Latest YouGov and ICM voting intentions
Two new voting intention polls this week showing very similar figures. YouGov's latest poll was actually conducted last week, but was only released today and has topline figures of CON 41%, LAB 42%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 4% (full tabs are here.
The regular ICM poll for the Guardian, conducted over the weekend, has extremely similar topline figures - CON 42%, LAB 42%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 3% (full tabs are here).
ICM also asked about people's attitudes towards Britain paying a financial settlement as part of our Brexit negotiations (a so-called "exit fee"). ICM asked similar questions back in April and found very little support - only 10% thought paying a £20bn settlement would be acceptable, 15% a £10bn fee and 33% a £3bn exit fee. This time the figures suggested in the question were changed to what are probably more realistic figures and with interesting results - now 9% think a settlement of £40bn would be acceptable, 11% a £30bn settlement, 18% a £20bn settlement, 41% a £10bn settlement.
On the face of it this one might think this is a startling change, a few months ago only 15% thought it would be acceptable to pay a £10bn settlement as part of Brexit, now 41% think it's acceptable. I think it's probably actually a good example of the importance of context in a question. Most people are really not that good at putting figures of billions of pounds in context - any sum that involves the words billion is a huge amount of money to begin with, so what would be a relatively small settlement? A moderate settlement? A huge settlement? The only thing respondents have to scale it by is the question itself. In April £3bn was implicitly presented as the small option and £10bn was presented as the medium option. In this poll £10bn is implicitly presented as the small option and £20bn or £30bn are presented as the medium options - hence why a £10bn settlement suddenly seems to be so much more paletable.
That's not to say the question doesn't tell us anything at all - there's still an interesting increase. In April only 33% thought a "small" financial settlement would be acceptable as part of the Brexit deal; now that figure has risen to 41% (despite the actual figure quoted tripling!). It looks as if the public may be moving towards accepting that a financial settlement may be an inevitable part of Brexit.
