YouGov/Sunday Times polling on last Thursday's strikes
The full tables for the YouGov/Sunday Times poll are here, mainly covering the strike and public sector pensions.
40% of people said they supported teachers going on strike last week, with 49% of people were opposed - exactly the same split YouGov found when they asked a similar question for the Sun before the strikes. There was less support for the other workers who went on strike on Thursday though - only 35-36% supported strikes by immigration, job centre and court staff, with 52% opposed.
This is an interesting pattern, teachers going on strike probably cause disruption to more people than immigration officers, job centre staff and so on, yet they have more support. It suggests to me that the difference in attitudes towards the different groups on strike is more down to people having more respect or sympathy for some occupations than others, rather than the different amounts of disruption caused by different occupations going on strike.
Note that parents of schoolchildren were not more opposed to the strike (in fact, they were marginally more favourable - the reason is probably demographic - over 60s were by far the most hostile towards the strikes, and are obviously much less likely to have school age children. If you compare people with school-age children's views to to those of everyone between 25-59 (the age groups most likely to have school age children), views are almost identical.)
People blame the government and the unions roughly equally for the strikes. 36% blame the government most, 33% blame the unions the most, 22% blame them both equally. They are slightly more likely to think the unions are behaving reasonably though - 43% think the trade unions are being reasonable, 36% think the government are. People are also evenly split over whether the trade unions are primarily concerned about protecting their members' pension rights (41%), or are primarily using it as a way of combating the government's wider cuts (40%). There is an overwhelming expectation there were are more wide-scale strikes to come.
Respondents thought both Cameron and Miliband handled the strikes badly- Cameron by 53% to 28%, Miliband by 49% to 19%. There is an interesting difference in the partisan balance though. Opinions on Cameron were largely and predictably partisan - most of Conservatives thought he handled the strikes well, most of Labour supporters thought he'd handled them badly. Compare this to Ed Miliband, where his own Labour supporters think he has handled the strikes badly by 47% to 24%, suggesting that criticising the strikes is not chiming with his own supporters.
Turning to the issue of pensions themselves, YouGov asked specifically about some of the changes proposed to pensions. People tend to think it is right that public sector workers should have to pay more towards their pension (by 51% to 34%) and that pensions should be based on average salary rather than final salaries (by 46% to 32%). However, they are less supportive of making public sector employees work for longer before receiving their pensions (44% think this is right, 44% wrong).
