YouGov on Egypt, forests and crime
The full results of the YouGov/Sunday Times poll are now available here. As usual with the Sunday Times, there were questions on a broad range of topics, these are the ones I found most interesting:
First, there were some broad brush questions on people's attitudes towards the recent events in Egypt - naturally we can't really expect the general public to be experts in Middle Eastern geopolitics, so it was more whether the uprising made people more pesimistic or optimist about the future of the Middle East - 51% were more pessimistic, 14% more optimistic.
Secondly there were some questions about the sell-off of Forestry Commission land in England. We've already had YouGov questions on this for the Sunday Times last week and for 38 Degrees and this one shows the same pattern as the previous ones: very widespread opposition. 71% oppose the disposal of the Foresty Commission land with only 12% supporting it.
Thirdly there were some questions on crime and policing, mostly dealing with the new crime maps. An interesting question asked people how they thought the police should priortise different areas of crime, and what they percieved as the police's priorities. People viewed violent crime, sexual crimes, mugging then burglary as the things that should be police priorities, with anti-Social behaviour, car theft and vandalism less so and traffic offences least so. Their perception of the police's actual priorities were that sexual crime, violent crime and traffic offences were the police's top priorities, followed by mugging, burglary, ASB with car theft and vandalism the lowest priorities.
Essentially people see the police as putting crimes in roughly the same order of priorities as they would themselves, with the exception of traffic offenses, which the public say they perceive the police as prioritising above things like mugging or burglary.
There was also an ICM poll in the News of the World. The NotW is behind a paywall now, so I haven't seen it myself but it doesn't appear to have contained any voting intentions or anything earthshattering - the question that has received the most publicity was one asking people to choose between the coalition or Labour or neither, which showed 32% prefering the coalition, 26% Labour and 29% neither. Incidentally, it was conducted online, which seems to be increasingly common for ICM polls. A couple of their polls on the Alternative Vote for the ERS last year were online, but I think this is the first party political one of theirs I've seen.
