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Labour
Looking back over the year the turning point for Labour was the May local elections, or more specifically the week prior to them was they were faced with the triple whammy of John Prescott’s affair, the foriegn prisoner release scandal and Patricia Hewitt’s misjudged comments on the NHS’s “best year ever”. Prior the the local elections the Conservtive honeymoon seemed to be faltering and a few polls had shown Labour regaining their lead - since the local elections they have been consistently behind in all but a few polls that don’t have political weighting (and therefore show more erratic results).
April 2006 damaged Labour’s reputation for competence. In YouGov’s political trackers prior to the local elections, 25% of people associated the Labour party with competence, following the local elections it fell to only 17%. While it recovered noticably during the Labour party conference, briefly touching 25%, it fell back again afterwards and seems stable at around 21%. In the autumn polls painted a dismal picture of how people saw the Labour party - 71% thought they were divided, 54% thought they weren’t concerned with the welfare of ordinary people, 66% thought the wheels were falling off the coach. An ICM poll in September found that 70% of people thought it was “time for a change.” Populus’s pre-conference poll found a pathetic 14% of people thought Labour were united, found them trailing on nearly every measure and found that only 16% were satisfied. Presumably the only reason that the government were not further behind in the polls was that over a third of the 78% who were disatisfied said they still prefered Labour to the Conservatives. The continuing poor image of the Conservative party helped save Labour from the sort of double digit defecits that the last Tory government endured in the polls.
In terms of party image September seems to have been Labour’s nadir. According to last month’s Populus poll Labour’s party image has perked up considerably since the conference season and in terms of party image is ahead of the Conservatives on all measures apart from unity and honesty. Thus far it hasn’t been entirely clear whether this is reflected in the voting intention polls. The polls immediately following the Labour conference showed a large boost for Labour on the back of vastly increased ratings for Tony Blair. However, this was a transient, short term factor and of the most recent polls most seem to show that the Conservative lead is as strong as before the conference season - YouGov have the Tory lead weakening slightly at 4 or 5 points, but ICM’s last two polls have a Conservative lead of 8 points. The exception amongst the polls using political weighting is Populus, who showed the lead dropping to only a single point, but in context this seems to be the outlier.
The issue of Blair’s departure and the succession has dominated much of this year and will obviously dominate much of next year. Gordon Brown’s poll ratings have been consistently poor - while people say he is competent, effective, strong and trust him to run the economy, he consistently performs worse than Tony Blair in hypothetical voting intention questions. As I argued here, I think this is meaningful and is a result, as shown by a myriad of polling questions, of people not warming to Gordon Brown - as much as they respect him they simply don’t like him. Despite this, all polls on the Labour leadership have shown that Brown is still seen as the best choice for the next Labour leader, especially amongst Labour voters and Labour party members. Attempts in the media to boost the cases of Alan Johnson or John Reid don’t seem to have created any swell of public support for them and it still looks certain that Gordon Brown will be Tony Blair’s successor.
What will happen when he does succeed? I am still convinced that he will produce a temporary boost in the polls for Labour despite what hypothetical polls conducted now predict - people simply aren’t very good at predicting how they will react to events in the future. An interesting question is whether he will use the opportunity to go for a snap election next year during his ‘honeymoon’ as Sir Menzies Campbell has predicted and David Cameron has demanded. Convential wisdom is that the electorate punish politicans for calling “unnecessary” elections, but the polling evidence suggests that people think that it would be appropriate for the new Prime Minister to call an election to get a mandate - YouGov found that 51% thought there should be an election, NOP found 56% thought there should be and Populus found 67% in favour. While Gordon Brown’s actual decision on whether or not to call an election will obviously be based on practicialities like cost and whether he can win it or not, not whether the polls say the public want one, the figures suggest that if Brown does call an early election the public will not see it as unecessary and punish him for it, and if he doesn’t and the opposition parties call for one they will have public support on their side.
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The Conservatives
On the surface the Conservatives have had a good year in the polls, certainly their best since the early 90s. In terms of voting intention they have moved from a position last year of consistently being in the low thirties to consistently being in the high 30s. They have opened up a signficant lead over Labour and, more importantly, have maintained it.
