The full tabs for the ComRes European election poll are now online here. The poll also asked Westminister voting intention and produced topline figures of CON 26%, LAB 37%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 20%. It did not use ComRes’s normal method, excluding the reallocation of don’t knows and their normal squeeze question, so it is not directly comparable.

The strangest thing about the poll though is the relationship between Westminster and European voting intention. I could be reading it wrongly, but it looks as though there is hardly any relationship at all. The overwhelmingly majority of people who said they would vote UKIP in a Westminster election said they would vote UKIP in a European election, as one might expect, but the other figures look very odd. Amongst Conservative Westminster voters, 12% would vote UKIP in the European elections, 39% Labour and 22% Lib Dem. Amongst Westminster Labour voters, 6% would vote UKIP in the European elections, 30% Conservative, 31% Lib Dem. Amongst Westminister Liberal Democrat voters, 2% would vote UKIP in Europe, 35% Labour, 33% Conservative.

People do, of course, vote differently at Westminster and European elections, but not to this extent. If we compare it to the Survation poll at the weekend, the vast majority of people who said they’d vote Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem for Westminster said they vote the same way in a European election. YouGov found the same when they asked back in January. ComRes’s previous European Election poll in January didn’t give cross-breaks for current Westminster voting intention, but the 2010 cross-break did at last suggest the majority of Labour and Conservative 2010 voters were sticking with their party in the European elections. I can’t work out exactly what has gone wrong in this latest poll, but it certainly looks very strange.

This week’s YouGov/Sunday Times polls is now online here. Topline voting intention figures are CON 29%, LAB 40%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 14%. The eleven point Labour lead is at the high end of YouGov’s recent results so could be a sign of the infighting over Europe reversing the recent picture of narrowing Labour leads… or could equally well just be normal variation within the standard margin of error.

Last night I grumbled about the problems with polls purporting to show what issues affect people’s voting intentions. YouGov have asked it in a way that gets round one of those problems, that of giving a single issue false prominence, by asking people to pick from a list of all sorts of issues. Same-sex marriage remains an issue that only a small minority (7%) pick out as one that will affect their vote, and by 58% to 42% those people say they would be more likely to vote for a party that supported gay marriage. More people, 28%, say that Europe is one of the three or four issues they think would affect their vote at the next election, with most of them saying they would be more likely to vote for a party that promised a referendum.

Even asked this way strong caveats still apply – people still are not very good at understanding the motivations of their own decisions, and people still really don’t vote on individual policies or policy areas. They vote on broad perceptions of party, of competence and of the leaders. Individual issues play into those perceptions of course (does this party consider the same issues to be important as I do? Do they have similar values and beliefs?) but so do things like strength and weakness, competence, unity and so on.

It also gives the opportunity to point out something else that, while I think is beginning to get through to the commentariat and politicians, still needs to be repeated whenever possible. Only 49% of UKIP voters named the issue of Europe. In other words, 51% of UKIP voters don’t even consider Europe to be in the top three or four issues that affect their decision. The simplistic view that UKIP support is all about Europe and, by extension, it is policies on Europe that will suddenly win back UKIP voter is just that – simplistic.

Moving on to those wider perceptions of how the Conservative party is seen, only 10% of people now see the party as united, 73% divided. YouGov have been asking the same question since 2003 and this is highest proportion so far seeing the Tories divided, more than under Iain Duncan Smith. The party is not seen as widely divided as Labour was towards the end of Tony Blair’s leadership (6% united) or under Gordon Brown (just 3% united at its worse), but it is certainly in that sort of territory. Also note, however, that while perceptions of division are widely seen as negative they are not necessarily fatal – in 2004 over 60% of people saw Labour as divided but they still won the 2005 election. Personally I think there is some truth in the idea that division drives away voters (constant infighting makes a government look incompetent, and we know perceptions of competence are a key driver of voting intention), but its not as simple as division equals defeat.

A majority (54%) of people continue to support the introduction of gay marriage. Asked if the subject should be decided by a referendum or by Parliament it only narrowly follows my past comment that people support a referendum on absolutely anything you ask about – just 39% think there should be a referendum on gay marrige, compared to 34% who think it should be left to Parliament.

On Europe, referendum voting intention asked using the wording in the Conservative party’s draft bill has 36% of people saying they would vote YES (to stay), 45% saying they would vote NO (to leave). Asked about the Conservative rebellion over the Queens speech people are pretty much evenly split on whether they are more sympathetic towards David Cameron or Conservative MPs (most are sympathetic towards neither!). Conservative voters are far more on David Cameron’s side – 52% are more sympathetic towards Cameron, 19% his rebellious MPs.

The Guardian have released this month’s ICM poll, the first telephone poll conducted since the local elections. Topline voting intention figures with changes from a month ago are CON 28%(-4), LAB 34%(-4), LDEM 11%(-4), UKIP 18%(+9!).

The 18% for UKIP is the highest that ICM have shown and, more strikingly, the highest any company have shown. I will advise my usual caution about polls showing extremes and records, more often than not they tend to be outliers. ICM’s methodology tends to produce some of UKIP’s lower figures (ICM reallocate some don’t knows to the party they voted for last time, weight down people who didn’t vote last time and interview by phone… all things that tend to produce lower UKIP scores) so it is particularly surprising to see ICM with a record breaking UKIP score. While the scale of the UKIP increase may well be a bit of a blip though, the broader trend is the same as other companies – they are all showing a surge in support for UKIP.

It does make one ponder about how high we might see UKIP in some other companies’ polls. If YouGov have them as high as 16% or 17%, if ICM have them at 18%, what might we see from companies like Opinium or ComRes who tend to show higher levels of UKIP support?

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.