ComRes show economic boost for Brown & Darling

The BBC's producer guidelines prevent them from commissioning voting intention polls without special permission. There is some merit in that, it itself, but it actually leaves us very ill-served by other political polls the BBC commission. When phone pollsters conduct voting intention polls the samples are weighted by past vote to be politically representative. When polls don't include a voting intention question, they invariably aren't. In practice, this will normally mean the samples are skewed towards Labour, since past vote weighting nearly always reduces the number of Labour supporters in a sample.

One should therefore always be wary about reading too much into any questions that compare the parties in polls like this. Mike Smithson over at Political Betting normally refuses to give them the time of day for this reason. For once, however, today's results are quite interesting.

ComRes asked "who do you trust most to steer Britain's economy through the current downturn". Brown & Darling lead on 42%, compared to Cameron & Osborne on 31% and Clegg & Cable on 7%. The actual Labour lead is pretty meaningless given the make up of the sample, but what we can do is compare it when ComRes asked exactly the same question in another BBC poll back at the beginning of October. Then they found figures of Brown & Darling 40%, Cameron & Osborne 34% and Clegg & Cable 5%.

The wording of the question makes a big difference in "best on the economy" questions, we get different answers asking about best on the economy, best on the current crisis and so on. But here we've got the same question asked before and after the government's rescue plan and there has been a clear shift towards Brown & Darling.

There should be some voting intention polls over the weekend and I would expect a further narrowing of the Conservative lead.