Earlier this week the Government was defeated at the Labour party conference over their plans for more private sector involvement in the NHS. Although the anti-government motion was actually opposed by a majority of Labour’s constituency party delegates, it passed because the trade unions backed it almost unaminously.
Over the last week there have been a couple of polls on private involvement in the NHS, and the results aren’t what you’d quite expect. ICM’s monthly poll for the Guardian included a couple of questions on NHS funding - they showed that the public was split right down the middle. Asked if more choice in hospitals would drive up standards, 48% agreed while 49% disagreed. Asked if the private sector should have more involvement in the NHS, with the caveat that healthcare treatment should remain free at the point of delivery the split was again 48% in favour, 49% against.
A second ICM poll, this time for the Sunday Mirror, also asked about the NHS. An overwhelming 80% of those who expressed an opinion said they thought way the NHS was run and funded needed a radical review. When asked if they would favour a system of compulsory health insurance, those who expressed an opinion were again split pretty evenly - 50% said they agreed, while 45% said they disagreed.
This sits rather strangely with the way the NHS is seen as a sacred cow in British politics. No political party would dare enter an election suggesting any radical restructuring of the way the NHS is funded, let alone that people might have to pay directly for more NHS services. It seems that the public are prepared to be more radical than the politicians when it comes to health.
Part of this is that health service reforms have proved in the past to be very easy for opposing political parties to misrepresent. Perhaps part of the reason why politicians are so cautious on health can be also be seen by looking at the tables for the ICM/Sunday Mirror poll. The people who support compulsory health insurance are comparatively vague - they agree “somewhat” with the idea. On the other hand, most people who oppose it oppose it “strongly”. Add to that the fact that various polls in the past have shown that those people who actually care about the issue of health and say it will effect how they cast their vote, also tend to be people who prefer the Labour party’s policies on health to more radical alternatives. As a whole there might be slight majority of people who support such schemes as compulsory heath insurance, but opponents of such reforms feel more strongly and are more likely to let it effect their vote.
Every poll of the general public so far has shown Ken Clarke to be the most popular candidate for the Conservative leadership. Every poll asking how people would vote with various potential Tory leaders has shown that Clarke would put on the most votes. However, every such poll has also had to be hedged with caveats saying that Ken’s lead may just be down to him being easily the most recognised of the candidates. People don’t pick David Cameron, say, or Liam Fox because they have very little real idea of who they are.
There is a YouGov poll in today’s Spectator (registration required) that tries to deal with this problem. Instead of just giving respondents a list of names to chose from, they were asked how likely they were to vote Conservative, then shown a photo of one of the candidates, along with five statements about them - things about their background and things they’ve said during the campaign - and asked to say, based on the things they’d just read, how likely they would be to vote Conservative with that person as leader.
Once the candidates were put on a level-playing field, Ken Clarke was no longer the leader who would increase the Tory vote the most. In fact he increased it the least. On average people currently rate their chances of voting Tory at the next election as 3.3/10. With Ken Clarke in charge it would go up to 3.6/10, with Liam Fox in charge 4.0/10, with David Cameron or David Davis it would rise to 4.2/10.
Exactly how much weight you place on this obviously depends upon how well the information given to respondents in the poll actually reflects the candidates’ positions. Since candidates haven’t issued nice neat one page statements of where they stand on issues this is far from easy, and to get a rounded picture it is also necessary for potential negatives about candidates to be pointed out (such as Cameron’s background at Eton and Clarke’s links with BAT). Most of the statements are actually culled from candidates’ speeches in recent weeks, but even then there is the question of what things to include. Liam Fox, for example, has spoken about human rights in China, rebuilding the “broken society”, mental health, abortion, Iraq, the European Union and so on - with each candidate getting only 5 statements, only a few of them can be mentioned.
So while the relative positions of the candidates are only as accurate as you think the statements summing up the broad thrust of their campaigns are, the more important finding of the poll is that Ken Clarke’s lead really is just down to increased recognition - tell respondents about who the other candidates are, what they look like and some of the things they stand for, and they too can be just as popular.
As to the particular strengths and weaknesses of the candidates, there are no great surprises. Ken Clarke’s anti-war stance and his general ordinary-bloke image are his greatest strengths, his experience in government is a positive and his links with BAT a negative. David Davis’s personal narrative - growing up on a council estate to a single parent family before going on to forge a successful business career was, predictably, a strong positive, as was his support for low taxes. People were less sure about his support for bringing more competition and choice into public services. It’s probably worth noting that the was a particular gender difference with David Davis - amongst women voters likelihood of voting Tory went to up 4.4, amongst men it only went up to 3.9.
