Populus snap PBR poll

I've been busy today, so have only just had time to catch up with the Populus snap poll of 500 on the PBR in this morning's Times.

Almost all of the individual measures in the PBR received strong support - 78% supported the bankers bonus tax, 61% the capping if public sector pay rises and even the rise in NI was supported by 51%. The only exception was the cap on contributions to public sector pensions, supported by only 38%. Labour's message that cuts should not be too early seems to be approved of - 59% agreed with the statement that cuts "should not be made until the economic recovery is much stronger”. The Conservative lead on being the party most trusted to cut spending in way that do not harm the public services has also evaporated.

This all looks positive for Labour, but the poll also showed Cameron and Osborne extending their lead as the team most trusted to run the economy - they now lead Brown & Darling by 46% to 32%. There was also very little faith that the Chancellor's measures would be enough to deal with the countries problems - only 12% thought so, 39% thought not and 48% didn't know (not that this is necessarily a bad thing, I'm sure even Alistair Darling would claim that the PBR solved everything and there was no more work to do!)

However, I'd add a couple of caveats to reading too much into this poll. Firstly budgets (and presumably pre-budget reports!) are more than the sum of their parts. Back in April Populus did a similar snap poll straight after the budget, and also found strong approval for most of the measures within it. However, when voting intention polls finally turned up they showed Labour sharply down. Secondly, as I said in the comments yesterday, there is such a thing as polls that are too quick - realistically many respondents to this poll would have answered before they saw the full media reaction to the PBR, so opinions would still have been in flux.

Hopefully we'll get some voting intention polls over the weekend.