Ipsos-MORI’s monthly political monitor is now on their website here. The topline voting intentions, with changes from last month, are CON 47%(+2), LAB 27%(-1), LDEM 15%(-1). The poll was conducted between the 18th and 20th July.
The rest of the poll is the usual litany of bad news for the government. Their net approval rating is at minus 59, Gordon Brown’s net approval rating is minus 51. 75% of people now think that the economic conditions in the country will get worse in the next 12 months, the highest MORI have ever recorded in the 29 years they have been asking the question. Only 11% expected things to improve.
In contrast David Cameron’s net approval rating is now plus 21, with 50% approving of the way he is doing his job. This isn’t as high as Tony Blair’s best scores when he first became Leader of the Opposition (his highest rating was plus 30 in March 1995), but is the sort of rating Blair used to receive around 1996 and early 1997. On the other hand, people are evenly split 44% agree, 44% disagree on whether David Cameron is ready to be Prime Minister just yet.
MORI have repeated a question that asked a while back, seeing whether the popularity of parties ran ahead or behind their leaders. It suggests that the Conservative party now has a more positive image than the Labour party, and that while David Cameron has a positive effect on the Conservative party (54% like Cameron, compared to 42% who like his party. 19% of people say they like Cameron but not his party, with only 9% saying the opposite), Gordon Brown is a considerable drag on the Labour party (only 29% like Brown, but 39% like his party. 21% of people say they like Labour, but not Brown, only 11% say the opposite).
Mike Smithson has managed to get hold of the tables for the Progressive Scottish Opinion poll in Glasgow East.
Looking at the tables, Progressive Scottish Opinion do not appear to have used any political weighting when weighting their sample. Politically their raw sample appears to have been pretty much the same as ICM’s, whose weighting had the effective of weighting the SNP sharply downwards and the Liberal Democrats very strongly upwards. As a result, the Progressive Scottish Opinion sample contained a lot more former SNP voters, and a lot fewer Liberal Democrats than ICM’s.
It also looks as though Progressive Scottish Opinion did not make any attempt to weight or filter people by their likelihood to vote. In a contest likely to be won on a very low turnout, this is questionable. However, while turnout filtering normally works against Labour, in ICM’s Glasgow East poll it helped them - their supporters were more certain to vote than the SNP’s.
The irony is that Progressive Scottish Opinion used a methodology that should have produced significantly better figures for the SNP than ICM’s method, yet they ended up showing a larger Labour lead than ICM did.
We’ll know if either of them are close to the result on Thursday. Personally I would be dubious about reading too much into any polls of the contest: the severe social deprivation and likely atrocious turnout make this constituency a formidable challenge to pollsters.
ICM’s monthly poll for the Guardian has topline voting intention figures, with changes from their last poll, of CON 43%(-2), LAB 28%(+3), LDEM 19%(-1). The poll was conducted between the 18th and 20th July.
We’re getting some contradictory messages from the polls this month. Populus and ICM are both showing Labour recovering from their nadir, YouGov and ComRes show things pretty much as they were. Of course, it’s easy to exaggerate the differences - the broader picture is still that all are showing the Conservatives up in the 40s and Labour in the mid to high 20s.
The other questions in the poll revealed the deep pessimism over the economy that has become typical in recent polls. 61% are not confident about their finances, 60% say they are cutting spending and 80% think we are headed for recession. David Cameron and George Osborne now have a 19% lead over Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling on which team people most trust to run the economy.
For those who got excited about that 5% for the Greens in Sunday’s ComRes poll. they are at 2% in this poll.
Yesterday’s News of the World included an ICM poll of under 25s about knife crime. Considering that the British Crime Survey doesn’t include juvenile crime, and that while actual stabbing will very probably end up as recorded crime figures, people carrying knives, or waving knives about probably won’t, it gives an interesting view of exactly how widespread knife crime amongst young people is.
