers and bigger constituencies will exacerbate both these problems, and I have no doubt that if the Tories were to be the big losers this proposal would not appear on Cameron’s policy list. I would support an increase in MP numbers if it were linked to a radical change in the way they worked – it might help us get some decent governance for a change.
Alec,
I think almost every politician and member of the broad political class (ie. journalists and academics as well) tried to use the expenses scandal to push their particular constitutional agenda after about a decade of stagnation in constitutional debate.
Hence Cameron has made proposals which, as you say, would if anything increase the existing problems; on the other hand, certain members of the political elite tried to say that the problem was the fact that MPs are individually accountable (!) and that we should introduce proportional representation. Others tried to get the House of Lords turned into a PR elected chamber, which again would have made punishing intransigent MPs even more difficult.
Quite a lot of wasted talk for an issue that could have been resolved simply by saying “from now on, we will enforce the existing rules, which forbid everything we’ve done”.
Come to think of it, this is how politicians generally address problems. Consider the banking crisis: one of the most regulated sectors of the UK economy goes to pot because of irresponsible monetary policy in the UK and (especially) in the US under Brown/Bush, which caused a property boom that broke at its weakest link.
Of course, rather than resolve this with a sensible but unsexy decision like “We will pursue better financial regulation and a more responsible, sustainable monetary policy”, politicians focused on bankers’ bonuses, which are so small as to be totally irrelevant to the global economy.
Thus Gordon Brown is on the Guardian politics page with an obvious cheap-seat call of “We must have the toughest bankers’ bonuses”. If he was saying “We must have Friedmanite reserve requirements for banks” or “We will pursue a transparent certificate-rating system so that savers know which banks are risky” I suppose he wouldn’t be doing modern British politics.
Is this really an inevitable part of democracy, which must be accepted for the system’s advantages? Or is it just the nature of the current context and/or politicians that has created so many policies which are irrelevant to the public concerns which are said to justify them?
Anthony – I’ve just read that Lord Ashcroft has bought the ConservativeHome and PoliticsHome websites. In the case of the latter, some people are speculating that he has done this in order to gain site from the polls in marginal seats PoliticsHome apparently commission, but without having to declare the costs against Tory spending. Do you know if these polls are normally published anywhere, and do you have any judgement aboput whether these claims are likely to have any validity?
@Alec,
If the polls are right, then the Tories WILL be the biggest losers from a drastic cut in the number of MPs as more than half of the total will be theirs.
I can’t see how less MPs makes the problem worse. Even if everything else stays the same it means a drop in the total salary and expenses bill for starters. And given that the main complaint of backbenchers is that they “don’t have anything useful to do” it should help with that as well. So long as the number of ministers is slashed pro rata (so that we don’t end up with 1 in 4 MPs in the House drawing a ministerial salary) then it is a jolly good idea I think.
Opportunism? Well, maybe. But the Liberals are proposing something similar. I don’t hear you slagging them off for opportunism. At the end of the day, if something is right then “seize the opportunity” I say!
Alec – there’s only been one so far, and it was published on the PoliticsHome website last autumn. The idea is bonkers anyway, since it wouldn’t work – it would still count as a gift in kind and be declarable expenditure.
It’s a bizarre theory. If Michael Ashcroft wants to buy big polls of marginal seats he doesn’t need to spend money on buying several websites to commission them on his behalf, he just needs to phone up a pollster and commission a private poll – after all, that’s what he did at the last election when he commissioned loads of private polling from YouGov and Populus to write his book.
[...] find the link on the BBC website – maybe they’ve seen sense and pulled it – but this poll, which states 41% of people think Brown is almost certainly going to lose is bad, bad news. [...]
AW – thanks. I thought that sounded rather fanciful, although questionmarks over the independance of the sites might be a more appropriate criticism I guess.
@Neil A – I think it’s a poorly thought out move done for party political advantage for both the Tories and LDs. The cost savings are miniscule, but I would agree that there is a real need to make MPs work much better. We’ve had a really good example recently of the problems with the child protection legislation thta would have crippled volunteer groups. All parties supported it, but MP’s failed to grasp its impact. This was because they fail miserably to scrutinise legislation and have very little contact with the real world. I would make constituencies half the size, introduce a quorum for House business, and work out ways to get MPs into constituencies more of the time.
This has gone off topic, but you could have more AND fewer legislaters if devolution was completed with an English Parliament and a smaller federal parliament.
MEP’s (!!) would get out and about constituencies as Alec wants on the issues most constituents engage with.