Two new polls in Saturday’s papers show Labour back in the lead as the “Brown boost” takes effect. A YouGov poll in the Telegraph has headline figures, with changes from the last YouGov poll, of CON 35% (-2), LAB 38% (+3), LDEM 15% (+1). An ICM poll in the Guardian has CON 35% (-2), LAB 39% (+7), LDEM 18% (-3).
The boost in Labour support from Gordon Brown’s accession to the premiership is clear in both polls, both of which were presumably conducted in the days immediately following Brown becoming Prime Minister while he was recieving blanket news coverage. The important questions in the weeks ahead will be firstly - how high will Labour support peak? Will these polls carried out during the euphoria of Brown’s accession be their high watermark, or is there more yet to come?
Secondly, how long will the honeymoon last? Is it just a publicity boost that will fade almost immediately, like the boost in Labour ratings that accompanied Tony Blair’s final conference speech, will it last the summer, or into the new year, or will it be a step change leading to permanently higher Labour support?
Thirdly, when the boost from Brown’s accession subsidies, whether that be next week, next month or next year, where will it settle? Will Labour retain a lead, if not, will the Tory lead be bigger, smaller or the same as with Tony Blair?
Finally, will the Conservatives and the Lib Dems keep their nerve? They are both going to see their support squeezed over the next weeks or months as Labour ride high in the polls. Will their politicians dismiss it as the natural and temporary result of the publicity surrounding Labour’s new leader, or will they start panicing and agitating against their leaders? We shall see.
There is a new YouGov poll in today’s Economist - it was carried out prior to Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister, so we still await the first opinion poll actually conducted with Brown in office.
YouGov asked about whether people thought a Brown or Cameron government would or would not do a number of things. Looking at taxation first, Brown still has the reputation as a tax raiser: 53% think taxes will go up with him as PM, 31% think they’ll stay the same and only 2% think they will fall. That said, only 16% of people think Cameron will cut taxes (though of course, Cameron himself has repeatedly said the the Conservatives will be putting other considerations before tax cuts, so even that 16% may be people who are putting hope about expectation) and 35% think he would also increase taxes.
Having been custodian of the economy for the last ten years, Gordon Brown was unsurprisingly seen as likely to strengthen Britain’s economy by more people (38%) than David Cameron (27%). More surprisingly though, given the prominence Cameron has given to the issue since becoming Conservative leader, Brown and Cameron are equal on the issue of climate change (31% think Brown will help cut climate change, 34% think he won’t. 28% think Cameron will, 31% think he won’t, so they both have a net score of -3).
On every other issue Cameron is seen as likely to deliver by more people, though in most cases Cameron’s lead in the proportion of people who think he will deliver is small, and the real difference in the proportion of people who think they won’t. 26% of people think Brown will improve the NHS, 47% think he won’t - a net score of -21. 27% of people think Cameron will improve the NHS, 41% think he won’t - a net score of -14. On improving schools Brown’s net score is -16, Cameron’s -5. On protecting British interests in Europe Brown’s score is -8, Cameron’s is +5. On reducing immigration Brown’s score is -40, Cameron’s is +11.
The increasingly positive poll ratings that Gordon Brown is receiving elsewhere suggest that people wish him well and are willing to give him a chance, but these figures suggest that they don’t actually have very high expectations of him and in most cases think David Cameron is actually more likely to deliver. That isn’t necessarily a huge problem for Gordon Brown at the moment - he’s going to be riding high in the polls anyway and low expectations are easier to meet and easier to out-perform. He needs to make sure however, that by the that the public goodwill towards the new man in the job has faded, he has done something to convince the public he is more likely to deliver than David Cameron.
As mentioned below, the voting intention figures in the YouGov poll for Sky News were actually prompted using the names of the party leaders, so aren’t comparable to normal voting intention figures (though they do tell an interesting story in themselves, showing Labour doing better with Brown - only 1 point behind the Conservatives - than under Blair, where they would have had a 2 point defecit. Aside from the voting intention question, which I have a horrible feeling will be bandied about far and wide without the caveats that it isn’t using comparable wording, there are some other interesting questions in the survey.
