YouGov VI and polling on FIFA
The Sun this morning have YouGov voting intention figures - their first since the election - of CON 41%, LAB 30%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 13%, GRN 4%. Note that in terms of methodology, the figures are past vote weighted to the election result for the time being, obviously the pollsters are all still looking into their methods in the light of the pre-election polling and there will be presumably be more changes once the different companies' internal inquiries and the BPC external inquiry are complete.
The YouGov/Sun poll also had a question on people's preferred Labour leader, currently Andy Burnham leads the other candidates, but is a mile behind "don't know". As was the case a couple of weeks ago, we're really seeing a race between candidates who have extremely low public profiles, so the figures are pretty much just name recognition.
The YouGov/Sunday Times results from yesterday are here, and largely covered the issue of British perceptions of FIFA and corruption. There is a broad consensus amongst the British public that FIFA, the decisions on Russia and Qatar and Sepp Blatter himself are all corrupt (83% think FIFA corrupt, 78% the hosting decisions, 57% Blatter personally). A majority think the corruption is widespread throughout FIFA, and 46% now think the problem is so deep seated that FIFA is beyond reform and should be disbanded and replaced (a shift from a year ago, when people tended to think FIFA was corrupt but could be mended).
Looking forward people think the Russian World Cup should be cancelled and held elsewhere by 50% to 19%, and think the Qatar World Cup should by cancelled by 67% to 7%. 78% think that Blatter should stand down. There is, however, very little expectation that any of these things will happen
- 73% think the Russian World Cup will go ahead, 53% that the Qatar World Cup will go ahead and 51% that Blatter will remain in office.
54% of people think that the England football team should boycott the World Cup if FIFA is not reformed, 18% of people disagree. This is not just people who don't care about football - even amongst those who say they are interested in football 62% of people would support a boycott of the World Cup. This sounds a little high to me - after all, we'd just asked people lots of questions about what rotters FIFA and Blatter are, which probably disinclined them to say "let's go along anyway and do nothing about it" but I expect we'll see some more World Cup boycott questions in days to come.
