New YouGov and ComRes polls

Anthony Wells

— 2 min read
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There are two new polls out tonight. Firstly YouGov's daily poll for the Sun has topline figures of CON 37%, LAB 41%, LDEM 10%. This is something of a narrowing of the Labour lead, in the last week leads of 8 points or so were becoming pretty standard, but I'll add my usual caveat about being cautious about any single poll that shows something useful: sure, it could be Labour's lead falling in what will be the first poll taken since the hacking saga has (temporarily) fallen off the news agenda, but just as likely it's an outlier and we'll be back to bigger Labour leads tomorrow.

Tomorrow we're due the GDP figures, so perhaps it's also worth a look at the regular YouGov trackers on cuts in today's tables. The broad picture remains as we've seen for much of this year - a majority of people (53%) think the cuts are being carried out too quickly (27% about right and 8% too slowly), 46% think they are too deep (27% about right and 10% too shallow), 48% think they are bad for the economy (36% think they are good). However, despite all this 57% of people think they are necessary, and people are still more likely to blame the last Labour government than the coalition.

Secondly we have the monthly ComRes telephone poll for the Indy. Topline figures with changes since the last ComRes phone poll are CON 34%(-2), LAB 40%(nc), LDEM 13%(+2), Others 13%(-2), so once again the Conservatives taking a small knock from the phone hacking saga.

The other questions are on the phone hacking saga. 65% agreed with a statement that the phone hacking scandal showed News Corp were not a fit and proper organisation to own part of BSkyB. There were also some questions asking if people viewed the party leaders more positively or negatively as a result of the phone hacking saga - these suggest that people view all three more negatively, but I'd suggest that tells us more about the deep uselessness of asking questions in this format! Proper tracker questions asked before and after the phone hacking saga reached its peak, asked by YouGov, MORI and ComRes, all show pretty conclusively that perceptions of Ed Miliband have increased substantially, even if respondents themselves don't realise it!

UPDATE: There is also a new Angus Reid poll, their first since April (I thought they had faded away!). Topline figures with changes from April are CON 34%(+3), LAB 41%(-1), LDEM 10%(-1). The poll was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

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