Public expectations are now that Brown is more likely to be Prime Minister after the next election than David Cameron (by 41% to 29%). YouGov asked whether it was a good or a bad thing to be the ‘heir to Blair’ - 45% of people thought it bad, with only 14% saying it was a plus. Bad news for David ‘heir to Blair’ Cameron then? Well, no, because only 15% see Cameron as the ‘heir to Blair’ compared to 34% thinking Brown is his heir. Whatever the stylistic resemblence between Cameron and Blair, it still appears to be Brown who needs to shake off his luggage.
YouGov then asked about party preference on a number of policy areas, Brown’s Labour party had a large lead on the economy (41% to 23%) and has moved back ahead on the NHS (32% to 25%) and education (31% to 27%). Cameron’s Conservatives were narrowly ahead on the environment (26% to 24%) and foreign affairs (26% to 25%). Incidentally, the question wording makes a significant difference here - we’ve seen in YouGov polls over the last few years that the Conservatives and Labour are pretty much even on the economy when you ask about the parties. If you ask about whether people trust Gordon Brown or David Cameron more on the economy though - the leaders rather than the parties - Brown wins hands down.
YouGov also asked if people thought it would be a good idea for Brown to bring politicians from other political parties into his government. Only 29% of people though that it would be good for him to bring in Conservative politicians, with 42% thinking it a bad idea. A majority of Labour voters thought it a bad idea - Tory voters were split 38% against, 39% in favour (presumably they were thinking of them serving as Conservatives - not defecting Quentin Davies style!). Asked if it would be a good idea to bring Lib Dem politicians into the government, 34% of people thought it would be a good idea, 35% a bad idea…but interestingly a plurality of Labour voters (42%) and a majority of Liberal Democrats (58%) approved of the idea.
The Privy council approved the new Parliamentary boundaries a fortnight ago, meaning they officially come into force today. From now on any general election would be fought on the new Parliamentary boundaries. By-elections in this Parliament - such as the forthcoming ones at Ealing Southall and, by all accounts, Sedgefield will continue to be fought on the old boundaries. UKPollingReport’s guide to all the new constituencies is here.
Sky News have released a new YouGov poll showing voting intentions of CON 37%, LAB 36%, LDEM 12%(!). It appears to be the lowest Conservative lead in a YouGov poll since last September, and the lowest level of Liberal Democrat support in any poll since 2001…except, it isn’t actually a standard voting intention poll.
Look carefully at the Sky News report which says “the survey shows a swing of four and a half percentage points upwards since a similar YouGov poll three months ago.” It’s referring to the last time YouGov asked a voting intention question giving the party leaders in the question, since that’s also what this question did. Lib Dem supporters can breathe a sigh of relief!
But, given that these sort of hypothetical polls usually produce a larger Conservative lead once Gordon Brown is mentioned, does this mean that Labour would have been ahead in a normal voting intention poll? Not necessarily - when the polls were asked before I always used to have to repeat the same old caveats about it being a purely hypothetical poll and about how Brown becoming PM would undoubtedly be accompanied by loads of positive publicity and eye-catching announcements. Well, Brown is now Labour leader and I have no doubt that it will have changed his image - is he an electoral negative anymore? Could he be an electoral positive when mentioned in a question these days? We don’t know. One sign that he might be an electoral plus for Labour at the moment is that when YouGov ask the same question with Blair as leader, Labour perform less well - a reverse from the position a few months ago.
More to come later once the tables are up.
Communicate’s monthly poll for the Independent is out. The headline figures with changes from their poll last month are CON 37%(+2), LAB 32%(+1), LDEM 18%(-1). The poll was conducted between the 22nd and 24th June, so fieldwork would have been conducted after Gordon Brown’s job offer to Liberal Democrat lords, and just after the end of hte European summit that agreed the new treaty.
The poll clearly isn’t telling the same story as the recent MORI poll - Communicate still have a reputation for being somewhat erratic, but they have adopted past vote weighting in recent months so their polls should be more stable. There isn’t yet any clear “Brown boost” here, if anything the Conservatives are recovering - though I hasten to add that the movements are not large enough to be significant.
