Polls indicate opposing cuts boosts Labour

By Lee Brown

Recent days have seen a number of contributions from the more Blairite side of the party seemingly intent on diluting Labour’s opposition to the Tories cuts agenda.

Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis received wide press coverage when he implied Labour was profligate. Labour’s former General Secretary Peter Watt was more explicit proclaiming that Labour “must stop fighting the cuts”. He states that to win again “the first thing that we should do is just accept the Tory spending plans as set out in the spending review”.

The approach advocated by Peter Watt would ally Labour with policies that will cause great damage to the economy and the livings standards of the many, as numerous economists including David Blanchflower and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz have explained.

But its not just bad economics, its also bad politics. A quick look at the polls since the general election provides no evidence to back up assertions that ceding to Tory cuts is how Labour can win.

In fact, it strongly suggest the exact opposite.

The graph below shows the average of Yougov daily tracker polls since the coalition came to power. Each point shows the average of seven previous polls to iron out any daily fluctuations and to focus on the trends.

What is evident is that following a slight post general election boost, the Tory Party has been falling back to its low level of support received last May, around 36%, which left it short of being able to form a government on its own.

Or to put it another way, almost two-thirds of the population does not agree with the Tory programme, which is an agenda dominated by cuts.

Instead of ceding to Tory cuts, Labour needs to build a winning alliance from amongst the two-thirds of the population opposing the Tories.

The pressing issue facing Labour therefore is how it should construct such an alliance. Going along with a cuts agenda can’t be the answer as it would simply undermine Labour’s support just as much as it has the Tories and Liberal Democrats.

Again the graph seems to be clear: opposing Tory cuts is good for Labour. It shows Labour’s support has been steadily rising following the general election as the population became more and more concerned about the damage to be caused to their families and communities by the Tory cuts agenda and because Labour has expressed its opposition.

Furthermore, it shows Labour first overtook the Tories around 16 November – just a week after the first of the impressive student demonstrations against fees and a period of sustained Labour opposition to higher fees.

Labour then began to open up a consistent lead from around 16 December as its strong warnings against the VAT rise and its effect on living standards, amongst other issues, chimed with the public.

There seems to be every reason both economically and electorally that a strong anti-cuts message is key to reaching out the two-thirds of the electorate not backing the Tories. It would even whittle down the Tory’s support further.

In contrast it is not at all clear why accepting a Tory cuts agenda would boost Labour. Looking at the graph it could even be argued that at times where there has been less focus on Tory cuts, Labour’s lead has narrowed with the plateau in Labour’s lead coming around the time of the outbreak of the war on Libya.

Of course, Peter Watt bases his assessment on the recent election results not just on polls. Yet Labour’s 37% share of the vote achieved earlier this month was a big step forward compared to the very low levels of recent years. It is worth remembering that by last year’s general election, Labour had been reduced down to 29%; five million voters had been lost since 1997 with four million of these under Blair; and since 2004 there has been a series of local election performances where Labour was scraping around the mid-20% levels. Since the 2009 local elections low point Labour has clawed back a sizable chunk of the vote lost over the previous decade.

Adopting a more Tory economic framework seems to be just a rehashing of the old Blairite idea of triangulation. Election results show that this approach failed in recent years. Keynes famously once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”. Some in the party should heed this advice.