Three holiday polls
No sooner do I go on holiday for a week than we get three polls in a row.
ICM/Guardian (15-17th August): CON 44%(-1) LAB 29%(nc) LDEM 19%(+3) YouGov/Sunday Times (14-15th August): CON 45%(-1) LAB 25%(-1) LDEM 18%(+1) Ipsos MORI
(15-17th August): CON 48%(+1) LAB 24%(-3) LDEM 17%(+2)
Polls in August are normally treated with slight scepticism because it's the holiday season - at any point a certain proportion of people are likely to be away from home on holiday and this has the potential to result in skewed samples if the sort of person who goes on holiday in August is more likely to have a certain sort of view. In fact some pollsters do attempt to control for this by weighting according to the number of foreign holidays people take each year. Presumably raw samples in August find fewer people who take one or more foreign holidays each year than they should, and those people are weighted upwards to correct for any skew this causes.
August is also a period without any real political news beyond unexpected events like those in Georgia. There is little in the way of policy announcements or the day-to-day cut and thrust of politics. A lot of the normal polling figures we see may well be a reflection of good or bad news at the time - that day, that week. In August, when there isn't any news to speak of, it's easy to imagine that we might get figures that better reflect the underlying position. For that reason I normally expect a slight improvement for an embattled government over August. It doesn't always happen, and clearly it hasn't this year. The government's position away from constant negative news stories seems to be pretty much the same as it was during them.
These three polls essentially show a stable position - the Conservaties are still in the mid to high forties, with a lead of 20+ points with YouGov, MORI and ComRes or 15+ points with ICM and Populus. The difference, incidentally, is at least partially because of ICM and Populus's reallocation of those who say don't know to the party they voted for in 2005. In Populus's last poll this reduced the Tory lead by 2 points, in ICM's poll for the Sunday Express earlier this month by 3 points.
Notably the couple of recent polls that showed a fall in Lib Dem support have reversed. In the absence of any reason to expect a sudden fall and recovery in Lib Dem support, it looks that that was just a blip.
Looking at other questions in the polls, both ICM and YouGov had some questions about David Miliband - I'll come to them in a later post. On other topics, YouGov in the Sunday Times asked about the situation in Georgia. 32% thought the West should have done more to help Georgia, 27% disagreed. 37% thought that Russia was trying to recreate the Soviet Empire and 48% that we should fear them.
YouGov also covered the subject of the NHS. A large majority (73%) of people rejected the idea that NHS treatments should be limited according to cost, thinking that any treatments that exist should be available on the NHS. However asked if they would be willing to pay for them, 46% said they would not be willing to pay extra taxes to make more expensive treatment available. Only 32% agreed. This is not necessarily a direct contradiction - I expect people who wanted all treatments available on the NHS, but were not prepared to pay for them expected other people to pay higher taxes to fund it. It is a notable turnaround however, if you go back three or four years then any question asking if people would be prepared to pay higher taxes to spend on the NHS would have resulted in a resounding yes. It was questionable whether those answers were realistic, or simply people giving the 'socially acceptable' answer, but either way there has been a significant shift in attitudes. Asked if people should be able to "top up" their NHS treatment by paying for treatments that the NHS does not fund, 65% thought people should with only 23% opposed.
