More Bad News For The Tories

More bad news for the Conservatives in the latest polls. NOP is the only major polling company reported in papers today -- as both the Observer (ICM) and the Sunday Telegraph (MORI) take a break in mid-campaign from spending the money to find out that the Labour Party is still flat-lining in the polls.

A few months ago it was expected that the MoS would be polling every week as would the News of the World, Observer, Sunday Telegraph and possibly the Sunday Mirror. As the flat-lining continued month after month since the beginning of November, each cut down their commitment to measure the mood of the electorate each week during the campaign. Instead, most of them are doing a weekly 'focus group', made famous by Philip Gould, Labour's political consultant, which make pretty boring reading to even an election junkie like me.

NOP in the Sunday Times: What is of interest is some of the fine print of the polls in this morning's newspapers. The Sunday Times headline "Poll lead points to Labour landslide" with the NOP findings of Labour 49% (unchanged), Tories 30% (down two) and the Liberal Democrats 14% (up one) with 'others' (Nats, Greens, UKIP, etc.) 7% (up one).

It might not be "the economy, stupid" because the people think the economy is under tight control with low inflation and low unemployment, so much so that this normally Tory (pre-Black Wednesday in September 1992) issue has a three to one Labour lead among one intending voter in four who think it is a "very" important issue (MORI) and among all electors asked which party they would most trust to make their families better off, Labour leads the Tories by 49% to 23%, more than two to one.

NOP now say that 80% of people now say they are "certain" or "likely" to vote on 7 June. In a month of Sundays I say! My guess would be closer to 67% as I read the entrails at the moment.

NOP also find in their poll in the Sunday Times (done by telephone on Thursday and Friday) that among electors 55 and over Labour has a three point lead (it was four points in 1997) from a sub-sample of around 300 people in their sample.

NOP in the People: Funny, NOP are also in the Sunday People with a telephone survey of pensioners, done Thursday, but finding a 19% lead for Labour, 50% for Labour, 31% for the Conservatives. This is matched by the 16% lead in the MORI surveys conducted last week.

If these two leads of 16% -- 19% are replicated on election day, it would be a swing to Labour from their 1997 landslide of about 6%, which would deliver Labour an overall majority in the House of Commons of over 300 seats, compared with 179 at the 1997 election. Why the People paid for data that was available for the asking, I don't understand.

NOP's Private poll for the Labour Party (S.Tel): Perhaps the most interesting poll in the papers today is to be found on page two of the Sunday Telegraph, where Joe Murphy reports the leak of Labour's private polling which has the Labour Party on 47%, Conservatives on 25% (sic) and the Lib Dems on 13%.

The numerate reader will notice that these figures add up to 85%. Add five per cent for "others", and you get to 90%, the remainder likely to be the "don't knows".

Reallocate these, and you get a set of figures comparable to the published polling figures: 52%, 28%, 14%, which would project to a Labour majority of 287 seats, up over a hundred from 1997!

British Election Study, on the World Wide Web: The initial results from the British Election Study (BES) supports the level of MORI's surveys.

These are so far unpublished but can be found at the Essex University website. Done over three days in a rolling poll of around 150 interviews a day, the findings from 14-16 May show a rising level of likelihood of a Labour landslide.

Gallup 'Rolling Poll' for BES

Given the design of the "rolling poll", a form of research I don't think a great deal of, and that the poll is done with around 150 interviews a day, and that they are reporting on 1,156 interviews today, it would appear that they are aggregating over seven/eight days. Thus, their final day's fieldwork would have had the Labour Party at about 60% and the Tories at about 25%!

I am also sceptical of any poll findings being reported to a decimal point, suggesting spurious accuracy, as no poll of a national population can be said to deliver results with that degree of accuracy.

The results of the MORI poll in the Economist were regarded with great scepticism among the politicians and pundits, but it seems to be confirmed by the academic "gold standard" (so they keep telling us) of the British Election Study. Their findings would project to a Labour majority of 299 seats in the House of Commons.

Sunday Mirror DIY: The Sunday Mirror have forsaken the professionals, and have mounted their own poll of "first-time voters" among an unreported number of "young people" (undefined), carried out sometime (no mention of when), somehow (no mention of how the interviews were carried out) but finding 67% answering "yes" to the blunt question "Are you going to vote at the general election?" In a month of Sundays I say!

At the last election, fewer than half of those did, and this time, I'd guess 45% is a more likely turnout. Further, when asked "Which single thing would you change if you were Prime Minister?", the "elimination of university tuition fees" topped the poll. I'd never have guessed it. I sometimes say that the job we do is to ask the right people, the right questions, and add up the figures correctly. The Sunday Mirror added up the figures correctly so far as I can tell.

Thornton Chocolate Lolly Poll (MoS): "and finally", as Trevor would say, The Mail on Sunday carries the latest results in the "survey of 18,000 chocolate lollies sold by Thorntons in the form of the leaders" heads (Hague's the bald one), and has found Blair at 46% of sales, Hague sticking (sic) at 34% and Kennedy appealing (sic) to 17%. Looking back at 1997, it was the Thornton's Lolly Poll that forecast a Conservative victory, 38% to 31%, with the Loony Party at 17%.

As you may recall, Labour won in 1997.