The Budget in the polls

A series of political polls have recently shown a decrease in Labour’s lead over the Conservatives, leading to a great deal of speculation about the implications for the two parties. Our own Ipsos Political Monitor carried out just before the Budget showed Labour down three percentage points from February, while various other polls since have indicated a further closing of the gap.

The first thing to say when trying to assess the impact of an individual political event is that we need to wait and see whether this is just an immediate response or something with longer-term consequences. This is especially so given even the most recent polls are not uniform – some of them show the parties neck and neck, but not all. Further, some – such as ours - had shown a narrowing of the Labour lead even before the Budget, which makes the point that we need to be wary about ascribing any change in public opinion to a single event.

There are many influences on people’s views (some of which we discuss below), and it can be an oversimplification to say a change in the polls is only due to a single event that happened around the same time, rather than down to a whole mix of underlying factors. It’s also worth noting that most members of the public won’t have been following the Budget as assiduously as the Westminster village, and much of what they have picked up will have been through the prism of the media – which can also mean that people’s immediate reaction may not be the same as the long-term response. Nevertheless, we can analyse recent trends in public opinion to help understand the likely impact.

First of all, if we look at previous Budgets it suggests that they can have an impact on public opinion – but more often than not they don’t. The table below shows the change in the Conservative share in the months after each Budget between 2010 and 2013, and it is only really the 2012 “omnishambles” Budget that stands out as having a long-term impact on public opinion.

Source: Ipsos Political Monitor * 2010 figures show change from 2010 election result

A parallel, incidentally, can be drawn with Ed Miliband’s 2013 conference speech on the cost of living. His policy to freeze gas and electricity prices was the clear winner of the conference season, and helped lead to an improvement in his own ratings, but again Labour’s vote share was little changed.

Whether the 2014 Budget is a game-changer or not will at least partly depend on the extent it reinforces (or can break) three key underlying trends in public opinion:

1. We went into the Budget following nine months of economic optimism; since July 2013, more people have thought the economy will get better than worse every single month in the Ipsos Economic Optimism Index, this following forty-three straight months where more thought the economy would get worse than better. Over the same time, the Conservatives have built up a clear edge on economic matters, with a 13 percentage-point lead over Labour on managing the economy, while George Osborne had a pre-Budget lead of 5 percentage-points over Ed Balls as the most capable Chancellor.
2. However, this hasn’t successfully converted into rises in people’s perceptions of their own standard of living. Six in ten (59%) say that the government has done a bad job at raising their standard of living, while as of last October 84% believed they hadn’t benefited much from economic growth.
3. This may explain why economic growth hasn’t yet made a great deal of difference to the Conservatives’ share of the vote. Comparing the nine months since July 2013 where more people have believed the economy will get better than worse to the previous six months from January 2013, this impact so far appears minimal. In the six months before July, the Conservatives averaged 30% of the vote, Labour 39%. In the months since, the Conservatives have averaged 32%, Labour 38%.

So what does this tell those of us looking ahead to the impact on 2015? That Budgets can make a difference to public opinion, but often don’t. That even something as important to voters as the growing economy has not yet filtered through into major shifts in their voting intentions, although it has built up credits for the Conservatives on other measures. And that if this Budget is to have a long-lasting effect, it probably needs to start changing people’s perceptions about the extent to which the recovery is filtering through to them.

Finally, of course, the Budget can have another more indirect effect – not just the reaction to the policies within it, but the reaction to the reaction to the Budget, from the parties and the media. Whether this will have an impact on public opinion is a question for another day.