48% of young people thought they themselves were at risk from knife crime, with 36% disagreeing. Only 4% admitted themselves to having carried a knife “for protection”. With polls asking young people whether they have done illegal or socially unacceptable things, I often ponder whether any interviewing effect will be a positive or negative factor - will young people be embarrassed to admit to things, or will they boastfully tend to exaggerate such things? In this case the poll was conducted online, so the interviewer effect should not have been a major factor. A bigger stumbling block is that the stereotypical demographic of knife carrying youth - surly, illiterate hoodies hanging around the streets - probably aren’t the sort to have found themselves on an online panel recruited through telephone market research.
Asked if they knew other people who had carried or carry a knife, 25% of young people said they did, including 30% of under 20s. That still probably isn’t a particularly high number - ICM didn’t ask if they knew someone who habitually carried a knife, or if it was someone they knew well. Some of those yes’s could be no more than a vague aquaintance taking a knife out once to show off. More meaningful was the 11% of under 25s who said they themselves had been threatened with a knife. 37% said they knew someone who had been threatened or attacked with a knife.
Asked why they thought young people carried knives, 47% said peer pressure, 27% protection and 23% to threaten or rob people with.
There was overwhelming support (93%) for the police being able to stop and search people who they thought were carrying knives. Considering that opposition to more stop and search usually hinges on issues of targetting and racial considerations, support was not significantly lower amongst ethnic minority respondents (91%).
62% said that prison sentences would be the most effective deterrent to knife crime. 75% thought that the present sentencing guidelines for carrying a knife (a maximum sentence of 4 years plus a fine of £5000, but with no automatic prison sentence) were too soft, with 71% supporting a mandatory minimum sentence of 2 years. Asked about the idea of a 9pm curfew for under 18s, a majority (53%) were opposed. Perhaps more surprising was the proportion of young people in favour, even amongst under 20s, 35% supported the idea.
ComRes have a new poll in the Independent on Sunday. The topline voting intention with changes from the last ComRes poll are CON 45%(-1), LAB 24%(-1), LDEM 16%(-2) (the drop in support for the main parties, interestingly enough, seems to have benefited the Green party, up on 5%, hich will be interesting if it is reflected in any other polls). The poll was conducted between the 16th and 17th July.
The Tory lead is steady at 21 points, which aside from the Populus poll this month seems to be the wider picture at the moment: no change, with a Tory lead at around about twenty points.
The poll also asked people whether they agreed with the statement “The Labour Party will lose the next election regardless of who leads it”. 68% agreed with only 22% disagreeing. This doesn’t actually tell us much about what would happen if Labour did change their leader - people are not good at predicting how they would react to hypothetical events, most of the respondents to the poll probably have very little idea who people like - say - James Purnell are, let alone what he would do as PM or how they would react. What it does tell you is quite how many people think Labour have already lost the next election, a lot of people are clearly alreay writing them off.
ComRes also found 74% of people wanted troops withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible, with 18% disagreeing.
Progressive Scottish Opinion have produced a second poll for the Glasgow East by-election. As with ICM, it shows a substantial Labour lead with voting intentions of LAB 52%, SNP 35%, CON 7%, LDEM 3%. The poll was conducted between the 14th and 17th July, and interviewed 509 people.
Progressive Scottish Opinion are not registered with the BPC, so they are not obliged to publish results. Some people get very sniffy about pollsters who aren’t registered with the BPC. It should be pointed out that membership of the BPC isn’t compulsory - it’s a voluntary agreement between the pollsters who produce high profiles polls for the media agreeing to publish their tables and answer questions. Companies outside it are often perfectly reputatable companies, often highly experienced, working inside MRS rules and codes of conduct. There’s nothing stopping them releasing their tables either if they wish to (hint!)
The downside is we don’t know things such as how the poll dealt with turnout, or don’t knows, what weighting they used and so on. We don’t though if they faced the same problems ICM did getting a representative sample. Thus while it seems likely that this poll is backing up ICM’s findings and showing a substantial lead, we can’t be certain that it isn’t just using some form of methodology that is more generous to Labour.