However, what they haven’t done is made progress over the last year. The level of Conservative support in the polls now is pretty much the same as it was in David Cameron’s honeymoon period, and while their lead over Labour is now larger than at the start of 2006, it is because of the fall in Labour’s support rather than an increase in Conservative support. They also seem to have benefited from Labour’s misfortune rather than won support themselves - prior to the local elections Conservative support was on the slide, it only perked up again after the prisoner release scandal.
While David Cameron has increased Conservative support, there is scant polling evidence to suggest that he has made any progress on improving perceptions of the Conservative party as a whole. Populus’s conference poll found that people’s perception of the Conservative party on the left-right scale is pretty much unchanged - people see Cameron as to the left of the Conservative party, but they don’t think he has moved the party to the left. Populus has now asked the same questions about party image in their conference poll for the last 4 years, and reasked the question this month. Comparing the image of the Conservative party now with how it was seen back in 2003, it hasn’t changed to a great extent - people think it has a better team of leaders (39% think so, compared to 22% back in 2003), is more competent (43% now compared to 32% in 2003) and is more united (46% compared to 32%), but in things like whether the Conservative party cares about the problems of ordinary people, shares peoples values, is honest and trustworthy or understands normal peoples lives, the improvement is far more meagre.
Next year should see the Conservatives start to wheel out the results of their policy reviews and, presumably, start to actually adopt some of them as party policy. This may improve matters for them - a YouGov poll in October asking what the main problems were with the Tory party found that the most cited reason they weren’t doing better was that people didn’t know what a Cameron government would actually do. At the same time it will force difficult decisions upon them and risks upsetting either the party’s traditional supporters or the centrist swing voters they are seeking to appeal to.
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Liberal Democrats
Any way you cut it the Liberal Democrats are substantially down in support compared to last year. In 2005 their average support in all the polls was 21%, in 2006 it was 18.5%. This is the lowest since 2001 - and back then the figure was dragged down by unprompted MORI and Gallup polls which underestimated the true Lib Dem level of support. The comparable figures for the last Parliament were 21.9% in 2004, 22.6% in 2003 and 20% in 2002 (which also lends the lie to the automatic assumption that the Lib Dems always put on a couple of percentage points during the General Election campaign, so low figures now do not matter. They do indeed tend to improve during election campaigns compared to their figures immediately prior to the campaign - it doesn’t follow that they improve compared to their mid-term figures, in fact their share of the vote in 2005 was almost the same as their mid-term support in 2003.)
Exactly how badly the Lib Dems are doing in terms of support is unclear - the December polls have all shown the Liberal Democrats substantially down, with support between 14% and 18%. but there have been consistent differences between how much Lib Dem support different pollsters report. While the main polling companies don’t tend to produce a wide variation in support for the Conservatives or Labour they have done for the Liberal Democrats, with YouGov on average showing the Lib Dems three points lower than ICM and MORI do (Populus produce figures somewhere inbetween the two extremes). This means at some points in the year ICM have shown them only marginally down on their general election performance while YouGov have shown them struggling. The methodological reasons for the difference are unclear, but with even ICM showing them 5 points down on the general election the trend seems clear.
The reason for the Lib Dem malaise isn’t certain, primarily because David Cameron’s election as Conservative leader and Charles Kennedy’s removal as Lib Dem leader were so close together it is difficult to separate out their effects. On one hand Cameron’s attempts to appeal to Lib Dem voters could have been successful to some extent, squeezing the Lib Dem vote. On the other hand, their drop in support could be a result of poor public perceptions of Sir Menzies Campbell. Compared to the consistently highly positive poll ratings achieved by Charles Kennedy, Campbell’s ratings have been mediocre. The more experienced and statesmanlike Campbell was expected to be a more Prime Ministerial figure than Kennedy, at times derided for his light-entertainment appearances. In reality Charles Kennedy consistently scored in the high-teens on the question of who would make the best Prime Minister, on occassion equalling the Conservative leader, in contrast Campbell has often struggled to achieve more than 6 or 7%. The decrease in Lib Dem support could be because the Conservatives have gained at their expense and the party has received less media coverage as the race between the two main parties becomes more competitive, or it could be due to Campbell. At present it’s impossible to say - newspapers don’t really bother to conduct polls about the Liberal Democrats, there aren’t Lib Dem equivalents of Compass commissioning polls, we just don’t know.
