The teaching of evolution is a big issue in the USA - the PollingReport.com archive has whole pages of opinion polls on evolution.
Polls in the UK don’t ask about evolution, after all, we don’t need to. Apart from the controversy over Emmanuel College Gateshead a couple of years ago it simply isn’t an issue here - we don’t have the same brand of vocal Christianity here, we don’t have a written constitution that can be used for court challenges over the issue and we don’t have a long history of battles over the teaching of evolution. Charles Darwin is such an establishment figure he is on the ten pound note.
A BBC Horizon programme last week covering the recent court case over the teaching of intelligent design in US schools commissioned a MORI poll asking what people in Britain thought. 48% of people in Britain thought the theory of evolution best described their view, 17% thought intelligent design best described their view and, startlingly, 22% of British people thought creationism best described their view.
The wording of the question seems fair enough - a potential problem is that people can understand creationism to simply mean believing that God created the universe, perhaps using evolution as a tool, MORI though specifically described it as “God created human kind pretty much in his/her present form at one time within the last 10,000 years”. MORI’s description of evolution could, perhaps, be seen to imply that belief in evolution was incompatible with belief in God, but even so, the percentage saying they believed in creationism seems to be straightforward.
Asked which of the theories should be taught in “science classes”, 69% thought that evolution should, with 15% thinking it shouldn’t. 44% of people think that creationism should be taught in science classes, 39% think it shouldn’t. 41% think that “intelligent design” should be taught in science classes, 40% that it shouldn’t.
There is still, however, a huge gap between British and American beliefs on evolution. A US poll with comparable questions by CBS News in October 2005 found 48% of Americans believed in creationism, 29% thought that evolution had been guided by God and only 15% believed man had evolved from less developed life forms but God had no role in the process.
MORI’s monthly political monitor isn’t quite as grim for the Liberal Democrats as their poll for the Sun earlier this month. The topline figures, with changes from their previous poll, are CON 40% (+1), LAB 38%(-1), LDEM 17%(+2). This probably doesn’t reflect a Lib Dem recovery just yet - the fieldwork was actually carried out before or immediately after Mark Oaten’s resignation - it is more likely to be normal sample error or the minor effects of using a different sampling method (the MORI poll in the Sun was a phone poll, this was a face-to-face poll).
Asked who they would like to see as the next Liberal Democrat leader 57% of people said don’t know or none of the above. Of those who did express a preference, Ming Campbell was the preferred leader of 19% of respondents with Hughes on 18%. Chris Huhne clearly had not been noticed by the public at the time - he had only 2% support, compared to 1% support for “Stewart Lewis” - MORI’s ‘dummy’ candidate they like to put into questions like this to see how many people are just picking a name at random.
Finally David Cameron’s ratings remain positive - his approval rating is now +15 with 52% of people still not having made up their minds. As MORI point out in their commentary, this is not hugely different from Michael Howard, IDS, or indeed Tony Blair when they first became leader of their respective parties. All began with positive numbers and large numbers of don’t knows. The difference was that when those don’t knows made their minds up about Michael Howard and IDS they decided they didn’t like them, whereas Tony Blair’s don’t knows decided that they did approve of him. It remains to be seen what all those don’t knows eventually decide about David Cameron.
A new ICM poll in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph suggests that 39% of Liberal Democrat voters would prefer to have Charles Kennedy back as their leader, while 47% would still like a new leader (though bearing in mind that this is a normal sized sample, the sub-sample of Lib Dem voters is so small that the margin of error on the question will be huge.) Overall 80% of respondents said that the Lib Dems’ recent travails don’t make them any less likely to vote Liberal Democrat.
