The full tables for the YouGov/Sunday Times poll are up on their website here. Questions today are, unsurprisingly, largely about the two cabinet politicians under clouds – Ken Clarke and Chris Huhne. The most interesting (and worrying for the government) finding however is about crime.
Asked whether the current government is more tough or less tough on crime than the last Labour government, 30% think the coalition is less tough on crime than the last government compared to only 9% who think it is tougher (43% think they are much the same). Even amongst Conservative supporters only 20% think the government is being tougher on crime than Labour were.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Labour have become the public’s perferred party on crime. YouGov regularly ask people which party they would best handle the main issues, and the Conservatives retain a strong lead over Labour. There are various ways to explain this apparent paradox, but my guess is that the difference is between the Conservative party’s long-term reputation for being tougher on crime, and people’s short-term opinion of what they’ve seen of the coalition so far. Right now people are saying that generally speaking they trust the Tories more on crime… but that the coalition so far has been weak on the issue. If that perception persists, then it will start to eat away at the Conservative party’s reputation on crime.
On crime policy itself, there is widespread opposition to the idea of increasing the maximum sentence discount for pleading guilty early to 50%. Only 26% of people support the idea, compared to 62% opposed. There is even less support for reduced sentences for people who plead guilty to more serious crimes like rape, where sentence discounts are supported by only 13%.
Notice, however, that public opinion is not always blanket opposition to anything that reeks of shorter sentencing. YouGov found more a more balanced split in opinion over whether there should be more use of community sentences rather than short prison sentences for minor crimes (41% supported it, 45% opposed).
That brings us to the first of our politicians in trouble – Ken Clarke. 64% of people thought that Ken Clarke was wrong to draw a distinction between different types of rape, however, only 32% of people thought that he should resign over his comments. Note that this is significantly lower than when YouGov asked should Ken resign earlier in the week for the Sun – perhaps as a result of Clarke apologising and the media narrative become somewhat less opposed to him in the 24 hours between the two polls.
Turning to Chris Huhne, 62% of people think that the allegations against him are probably true, 58% think it is reasonable to investigate them despite the passage of time since 2003, 79% think that getting someone else to take points on their licence is a serious offence. However, despite all this people are broadly evenly split on Huhne’s future – 37% think he should resign, 35% think he should not.