David Cameron’s family background - his young family, his personal experience of looking after a disabled child and resultant campaigning for the disabled, was a positive (although his own priviledged background and Eton schooling was strong negative), as was his support for a more inclusive party. His most positive score (and the most positive score for any of the statements in the survey) was for his statement that the Conservative party should change its attitude to public services, and start seeing government spending on things like education and transport as a positive good, not a necessary evil.
People liked Liam Fox’s background as a GP, and his emphasis on the family (although David Davis and David Cameron made similar comments and got similar positive reactions), and his Euro-scepticism was a plus, but his closeness to the US and support for the war were a strong negative.
Welcome to old readers and new. Some people here will be my regular readers from elsewhere, other people will be entirely new and will probably be asking themselves exactly what UK Polling Report is, what it’s doing here on YouGov’s website.
Polling Report exists to report the latest opinion polls and to discuss what they mean, and how they work. Regular posts here will analyse all the latest polls, look at what the polling evidence says about particular issues of the day and demystify some of the mechanics behind how opinion polls themselves work. It’s also an opportunity for people to discuss what the polls mean in the comments sections.
The second conference of the season, and a fresh round of conference polls. Populus and ICM both have new polls in this mornings papers.
Populus’s poll looked at whether or not Tony Blair has managed to permanently change the public image of the Labour party. While we’ve already seen that Gordon Brown is seen as more left wing than Tony Blair, do people think that he will drag Labour back to the left when he takes over?
70% of people think that Labour has “really changed from its old Labour past and won’t go back even when Tony Blair retires”. However this doesn’t mean people think Brown won’t make any difference, opinion on that is far more divided - 52% think government policy will significantly change when Brown takes over, 44% think ti won’t. This suggests that, while few people think Gordon Brown will transform Labour back into a 1970s, unilateralist, beer-and-sandwiches version of itself, over half the population do think he will change the party, and I doubt many believe the change will be a move to the right.
The government’s attempts to emphasise that Gordon Brown will continue to govern in the same way that Tony Blair has seems to have had some effect though, the same question asked a year ago found that 61% thought that Brown would be significantly different to Blair. However, given how much more popular Gordon Brown is than Tony Blair, this is not necessarily good for the government.
On broader questions of the Labour party’s image Tony Blair also seems to have succeeded in changing the public’s perception of Labour. Throughout the 1980s the Conservative party revelled in its role as “the natural party of government”; now around 50% of voters see Labour as the natural party of government, while more than two-thirds think that “Labour used to be the party for the working class and the unions; now it is a party for the middle class and business”.
Meanwhile, ICM concentrated on whether people though Labour had delivered on the pledges they made way back in 1997. With one very important exception people thought they hadn’t.
Less than half of respondents thought that Labour had got more people off welfare and into work (42%) and governed for the many not the few (41%) while only around a third thought they had delivered “education, education, education” (34%), saved the NHS (34%) or brought an ethical dimension to British politics. Only around a quarter of respondents thought they had been “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” (26%), brought an end to sleaze (25%) or produced an integrated transport policy (25%).
The exception to the rule, however, was arguably the most important issue of all; 56% of respondents thought that Labour had indeed delivered a strong economy. Even 39% of Conservative supporters thought that Labour had delivered on the economy. Not that Tony Blair seems to have been given much credit for this - his net approval rating has fallen back to -19%.
The Times’s report on Populus’s conference polls at the weekend included a question asking people to put themselves on a left/right scale, ICM did a similar thing on Monday in the Guardian, and the Times also referred to a YouGov poll published in a paper by Peter Kellner in the Political Quarterly. As promised I’ve got the paper from Peter, but the actual left-right scale questions are already available online here anyway.
Now a straight left-right scale is pretty meaningless as a representation of parties policies these day. Despite that it is still a good way of looking at how people view the images of parties, and how close they feel to them.
Now, while Populus used a numerical scale (and found slightly different results - Labour, for example, were seen as being slightly right of centre), YouGov and ICM used almost identical wording in their questions, meaning we can compare the figures (On ICM’s tables they use a scale of -3 to 3, but so I can compare I’m using Peter Kellner’s method of changing this into a numerical average for both polls, very left-wing is counted as -100, fairly left-wing as -67, slightly left of centre as -33, centre as 0, slight right of centre at +33 and so on).
