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So much for that “Jubilee bounce”

June 11, 2012 8:51 am

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Today the Independent reports “Labour has opened its biggest opinion poll lead since the general election as the Conservatives struggle to recover from the aftershocks of the much-criticised Budget, according to the latest “poll of polls”". And they’ve even done this handy graphic to show this:

Meanwhile, a poll by Angus Reid published yesterday for the Sunday Express showed Labour 14 points ahead of the Tories – the biggest lead since December 2002. So much for that “Jubilee bounce”…

Related posts:

  1. Labour’s budget bounce
  2. Poll List: YouGov and Angus Reid show widened gap
  3. There is no budget bounce…yet
  4. New Populus poll shows Labour within three points of Tories
  5. The dirty underbelly of the Jubilee pageant
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1557475545 Jack Bonner

    Sadly polls in the midterm mean very little really. It’s nice to get double digit leads, but Cameron was getting poll leads of 15%, he ended up with a lead of just 7% at the general election. 1992 should be ingrained in the minds of all Labour activists, and we really can’t afford to do the same again.

    • AlanGiles

      That’s true Jack, but Labour has a chance to capitalize on the many gaffes and own-goals the coaliion have caused themselves.

      Cameron should have sacked Hunt weeks ago,  for example, because it makes them look very sleazy, but on the other hand Labour can only build on their lead if they start sounding as if tyhey have a clear and alternative set of policies.

      Too many TV interviews like the one with the dissembling Stephen Twigg yesterday, trying to be on both sides of the fence at once (and he is just the most recent example there are countless others) will make people feel Labour is all trailer and no big picture.

      Labour (and the Coalition come to that, but thats their problem) need to make some big changes to their front bench soon, and prune out the dead wood. If I were Ed this would happen before – not after – the summer recess

      • Daniel Speight

        …but on the other hand Labour can only build on their lead if they start
        sounding as if they have a clear and alternative set of policies.

        As the French Socialist Party did. Ed could learn a lesson from Hollande.

        • AlanGiles

          You’re right Daniel – I only wished he would, but you just KNOW he won’t – he is far too timid and worried about frightening the horses.

          Labour should realise that the country is crying out for an alternative, and it won’t be found between the pages of a purple book. If they continue to be ultra-cautious, my guess is that the country will look in 2015 at three parties offering more or less the same solution and decide that the devil they know (Cameron)…. five more years wasted.

          • treborc1

            When you have two parties like labour and the Tories and you basically cannot see the differences between them having an alternative view may be nothing at all to the voters.

            Miliband loves the squeezed middle class, he loves the hard working, the problem is he cannot say working class.

            I do not think having an Alternative Labour party which see free schools or affordable houses for the middle class or some of the NHS should be private, any different then what we have now.

        • treborc1

           He’s thinking,  he asked Byrne is Hollande next to Sweden.

      • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

        The question is whether this mid-term 1995 or mid-term 1989 over again.

        If its the former we can coast to a victory (which may nevertheless leave us with nothing but economic and social ruins to govern) – if its the latter a quick change of leader (thank God and Ken Boris Johnson is stuck in London until 2016 now) and a rebranding could still save them. 

        • AlanGiles

          With respect Roger I think we should forget the past – we will not coast, because despite the big mistakes of the coalition they are not so sleaze ridden with sexual peccadilloes as poor old Major’s shower was (Remember the “End of the Piers” Show?), though they will look sleazy in a different way if Hunt doesn’t go and Laws returns (and one other but as that matter is sub-judice I had better not mention it), BUT to change leader now would look what it is – a panic measure. Also, of course, you would merely be getting yet another member of the same wing of the party. It would also remind the public about the Tories 97-2005 with their “what about this one, do you like him?” chopping and changing.

          Actually I don’t think, apart from his timerous nature Ed M is doing too badly, but frankly there is a lot of rubbish in the shadow cabinet that needs taking down to the skip. I had better not name anyone, but I am sure you might guess who I have in mind.

          • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

            As Sanatayana said those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it….

            And sleaze was really just the cherry pirouetting lewdly on the top of the excremental cake. 

            The real damage had been done only a few months after the 1992 election by Norman Lamont’s disastrous handling of the ERM – the technicalities of which few of us understood but which was so poorly presented and opened up such a gulf within the party that even 4 years of actually (in their terms) quite competent management of the economy by Ken Clarke couldn’t bring them back.

            The question therefore will whether the combination of Murdoch and Osborne’s last budget was their Black Wednesday, dispelling beyond recall the illusion of competence which is so important to a British electorate who really don’t care about politics and deeply resent being forced to take an interest in it at all.

          • AlanGiles

            I didn’t mean we can’t learn from historyRoger, but what I meant was that in 1997 the Conservatives were so unpopular, you, me or my dog could have won the election for Labour.

            Where 1989 is concerned, the Conservatives were enduring their last full year of the Gestapo in Bloomers, and I think even some Tories were glad of that (if secretly so).

            Today Cameron for all his faults isn’t quite so unpopular as Mrs T, and the country is not so desperate to vote Labour – which, I am certain, is because our policies are too similar to those of the Coalition.

          • AlanGiles

            I didn’t mean we can’t learn from historyRoger, but what I meant was that in 1997 the Conservatives were so unpopular, you, me or my dog could have won the election for Labour.

            Where 1989 is concerned, the Conservatives were enduring their last full year of the Gestapo in Bloomers, and I think even some Tories were glad of that (if secretly so).

            Today Cameron for all his faults isn’t quite so unpopular as Mrs T, and the country is not so desperate to vote Labour – which, I am certain, is because our policies are too similar to those of the Coalition.

          • treborc1

             You me or my dog could have won the election for labour…. your dog was not named Blair was it.

          • Dave Postles

            The past can only be used as an analogy.  History does not repeat itself because: the circumstances change; ‘history’ is a reification; and people have some agency.

    • http://twitter.com/Arcowray Paul

      totally agree with you! its good but its about keeping it going and 2015 is a long time in politics.

  • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

    +8 is actually down from the average for May (see table attached as an image to this comment from ukpollingreport.co.uk) so could also be interpreted as a softening of support. 

    As for Angus Reid’s polls let us say they are frequently outliers. 

    We’ve been canvassing in a very Tory district council ward and while we have had surprisingly few voters say they’re voting Tory (which suggests to me that we may be seeing a re-emergence of the 1990s ‘Shy Tory’ phenomenon rather than that there is a real sea change) the real eye opener has been that out of several hundred conversations only two have confessed to being Lib Dems in a constituency where the Lib Dems have been coming a respectable second in GEs for decades.  

    And in a sense this is a bad thing for us and the country – on these figures Cameron and Clegg will be forced to hold together until the economy improves and if as is all too likely given their ruinous policies it doesn’t, this means we are stuck with them until May 2015 – by which point the ratchet will have been pushed so far that the NHS and the welfare state (not to mention possibly the United Kingdom itself) will be effectively finished and we’ll have to rebuild all over again but with an electorate far more fickle and a media vastly more hostile than we had in 1945. 

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