The topline figures, with changes from ICM’s poll conducted last weekend, are CON 37%(nc), LAB 36%(nc), LDEM 18%(-1). Part of any potential damage from Mark Oaten’s resignation would have been reflected in the poll conducted last weekend, but overall this suggests only slight damage. Matthew d’Ancona’s column in the Sunday Telegraph says that “The Lib Dems will be disappointed with their showing in our ICM poll today” - I rather suspect he’s wrong. After a torrid month I think the Liberal Democrats will be rather happy with 18% in ICM’s poll - at least they’ll be happier with this than the 13% and 15% they have in YouGov and MORI’s latest polls. That said compared to ICM’s polls last month, prior to the Liberal Democrats’ recent troubles, they are still down 3 points.
So, why the huge difference in the Lib Dem score between ICM and YouGov? The polls were conducted almost simultaneously and both pollsters’ figures are very stable. It is probably partially due to ICM’s weighting, which is slightly more favourable to the Lib Dems than other pollsters, and it is possible (though we won’t know until the full tables go up on ICM’s website) that it’s also partially due to ICM’s topline adjustment. Part of the reason for the decline in the Liberal Democrat’s vote in YouGov’s poll was that a larghe chunk of respondents who told YouGov they voted Lib Dem back in 2005 are now saying they don’t know how they’d vote. ICM’s topline adjustment means they assume that 50% of don’t knows vote the same way they did last time, potentially increasing Lib Dem support in the poll.
UPDATE: ICM’s topline adjustment to take account of don’t knows did indeed help the Liberal Democrats, although it only increased their reported level of support by 1 point, so it certainly doesn’t explain much of the 5 point difference.
YouGov’s monthly poll for the Telegraph has the Labour party regaining the lead after a collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote. The headline figures with changes from last month are CON 39%(+1) LAB 40%(+4) LDEM 13%(-5). The poll was conducted between Tuesday and Thursday, so was after Mark Oaten’s resignation but mostly before Simon Hughes admitted having had homosexual relationships.
The survey demonstrates that the ongoing chaos within the Liberal Democrats has done severe damage to their level of support. While the poll was still conducted “mid-crisis” and it’s likely that, once the immediate negative newspaper coverage has passed, their support will recover somewhat the sheer size of the fall in Liberal Democrat support suggests that they may have suffered permanent damage. The Lib Dems are now 10 points lower than the level of support they achieved at the general election - almost halving their support. Excluding MORI’s polls prior to their change in methodology, we need to go back to prior to the 2001 election to find such low figures.
While the poll is bad for the Liberal Democrats, it certainly isn’t good for the Conservatives either. While the level of Conservative support continues to grow - it is the Labour party that has gained almost all of the spoils from the Liberal Democrat decline, suggesting that any decline in third party support may end up bolstering Labour rather than helping the Conservatives.
I’ll post on the other questions on the poll tomorrow. For now a brief note on seat projections - it’s rather silly to speculate about how votes would translate into seats in Parliament based on polls four years before an election but everyone does it “just for fun”, as Peter Snow used to say. There are no swing calculators based on the new boundaries but, if you put these figures into Martin Baxter’s calculator based on the old boundaries, you end up with the Lib Dems reduced to only 2 seats (Alistair Carmichael and Charlie Kennedy). The reason it’s so extreme is because Martin’s calculator is based upon a proportional swing - i.e. the Lib Dems have lost 43% of their vote at the last election so their vote in each seat is reduced by 43%. Standard uniform swing calculators on the other hand are done on the asumption that parties’ votes change by the same amount in each seat - i.e. the Lib Dem vote falls by 10 percentage points in each seat. This would leave the Lib Dems with about 21 seats if they got 13% of the vote.
Both systems have their faults - it’s obviously absurd for the Lib Dem vote to fall by 10% in seats where they currently have less than 10% of the vote, but it’s also unlikely that it would fall by as much as 23% their safests seats. If people voted this way in a real general election the real figure would probably be somewhere inbetween.
