Petrol, Pensions and Party Advantage
Support for fuel blockades has fallen since the last wave of protests in early September, as much of the media has been assuming; but, as has been far less widely noted, the support still remains considerable. The public wants a reduction in the petrol tax, the majority were prepared to support further protests before Mr Brown's pre-budget statement, and half the country would still support it now.
Three polls in the past week - by MORI for the Mail on Sunday last Thursday and Friday, by ICM for the Guardian over Friday to Sunday and, after Mr Brown's speech, by NOP for the London Evening Standard on Wednesday night, all found fairly similar figures. MORI found 56% saying they would support protesters blockading oil refineries again if the government did not reduce the tax level within the protestors' 60 day deadline, and ICM using a differently-worded but similar question ("From what you have seen and heard, would you support a resumption of the fuel blockades by farmers, hauliers and other protesters?") found 55% support. After the Chancellor's statement, NOP found 51% would support further blockades.
Of course, this is a sharp fall since September, when 82% backed the protesters. The fall is partly the effect of some of those who supported the September protests having changed their minds (only 70% now think the protesters were right to take direct action in September), and also partly because some who still believe the initial protests were right would not support further disruption. Given the present transport chaos across the country because of flooding and Railtrack's safety precautions, it may even be that support for the protesters would be higher if the timing of their deadline were not so inappropriate.
Mr Brown's concessions on fuel, of course, were not entirely negligible (indeed, some of his critics have attacked him for giving in too easily to pressure), but they were considerably less than the hauliers and farmers wanted. He seems to have calculated that concentrating his largesse on pensioners would be more popular, and would perhaps defuse the momentum behind the protests. This made reasonable sense - ICM found that, forced to make a choice, 56% of the public said he should give priority to raising pensions while only 36% thought the priority should be reducing the cost of motoring; but that 36% seems to be a very solid hard core who will not be satisfied with anything less than a fuel tax cut, and many of the rest would presumably have preferred not one or the other but both.
The government's real problem is that the public don't believe that it needs the revenue from the petrol tax: in the MORI/Mail on Sunday poll, 73% said they thought that "The Government can afford to cut petrol taxes as it has enough money in reserve to maintain spending on public services, such as schools and hospitals", while only 19% took the contrary view that "The Government cannot afford to cut petrol taxes as this would mean reducing the amount of money that goes into public services, such as schools and hospitals". Consequently, the vast majority (82%) last weekend believed that the government should reduce the current level of taxes on petrol; despite the fall in support for protest action, support for cutting the tax has hardly fallen since September, when 85% thought it should be reduced.
Having had the chance to hear Mr Brown's proposals, just over half in the NOP poll (53%) thought he had got the amount of extra money for pensioners "about right", though two in five (39%) thought he had not done enough even for them; but much worse, 46% thought he had not done enough to help haulage companies and 56% that had not done enough for motorists. This issue is not going to go away.
Nor is it a purely sectional interest. The MORI/Mail on Sunday poll found support for a resumption of protests fairly even regionally, almost as high (51%) among those with no car in their household as among those who have a car (58%), and - even though this has been portrayed as an especially rural issue - not much lower in urban areas (54%) than rural ones (60%). Perhaps unsurprisingly, support is much higher among Tories (72%) than Labour (45%) or Liberal Democrats (52%), but even so this a mighty slice of government support that might potentially be alienated by confrontation.
But when we come to assess the potential political impact, yet again we are faced with the failure of the Conservative opposition to capitalise effectively on government weakness. Last weekend, only 21% were satisfied with Mr Blair's handling of the fuel price issue, but equally only 24% were satisfied with Mr Hague's - hence, in a poll that judged the government a failure on almost every aspect of its record that we tested (education being a partial exception), Labour still held an eight-point voting intention lead. Similarly, when NOP asked about the issue of rail safety, far more of the public blamed the last Conservative government for the problems than blamed the present Labour government (but only 14% think Labour is not to blame at all). Tony Blair's bad year is continuing, but there are no signs as yet that it is likely to cost him the next election.