The picture in the polls seem somewhat confusing at the moment - with some polls showing Labour continuing to catch the Conservatives (or in the case of MORI, overtake them), others showing them faultering, or the Tories moving ahead again. The broader picture is still one of the Conservative lead falling compared to a couple of months back - as should be expected given Labour’s change of leader and the attendent publicity, but beyond that we seem to be in a period of flux. We should be having a feast of polls over the next week or two to herald the arrival of the new Prime Minister, so hopefully we’ll end up with a clearer picture…though I wouldn’t bank on it.
No, not all in the same poll, but a few new polls from the last couple of days. An ICM poll for BBC Wales has found support for a “rainbow coalition” to govern Wales. 41% of respondents backed a coalition between Plaid Cymru, the Conservatives and Lib Dems, compared to 28% favouring a Labour/Plaid deal and 21% supporting a Labour/Lib Dem coalition.Rhodri Morgan remained the most popular choice for First Minister. In a straight choice between Ieuan Wyn Jones and Rhodri Morgan, 48% preferred Morgan to 34% for Jones. Finally, 47% said they would be in favour of giving the Welsh Assembly full law making and tax raising powers, 44% would be against.
Next up, we are yet to see the first voting intention poll since the controversy over Gordon Brown’s offer of cabinet seats to the Liberal Democrats, but Populus’s weekly poll for the Daily politics contained one question about it - 34% of people said they would be more likely to support Gordon Brown if he included Liberal Democrats in his government, 55% said they would not.
Finally Slugger O’Toole has details of a new poll in Northern Ireland showing 54% of people favoured Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK (including 22% of Catholics), with 30% supporting a united Ireland.
An Ipsos-MORI poll in the Observor tomorrow records the first Labour lead in any poll since December last year. The headline figures with changes from MORI’s poll last month are CON 36% (-1), LAB 39% (+4), LDEM 15% (-3).
On the surface there appears to have been a significant switch from the Lib Dems to Labour - along with ICM MORI tend to give the highest level of support for the Liberal Democrats, and the figure of 15% is the lowest in a MORI poll since the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kennedy’s resignation. It is perhaps tempting to associate the shift with the recent fuss over Gordon Brown’s offer of government jobs to Liberal Democrat peers, but I don’t yet know when the fieldwork for this poll was conducted. If it is MORI’s monthly face-to-face poll, the turn-around is often slower than phone polls and the chances are it was wholly or partially conducted before the story broke - potentially ruling out the story as a possible cause.
I expect a large number of polls over the next week or so to coincide with Gordon Brown’s accession to the premiership. MORI’s figures tend to be a bit more volatile than the other pollsters. so we may or may not see this shift reflected in other polls - it’s likely however that we will get a pretty good idea over the next couple of days as to exactly how large the “Brown boost” in the polls is!
UPDATE: The fieldwork was indeed conducted prior to the news about Gordon Brown’s approaches to the Lib Dems, so there can be no connection between the figures and the story.
UPDATE 2: Ralph in my comments below has been perusing the full tables on MORI’s website here. The recalled past vote in this poll (i.e. the way people said they voted at the last election) was Conservative 20%, Labour 35%, Lib Dems 11%, other 4%, didn’t vote 25%. In MORI’s poll last month it was Conservative 20%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 14%, other 5%, didn’t vote 23%.
In other words, a poll that found Labour up four percent apparantly contained three percentage points more previous Labour supporters than last month’s poll to begin with; the same poll found the Lib Dems down three percent, and had started out with a sample containing three percentage points fewer former Lib Dem voters. “Co-incidence?” asked Ralph - well, what can you say?
It doesn’t invalidate the findings thorugh. In fact, we have no way of knowing whether MORI have just had the misfortune of ending up with a sample that was particularly heavy with Labour supporters and light with Lib Dems, resulting in a misleading apparant shift in support, or whether there has been a genuine shift in support that means that people are more willing to admit that they voted Labour in the past. It could be that both samples are pretty much the same, and that people’s willingness to admit to voting Labour in the past has changed. We really don’t know, and it is one of the dividing lines in polling at the moment - companies like ICM and Populus think that recall of past vote is pretty stable, and when they do polls they weight them so they are always made up of the same proportions of past Labour, past Conservative and past Lib Dem voters. MORI think that levels of false recall can change, so don’t use this sort of weighting.
Two very similar new polls about the European Union in advance of the newly negotiated EU treaty - ICM for Open Europe and YouGov for Paul Sykes’s Speak Out campaign.
