The impact of the strikes...

The news agenda has rather moved on from the strikes now, and is dominated by News International's travails - however, I expect we'll have to wait until the weekend to get any substantive polling on that (though I believe there is some Survation stuff tonight, which I'll include in my 10 o'clock post. In the meantime, there are a couple of YouGov polls from earlier in the week looking back at the strikes.

Firstly on Monday YouGov repeated the questions on the strike and pensions that were originally asked a week ago, to see if the actual strike had changed views. In terms of support or opposition to the strike there was no substantive difference.

Last week people opposed the teachers' strike by 49% to 40%, this week people opposed it by 50% to 41%. There was a similar lack of movement on opposition to the civil servants strike.

On the subject of pensions though, people were marginally more *supportive* of the government's pension proposals. Last week 37% said they supported them, this week it was 41% . Normal caveats apply about small movements not necessarily being significant, but certainly the argument does not appear to be moving against the government.

On a different measure, the strike action does appear to be keeping pensions firmly near the top of the political agenda. It remains third on the list of what people consider the most important issues facing the country and second on what people think are the most important issues facing their families (both percentages up since last month).