Ipsos's first Political Monitor of 2007 shows the Conservatives leading Labour by 4 points (39% vs 35%), based on those who say they are "absolutely certain" (50% of the total sample of 1,955 British adults, 18+) to vote in an immediate general election. This puts the Tory share now higher than it was during most of the Autumn, and represents a swing of 3.5% from Labour since the 2005 general election.
MORI's final poll of the 2005 election campaign, published in the London Evening Standard on election day, predicted the Conservative and Liberal Democrat shares of the vote spot-on, and missed Labour by two percentage points - an average error of 0.67 points on the three major parties, well within the normally accepted margins of error.
Are you happy? Nearly nine people in ten say they are. In the immediate run up to Christmas 86% of the 967 people phoned told Ipsos interviewers that they were either "very" (38%) or "fairly" (48%) happy with their life at present, while just 7% admitted to woe.
The public's detailed image of the Prime Minister has deteriorated significantly in the last 18 months, analysis of data from the Ipsos Political Monitor shows; but while Gordon Brown's image is better, it shares many of the most negative characteristics of Mr Blair's. The poll, conducted at the start of September (before the recent public falling out over the Prime Minister's retirement date) finds that Mr Brown, like Mr Blair, is primarily seen as out of touch, though the public also admit that he has sound judgment, a description they are reluctant to apply to Tony Blair, and many more people describe him as inflexible, tending to talk down to people and narrow minded than have the same impression of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders.
On Saturday 9 September 2006, Dr Roger Mortimore (Ipsos's Senior Political Analyst) spoke at the EPOP Conference in Nottingham*, on "Ethnic Minority Voters and Non-Voters at the 2005 British General Election", delivering a paper by himself and Kully Kaur-Ballagan (Ipsos Head of Ethnic Minority Research). The paper, which draws on Ipsos research conducted for the Electoral Commission after last year's election, explores the turnout and votes of Britain's various Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. Turnout is strongly associated with a positive attitude to elections in general, as might be expected; but there is also some evidence of a strong community effect, with those who live in areas with many other BME residents disproportionately likely to have voted. Surprisingly, there is no evidence that attitudes to the government's policy in Iraq had any significant effect. The findings also illustrate how a high quality research design, including respondents from...
Some commentators have noted in recent months that Ipsos's voting intention figures are "more volatile" than those of the other companies, which in one sense is true; but they have also assumed that this implies they are less accurate, which is not necessarily the case, and some of them have clearly not understood why our figures sometimes move more dramatically than those in other polls.
The 2006 local elections represent a clear and embarrassing defeat for Labour. The party was relegated to third place in terms of the "estimated national equivalent vote share", (the generally accepted measure of the major parties' local election performance), with only 26% of the vote. It made a net loss of more than three hundred seats, and controls 18 fewer councils than it did before the elections. While this was not, as some had predicted beforehand, Labour's worst-ever local election performance — in fact, the 26% share was the same as in 2004 — it was a very poor one.
