We have two new GB polls today, plus YouGov polls for London & Wales.
Firstly, the weekly YouGov poll for the Times has topline figures of CON 42%(-1), LAB 39%(+3), LDEM 7%(-2), UKIP 4%(nc). Fieldwork was Tuesday and Wednesday and changes are from the YouGov/Sunday Times poll at the weekend. The trend continues to be towards Labour and, given YouGov tend to show the most favourable figures for Labour, that’s now heading into hung Parliament territory. Tabs are here. YouGov also have a new election model on their site here, providing a seat estimate – currently that is also showing a hung parliament, with the Conservatives on 317 seats.
Secondly we have this week’s Panelbase poll. Topline figures there are CON 44%(-4), LAB 36%(+3), LDEM 7%(nc), UKIP 5%(+1). Fieldwork was conducted between Friday and today, and changes are from their poll conducted at the start of last week. A sharp narrowing of the Tory lead here, and Panelbase now weight their voting intention figures to the age profile of 2015 voters, not the whole adult population, so they are using a method that we’d expect to show a big Tory lead. When they changed their method last week it increased the Tory lead by seven points, so without the change they’d presumably have been showing a very close race indeed.
YouGov’s London poll for Phil Cowley at Queen Mary University London has topline figures of CON 33%, LAB 50%, LDEM 11%, UKIP 3%. In 2015 Labour had a nine point lead in London, so this would reflect a swing of four points from Conservative to Labour, and would likely produce several Labour gains. That’s better for Labour than even the most favourable GB polls, but isn’t necessarily unfeasible. Given the different demographics in the capital the swing in London is increasingly divorced from the rest of Britain – there was also a sizable shift towards towards Labour in London in 2015, despite there being relatively little movement in England as a whole. It is also younger than the rest of England, and more anti-Brexit than the rest of England. Tabs are here. (For what it’s worth, there are actually two YouGov/QMUL London polls today – there was a YouGov London poll coming out of field at the time of the Manchester bombing, which given the timing was held back to release both together today. Not that there has been any real movement between them… the Conservatives are down one compared to last week. That does, at least mean we can be confident that the big shift towards Labour in London happened around the time of the manifestos, rather than in the last week).
Just out, there is also new YouGov poll of Wales, which has topline figures of CON 35%(+1), LAB 46%(+2), LDEM 5%(-1), Plaid 8%(-1), UKIP 5%(nc). I’ll update with Roger Scully’s commentary and the tables when they appear.
Finally, I have a longer piece over on the YouGov website about the differences between the polls, implied turnout figures, what is likely to happen at the election.