Last weekend the Sunday Telegraph published an ICM poll conducted in Glasgow East showing Labour ahead by 14 points. It’s a good lead, but a lot of people seem unconvinced by the poll. Let’s look at the reasons.
Firstly, the weighting of the poll. Some people have flagged up that on the unweighted figures Labour are only 4 points ahead of the SNP. This is irrelevant - the unweighted figures are skewed, even before we get to the politics they contained far too many people in social classes AB, and far too few people in social class D.
A few people have raised the question of the political weighting. ICM base their target weights on the last general election result, from back in 2005. Some people have worried whether respondents might have actually answered with how they voted in the Scottish elections in 2007, when the SNP did better. If that were the case, ICM should have weighted past SNP voters to a higher point. Confusion between the two past elections is a possible cause of a higher level of false recall than is usual, but ICM do specify in their question that they want to know how people voted at “the last General Election in May 2005″, they don’t just say last election, and they do assume some level of false recall anyway. There’s no way to rule out this factor, but neither is there any evidence to suggest it is affecting the result.
What the weighting does flag up is how unrepresentative the raw sample was. The proportion of people who owned their homes outright was twice what it should have been, the proportion of ABs in the sample was well over twice the proportion there really is in Glasgow East. At the most extreme extent, only 1% of the original sample voted Lib Dem in 2005 and they needed to be weighted up by a factor of 6 to get to the correct proportion.
None of this is a great surprise - the levels of severe social deprivation is some parts of Glasgow East are going to make them very difficult indeed to accurately poll. The more a sample relies upon weighting to make it representative though, the less robust the results are, and they weren’t actually very robust to start with: the sample size of the poll was 516, but once non-voters and some of the don’t knows were taken out, the final figures were based on 373 respondents, so we have a margin of error of 5% or so anyway.
There is also the issue of ICM’s reallocation of don’t knows, which boosted Labour’s lead from 11 points to 14 points. Normally this is a sound adjustment based on how people have behaved at past general elections. We cannot, however, have the same confidence that they behave that way in by-elections, and at Crewe and Nantwich it made ICM’s figures less accurate, not more so.
So, should we trust ICM’s figures? Well, there isn’t anything wrong with what ICM have done, it is just a very difficult contest to poll, as evidenced by the small sample size and the extreme weighting ICM were forced to resort to. While the large margin of error and sample problems should make us slightly wary, a 14 point lead is very substantial. The biggest caveat is probably the least technical - a poll is only a snapshot, and it was conducted with two weeks of the campaign still to go. Even if Labour were 14 points ahead a week ago, it doesn’t follow that they’ll still be there next week.
Today’s Guardian reports an ICM poll from last week that showed that British voters would overwhelmingly prefer to see Barack Obama as the next President of the USA, by 55% to 11% for John McCain.
I’ve seen a couple of polls ask about this (it’s also tracked on the Phi5000 figures on PoliticsHome) and the pattern is pretty consistent. To some extent is will be a result of hostility towards the Republican President Bush, but British people do tend to be considerably less right right than Americans, so it should be no surprise that a majority back the Democrat candidate.
Back in March YouGov did a big parallel study of opinion of people in the UK and the USA, which showed the differences and similarities between public opinion in the two countries. Some of the similarities were actually more surprising than the differences. Despite the USA being a nation of immigrants, there was no particular contrast in attitudes towards immigration - Americans don’t seem to be anymore welcoming to other countries’ tired, poor or huddled masses than British people are: 26% of Brits thought immigration had helped the economy, 25% of Americans did; 70% of Brits thought immigrants had taken jobs that should be being done by British people, 64% of Americans thought similar.
On the environment, the image of the USA as a nation of climate change deniers seems largely unfounded. American respondents were more likely to think that there was no global warming at all (18% compared to 7% of Brits), but British people were more likely to think it was nothing to do with mankind (25% to 19%) so the proportions of people believing in manmade global warming were not vastly different (55% in the UK, 49% in the USA). Asked about environmental policies attitudes toward subsidies for environmentally friendly energy, nuclear power or (amazingly, given the American love of big cars) increased petrol taxes were almost identical - only on airline taxes were the US far more hostile.
