After their mayoral figures apparently leaked out the Guardian, MORI have also accidently put up their monthly monitor figures on their website which were supposed to have turned up in the Observer on Sunday. The topline figures, with changes from their last poll, are CON 40%(nc), LAB 31%(-4), LDEM 19%(+1). The poll was conducted between the 18th and 22nd April.
While it shows a much smaller Tory lead than the YouGov poll which was conducted at almost the same time, the trend the two polls are showing is pretty much the same with the Labour vote crumbling in the face of the 10p tax row, and in sharp contrast to the ICM poll. Like YouGov MORI have also shown a gradual increase in the Lib Dem vote over the last few months. It’s gone unremarked because of the big Tory leads, but they’ve been creeping upwards.
A London voting intention poll by Ipsos MORI for Unison has voting intentions has topline voting intentions of JOHNSON 38%, LIVINGSTONE 41%, PADDICK 12%. Once second preferences are reallocated Ken Livingstone leads by 6% over Johnson. It was conducted between the 23rd and 24th April.
Ipsos MORI also asked a question about whether people were actually registered to vote, though bizarrely the implication in this Guardian article is that they were still included in the topline figures, since once they were excluded Livingstone’s lead fell to 4% on second preferences.
No other details yet. There should be more mayoral polls from YouGov, mruk, ICM and - possibly - another Ipsos MORI to come before polling day on Thursday. Unless other pollsters also show a Livingstone lead the race is looking close enough to produce a real embarrassment for at least one pollster.
UPDATE: it appears the poll was leaked to the Guardian, and shouldn’t have been published yet. It’s the Guardian who emphasised the 6 point lead that included people who aren’t eligible to vote, MORI I assume will be correctly excluding them from their topline figures! Over at Mike Smithson’s site he also says that, in response to his comment that this is the poll MORI will be judged upon for the mayoral election, MORI are pointing out “that the fieldwork was carried out more than a week before the election and a third of respondents said they might change their mind.” MORI are quite correct in this - in all fairness a poll does need to be done within a couple of the days of the election to really be compared to the result…but it does sound like they are hedging their bets already. Whether it is entirely fair or not, if polling companies’ final figures are showing different winners for the London election, it is going to reflect very badly on the companies who get it wrong.
Conservative Home is reporting that the MORI poll we’d been expecting in tomorrow is, in fact, a London mayoral poll. It apparently shows voting intention with second preferences reallocated as Johnson 51%, Livingstone 49%. It’s the first MORI poll putting Boris ahead, although given that their recent poll for Unison was actually only a fraction of a percentage point away from being 50%-50%, the change from their last poll is actually entirely insignificant.
UPDATE: The full figures are now up on MORI’s website here. First round voting intentions stand at JOHNSON 46%, LIVINGSTONE 40%, PADDICK 11%. With Boris leading by 6 points on the first round, but only 2 points on the second round, second preferences of Brian Paddick and the minor party candidates must have broken largely in favour of Ken Livingstone.
Note that MORI prefaced the question with the wording, “In the next election for Mayor of London, the present Mayor, Ken Livingstone is standing for re-election as the Labour Party candidate. Boris Johnson is standing for the Conservatives, and Brian Paddick is standing for the Liberal Democrats, and there will be other candidates too.” In their last poll Sian Berry was also included in the prompt and recieved 5% of first preferences. In this poll, with no prompt for Sian Berry, she recieved only 2% support.
A new Ipsos MORI poll for the London elections, commissioned by Unison, shows Ken Livingstone narrowly in the lead. The first preference votes, with changes from MORI’s last poll of the mayoral election back in February, are JOHNSON 40%(+2), LIVINGSTONE 41%(-1), PADDICK 14%(-2). Once second preferences are reallocated Ken is ahead by 51% to 49%, suggesting the second preferences split very slightly in favour of Livingstone. The poll was conducted between April 1st and April 7th, so prior to the Newsnight debate yesterday.
These figures are very close to those from ICM last week, although since they’ve arrived at them in very different ways that’s largely co-incidence: MORI use a much tighter filter on likelihood to vote than ICM; taking those 10/10 likely to vote MORI show a 1 point Livingstone lead, ICM on the same basis would have shown an 8 point Johnson lead.
As with the ICM poll that showed the leading candidates neck-and-neck, MORI found that Livingstone had a lead amongst young people. While all the polls show Johnson ahead amongst older voters, and Livingstone tending to do better amongst middle aged voters, opinions of younger people seems to be a big contrast between the ICM and MORI polls that show the candidates close together and the YouGov polls that show Johnson with a clear lead, where Johnson tends also to do well amongst young people.
