YouGov on the economy, Heathrow, Harry and Gaza
The full tables for the YouGov/Sunday Times poll are now available here.
Looking at the other tracker questions they follow the same trends as the voting intention. Brown's net approval rating is minus 25, down from minus 17 last month and minus 13 the month before, a month ago Cameron & Osborne's lead on which team people trusted to raise their standard of living had withered to just 1 point, now it is back up to 7. As ever with the Sunday Times poll though, there were a large number of questions on a wide variety of other subjects - here's some highlights.
The economy
As with Populus's poll, economic optimism has again fallen. The proportion of people who think the economy is doing badly has gone from 88% a month ago to 92% now. More importantly, given that almost everyone thinks things are bad and the issue is really how bad, the proportion of people who think things are "very bad" has grown from 42% to 52%.
People also seem to be more worried about the economic turmoil affecting their own lives - last month 42% said they were afraid that they, or someone else in their family, might lose their job; that has now risen to 47% (in some ways of course, in the longer term that might not be so bad for Labour. 47% of households are not going to see someone lose their job, so if it is an expectations game, that's probably one Labour can exceed!).
Most of the blame for the economic crisis is still being placed firmly upon the banks. 82% of people agree with the statement "This is a global recession caused by the banking crisis". A bare majority (50%) reject the statement that "This is ‘Gordon Brown's recession’ caused mainly by this Government's management of the economy", 37% agree.
On the face of it one might think those figures aren't too bad for Labour - people blame the banks, not the government. Actually it's probably just a result of putting statements that are rather too black and white - asking people who the main culprit is, rather than whether people share some of the blame. Even if one believed that Gordon Brown had handled the economy badly and contributed to the recession, it would be rather stretching things to claim that the government's economic management is the main cause of what is very clearly a global situation.
YouGov also tested the "Conservatives are a do nothing party" line again. This time 39% of people agreed and 41% disagreed, split, unsurprisingly, very much along party lines. The same question was asked back in December, when the split was 38% agree, 39% disagree, so while the tiny move against isn't significant, we can at least conclude that it hasn't gained any traction in a month.
Taking a slightly wider view, YouGov asked how they thought the economy should be balanced between the private and public sector. On average people said they would prefer an equal balance, with a slight preference towards the private sector. The question gave them a 10 point scale, and 44% picked the dead centre, with 26% picking a point on the private sector side and 20% a point on the public sector side.
Asked how they perceived the British economy at the moment, 60% of people thought the private sector played more of a role than the public sector. On average, therefore, people would prefer an economy that they perceive as more balanced and less dominated by the private sector. However, if you look at the party breaks this is not the same across the board. Labour voters see the economy currently as very tilted towards the private sector and would like things to be tilted towards the public sector. Conservative voters see the present economy as slightly tilted towards the private sector...but would like it to become more so.
Heathrow
Nationwide support for the Heathrow expansion stands at 29%, with 42% opposed. On the face of it this suggests people outside London are slightly more hostile to Heathrow expansion than those in London, who a YouGov poll last week found divided 35%-43% against. In fact, the questions that were asked are different, but looking just at the London break in this poll, Londoners appear to be very marginally more in favour, but the difference really isn't much to get excited about.
Asked about airport expansion in general, 26% of people opposed expanding our airports at all. 59% said airports should be expanded, but were split evenly between whether that extra expansion should be at Heathrow or elsewhere (interestingly there wasn't much difference in regional splits - one could easily imagine people wanting airport expansion, but not near them, or people wanting airport expansion in their own region, rather than always in the South-East. Actually neither of these happened (or they cancelled out); apart from in Scotland there was no real difference at all).
Prince Harry
YouGov also asked a couple of questions about the royal family and racism on the back of the Prince Harry story. A large majority of people backed Harry - 68% agreed with the statement "it was used in a good-natured way and wasn't racist", 19% said it was unacceptable. An even larger percentage of respondents - 78% - were unconcerned about Prince Charles calling a friend "Sooty". 66% of people said the royal family were not racist, 17% thought they were.
Gaza
Finally - though these are just my selection, there is some other stuff in the poll if you follow the link - YouGov asked about the conflict in Gaza and who was to blame. 18% said Israel, 24% said Hamas, 39% thought they were equally to blame.