To what extent the low poll rating is a problem for the Liberal Democrats is a different question. Judging how well or badly the Conservatives or Labour are doing is a relatively simple matter - uniform swing is a pretty decent guide to the number of seats Labour or the Conservatives would win at an election and their aim is to get a high enough share of the vote to form the next government. What the aim of the Liberal Democrats is less certain, and it’s far less easy to tell how well they doing. The old dictim that all politics is local is especially true in the case of the Liberal Democrats - they managed to win the Dunfermline by-election despite being without a leader and languishing as low as 13% in the polls. At the last general election the Lib Dem change in the vote in individual seats was the least uniform of the three main parties. In 1997 the Lib Dems saw their share of the vote fall, but more than doubled their number of MPs. While the polls show their support is down it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will see their number of seats reduced at the next election - that doesn’t mean however that there won’t be internal ructions within the party if their support falls any lower.
Welcome back! In the next couple of days I’ll be putting up some articles looking at how the polls have fared for the three main political parties over the last year and what they are indicating for the year ahead. In the meantime, here’s a round up of polls that have crept out over the Christmas period.
Communicate Research’s monthly poll in the Independent has voting intentions (with changes from last month) of CON 36% (+2), LAB 37% (+1), LDEM 14%(-3). The poll was conducted back on the 19th-20th December, so isn’t actually more recent than the pre-Christmas polls. As ever it is worth pointing out that Communicate do not use any political weighting in their polls, so compared to pollsters like ICM and Populus they will tend to produce figures that are more favourable to Labour - hence the Labour party lead in their last two polls.
It isn’t the first time that Communicate have produced such a low level of support for the Liberal Democrats either, but the polls in December have all been poor for the Lib Dems. YouGov’s last poll had them down at 15%, Populus down 1 to 19% and both MORI and ICM (the pollster whose methodology normally produces the strongest Lib Dem figures) down 2 to 18%. I’m always slightly dubious about how much weight to put on polls done in the immediate run up to Christmas, as most of this month’s were - in the same way that bank holiday weekends make it difficult to get a high quality sample, I’m sure that the Christmas shopping rush must have some impact on the quality of samples. The Lib Dems may yet pop back up in next month’s polls. If not it could be worrying trend for them.
Just before Christmas there were also some Christmassy polls from Populus and ICM. Populus found that 47% of people said they would be going to church over Christmas - in what the Times suggests is a cracking example of people not being strictly honest with pollsters - actual head counts at church services suggest that only around 6% of the adult population actually went to a church service last Christmas Eve or Christmas Day (though looking at the Populus question, it doesn’t look as though they specified Christmas Eve/Day, so respondents may well have been thinking of carol services and similar in the run up to Christmas). 81% of people told Populus they thought children should be encouraged to believe in Father Christmas, apparantly up from 70% in 2004.
An ICM poll for the Guardian found 54% of people saying they would attend a religious service at some point over the Christmas period. The survey included some wider questions on religion, reporting that only 33% of people considered themselves to be religious, with 63% saying they were not - including more than half of those describing themselves as Christian.
YouGov’s December poll has the Conservative lead down marginally at 4 points, the full topline figures with changes from last month’s are CON 37%(nc), LAB 33%(+1), LDEM 17%(+1). The changes from last month are insignificant in themselves, but over the longer term there seems to be a slight weakening in the Conservative lead in YouGov’s polls, down from the regular leads of around 7 points in the summer (this is in contrast to ICM, who are now reporting larger leads than they did earlier in the year).
On the “forced choice” question - asking all respondents to chose whether they would prefer a Conservative government led by David Cameron or a Labour government led by Gordon Brown - Cameron’s lead is up to 13%. This is a somewhat artifical question of course, in real life people can and do vote for parties other than the main two, but provides a useful pointer as to which direction tactical voting might work in come the next general election. Amongst current Liberal Democrat voters 39% would chose a Cameron government while 31% would prefer a Brown government.
