YouGov/Sunday Times post CSR poll

The full tables for YouGov's Sunday Times poll are now up on the YouGov website here.

The questions on the spending review have results very much in line with YouGov's poll straight afterward Osborne's announcement - time to digest newspaper reactions and an extra day's new coverage don't seem to have changed opinion as they sometimes do. 43% thought the announcements the government made were right, 43% wrong, 45% thought they went too far, 43% thought they got the balance right or didn't go far enough (33% and 10% respectively). 51% thought they were unfair, and 45% continue to blame the last Labour government the most compared to 17% blaming the coalition.

One notable change from last week is to perceptions of who will suffer most from the cuts. A week ago YouGov found that 48% thought middle income households would suffer the most, ahead of low-income households on 35%. Presumably this was the result of the child benefit announcement and, perhaps, the tuition fees announcement. This week YouGov repeated the same question and people saw the poorest as likely to suffer the most by 48% to 36% (only 6% think the rich will suffer the most).

Looking at the polls on the spending review as a whole there seems to be a pretty coherent pattern. People are either evenly divided or positive about the cuts themselves, evenly divided over their size, and continue to see them as both unavoidable and more the fault of Labour than the Conservatives. However, they also tend to see the way the coalition have carried them out as unfair, and expect the poor to suffer more than the rich.

On other questions in the YouGov poll, the majority of respondents supported the decision to protect the NHS and schools from cuts, but opposed the decision to protect international development. 70% expect to be worse off from the changes.

There was little sympathy for the BBC - 48% thought the freeze on the licence fee and the end of government funding for the World Service got the balance about right, 31% thought the BBC should face larger cuts, with only 13% thinking the cuts went too far.

There is a continuing appetite for banker-bashing. We asked people if they thought George Osborne had succeeded in getting right what he called the balance between making the banks pay their share and not driving them abroad. Only 5% thought Osborne had gone too far, 31% thought he had got it right, a majority (52%) thought he had not gone far enough and taxes on banks should be even higher.

There was also a BPIX poll in the Mail on Sunday. The quoted shares of the vote in the paper are CON 35%, LAB 37%, LDEM 10%... but this implies others at 18% which would be a sharp contrast with other pollsters. In the past the Mail on Sunday have published figures from BPIX that weren't repercentaged to exclude won't votes, so this could be the case here, meaning all three parties are actually higher. BPIX don't publish tables so we'll never know.