The state of Labour's core vote
A new Harris poll in the Financial Times (full tables here) gives an interesting look at the state of Labour's core vote.
Harris found 13% of people who said they had always voted for the Labour party. While this sounds low for the party's absolute core vote, remember that turnout at the last election was 62%, so if all that 13% always vote (a dubious assumption in itself) we are talking about roughly a fifth of actual voters. Beyond that 13% said they had often voted Labour and 20% said they had sometimes voted Labour. 37% of respondents had never voted Labour and 17% said they had never voted at all.
Compared to their usual voting behaviour, Harris then asked how likely people were to vote Labour at the next election. Unsurprisingly those 20% of "sometime" Labour voters and the 37% who never vote Labour haven't become any more likely to back them. The interesting bit is moving beyond that into Labour's core vote. Of 'often' Labour voters, 51% said they were less likely to vote Labour now, of their hardcode 'always' Labour voters, 26% were less likely to vote Labour.
It's important not to over-egg this - only 3% of hardcore Labour voters said there was no way they would vote Labour at the next election. The poll shows core Labour voters saying they are less likely to back Labour, not definitely deciding to abandon it. Still, it is a sign that even part of the core vote of the government is getting a bit shakey.
The rest of the poll contained various comparative questions on the economic situation in the five countries Harris do their regular poll in. The final question did catch my eye though. Harris asked people which country posed the greatest threat to global stability. The fieldwork was done between the 30th July and 12th August, so the majority of it would have been completed before the war in South Ossetia.
We've seen polls like this before so it's no longer a surprise to find that more people in Britain think that the USA (34%) is the biggest threat to world stability than do places like Iran (13%), China (15%) or Russia (7%). What was more surprising was that when compared to other European countries, the UK is more anti-American than France, Italy and Germany in all of which people see China as more of a threat than the USA. Spain is the only other country where people see the USA as the biggest threat to stability.