Despite Tony Blair’s interview with the police conducting the ‘loans for honours’ inquiry, the proportion of people thinking that Labour are “very sleazy and disreputable” has actually declined somewhat since it peaked after Lord Levy’s arrest in July 2006. Back then, with Lord Levy’s arrest all over the news, 69% of people thought that Labour were very sleazy and disreputable, now the figure has fallen to 58%. This is despite the fact that 64% of people thought that Labour probably did indicate in some way to potential donors that they might expect to get an honour in return.
YouGov also asked whether the government was right to halt the SFO’s investigation into British firms’ bribery in Saudi Arabia - 28% thought it was right to stop the investigation, 38% thought it was wrong to do so. 34% of people didn’t know.
MORI’s monthly poll for December is also up on their website, the topline voting intention figures are CON 37%(+2), LAB 36%(+3), LDEM 18%(-2).
The last of ICM’s monthly Guardian polls of 2006 shows the Conservatives with an 8 point lead in voting intentions. The full topline figures with changes from ICM’s last poll in the News of the World are CON 40%(+1), LAB 32%(+1), LDEM 18%(-2), although the last ICM poll in the Guardian showed only a 5 point lead - hence the Guardian’s reporting of the poll as showing an increase in the Tory lead. ICM polls have appeared quite erratic lately, with subsequent polls showing leads of 6, 10, 5 and 8 points. These are all well within the margin of error of a pretty static level of party support, but it has made it difficult to discern the Conservative lead was faltering or remaining strong. In context this poll suggests that the Conservative lead does indeed appear to be steady again after having all but disappeared after Labour’s conference back in the Autumn.
The poll was conducted at the weekend, after Tony Blair was questioned in the “loans for honours” inquiry, and the absence of any drop in Labour’s level of support suggests that the interview has not done any immediate and drastic damage to the government.
Given recent interest in the rise of “other” parties, ICM also asked respondents which other parties they might consider voting for. Around a third of Conservative and Labour supporters said they would not consider voting for any other party, of the rest 32% of current Conservative voters said they would consider voting Liberal Democrat, 19% would consider voting for the Green party and 14% UKIP. Amongst Labour voters, 30% would consider voting Lib Dem, 18% Conservative, 16% Green and 9% UKIP.
UPDATE: The tables are now on the Guardian website. The rest of the figures for which parties people might consider switching their support to are the next election show that 10% of current Conservative supporters would consider voting Labour at the next election and 8% the BNP. Amongst Labour voters 5% would consider voting for the BNP. Amongst 76% of Liberal Democrat voters say they would consider voting for another party come the general election, 32% say they would consider voting Labour, 30% Green, 18% Conservative, 8% UKIP and 4% BNP.
More from Populus’ latest poll in today’s Times. Populus found a small majority (52%) in favour of replacing Trident, with 20% saying they supported Trident in the past but don’t think it should be replaced now and 23% saying they have never supported Britain having a nuclear deterrent.
The was a very sharp contrast between the opinions of men and women - 64% of men supported the replacement of Trident, with 33% opposed. Amongst women the figures were 41% in favour, 52% opposed. YouGov found a similar contrast between men and women on attitudes towards nuclear power back in July. It looks as though nuclear weapons and power is one of those rare issues, along with things like internet pornography, embryonic research and belief in the supernatural where women and man have sharply contrasting views.
Populus’s final monthly poll of 2006 in Tuesday’s Times shows a drop in the level of Conservative support. The topline voting intention figures are CON 34% (-2), LAB 33%(nc), LDEM 19%(-1). Populus tend to show the smallest Labour lead of the main pollsters, and their Tory lead was as low as this as recently as October, but the drop in the Conservative share of the vote is more notable - they have been steady on 36% for the last four Populus polls, and this is their lowest level of support since prior to the local elections. The beneficiaries seem to be the smaller parties, with the “other” parties up to 14%, the highest level recorded by Populus since the election, including 4% for the Green party and 2% for UKIP.
The polls at the moment seem to be somewhat contradictory - the last YouGov poll also seemed to show a weakening of the Tory position, but the last poll from ICM showed them widening their lead to 8 points. With the Christmas holidays approaching I expect we will get the ICM and YouGov monthly polls earlier rather than later, which may shed some light on the situation.