If the big contrast between pollsters remains right up the election, it looks as though someone is going to end up looking embarrassed.
UPDATE: Mike Smithson points out that the apparent 2 point lead for Livingstone on the second vote is largely in the rounding - Johnson’s second round vote is around about 49.5% and Livingstone’s is around about 50.5%. If the figures had been very slightly different we’d have been discussing a poll showing them even on 50% in the second round.
Ipsos MORI’s monthly poll has appeared after what appears to be a lengthy delay - the fieldwork was carried out way back between the 13th and 18th March, so actually about the same time as the first ICM and YouGov polls that showed big Conservative leads back in the middle of the month. I have no idea of quite why there was such a delay.
The topline figures, with changes from MORI’s February poll, are CON 40%(+1), LAB 35%(-2), LDEM 18%(+2). It’s obviously not in the same league as the double point leads YouGov and ICM produced at the time, but the trend was in the same direction.
While there are already more recent voting intention figures than these, there are some interesting findings looking at some of MORI’s other regular trackers. The economic optimism figure continues to get worse - this month 67% of respondents told MORI they expected the economy to get worse with only 7% expecting it to get better. The net score of -60 is now worse than the poll straight after September 11th 2001, which was the lowest point in recent years, far lower than Black Wednesday and the stock market crash in 1987 - you have to go all the way back to March 1980 to find such pessimistic public expectations about the economy.
At the same time, the economy continues to sneak up the agenda as one of the most important issues facing the country - this month 23% of people named it, behind immigraion on 44%, crime on 40% and the NHS on 24%. This is the highest level of concern about the economy since 1998, though still not nearly as high as it was in the early 90s - after Black Wednesday 53% of people thought the economy was an important issue. People are far, far more likely to be pessimistic rather than optimistic about the economy and concern is definitely growing, but at the moment its still seen as a less of an issue than things like crime and immigration.
We shouldn’t expect many political polls in the next few days given the Easter break (and if we do, we should probably be wary of them for the same reason) In the meantime here’s an Ipsos MORI poll on class. The poll found 52% of respondents considered themselves working class and 44% middle class.
Polls are of course weighted to represent the correct class breakdown of the country, but these breaks - based on occupation - bare little resemblence to how people classify themselves. Amongst the AB socially classification (that’s professionals like teachers, doctors, businessmen, managers and so on) 68% see themselves as middle class, 30% working class. At the opposite end of the scale, the DE social classification (that is, casual workers, the unemployed and long term sick, labourers, semi-skilled manual workers, etc) 66% see themselves as working class but 28% see themselves as middle class. It may mean people have strange ideas of what class they are, or it may just mean the ABC1C2DE classification of social grade by occupation isn’t actually very good.
More fun are the questions further on about what political parties and activities people associate with different classes. Perceptions of political parties representing different social classes are still present to a degree - 39% of people think the Labour party best represent the working class (compared to 10% who think the Tories do and 8% who think the Lib Dems do). 46% of people think the Conservatives best represent the middle cass (compared to 19% who think Labour do and 7% who think the Lib Dems do). 65% think the Tories best represent the upper classes.
Taking the bus is the activity most associated with being working class (by 62%), followed by having an allotment (52%, down significantly from 72% when a similar question was asked in 1991), eating in front of the telly (48%), watching Coronation Street (45%), going to football matches (42%), and eating peas with a knife (35%). Buying organic food was the activity most associated with being middle class (52%), along with going to museums (46%), playing cricket (41%) or rugby (39%). Going to the opera (61%) was associated with the upper classes.
Shopping at Lidl, Somerfield, Iceland, Morrisons or Asda was seen as working class, Tescos as relatively classless, Sainsburys as Middle class and Waitrose as either middle or upper class.
Today is budget day and it is normally the excuse for lots of newspapers to commission polls, so in the next few days we can expect to get lots of data to paw over. Meanwhile, here’s a pre-budget poll for accountants BDO Stoy Hayward by YouGov.
It looks as though Alistair Darling faces his first budget with something of a reputation to mend following a pretty bad start. His reputation as a politician has hitherto been as a safe pair of hands. His repuation as Chancellor though looks poor - 31% of respondents thought that he had done a worse job than Gordon Brown so far (only 1% thought he had done better) - of course that could be a reflection of Brown’s high repuation rather than Darling’s low one; more crushingly 46% said they had “no confidence at all” in his ability to look after the economy in the current slowdown, with only 3% saying them had a lot of confidence. Asked to rate his first 9 months in the job out of ten his average score was 3.36.