Bear in mind that even using almost identical wording there are obvious differences - YouGov’s fieldwork is online, while ICM’s is done on the phone, not to mention the fact that they were done a couple of months apart. This means there are some differences: the primary one being that people are more likely to describe themselves as being in the centre in the ICM poll.
The average voter in both polls puts themselves almost bang in the centre of the political spectrum (on YouGov the average was -2, on ICM it was +2). The average Tory voter in both polls puts themselves slightly right-of-centre (YouGov +35, ICM +27), while Lib Dem and Labour voters put themselves slightly left of centre in YouGov’s poll (-23 and -22 respectively) and slightly less so in ICM’s poll (-8 and -10). Already there is an obvious lesson here - current Labour and Lib Dem voters are almost interchangable ideologically. They are currently appealling to exactly the same ideological demographic.
Now let’s look at the parties and their leaders. On average the Labour party is seen as only slightly left of centre at -16. This is actually to the right of Labour’s average voter, putting themselves in the enviable position of being situated nicely between the mass of their vote, and the mass of voters clustered around the mid-point on the scale. Labour voters themselves see the Labour party as being at -6 on the scale, again an enviable position to find themselves in; their supporters see them as being on the middle ground, but not quite to the point where they cross over into being a right-wing party.
Looking at YouGov’s data, Tony Blair is seen as only slightly right of centre on +7. Vitally though, he shouldn’t entirely alienate Labour voters because they place him exactly on 0. Conservatives view him as slightly right-of-centre at +6. Blair is still in the position of being seen as a centrist by Labour supporters, but slightly right-of-centre by Conservative voters - it is an almost perfect position. The problem comes when we look at Lib Dem voters - the most left wing group on YouGov’s polls; they consider Blair to be right of centre at +15.
Come the next election of course, Gordon Brown will be in charge of the Labour party and YouGov found that people perceive him as being far more left-wing, with an average rating of -20. In his article Peter Kellner suggests this illustrates one of New Labour’s strengths - the combination of Blair, who appeals to those on the middle ground and centre-right, and Brown, who traditional Labour voters see as one of their own.
When Brown takes over as PM of course, the Labour party will no longer have Blair’s middle-ground appeal, and suddenly they will be a party that is perceived as left wing, led by a Prime Minister who is perceived as left wing. Many people argue that Brown isn’t actually anymore left wing than Blair, that he is right at the heart of the New Labour project and believes the same things as Blair does - that isn’t really the point though; people’s perception of him is left wing, and that’s what matters.
Now, this may not be a bad thing for Labour - it will help them get back the support from those Lib Dem voters who see Tony Blair as unacceptably right wing, but it also risks driving away support from those on the soft right who are currently perfectly comfortable with Tony Blair, but may be scared off by a more left wing figure.
Gordon Brown is also part of the problem facing the Lib Dems - they have clearly gained from left wingers who are ideologically opposed to Tony Blair. What happens when Blair goes? Labour themselves are still placed on the ideological scale to pick up Lib Dem votes, without Blair to scare them away, will they go back to Labour?
If they do, the Lib Dems have begun to move out of the territory where they can also gain disillusioned Tory voters. ICM’s figures show that people now perceive the Lib Dems to be a party of the centre-left on -13. Given the Liberal Democrats reputation for portraying themselves in a different manner to different audiences, you might expect them to have managed to sell themselves as being more centrist to Tory voters, but they haven’t - Tory voters see them as even more left wing on -17. Moving to YouGov’s data, Tory voters also find Charlie Kennedy left wing, in fact, with a score of -30 they think he is more left wing than even Gordon Brown. Unless the Lib Dems move themselves back towards the centre, they are going to face an ideological barrier to winning extra votes from the Tories.
Finally we come to the Conservative party. Whereas Labour voters consider the Labour party quite centrist, and Lib Dem voters consider the Lib Dems quite centrist, even Conservative voters consider that the Tory party is firmly right of centre, with an average score of 31. Amongst voters as a whole the figure is 34. While they are quite well aligned with their voters, who on ICM’s poll averaged at 27, they are both a long way from the political centre, and on the “wrong side” of their voters, i.e. Conservative voters consider their party to be further to the right than themselves. Dragging them out even further rightwards was the figure of Michael Howard - YouGov found that Conservative voters put him on average at 42, while Lib Dem and Labour voters put him at an increasingly extreme 62 and 65 respectively.
