Sunday Polls

I was up in Scotland at a wedding this weekend, so wasn't around to herald the arrival of ComRes's latest poll for the Independent on Sunday last night (I had set a Sunday poll discussion thread to automatically appear for you all... but it didn't. Such is life!)

Anyway, topline figures from ComRes were CON 41%(-1), LAB 24%(nc), LDEM 18%(nc). Other parties remained on 16%. While the Conservatives have shifted slightly in the rounding, this is essentially showing no change in support at all since ComRes's last poll at the end of July. As suggested by YouGov's poll last weekend, the row over the NHS doesn't seem to have had any effect upon party support.

On the specific issue of the NHS, ComRes asked if people agreed or disagreed with the statement "The NHS would be safer under Labour than the Conservatives". 39% of people agreed, but 47% disagreed (I would, however, be slightly wary about drawing the conclusion that Andrew Hawkins of ComRes did that this means Labour have lost their advantage on the NHS. We can tell that 39% think Labour are better on the NHS, but that 47% don't necessarily prefer the Conservatives as someone who thought both parties were equally bad could also disagree with the statement).

ComRes also found 65% of people agreeing with the idea floated by Compass that there should be a "high pay commission to curb excessive pay and bonuses".

There was also a BPIX poll in the Mail on Sunday. The Mail on Sunday reported the topline figures as CON 36%, LAB 24%, LDEM 17%. The changes since the last BPIX poll back in May would be Conservatives down 6, Labour up 4 and Lib Dems up 2, with others presumably remaining on 23% (it wasn't made clear in the MoS).

Other pollsters have shown support for others falling significantly since then, so this seems somewhat anomalous. Mike Smithson has raised the question of whether these figures were re-percentaged to exclude don't knows or not. If not, the figures obviously wouldn't be comparable... but without the tables we can't tell.