UPDATE - the Telegraph also report approval ratings for Blair and Cameron and some questions on the Lib Dem leadership. Cameron’s net approval rating is still +22, compared to other recent Tory leaders this is very high indeed. However, don’t knows stood at 44% in the question. When Michael Howard became Tory leader he had quite positive figures because of the high level of don’t knows. After a while those don’t knows decided they didn’t like Howard after all and his ratings fell. It remains to be seen which way all those don’t knows fall when they make their minds up about David Cameron.
On the Liberal Democrats 61% of the public said they didn’t know who they would prefer as Lib Dem leader. Of the minority who did have a view, Simon Hughes just pipped Menzies Campbell as the favourite (18% to 16%), Chris Huhne was the favoured candidate of 5% of people. The low proportion of people giving an opinion is hardly surprising - a Populus poll this week found that only 41% of people could recognise Menzies Campbell, 34% of people could recognise Simon Hughes and 4% of people recognised Chris Huhne.
Finally YouGov asked respondents if they thought, given recent events, the Liberal Democrats were a credible force in British politics. 27% thought they hadn’t been anyway, 30% thought they were not a credible force, and 29% thought they were.
ICM’s monthly poll for the Guardian has Labour and the Conservatives unchanged from last month, though Labour have narrowed the gap since ICM’s poll in the News of the World earlier this month. The topline figures with changes from the ICM/News of the World poll are CON 37%(-2) LAB 36%(+1) LD 19%(-1).
The Lib Dems are down one point - in itself an insignificant change. However, it does mean that all the pollsters now have the Liberal Democrats below 20%. The fieldwork for the poll was conducted between Friday and Sunday, meaning that only around a third of interviews were conducted after Mark Oaten’s resignation.
More 4 News has a Populus poll on perceptions of the political parties. People were asked to rate the parties on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being very left wing and 10 being very right wing. On average voters put the Liberal Democrats at 4.55, Labour at 4.79 and the Conservatives at 6.00.
Tony Blair was rated as 4.91 on the same left-right scale - so slightly right of the Labour party - while David Cameron was rated 5.73, so slightly left of the Tories. Gordon Brown was at 4.71, suggesting he is perceived as being slightly more left-wing than Labour is at present.
I was rather confused when I first read these figures since, comparing them to what seemed to be an identical Populus poll from last September which had the Conservative party at 5.89, it appeared that people think the Conservatives under David Cameron are more right wing than under Michael Howard. This would have been an unusual result to say the least - but in actual fact that poll had a scale of 1-10, while this one has a scale of 0-10 meaning the figures are - rather disappointingly - not directly comparable.
Despite the difference in scale, one intriguing difference between the two polls is that the perceived ‘centre ground’ in politics (and despite the different scales, respondents to both surveys were told that 5 was dead centre) seems to have shifted. Last year people told Populus they saw the centre ground as a point somewhere between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, with the Tories off to the right. Now they’re telling Populus that the centre ground is a point somewhere between the Tories and Labour.
The latest MORI poll, published in Saturday’s Sun, had the Lib Dems down to 15%. This is their lowest rating in a MORI poll since 2002, and that was prior to MORI’s change in methodology to filter my likelihood of voting. Remember, this poll was conducted before relevations about Mark Oaten’s private life and his subsequent resignation so there may yet be worse news to come.
Before any Lib Dem supporters reading this panic though, it’s worth remembering that MORI’s topline figures do tend to exhibit more volatility than the other pollsters (probably because they do not weight by past vote, which serves to dampen down sample error in other pollsters’ figures). Last month MORI showed an incredible 9 point lead for the Conservatives - this month they have more believable figures with the Conservatives and Labour both on 39%. The low Lib Dem score could simply be the Lib Dem equivalent of last month’s anomolously low score for Labour - there should be both ICM and YouGov polls in the coming week which will give us a better idea of if the Lib Dem party has suffered any damage from Mark Oaten’s resignation.