Populus also asked their, now standard, question of how people would vote if Gordon Brown were Labour leader. This had appeared to show a narrowing of the Conservative lead last month, but this month seems to be back to normal - when David Cameron and Gordon Brown’s names are included in the question the Conservative lead grows to 7 points, 39% to 32%.
Populus also asked about how well people thought that Brown would perform as Prime Minister. While 57% of people said that they thought that Gordon Brown had been a good Chancellor of the Exchequer, it doesn’t necessarily translate into thinking he’ll be good at the top job. The 57% was made of up 34% of people who thought that he had been a good Chancellor, and would also be a good Prime Minister…and 23% who thought that while he made a good Chancellor, he would not make a good Prime Minister (there were 6% of people who thought that he hadn’t been a good Chancellor, but would be good as Prime Minister, the rest presumably didn’t rate him in either job).
There was a new TNS System Three poll in the Sunday Herald yesterday. The constituency vote, with changes from TNS’s last monthly poll, breaks down as CON 11%(-1), LAB 35%(-3), LDEM 14%(nc), SNP 32%(+2), GRN 3%, SSP 4% (though the Greens do not put up candidates at the constituency level, so come the actual election these voters will obviously have to go elsewhere or not vote). Regional support stands at CON 11%(+2), LAB 32%(+2), LDEM 15%(-2), SNP 30%(-3), GRN 5%(nc), SSP 4%(nc).
There doesn’t seem to be any consistent trend since the TNS poll last month - at the constituency level the figures are better for the SNP, at the regional level the figures are better for Labour. In both votes Labour and the SNP are very close to one another.
System Three continue to paint a somewhat better picture for Labour than to the other pollsters - at the constituency level System Three tend to put Labour around the mid-30s and the SNP nearer 30%; ICM and YouGov tend to do the opposite. In the regional vote System Three have put Labour at 30 or above in their last two polls, while ICM and YouGov have put them in the mid-to-high 20s. The difference between the polling companies is very likely down to ICM and YouGov using political weighting in their samples.
On a separate note, a fortnight ago The Herald reported a leaked internal Labour party poll by Populus that put the Labour party 8 points behind the SNP on both the constituency and the regional vote. No other details were given about when it was done, what adjustments were done to take account of turnout and so on. Populus are, of course, members of the BPC and, as such, I said a week or two ago that I would try and get them to disclose the full tables. The Labour party have stated that the figures were genuinely leaked without their approval and, since only the lead was disclosed and no actual figures were, Populus had decided that it probably doesn’t fall under the aegis of the disclosure rules.
Since the election have been nineteen polls asking how people would vote with Gordon Brown as Labour party leader. Populus seem to have pretty much made it one of their regular tracker questions. Every month when one is published I try to add a caveat of some sort to them saying not to worry too much about them, but how useful are they as a guide to how Gordon Brown will perform?
It is easy to see why the papers commission this question. British politics is in a strange interregnum. We all know Tony Blair is going very soon, we know that whatever policies are announced now are liable to be changed once Gordon Brown enters Number 10, whether people would vote for Tony Blair or not is pretty much irrelevant. Naturally the papers are keen to look past this to proper politics, once the new Prime Minister is in situ so are trying to do so by asking how people would vote with Brown in place.
The results have been very consistent. Labour would do badly. Since David Cameron became Conservative leader in December no hypothetical poll of how people would vote with Brown as Labour leader has shown a Labour lead. In the vast majority of cases, it has shown the Conservatives performing better against Brown than they are at present. But does this actually mean anything?
The first question is whether this is actually anything to do with Gordon Brown. Normal voting intention questions don’t mention party leaders, just the party names. Obviously if a question mentioned just Gordon Brown it would be skewed to Labour, so the hypothetical questions also mention David Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell. The difference in the results could, therefore, not be a result of Gordon Brown at all - it could be a positive result of mentioning David Cameron’s name (or a negative one of mentioning Menzies Campbell’s).
