More from the YouGov/Sun poll
The voting intention in the Sun today are re-reporting of the figures on Friday, however we do have lots more data based on the large 10000 sample that the two polls last week were drawn from. Full tables are here.
The poll mostly dealt with Labour's record since 1997, and painted a pretty miserable picture. In most cases more people felt things had got worse than better. Economically 44% of respondents feel worse off than 1997, 28% better off. On crime, 49% thought it had gone up since 1997. On Welfare, 80% thought benefits culture was a significant problem under the current government, compared to 54% who thought it was a problem when the Conservatives were last in power.
Education was one of the few positives, amongst parents with children at school 89% thought their children's school was fairly good or very good. There is a fairly typical pattern of people rating their own local services more highly than national services as a whole, but even overall people were pretty positive about education: 57% thought primary education was good, 25% poor, figures for secondary educaton were 50% and 33%. Unfortunately for Labour, it doesn't appear the government are getting any credit for it - asked how education had changed since 1997, only 26% thought it had got better. 34% thought it had got worse.
Only when we come to NHS do we actually find a positive verdict on whether things have got better or worse under Labour. 34% thought things had got better, 31% thought things had got worse. Taking the government's record overall, 44% thought things had got worse, 17% got better.
The discussion in the comments here often veers off into whether the government has done a good job on this or that. I expect a poll that directly asked people that question will elicit the same sort of comments, but while that's an interesting discussion in its own right, for a blog focusing on public opinion it can be a bit beside the point. For example, both the British Crime Survey and crime recorded by the police are both falling... yet that does nothing to change the fact that people believe crime has risen since 1997. Polls measure what people think, regardless of whether they are right to think it - and an inaccurate belief is just as likely to influence someone's voting intention as an accurate one.
Meanwhile, on a very slightly different topic the poll also asked who people blamed for the state of the economy? The banks take the biggest share of the blame, 88% blame British banks, 84% American banks, but 67% of people attribute a lot or a fair amount of blame to the British government. YouGov asked a similar (but not identical - it referred solely to the credit crunch, not the recession) question in October 2008, and opinion hasn't vastly changed since then. In 2008 81% of the public blamed British banks, 89% US banks and 65% the British government.