Replacing Howard with a leader who is seen as less extreme should help the Conservatives move people’s perception of them closer to the centre ground, and once Labour’s leader is a figure who is percieved as being on the other side of the psychological left-right divide they may be in a better position to win support back from Labour amongst right-of-centre voters, but either way you cut it they are still as by far the most extreme of the three main parties.
ICM regularly carry out polls for Retail Week, and you’ll regularly not find me mentioning them since they deal with exciting things like how often you shop at Primark. The most recent one is more interesting however, dealing with question of whether or not people agree with the EU quotas on Chinese textile imports.
Asked straight out if textile imports from China should be limited to protect European clothing manufacturers a substantial majority think they should - 57% compared to 33% opposed.
However, when people are asked how much more they personally would be willing to pay for clothes that are made in the EU, their protectionist insticts seem to fade a bit - 38% wouldn’t pay anything more whatsoever, 21% would pay just 5% more, 19% would pay 10% for European made clothes. Only 3% would pay 25% more for European made clothes.
What I found surprising, is that there is very little difference between this and how much people say they would be willing to pay for British made clothes - 35% would pay no more at all, 21% would pay up to 5% more, 21% would pay up to 10% more, and only 3% would pay 25% more for British made clothes. This suggests that, people are on the whole just as happy to support European clothing manufacturers over cheaper alternatives as they are British ones.
So, what is the actual price differential, how much are people actually paying for the benefit of buying clothes made in the EU rather than China? I’m not aware of any general figures, but the widely quoted example at the time of the stand off was that a blouse that would cost £6.50 to manufacture in China, would cost £7 to make in Eastern Europe and £10 to make in Britain. So if you bought a blouse made in Eastern Europe you would actually be paying 8% more than if you bought an identical Chinese version - if you bought a British made blouse it would cost you 50% more than if the same blouse had been made in China.
(In reality of course, the difference isn’t that much because Chinese imports also face a tariff barrier that domestic goods don’t. For almost all clothes this is 12.4%)
The Times today has the first installment of its Populus Conference poll, this week covering the Liberal Democrats. There was also a small ICM poll on the Liberal Democrats on yesterday’s Politics Show, and a more extensive ICM poll in today’s Guardian.
Populus’s poll shows, as usual, that in terms of party image the Liberal Democrats are very, very strong. Asked about whether various positive comments are true of each party, the Liberal Democrats beat the Conservatives on every count, and are only marginally behind Labour when it comes to being seen as competent and having a good team of leaders. The Liberal Democrats the party who the largest proportion of the country think understands they way they live their lives, shares their values, are honest and principled, have clear ideas for the issues facing the country and (by a huge margin) are seen as the most united party.
So, with an image this good how come more people aren’t voting for them? Populus asked people if they agreed with various statements about the Liberal Democrats - just under half of respondents thought that the Lib Dems would do a good job if they did win power and thought they were a better opposition than the Conservatives, but it was the negative comments that were more telling: almost two-thirds of respondents agreed with the statements that the Liberals Democrats were “basically a protest vote party, because they have no real chance of winning” and “Lib Dems seem decent people but their policies probably don’t really add up.” Worrying for the Liberal Democrats, those agreeing with these statements included almost four out of ten Liberal Democrat voters. Almost of third of those who did vote Lib Dem in May 2005, said that they might not have voted for them if there had been a risk of them actually winning.
Populus also offered respondents a list of possibilites and asked them which would make them more likely to vote Liberal Democrat. Tougher crime policies was the most popular option - 65% of people said this would make them more likely to vote Lib Dem, including an overwhelming 80% of Lib Dem voters. Around half of respondents said that opposing ID cards and replacing council tax with a local income tax, both of which were actually already Lib Dem policy at the last election, would have made them more likely to vote Lib Dem suggesting these are more popular solutions than the direction proposed by “orange book” Lib Dems - only 32% of respondents thought that proposed radical reform of public services with more private sector involvement would make them more likely to vote Lib Dem.
ICM’s poll gave respondents another list of statements about the Lib Dems, and found similar results - a majority of people (56%) thought they were a serious alternative to Labour and the Tories, 59% of people thought they were right to oppose the war in Iraq, but after that it began to turn bad - 60% thought it was hard to know what they really stood for, 58% thought the Lib Dems would tax people like themselves more, and 57% thought they were more concerned about criminals than victims of crime. While almost half of people thought Britain would be better run with the Lib Dems in government, 69% thought people they knew who voted for them were just making a protest vote.
