Sunday polling round up
A quick round of of today's polls. The weekly YouGov poll for the Sunday Times is here, and has topline figures of CON 33%, LAB 39%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 11%. YouGov's daily polling appears to be showing an average Labour lead of around about six points.
The rest of the poll deals mainly with the economy and the royals. Economic optimism continues to get slightly less pessimistic, the "feel good factor" (those thinking their economic situation will get better in the next twelve months minus those who expect it to get worse) is minus 27. Asked more specifically about the recent GDP figures, 38% think that it shows the economy is now on the mend and will continue to grow, 49% think it is bouncing along the bottom. Looking at the crossbreaks shows quite how much people's opinions on the economy are shaped by their pre-existing views of the government and politics: three-quarters of Conservatives think the economy is now on the mend, three-quarters of Labour supporters think it shows things bouncing along the bottom.
George Osborne continues to have a negative rating as Chancellor - only 25% think he is doing a good job, 45% a bad job. However the widespread desire for Cameron to replace him that YouGov found back in March has declined somewhat - back then people wanted Osborne sacked by 51% to 17%, it's now a less overwhelming 42% to 30%. He also has better ratings than Ed Balls, and people think Osborne would make a matter Chancellor than Balls by 35% to 27%. By 43% to 32% people think the economy would have been worse if Labour had won the last election.
On the monarchy 17% of people think Britain should become a republic, 75% that we should continue to have a monarchy. A new ComRes poll for the Sunday Telegraph found a similar pattern - 66% think Britain is better off as a monarchy, 17% that it would be better off as a republic. The Sunday Telegraph article has a rather overblown headline of "Confidence in British monarchy at all time high, poll shows" which is a bit silly on various grounds (the monarchy predates opinion polling by hundreds of years so we don't have anything to judge by, and as far as I can tell the survey did not ask questions that have a long train of past tracking data to compare to).
The best long term tracker data on attitudes to the monarchy is probably MORI's collection here. Even there things are a bit hamstrung by the fact that lots of polling on the royal family started in the early nineties when the monarchy was at a low ebb in the wake of the the failure of the marriages of Charles, Andrew and Princess Anne and the Queen's annus horribilis - so most current polling does show the royal family being held in higher regard than in the 1990s...but those few trends that stretch back into the 1980s show much more positive ratings. I suspect the reality is "confidence in British monarchy higher than it has been for twenty years or so"... but we don't have the data to be sure.
Finally the Sunday Times had a new Panelbase poll on the Scottish Independence referendum, which had YES on 37%(+1), NO on 46%(+2). Past polls on the independence referendum are here, and it's worth noting the consistent differences between pollsters. Panelbase tend to show a relatively tight race, Ipsos MORI and TNS tend to show a much bigger lead for the NO campaign.
