Latest MORI poll and Ashcroft constituency polling
Today we've the final Ipsos MORI monthly poll of 2014 and the last 2014 batch of Lord Ashcroft's constituency polling (the keenly awaited Scottish marginals polling is taking place next year).
MORI's monthly poll has topline figures of CON 32%(nc), LAB 29%(nc), LDEM 9%(nc), UKIP 13%(-1), GRN 9%(+2). The Conservatives are three points ahead, but as ever it's the trend that counts and there is no difference from last month for the main parties here. Note the Greens though - nine points is another new record high for them. Full tabs are here.
Meanwhile Lord Ashcroft's final batch of 2014 constituencies polls covers three groups of seats. One is another swathe of Con-held Labour targets, another is a group of those Labour seats who the Fabians have identified as the most vulnerable to UKIP, the final one is the unusual seat of Brighton Pavilion. Full details of all the polls are here.
This batch of Con/Lab seats covers those with Conservative majorities between 7.1% and 8.1% - in other words these are seats that would need a swing of between 3.5% and 4% to fall to Labour, the equivalent of national polls showing a Labour lead between zero and one point. This is in the region of current national polls, and as the swing in individual seats
varies from one to the next, Ashcroft found Labour ahead in some of these seats, the Conservatives ahead in others. Across all eight seats polled Ashcroft found an average swing of 3 points in these seats, the equivalent of national polls showing a one point Conservative lead - so in this batch of seats, Labour are actually doing slightly worse than they are in the country as a whole. These might just so-happen to be eight seats where the Tories are doing a bit better of course, so don't run off with the idea that the Conservatives are out-performing in the marginals just yet. The broader finding in Ashcroft's Con-v-Lab battleground polls so far is that the marginal swing is pretty similar to the national swing.
The Lab-UKIP part of the polling covered four Labour-held seats (Great Grimsby, Dudley North, Plymouth Moor View and Rother Valley) that the Fabian Society's paper Revolt on the Left identified as being at critical or high risk from UKIP. The polling found Labour ahead in all four seats, but with UKIP in a close second place in all four of them. Labour have a 1 point lead in Grimsby, 3 points in Dudley North, 5 points in Plymouth Moor View and 6 points in Rother Valley. This appears to confirm the research by Rob Ford and Ian Warren that these would be seats where, based on demographics, UKIP would pose a strong challenge - and suggests that Labour cannot afford to take them for granted. It's also worth pointing out that using standard "how would you vote tomorrow" UKIP were ahead in three of the seats, Labour only moved ahead on the question asking people to think about their own constituency and candidates.
Finally in Brighton Pavilion, very much a unique seat given its Green incumbency, Ashcroft found latest voting intention figures of CON 21%, LAB 28%, LDEM 5%, UKIP 8%, GRN 38%.
