Poll Watch: Three New Polls Indicate Conservative Lead Growing After Labour's Budget

There are three new polls available tonight which will be published in tomorrow's papers; they all show a post-budget swing towards the Conservatives.

For The Sun YouGov has Conservatives 39% (up 2%) | Labour 32% (no change) | Liberal Democrats 18%(down 1%).

Meanwhile in The Independent, ComRes has Conservatives 37% (no change) | Labour 30% (down 2%) | Liberal Democrats 20% (up 1%).

Finally in The Daily Express, newcomer Opinium has Conservatives 38% (up 1%) | Labour 28% (down 2%) | Liberal Democrats 16% (up 1%).

YouGov’s daily poll for The Sun gives a seven point lead, up from five in YouGov's Sunday Times poll and equalling the highest they have given the Conservatives this month. ComRes show the Conservatives unchanged, but Labour dropping two since the end of last month. Opinium have a ten point Conservative lead.

The changes themself are not big, but every poll since the budget has shown a trend back towards the Conservatives. There seems little doubt that the budget has shifted things back towards the Conservatives, at least a little. The question now is whether it a lasting shift in public opinion, or whether it is just a brief downwards blip for Labour that will pass as new events take over the political news agenda.

Poll Watch: A Tale of Two Polls

Two new opinion polls suggest the general election will conclude with a hung parliament, although the polls are interpreted as conflicting stories.

A YouGov tracker for The Sun shows the Coservative lead boosted back to seven points, wit changes from the YouGov poll in The Sunday Times.

Conservatives 39% (+2) | Labour 32% (-3) | Liberal Democrats 17% (n/c)

Meanwhile a ComRes for The Independent, with changes from their last poll in mid February, give the Conservative lead at five points.

Conservatives 37% (-1) Labour 32% (+2) Liberal Democrats 19% (-1)

This suggests that Labour would remain the largest party.

This weekend, I was in Brighton, for the Conservative spring conference, at the Hilton Brigton Metropole. I had a really good time - and the general mood seemed to be much better than at Manchester, where a gloom reigned, as we recognised the scale of the task ahead, last autumn - but doubtlessly not because of the front page of The Sunday Times, which was outside my bedroom door as I emerged for breakfast; it read: "Gordon Brown on course to win election".


The Sunday Times had a poll which narrowed the Conservative lead to just two percentage points, with changes from the previous weeks poll.

Conservatives on 37% (-2) | Labour on 35% (+2) | Liberal Democrats 17% (n/c).
Because of the way our electoral system works and the way constituency boundaries have been drawn this would bizzarly give labour the largest number of seats if repeated at a General Election - ado those who say that changing the voting system is the answer to making it fairer, under the proposed Alternative Vote method Labour wound notfind themselves as a minority administration, they would likely as not have a majority.

In the end Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report concludes:

"It appears from this that the weekend poll was most likely an outlier, and that the Conservatives had a lead of about 6 points or so all along. Polls on the fringes of the margin of error are unavoidable, the benefit of daily polling is at least that we only have to wait 24 hours to identify them.

"Of course, in theory it is possible that Labour did narrow the gap before the weekend, but that David Cameron pulled it back over the weekend (or perhaps more likely, that it was a mixture of the two with a genuine narrowing of the lead, exaggerated by random sample error) – the reality is that we’ll never know."

He is probably right, together with the fact that Politics Home's Eletoral Index suggests that the swing at the next General Election is not going to be uniform. Time will reveal all.

GE2010: General Election Summary Day #12

More progress for the Welsh Conservatives. A YouGov poll last night for ITV Wales had the Conservatives on 32% (Up 1% point), Labour on 35% (Up 1% point), Liberal Democrats 13% (down 1% point) and Plaid Cymru 13 (down 1% point). That would mean nine more Conservative MPs from Wales if translated into a uniform swing on election day. UKPollingReport has more (here).

Labour plan five new pledges for the General Election campaign. Gordon Brown is drafting five reasons to vote Labour and five reasons to reject the Conservatives. ConservativeHome has more (here).

Overnight, there were newspaper stories of immediate cuts from the Conservatives, cuts in the arts budget, cuts in the aid budget, cuts in middle class welfare, cuts in defence. ConservativeHome front page was plastered with it (here). However, The Economist was not satisfied (here):

"The squeezes [George Osborne] identified amounted to £7 billion ($11.4 billion) a year. In 2009-10 the deficit is £178 billion."

David Cameron underperformed at Prime Minister Questions on Wednesday. The Evening Standard (here) did not think Mr. Cameron has really been winning PMQs for a couple of months now, nor can it be said he been losing. He normally provides enough of a strong soundbite for the news bulletins and that is where his battle is to be fought.