Back in July Populus sought to solve this question. Using a split sample they asked three questions - one was a normal voting intention question. The second was a voting intention question with the names of the present party leaders. The third was a hypothetical voting intention question with Gordon Brown as Labour leader. The results were that mentioning the names of David Cameron and Tony Blair also increased the Conservative lead, from 2 points in the unprompted question to 7 points in the prompted one. Changing the Labour leader from Blair to Brown further increased the Conservative lead - up to 9 points.
What this suggests is a large part of the apparant change is just the effect of mentioning David Cameron’s name in the question (or a negative result of mentioning Tony Blair’s name) but some of it is also people being less willing to vote for Brown’s Labour party than Blair’s labour party. Certainly it doesn’t suggest that Brown would increase Labour’s support relative to the Conservatives.
The second question is whether it means anything. People are not very good at predicting their future behaviour, and obviously they cannot take into account “events” that haven’t happened yet, future policies and publicity. At the moment they are judging Gordon Brown on his record as Chancellor. As yet people have no way of knowing what policies Brown will announce when he becomes premier, of how they will react to him as Prime Minister. At least, they don’t in some ways.
My personal prediction is that, when Gordon Brown actually becomes Prime Minister Labour will experience a strong boost in the polls. Obviously it depends where they are starting from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they regaining a healthy lead. There will obvious be a flurry of press coverage, TV profiles, interviews and so on. Brown will undoubtedly start his premiership by rolling out new policies and new agendas designed to boost his support. However people think they’ll react, in reality I suspect many people will want to given Gordon Brown a chance. Whatever the polls say now, I am confident that reality will be different and Brown will take Labour up in the polls, not down….in the short term.
In the longer term, once the bells and whistles of Gordon Brown’s accession have faded away, I’m afraid that the present polls probably do give a good indication of the sort of effect he will have on Labour’s fortunes. Here is why.
The polls are pretty consistent on questions of why people seem to dislike Gordon Brown. They consistently show that people rate Brown as having run the economy well, of being strong, reliable, experienced, competent and efficient. On every rational measure people rate Gordon Brown very highly, yet if you ask whether people would rather have a Brown or Cameron led government, Cameron leads. Brown’s weak point is that people think he is not charistmatic, caring or likeable. However highly they rate his performance as a politician, they don’t like him as a man.
That is why I think the present polls do say something about Brown’s future success. If they showed people didn’t like Brown because they doubted his competence or experience, or disagreed with his policies or principles, then it would be perfectly possible that Brown in office would change peoples’ opinions, impress them with his competence or change their minds with new policies and ideas. Brown’s negatives though are far more nebulous - they just don’t like him. This will be very hard to change.
Gordon Brown has been on the public stage for well over a decade. People have a very firm image of him in their minds of a dour, brooding Scotsman, and it would be incredibly difficult to shift. Perceptions of Tony Blair have changed in the last ten years, but the core impression that he is at heart a decent, fairly normal, sort of family chap is unmoved. Polls show that people think he is an untrustworthy liar, he is firmly associated with a now deeply unpopular war and seen as a poodle to an even more unpopular President. Yet polls show that people still consider him likeable. Impressions of Blair as a person haven’t shifted. The public formed an impression of William Hague as a bit of an oddball very early in his leadership and he never shifted it. Michael Howard was never able to escape the public image that Ann Widdecombe had summed up as Howard “having something of the night” about him. I have great doubts that any rebranding exercise could do anything to change perceptions of Brown’s character.
If you wish Gordon Brown success, as I am sure the majority of Labour supporters reading this do, then I am sure you are saying to yourself that this doesn’t matter. People are not so shallow as to vote on such trivialities and who is the nicest chap. I’m sure a lot of other people think the same people democracy wopuld be far healthier if everyone cast their vote based on a lengthy consideration of the rival manifestos. They do not. Most people vote on broad perceptions of the parties, and the fact is that people do not make purely rational decisions. This applies to all of us, however smart or immersed in politics we are. You cannot turn off your subconscious.
Why do companies spend so much time and money on the packaging of their goods? Because it makes people buy them. It isn’t just a case of good packaging making them look more appealing on the shelf though, good packaging changes opinions of the goods inside them. In taste tests of identical products in different packaging people will pick one over the other and believe it is on grounds of taste, there are companies devoted to it. Put margarine in foil, people think it tastes better. Put more yellow on a can of 7UP, people report that it tastes more lemony, people think that ice-cream tastes better if they’ve bought in a round box. If you ask people why they prefer that particular margarine, soft drink, ice-cream, etc they won’t say - it was in foil or a yellow can or a nice round box. They are under the impression that it is actually better.