So, the Lib Dems have a wonderfully positive image, but people really know what they stand more, are wary about their policies on tax and crime and don’t take them seriously as a potential government - they are seen as just a particularly pleasant vehicle for protest votes. What to do about it is the task facing the Lib Dems at conference - to be seen as anything other than a protest party, it appears they need to be more clearly defined, the question the Liberal Democrats seem to be asking is what sort of party they want to define themselves as. Are they happy to continue to be seen as a party of the left, or will they pursue the more right-wing agenda suggested by the “orange book” Liberals?
The ICM poll for the Politics showed asked people if they thought the Lib dems were positioned closer to Labour or the Conservatives - people overwhelmingly put them closer to Labour. The Guardian’s ICM poll asked people to put the Lib Dems on a scale from left to right. 35% put them at the centre, but 30% put them to the left-of-centre, compared to only 10% who put them to the right-of-centre (25% didn’t know). The Lib Dems were closely aligned with their own voters, 51% of whom placed themselves at the same place as the Lib dems. They also seem well placed to take disillusioned Labour voters; 29% of them place the Lib Dems at the same place on the left-right scale as themselves.
If they want to target disillusioned Conservative voters, they face a more difficult task - 40% of Conservative voters categorise the Lib Dems as being left of centre and 61% place them to the left of their own position. If the Lib Dem strategy is to continue to target the Conservatives, then they may need to address a perceived drift to the left.
Finally there is the Charlie Kennedy question. In Populus’s poll 33% of people thought that replacing Kennedy with a “more credible” figure would make them more likely to vote Lib Dem, Lib Dem voters themselves were just as likely to agree with this. The ICM/Guardian poll asked respondents straight out if, after 6 years as leader, it was time for Kennedy to stand down. 30% thought he should go, 58% thought he should stay. Amongst Lib Dem voters there was still very strong support for Kennedy, but a substantial minority thought it was time he went - 77% said stay, 20% said go.
(I know I have also promised you all a look at Peter Kellner’s paper from the Political Quarterly - don’t worry, that too is on its way)
As well as the questions on the Lib Dems, covered in the article above, ICM’s latest poll also had some surprising figures on Gordon Brown and Ken Clarke. The poll suggests that, with Clarke and Brown as party leaders the Conservatives would fall back very slightly (almost exacly echoing the YouGov poll in last week’s Sunday Times), but unlike the YouGov poll Gordon Brown would not boost Labour, rather it would be the Lib Dems who would benefit from the change.
This is an unusual poll to say the least. So far every poll that had asked how people would vote with Gordon Brown in charge has shown an increase in the Labour vote, often a huge one. As an example, two days before the general election YouGov asked how people would vote if Gordon Brown was leader - the Labour lead went from 4% to 13%.
The topline figures in this month’s ICM poll appear to be CON 31%, LAB 40%, LD 21% - the figures for an imaginary election with Brown and Clarke as leader are CON 30%, LAB 38%, LD 25%, so far from increasing the Labour vote, it suggests that Brown would drive some voters towards the Liberal Democrats.
This is a dramatic turnaround. It could be that the earlier questions in the poll that asked people if they were more or less likely to vote for the parties with difference leaders, and asked them to place themselves on a left-right scale compared to each party influenced their answers, or it could simply be that Gordon Brown has suddenly fallen in the public’s estimation. The poll was taken when the media spotlight was on fuel tax, an issue where Gordon Brown took a main role in defending the government’s stance - perhaps that affected his support. Either way, this poll does cast some sort of doubt on the accepted wisdom that Gordon Brown’s accession will be an immediate boost for the Government.
Incidentally, the tables in the pdf file for the Brown/Clarke voting intention on the Guardian’s website do not match the figures in the article, which suggests that ICM have (rightly for purposes of comparison!) made the same sort of adjustment for the spiral of silence as they do in there main voting intention polls.
Yesterday’s YouGov poll in the Sunday Times actually included quite a lot of questions about President Bush, far more than the two reported in the paper. I think it’s fair to say that the British public are not over-enamoured of him.
