LabourHome poll of party members

The Independent today reports the results of a poll of Labour party members and supporters by Labourhome.org suggesting even a majority of Labour party members would rather Gordon Brown went. Polling party members is hard - they are hard to get hold of, hard to know how to weight them and, unless there are election results to compare to, hard to know if they are any good or not.

Obviously polls like this do pose a risk of any old person pretending to be a party member to skew the results, or getting a very skewed group of activists, but the polls of Conservative party members done by Tim Montgomerie over on ConservativeHome did get their leadership election right, so we do at least have a precedent for a website running polls of party members in this way and getting good results. Besides, until a polling company with a track record of polling party members carries one out, it's the best we've got. So with that caveat, what were the findings?

57% of respondents to LabourHome's poll wanted a vote at the Labour party conference on whether or not there should be a leadership election. 45% of respondents thought that a change of leader would improve Labour's prospects at the next election, with 28% fearing it would make things even worse. 46% said they would like Gordon Brown to lead Labour into the next general election, but a majority (54%) wanted to see someone else.

Were Gordon Brown to go, the front runners amongst party members and supporters (sadly not differentiated) were unsurprisingly David Miliband on 25%, but after that Alan Johnson on 18% and Jon Cruddas on 11%. Jack Straw was on 10%, James Purnell way down on just 3%.

Meanwhile on policy, 71% supported a windfall tax on energy companies, an overwhelming 86% supported higher taxes on people earning over £250k. On how money raised from tax rises should be spent though respondents were pretty evenly divided, with 48% saying it should go on tax cuts for people on lower incomes and 52% saying it should be spent on public services.

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