YouGov on the Eurozone, pensions and protests
Full tabs for this week's YouGov/Sunday Times poll are here, covering the Euro crisis, public sector pensions and the protests outside St Paul's (along with some stuff about cricket which I won't parade my ignorance by writing about!)
18% of people think the Eurozone should try to keep Greece in the Eurozone, 59% think they should not, largely unchanged from a week ago. An overwhelming majority of people (80%) think that it is important for Britain's economy that the problems in the Eurozone are solved, and by 39% to 18% people think it would be bad for Britain if the single currency collapsed. However, a majority (55%) of people continue to think that Britain should not be financially involved in any bailout.
Moving onto public sector pensions, people think it is right that public sector workers should contribute more of their salaries towards their pensions by 51% to 35%, support linking pensions to average salary rather than final salary by 49% to 30%. They are, however, evenly split over whether public sector workers should have to work until they are older to recieve their pension - 44% think it is right, 45% wrong. These questions were a repeat of a poll back at the beginning of July, and show no real significant change.
Asked about the changes the government proposed to the pension scheme last week (keeping existing retirement dates for those within 10 years of retirement, building up pension entitlements quicker... but still requiring public sector workers to contribute more to their pensions), 16% of people thought they were too generous, 17% thought they didn't go far enough, 42% thought they seemed like a reasonable compromise.
On the strike action at the end of the month, 31% of people said they supported public sector workers taking strike action over their pensions, 53% were opposed. This is a slight shift against the strikes since YouGov last asked the same question in September, when 38% of people supported it and 49% were opposed.
Moving onto the Occupy London protests outside St Paul's, YouGov asked a general question over whether people supported or opposed the protest outside the Cathedral. 20% of people said they supported it, 46% were opposed, 33% said neither or don't know (note the contrast with the question a week ago that found 39% of people saying they supported the aims of the protesters, suggesting there are significant numbers of people with sympathy towards the protesters aims but don't support them protesting outside the Cathedral). 44% of people said that legal action should be taken to remove them, 38% said it should not.