The only positive sign for Darling is that there was no great swell of support for George Osborne and the Tories as an alternative - only 28% thought they would do a better job, 40% thought they would not.
YouGov asked what people thought Alistair Darling should do if he had no option but to raise taxes. The most popular (or least unpopular!) option was an increase in corporation tax, backed by 37%. Next least unpopular was capital gains tax, suggested by 20%, income tax 9% then inheritance tax 7%. Only 2% would like to see increased national insurance or stamp duty. The pattern is unsurprising, people would much rather businesses suffered than them themselves.
UPDATE: Just as I typed this I’ve been sent details of a new MORI poll. They have 28% of respondents satisifed with Alistair Darling’s performance as Chancellor, but have 44% disatisfied - a net rating of minus 16.
MORI have published their annual survey on trust in professionals, carried out for the Royal College of Physicians. Doctors are the most trusted of the professions MORI asked about (as indeed they always are!). As Bob Worcester says on the results page, the most surprising thing about the survey is probably the lack of change over the years.
We might expect to find that politicans and ministers are distrusted as never before, but while they are indeed two of the least trusted professions, with net trustworthyness ratings of -49 for ministers and -58 for politicians, this isn’t actually vastly different to the scores they’ve had for the last 8 years, and higher than they were in the final days of the last Conservative government. (The other highly distrusted group was journalists, though this probably does them a disservice - YouGov occassionally do similar surveys and separate out broadsheet and tabloid journalists: it’s the latter people really distrust, broadsheet journalists are viewed quite positively.)
Nearly all the professions asked about are trusted slightly less than they were last year, with the exception of judges (they were also the odd ones out in the YouGov poll above), though the movements are all small. The only group where there does appear to be a really significan trend over time is TV newsreaders. Their net trustworthyness is now +34, whereas in most previous years they tended to be in the 40s or 50s - in 1997 their net rating was +60 and they were the third most trusted profession. It’s interesting to ponder what has made the shift, the signs were there before the various crises of trust in the BBC last year, perhaps it is just the general movement towards younger presenters rather than the gravitas of past decades.
MORI have released their monthly political monitor. The topline figures, with changes from their January poll, are CON 39%(+2), LAB 37%(-1), LDEM 16%(nc). The fieldwork was conducted between the 21st and 26th February, so it’s actually slightly older than last weekend’s YouGov poll.
The two point Conservative lead seems much smaller than that shown in other recent polls, but is an improvement for the Conservatives from the January MORI poll which - uniquely amongst all the polls in the last four months - showed a Labour lead. The 37% figure Labour are recording in this poll is significantly higher than the level of support they are recording in other companies’ polls, but is actually marginally down on January’s figure.
It is difficult to know what to make of this - in hindsight I’m tempted to dismiss the January MORI poll as a rogue, and therefore see this one as good for Labour. Overall though we shouldn’t obsess too much over the ups and downs of individual voting intention polls since right now the next one is likely to contradict you. Leads and figures seem rather erratic at the moment, probably because there isn’t a clear trend so we are seeing only noise - the Tories in the high 30s or low 40s depending on the pollster, Labour in the low thirties to mid thirties depending on the pollster, Lib Dems around 16%-17% or up at 21% depending on the pollster.
On MORI’s other questions, crime and immigration remain the most important issues by far when asked what the single most important issue facing the country is. On the combined question that asks people to list more than one important issue they lead with 50% and 44% respectively, following by NHS on 25% and then the economy on 18%. The economy has actually risen significantly up the table - last month it was slightly higher at 20%, but looking back it never rose above 14% last year, it peaked at 11% in 2006, in fact you have to go back to 1999 to find a time when as many people thought the economy was one of the important issues facing the country.
The Liberal Democrats have commissioned a poll to defend their policy on the referendum issue. The Ipsos MORI poll found 54% of people supported a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, with 27% opposed.
Asked if people would prefer a referendum on the current EU treaty or membership as a whole, people much prefered a referendum on EU membership (by 38% to 18%, with 10% not wanting a referendum at all, 8% saying they’d like both and 26% don’t know).
Interestingly enough, the least supportive towards the Lib Dem policy were their own voters - they supported a membership referendum over one on just the treaty by only 37% to 30%, and only 49% supported a membership referendum per se, with 42% opposed.
Incidentally, before someone asks it is clear from the crossbreaks provided that a voting intention question was asked. Unfortunately, there are no details of a likelihood of voting question so we cannot extrapolate comparable topline voting intention figures from that. The corssbreak figures work out at Conservative 34%, Labour 44%, Lib Dem 15%, which is within a percentage point of the unfiltered voting intention figures in MORI’s January political monitor.