YouGov/Sun - CON 39 LAB 41 LD 9
Tonight's YouGov poll for the Sun has topline figures of CON 39%, LAB 41%, LDEM 9% - another two point lead. Since the local elections the average lead in YouGov's daily polls has dropped to just over 3 points, compare that to a peak in YouGov's polls of a 9-11 point Labour lead for a while in mid-March.
The pattern of a shrinking Labour lead is consistent across the polling companies, with all the regular pollsters now showing the Labour lead dropping to the low single figures. There appears to be a genuine tightening of the polls since February and March when the Labour lead was generally between 6 and 10 points. YouGov's daily government approval also appears to have improved - back in mid-March it got as low as minus 30 on a couple of occassions, and the percentage of people thinking the government was doing a good job fell into the 20s. In the last week has been hovering around minus 20, with the percentage of people approving of the government back into the low 30s.
Part of this will be down to the halo effect of the local elections - rightly or wrongly it was seen as a disappointment for Labour and better for the Conservatives than had been expected. However, I think there may well be an economic factor too. Figures on economic confidence and how well people think the economy is doing remain atrocious... but not quite as atrocious as a couple of months ago. Through February and March 77-80% thought the economy was in a bad state. In the last three YouGov/Sunday Times polls that's fallen to 73-74%. We see the same pattern with the "feel good factor" (the proportion of people who think their financial position is going to improve minus the proportion who think it will get worse) - between January and mid-March it was around minus 55, since mid-March it has dragged itself into the minus 40s and was -45/46 in the last two Sunday Times polls.
These figures are the sort of thing we were seeing back at the tail end of 2010 - so it looks as if what actually happened over the last few months is that the negative growth and bad economic news at the start of 2011 knocked government popularity and temporarily pushed Labour's lead up into the high single figures... since then economic optimism (while still dire) has improved marginally, and so has government support. For Populus, ICM, MORI and YouGov at least, we are back in a position where the Conservatives are retaining their General Election support, and the only change since the election is the fracturing of Lib Dem support towards Labour.
Not, of course, that public opinion can be boiled down to a single economic cause. Other factors will be also be wider perceptions of the government's competence and ability (the rows about privatising forests, for example, have faded away and the NHS reforms have been paused), there may also be an Ed Miliband factor, since his negative ratings seem to be becoming more entrenched. There are no doubt plenty of other possible explanations too.
Will it last? Probably not, a halo effect from the local elections is by definition short lived, the country is certainly not out of the woods in economic terms, and there are certainly many unpopular cuts that still need to be implemented. The Conservatives are doing better than one may have expected (certainly I've made many comments here saying I expected Labour to open up a bigger lead after the May elections - I got that one wrong!) but I expect the government's real mid-term blues will show up sooner or later...