The overwhelming majority of respondents thought that President Bush had handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina very badly (60%) or quite badly (26%), and 63% thought that his response would have been greater and faster if New Orleans had been a city full of white, middle-class people. 48% thought that the deployment of US troops in Iraq has made the crisis worse. 57% of people thought that the handling of Hurricane Katrina, in combination with Iraq, showed that President Bush was “one of the worst presidents America has ever had.”
Asking about George Bush in general, the strength of negative opinion was overwhelming - 70% thought Bush was incompetent, 60% thought he was stupid, 68% thought he wasn’t concerned about ordinary people, 66% thought he was untrustworthy. There was an obvious correlation between British party support and opinions on President Bush. Liberal Democrat voters were even more united in their negative attitudes towards Bush than the population as a whole (84% thought he was incompetent, 73% thought him stupid), Labour voters were somewhere inbetween while Conservative voters had the least negative opinion of the US President, though even then their opinion was negative.
There is, of course, no particular reason for President Bush to care what British people think of him, even if they do seem to overwhelmingly accept the Michael Moore version of him. It does seem to have something of a knock on effect on British attitudes to the USA. Asked if they thought the United States were a force for good in the world, 47% of people disagreed, with only 36% agreeing. Again there was a strong difference between different party supporters: Conservative supporters were relatively pro-American, 53% thought that the US was a force for good; Lib Dems were comparatively anti-American, only 19% thought the US was a force for good. Asked if respondents saw themselves as closer to the US or to Europe, the same pattern emerged - Conservative voters looked more to America, though only just (48% compared to 42% who felt closer to Europe), Labour and Lib Dem voters both felt closer to Europe than they did to the US.
Today’s Sunday Times has a new YouGov poll which again compares how people would vote with Davis or Clarke as Tory leader. While it echoes Populus’s recent poll in showing that Clarke would perform better than Davis, unlike Populus it suggests that both potential leaders would trail a long way behind a Brown-led Labour party.
The standard voting intention figures were CON 32%, LAB 37%, LDEM 21%. Asked how they would vote if Gordon Brown was the Labour leader and Ken Clarke the Conservative leader, Labour’s lead would jump up to 11 points with the Conservatives on 31%, Labour on 42% and the Lib Dems on 17%. Asked the same question, but with David Davis as leader, Labour’s lead would be even larger - 14 points, with the Conservatives on 30%, Labour on 44% and the Lib Dems on 18%.
The main difference between the two scenarios isn’t actually the Conservatives - there is very little difference between the level of Conservative support - it’s Labour. With Clarke as Tory leader Labour would get 42%, with Davis as leader they would get 44%. A possible explanation is that Clarke would indeed win more votes from Labour as leader, but they would be partially cancelled out by Tory voters drifting away to UKIP or other fringe parties.
Anyway, leaving such speculation behind the bottom line is that , while Clarke again comes out top, the poll doesn’t tell us a huge amount about the respective popularities of Clarke and Davis, when they are put aside the huge impact that Gordon Brown will make on voting intentions once he takes over.
YouGov also asked a straight forward question on who people would like to see as party leader. As usual Clarke was the runaway leader on 42% with Davis second on 16%. Liam Fox’s launch does seem to have had some minimal impact, since he is now third on 9%. Rifkind and Cameron are both on 6%. Bear in mind that, unlike most if not all of the other questions asking about people’s prefered leader, this had been re-percventaged to exclude don’t knows.
Moving on there were a variety of other questions in the YouGov/Sunday Times poll. Respondents were asked about a variety of possible policies the Tories might take forward, 47% of people supported a policy of withdrawing from the EU if there was not repatriation of powers (29% opposed), 46% supported cutting taxes and public spending (28% opposed), 50% supported radical reform of schools and the NHS, including possible privatisation (28% opposed), and 72% supported tax policies that benefit those on middle income, as opposed to those on low income (strange finding that - it’ll be interesting to see what the breakdown by social class was) [UPDATE - not so strange, it was a mistake by the Sunday Times. The poll actually found that people wanted the Conservative’s to give less help to the well off and more to average and low income families, which makes more sense]
YouGov also asked about President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina - 60% said he handled the crisis very badly, while only 1% thought he handled it very well. 63% thought he would have done more if the victims had be white and middle-class. Not, I suppose, that George Bush will lose much sleep over what British voters think of his performance.
Finally YouGov asked about foreign takeovers of British firms. 69% of people said they were concerned about British companioes falling into foreign ownership, while 63% said they thought the government should take some form of steps to prevent large British companies being taken over by foreign groups.