The biggest surprise similarity though was the death penalty, which proved only marginally more popular in the USA than the UK. 74% of British people supported the death penalty for some (53%) or all (21%) murders. 76% of Americans supported the death penalty for some (50%) or all (26%) murders.
If those are the similarities, where are we different? Attitudes towards withdrawing troops from Iraq were much the same: 35% of British people wanted troops out this year, 36% of Americans wanted troops out this year. This similarity though masks far more hawkish foriegn policies attitudes in the USA in general. In Afghanistan 42% of Brits wanted withdrawal this year, but only 28% of Americans did. On Iran, 26% of British people would countenance military action to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapons, 46% of Americans would.
Amongst the public the special relationship between the UK and USA seems rather unrequited. British respondents are equivocal about it - 46% would like it to be fairly close or very close, 46% would like it to be not very close or not close at all. For American respondents 78% would like it to be close, only 9% not very close or not close at all.
There was not a huge contrast in attitudes towards the level of tax and spending (though the US was more polarised) but when asked who any tax cuts should benefit there was against a contrast - US respondents wanted to see then go to the middle classes rather than the poor (35% to 20%), UK respondents would rather they were concentrated on the poor (38% to 21%). On welfare too Americans tended to be more right wing. If people are made redundant British voters think it is the responsiblity of the government (38%) or the company (35%) to look after them, in the US, people tend to think it is the worker’s own responsibility (36%), with only 17% thinking the government should. Another contrast was free trade vs protectionism - British respondents favoured free trade by 52% to 30%, US respondents tended to think free trade was a bad thing, by 55% to 31%.
Some things were less predictable - people in the US seem to be *less* comfortable with big business and successful businessmen, when one might expect it to be the other way round. On the other hand, they were more likely to see the profit motive as a good thing - suggesting is particular businesses and the influence they wield on politics that they have problems with, not capitalism per se.
All the differences above, however, pale into insignificance compared to the biggest difference - attitudes towards religion and moral issues. Only 39% of British respondents believed in God, compared to 80% of American respondents. On top of that, those who are religious are MORE religious - only 21% of that 39% of Brits who believe in God said it was very important to their life, 53% of the 80% of believers in America did.
A paltry 5% of British people think sex outside marriage is a sin, 33% of Americans think so. 54% of Americans believe in hell, only 16% of British people do. 63% of British people accept the theory of evolution, 23% believe in creationism or intelligent design. Only 30% of Americans believe in evolution, 59% believe in creationism or intelligent design. 40% of Americans think homosexuality is a sin, only 26% think it is perfectly acceptable. In the UK the figures are 13% and 46% respectively.
On more political grounds, 76% of British people think abortion should be legal in all circumstances, or with only limited restrictions like a time limit. Only 48% of Americans agree, with 48% thinking it should be totally banned, or banned apart from extreme circumstances such as the life of the mother being in danger.
We shouldn’t be surprised the more left wing of the two candidates in the USA is preferred by British people, since in terms of things like welfare, foreign policy, taxation and, most of all, moral and religious issues, America is far to the right of the UK.
The monthly YouGov poll for the Sunday Times has topline voting intention figures, with changes from YouGov’s last poll, of CON 47%(+1), LAB 25%(-3), LDEM 18%(+3). The poll was conducted on the 10th and 11th July.
It looks like a drop for Labour, but the comparisons above are from YouGov’s last Telegraph poll, which itself showed an increase for Labour and drop for the Lib Dems. These figures are identical to the YouGov poll before that, suggesting that the bigger picture for voting intention polls is one of no change.
UPDATE: The Sunday Times got the figures wrong! The actual voting intentions were CON 47%(+1), LAB 25%(-3), LDEM 16%(+1).