Both polls show around half the public think that the EU already has too much power (in slightly differently worded questions YouGov found 59% thought the EU had too much power, ICM found 49%). Few people (6% in YouGov’s poll and 15% in ICM’s) thought the EU should have greater powers.
Both also found an overwhelming majority in favour of a referendum if the new treaty gives extra powers to the EU - 78% in YouGov’s poll and 86% in ICM’s.
ICM asked how people would vote in a referendum on a treaty that “gives more powers to the EU” - 65% said they would vote against, with only 26% voting in favour. YouGov’s question was slightly more subtle - only 4% said they would vote in favour, 40% said they would vote against, 45% said it would depend upon the exact details of the treaty. This is actually an interesting result, and one that shows the difficulty facing the government in trying to win any such referendum: 40% of people say they will vote against a European treaty almost regardless of what the actual contents are. To win a referendum, the government would need to win over the vast majority of the 45% of people who say their vote would depend on what was actually in the treaty and, presumably, are open to pursuasion.
Finally ICM asked whether it would make people less likely to vote Labour if Gordon Brown ratified the treaty without allowing a referendum. 21% of people said it wouldn’t make them less likely to vote Labour, 74% said it would. As regular readers will know, I’m not a fan of questions like this and prefer the format YouGov sometimes use were people are given the option of saying “No difference - I’ll vote Labour anyway” and “No difference - I wouldn’t vote Labour anyway”. A lot of the people answering this question and saying it would make them less likely to vote Labour wouldn’t vote Labour if hell froze over. 86% of Tory identifiers, for example, say it would make them less likely to vote Labour. In this case though, it doesn’t seem to be just Tories expressing concern - 43% of Labour identifiers also say it would “definitely” make them less likely to vote Labour. Of course, saying that to a pollster to send a message is different to actually changing your vote, but it’s worth remembering that Europe isn’t an issue that only worries Tory voters in the shires.
Today’s Channel 4 news has a new YouGov poll asking people about their perceptions of the party leaders and their parties on a left-right scale (full details here). Obviously it is easy to argue that a left-right scale is pretty arbitary and doesn’t mean much in this day and age, but questions like this are very useful in measuring how close people think parties and politicians are to themselves and who is closest to the “centre ground”. More importantly, since YouGov have previously asked the same question in April 2005 and February and September 2006, it lets us see how perceptions of the parties are changing.
Respondents were asked to rate politicans and parties on a scale of “very left-wing”, “fairly left-wing”, “slightly left of centre”, “centre”, “slightly right of centre”, “fairly right-wing” and “very left-wing”, but YouGov have converted into a numerical scale so we can get average results for each politician/party.
The average respondent puts themself at +1, so almost bang on centre. David Cameron is at +33 (the score YouGov gave to “slightly right of centre”), marginally more centrist than last year when he scored +35 and +34 and significantly more centrist than his predecessor Michael Howard was in 2005 (+53). However, despite Cameron being more centrist, he has barely shifted perceptions of the Conservative party as a whole, who have an average score of +52, compared to +50 and +53 last year. Sadly YouGov didn’t ask the question about the party in April 2005, but still being seen as just as right-wing as Michael Howard was doesn’t suggest perceptions of the Conservative party beyond Cameron himself have moved to the centre!
While perceptions of Cameron and the Conservatives have remained static since last year, views of Gordon Brown and Labour have shifted…or more to the point, they have swapped places. In February 2006 the Labour party as a whole scored an average of -27 on the scale, with Gordon Brown seen as somewhat more centrist at -21. In September 2006 perceptions of Brown and the Labour party in general were almost identical. The latest figures show Labour on an average of -22, but Brown on -26. Strangely enough, Brown is now seen as more left-wing than the Labour party in general are.
Contrasted to Tony Blair of course neither man can stake claim to the centre ground, in February 2006 Blair had an average score of +5. The 2005 election was a contest between a leader bang in the centre of politics against a leader seen out on the right. Now we approach a contest between two leaders seen as respectively slightly to the right and slightly to the left of centre. The difference between them is that Cameron is seen as the centrist leader of a more right wing party, while Brown is seen as slightly to the left of his centre-left party.