Grant Shapps, Conservative (Welwyn Hatfield) and Shadow Housing Minister, has had a hit rate in the media which has been truely remarkable. He had a big splash in yesterday's Sun (and other newspapers) which showed that government spending on propaganda advertising was soaring in this election run-up. Labour ministers, said Mr Shapps,

"should not be raiding the taxpayers' pockets to try to keep their own seats."

Meanwhile Nick Clegg, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats told Attitude, a gay lifestyle magazine, that David Cameron was

"someone who is 'very difficult to trust' on the issue of gay rights."

I wonder if he will play as dirty in the televised debates?

Watching the media, watching us. One of the most important roles that the blogosphere can play in the election campaign is to keep an eye out for media bias. Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome knocked The Telegraph yesterday evening for a story that The Mirror would have been proud of (in fact, it was written by an ex-Mirror journalist now working for the Barclay Brothers). Iain Dale has a bigger target today. He's got the BBC's One Show in his cross-hairs for an appalling piece of anti-Conservative bias last night.

Acknowledgement: ConservativeHome | ToryDiry | 15/01/10

The Morning After the Pre-Budget Report Before.

If the chancellor had a pound for every negative verdict on his budget plans in this morning's papers, the United Kingdom's finances might be in better shape!

The Times says Alistair Darling's pre-Budget report is the latest instalment in a farcical but unfunny comedy series it dubs 'Carry On Spending'. Whilst The Daily Express reports a 'furious backlash' over an epic election spending splurge.

'Pain postponed' is the view of the Independent front page.

A Guardian editorial suggests the chancellor 'did enough... to secure a few not-entirely-awful headlines'. But that prediction is only really backed up by the Daily Mirror, the front page of which offers in tabloid style: 'Bank you Darling!'

"Some early Christmas cheer"

was delivered, it says, by a tax on bonuses

"bashing the bankers who dragged us to the brink of economic meltdown".

More typically, the Daily Telegraph brands it a 'political survival plan' not an 'economic recovery plan'. The Daily Mail suggests that it was a time for:

"acutely painful and inevitably unpopular measures necessary to pull Britain back
from the brink of bankruptcy".

But the chancellor

"shut his eyes to the reality of our plight"

Amid

"the biggest economic crisis of our lifetimes"

Mr Darling's answer is replacing old boilers, jeers The Sun.

And finally The Daily Star offers its readers 'one silver lining', pointing out that:

"Darling's likely to be unemployed himself by next summer!"

'Labour's Lost It' - The Sun

The Sun newspaper has ditched Gordon Brown's Labour party and will support the Tories at the next General Election.

The Sun has supported Labour for the last 12 years.

Sky's political editor Adam Boulton described the move as a nail in the coffin of the Prime Minister.

Next the headline Labour's Lost It the paper's front page says:

"After 12 long years in power, the Government has lost its way.

"Now it's lost The Sun's support too."

The Sun's political editor George Pascoe Watson speaking to Sky News said:

"We felt Labour had it within them to change the course of Britain's future.

"But we feel now that they have failed the country and are letting people down."

Watson said The Sun was 'impressed' by David Cameron, but promised:

"We will always be critical friends of the Conservatives, as we were with Labour, we will tell them when they are going wrong."

The paper has backed Labour since 1997 when Tony Blair led the party to victory in the General Election.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said he 'regretted' The Sun's decision to turn away from Labour.

"Newspapers have influence, there is no question about it,

"We would rather have their support, but it does not undermine, however, the committment we have to the British people, nor the fact that I believe they have made a mistake on behalf of their readers.

"I think it is a mistake."

There is of course no hard evidence that newspaper endorsements affect their own readers, let alone the broader public, but they are significant in the battle of ideas.

The Sun newspaper's endorsement is probably the most significant of all.

UPDATE: 08:30 30/09/09

Mr Pickles on Sky News has said that The Sun's endorsement of the Conservative Party would not make them complacent, insisting they would have to work even harder to win the election.

"To get 117 seats [necessary for a Conservative majority] is a big ask, so for all Conservatives around here this endorsement means were going to have to work even harder.

"It's now up to us to persuade the public that we can form the government and can be trusted with the economy.

"Complacency is an enemy when we're so far back."

UPDATE: 13:00 30/09/09
Mr Cameron said he was dlighted by the decision of The Sun to switch its support from Labour to the Conservatives, but maintained that voters would decide the election result.

"In the end elections are decided by people... not by newspapers, but I'm delighted that The Sun, that is a really important national newspaper... has come out and said it's going to support the Conservative party because we are setting the agenda in British poltics,"

"I want to have the widest possible, broadest possible coalition for change so obviously I welcome any newspaper or business or media organisation that comes on and says the Conservatives have got the right ideas."