At this point many of you reading this - possibly nearly all of you - will be thinking something along of lines of “Politics is different. You can’t just apply the logic of flogging ice lollies to selecting the head of government. People take it more seriously.”
The reason you think people look at politics differently is because you do, right now you are reading a blog about political opinion polling. It’s a long post so you’ve probably spent quite a while doing it. To you politics is far more important than fizzy drinks and margarine. You aren’t typical. Most people aren’t particularly interested in politics. Most people cannot identify politicans beyond the party leaders (Brown himself is one of the few exceptions). To most people politics isn’t that important. More importantly, we are talking about subconscious reactions. You cannot turn them on and off depending upon how important the issue is. People do think “I am only buying carrots so I shall allow my subconscious thoughts free rein” and later, “Now am I voting, so must become a dessicated calculating machine, banishing all but rational thought”. You couldn’t if you wanted to anyway.
You will probably have done the Implicit Association Test at Harvard University’s website in the past. It flashes rapid pictures and words on the screen, black faces and white faces, negative words and positive words, and sees if people are microscopically slower at associating positive words with black faces than they are with white faces. It measures your unconscious prejudice over age, gender, race and so on. If you haven’t yet tried it and you’ve got a spare 15 minutes or so do so, the chances are that you’ll find that you have some minor degree of subconscious prejudice on age, race, etc. The thing is, even if you do your level best and really concentrate on not being biased at all in the test, it is very hard to fool it. The point is, you can’t turn off your prejudices at whim. If you are prejudiced towards white people, or young people… or English people, or pleasant, likeable people (or indeed, against grouchy, insular, Scottish people) you aren’t going to turn it off.
Choosing someone to run a major international company is presumably a vitally important issue. The CEO of major companies like BP, General Motors or Microsoft arguably has more power than the heads of government of some countries. When appointing CEOs company boards presumably make decisions on things like competence and ability and not trivialities like, say, how tall they are. A third of the CEOs of the top 500 American companies are over 6′2″ tall. Under 4% of American men as a whole are over 6′2″. Presumably no company boards chose their CEO on the basis of height, but clearly there was some subconscious bias at work here.
I’ve referred to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink here before (in fact, if you’ve read it you may have spotted that some of the packaging examples and the comment about the height of CEOs are drawn from it). In his book Gladwell talks about the “Warren Harding Error”. Warren Harding is normally rated as one of the very worst American Presidents. He had an undistinguished record in Ohio politics. As a Senator he didn’t turn up for the majority of votes. He was an ill-educated, was having a long term affair with a friend’s wife and illegally drank alcohol. Despite his manifest shortcomings, Gladwell argues, he got elected because he looked like a President, a tall, handsome, patrician figure with a strong, rumbling speaking voice. Subconsciously people assumed that because Harding looked like a great President, he would be a great President. They were wrong.
People’s opinions of other people are influenced by unconscious prejudices. So are people’s votes. People consistently voice their approval of Brown’s performance in his job and say how strong, effective and competent he is. These things are clearly not the problem. The reason he polls worse than Blair, must be because he is seen as having an unattractive personality, people just don’t like him, and that will be difficult to change.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he won’t win. James Callaghan was always regarded as far more likeable than Margaret Thatcher yet she won in 1979 and twice thereafter. I do think it will be a real obstacle though. My prediction is that there will indeed be a Brown boost when he becomes leader, but that it won’t last. The public already have firm perceptions of Brown, and they won’t be easy to shift, especially when he is up against an opponent in the form of David Cameron who seems to have the exact opposite effect upon the public.
The ICM poll published in the News of the World was actually their unadjusted figures. Once ICM’s spiral of silence adjustment is taken into account the correct figures are CON 39%, LAB 31%, LDEM 20%.
