Growing support for "other" parties
I don't usually comment much upon the "others" scores in regular voting intention polls - there's various reasons for that: support for them is so low that movement from month to month is hidden away by rounding, for the SNP and Plaid you really need proper Scottish and Welsh polls to get anything meaningful, and for minor parties like UKIP, the Greens and BNP their support has little impact, whether any of them breaks through to win seats at Westminster depends far more upon them getting concentrated support in particular constituencies (as Caroline Lucas did in Brighton) than their overall support.
Nevertheless, the comparatively high levels of support for UKIP last week produced some comment, so I thought it time to have a better look at the figures. The graph below shows a four-week rolling average for the others in YouGov's Sunday Times polls (obviously a rolling average of all YouGov's daily polling would be better... but would take 7 times longer to type into a spreadsheet!)
As you can see, there is an overall upwards trend, but different patterns for the different parties. The BNP's position is largely unchanged from last Summer, with no obvious trend up or down in their support. The SNP & Plaid (YouGov do not separate them out in GB polling) have a rise in support, particularly in the run up to the Scottish and Welsh elections last May - very much in line with the increase in SNP support that we know happened at the time from Scottish polling.
The Green party have a clear upwards trend in their support, though total levels remain very modest. By far the biggest increase is for UKIP, who have gone from around 2% last July to around
5 or 6 percent.
One can only speculate about the reasons. It seems a fair assumption that the increase in the last week is due to the issue of Europe moving up the agenda (though it's worth noting that UKIP's support is not always based on the issue of Europe - in past polling we've seen that issues like immigration are more important). I'd suggest other factors could be support from the disgruntled right of the Conservatives, and perhaps more significantly, the Liberal Democrat entry into government meaning the Lib Dems are less available as a vehicle for protest votes from those opposed to the main two parties, and that other parties have the opportunity to pick up these votes.