With hunting now banned, the League Against Cruel Sports seems to be targeting shooting - or at least, they commissioned a new poll from Communicate Research asking about people’s attitudes to shooting. Communicate asked if people thought shooting wild birds or mammals for sport was acceptable or unacceptable - 71% thought it was unacceptable, 85% thought it was unacceptable to make money from the killing of wild birds or mammals for sport and 80% thought the rearing of pheasants in intensive conditions to supply shooting estates was unacceptable.
Personally I’m rather wary about the wording of the questions in the poll - gamebirds obviously aren’t “wild birds” in any real sense of the word, though one of the League Against Cruel Sports’s objections to shooting game birds is that many wild birds and animals are killed by gamekeepers to protect the pheasants. It’s unlikely that people answering the question were looking at it in those terms though. Equally, you can’t tell from the last question whether people find the breeding of birds to be shot unacceptable, or breeding birds in intensive conditions unacceptable. Despire these shortcomings, the poll does suggest that a majority of the public would be receptive to a campaign against shooting.
On a different “animal welfare” issue, the government this week said they were reversing their earlier decision not to pursue a ban on docking the tails of dogs. While it isn’t up on MORI’s website yet, the RSPCA commissed a poll last month which found that only 8% of people supported docking tails for cosmetic reasons, while 75% were opposed. Of course, those opposed to a ban frequently argue about the desirability of docking the tails of working dogs to avoid infection and injury - either MORI didn’t ask about docking for these reasons, or the RSPCA didn’t report the figures.
ICM’s weekend poll for the News of the World also contained questions on the Prime Minister’s ‘respect agenda’ and, though it doesn’t seem to have been published in the paper, a hypothetical voting intention question asking how people would vote if Gordon Brown were Labour leader and Ming Campbell were Lib Dem leader. For most of the last Parliament hypothetical questions like this used to indicate that Brown would be a boon to Labour, more recently they have indicted that Labour would in fact perform worse with Brown as leader. ICM’s poll suggests that Brown and Campbell becoming Labour and Lib Dem leaders would make virtually no difference at all.
On the ‘respect agenda’ ICM found that 64% of people thought that Britain’s streets had become less safe since Labour were elected in 1997. When it came to the long list of initiatives laid out by the government last week, respondents thought that nearly all of them would be successful (the exception was the plan to evict nuisance families from their homes for 3 months, which 49% of people thought would be unsuccessful), but overall 67% thought that Tony Blair’s ‘respect agenda’ would make little difference.
There is an ICM poll in the News of the World tomorrow showing the topline voting intentions (with changes since ICM’s last poll in December) at CON 39%(+2), LAB 35%(-1), LDEM 20%(-1).
The poll suggests that David Cameron is continuing to build upon his political honeymoon. Leaving aside the apparently rogue MORI poll last month, this is the highest level of support recorded by the Tories for several years. The poll is also the first measure of voting intention since the news of the Liberal Democrat leadership election has really sunk in and, unlike Populus’s poll in the week, ICM ’s poll does not suggest that the Lib Dems have sustained any real damage, down just a single point.
There is a surprising contrast between ICM and Populus’s polls this week - ICM had a Tory lead of 4 points, Populus a Labour lead of 3 points; Populus had the Lib Dems falling 3 points to a worrying 16% of the vote, ICM has them on a study 20%, only 1 point down from prior to their troubles.
While ICM have consistently suggested a higher level of Lib Dem support during this Parliament (probably due to ICM’s weighting, which is more favourable to the Lib Dems and Tories than Populus’s), the difference in the drop in the Lib Dem vote is somewhat different. It could simply be the result of the Populus poll having been conducted in the midst of complete turmoil within the Lib Dem party - now that Kennedy has resigned and the immediate crisis passed, the Lib dem vote has recovered slightly in ICM’s poll. Alternatively, it could just be down to simple sample error - let’s wait and see what ICM and YouGov’s polls later this month say.
If there are any other interesting results from the poll I’ll update tomorrow.