Now the full figures are up on the ICM website we can compare them to ICM/News of the World poll back in February, which asked many of the same questions about Gordon Brown and David Cameron. While there have been lots of surveys asking these sort of questions on which politician would be better at this or that, there haven’t been many with comparable questions like this.
Overall perceptions of David Cameron seem to have improved and perceptions of Gordon Brown have fallen, relative to one another. In February Brown recorded a 7 point lead as the more in touch of the two men, now Cameron leads by 10 points. In February Brown had a 11 point lead on trust, now Cameron has a 5 point lead. In February Cameron had a 5 point lead on the man most likely to stop and help, he now has an 11 point lead. In February Brown had a 1 point lead as the man most likely to have a good idea, now Cameron leads by 12 points.
The ironic thing is that, despite this, Brown led Cameron in the Best Prime Minister question.
UPDATE: Looking more closely at the two polls, it looks as though Cameron may not have had a big boost after all. These questions were conducted as part of a voting intention poll, and were therefore weighted by past vote. The figures from February were not, and it doesn’t look as if they were weighted by past vote. At least part of the difference between the figures is therefore probably just down to the different weighting.
A YouGov poll in the Telegraph suggests continuing unease over ID cards and the national database, and the potential for outright refusal to co-operate with any scheme from a minority of the public.
50% of people said they were in favour of ID cards, with 39% of people opposed. This is very similar to the last two times YouGov asked the question.
Asked how much they would be willing to pay, only 11% of people said they would be willing to pay extra, although it may well be that people misunderstood the question. The wording asked how much people would be willing to pay for a combined biometic passport and ID card, given that passports currently cost £66, and I suspect some people interpreted as how much extra they would be willing to pay.
Of the 39% opposed to ID card, 25% think they will do more harm than good and 30% think they will be too expensive, but 43% say they are opposed on principle. The poll suggests that many of those people would refuse to co-operate once cards were introduced. 21% of those opposed to cards said they would refuse to have a card even if it meant paying a small fine, 7% said they would refuse even if it meant a long fine. 15% said they would refuse even if it meant a prison sentence.
This works out at about 17% of the population who say they would refuse to co-operate with the ID card scheme. Of course, a large proportion - probably a large majority - of this will turn out to be empty bravado. It is far easier to claim in a survey that you would be willing to go to prison rather than have a card than to actually go to prison. However, if even a small proportion of that 17% of people actually do stand firm then there could be a severe problem with non-compliance and media focus on “ID card martyrs” (not having an ID card will not be an imprisonable offence, but the ultimate punishment for not paying fines for not having an ID card would be).
The survey also asked about the national database that will back up the ID card system. 43% of people thought that the information held upon it would be accurate and reliable, but 48% thought it would not. 66% said they did not trust the government to keep such data confidential and 82% thought there was some danger than civil servants working on the data would divulge it improperly to others. Taking these things into consideration, 52% said they were unhappy about a national database 52%.
The survey also asked about CCTV cameras, also regularly cited in articles about increasing state surveillance, and in contrast to ID cards and the national database found strong support for them. 37% of people said that “CCTV cameras and so forth” made them feel they were being spied upon, but when asked if they approved or disapproved of CCTV in various places, approval was overwhelming. 97% of people approved of CCTV in banks, 93% on public transport, 86% outside pubs, 85% on high streets. The lowest support was for CCTV in taxis, but even then 65% of people supported it.
On other facets of the “surveillance society”, 72% supported photographing airline passengers, 56% of people supported roadside fingerprinting of alleged suspects, 50% supported speed cameras and 45% supported fingerprinting airline passengers (39% were opposed). A majority of those expressing an opinion of people (48% of people overall) were opposed to maintaining DNA records of people who have not been charged or have been acquitted, with 37% of people supporting it. The idea of using the chips within ID cards to track people’s movement met with sharp opposition - 70% said they would disapprove with only 16% approval.
Overall people are supportive, but uneasy, about increasing state surveillance. CCTV cameras have wide support, as do security provisions on flights (presumably because of memories of past terrorist atrocities). However, there are doubts about whether the national database will be secure or accurate and public attitudes towards ID cards are ambivalent – around half of respondents still support them, but a minority seem to be staunchly opposed to the extent that they claim they will be willing to break the law rather than accept them.