The Voice of Britain: 1969 - 2009

As next year's election approaches, Ipsos is now republishing on its website some long-forgotten polls from the run-up to the 1979 election.

MORI was founded in 1969. From the first, we focussed more on ‘social’ research rather than ‘market’ research. We were retained by the Labour Party to do its private polling in our first year, and reported a 2% Tory lead to a surprised Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, on the Tuesday before his election defeat two days later. We started polling for the media in 1976, first for the Sunday Times, then for the Evening Standard. The story will follow in this series of articles, which we’ve entitled “The Voice of Britain”.

As next year's election approaches, with the government trailing in the polls, we have been looking back into our archives to find what MORI's polls were saying in the run-up to the last time a Labour government was voted out of office, the 1979 election. This was the period at which MORI first began publishing political polls regularly, but at some later period a decision was made to take the 1979 election as a natural starting point for our trend tables, and much of the earlier data has not seen the light of day since. We report on a number of our polls from the 1977-9 period, which document the course of the Callaghan government's fall and Margaret Thatcher's success. But as well as the purely political questions (some of which are the same as the ones we still ask in the Political Monitor, but others of which are very different), there are numerous questions on social attitudes and on the issues of the day. Some are fascinating for the comparisons with attitudes on the same subjects today, others because we wouldn't dream of asking them now, so completely has Britain changed over the last 30 years. We will also report on some of our earliest polls, e.g., British Attitudes to Air and Water Pollution, 1970-1972, and reflect on those as well. Over the next few months we will be re-publishing these poll results on our website. We invite you – depending on your age – either to take a stroll down Memory Lane or a glimpse into history, both of British politics and opinion polling. Find out what the public thought about the prospect of having a woman as Prime Minister for the first time and about the "Winter of Discontent", but also about the novelty of Parliamentary broadcasting and the possibility of law to make wearing seatbelts compulsory. Our first article will be published before the end of the year with reflections on the Callaghan election in 1979, and the rest will follow early in the new year. Our next instalment after that sets the scene with a wide-ranging poll conducted in October 1977, covering among other issues unemployment, immigration, the death penalty, and the Common Market (as it then was).

Dr Roger Mortimore is Ipsos's Head of Political Research Sir Robert Worcester is the Founder of MORI

Articles - "From Our Archives":

N.B. Please note that to avoid any risk of visitors to our website confusing this archive data with newly-conducted surveys, we will be tagging the pages with the original publication dates of the polls rather than the dates on which we have re-published them. When searching the website by date, you will therefore find them under their year of polling, and not among the newly-published 2009 pages.

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