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How was Labour polling before Brown?

Jack Straw was wrong to claim "the polls are better now"

By George Eaton Published 08 January 2010 16:26

One of the most curious cabinet statements issued in support of Gordon Brown during the coup attempt was that of Jack Straw.

He said:

The polls are better now than they were immediately before Gordon Brown took over. Our fortunes are linked to the fortunes of the country and indeed the economy . . . I do not think there is an issue about the direction that Gordon Brown and the cabinet and the government as a whole are trying to lead this country.

Straw is renowned as the cabinet's top poll-watcher, but I've dug out the figures from UK Polling Report and he's wrong. The final poll before Brown took office on 27 June 2007 put Labour on 32 per cent, 5 points behind the Conservatives. That's a better result than the Observer poll late last year which put Labour 6 points behind the Tories and provoked such euphoria among Labour activists.

Another poll, carried out by Ipsos-MORI a week before Brown took over, actually put Labour 3 points ahead of the Tories. Throughout May and June the party regularly polled only 2 or 3 points behind the Tories, enough to make Labour the largest single party in a hung parliament.

By comparison, the most recent polls on the day Straw spoke gave the Conservatives a lead of 9 to 10 points.

The casual belief that Labour became fantastically unpopular under Tony Blair is not supported by the evidence. It was Blair's unpopularity with Labour MPs that ensured his political death.

Here are the full figures from June:

24/06/07

Communicate/Independent: Con (37%) Lab (32%) Lib Dems (18%)

20/06/07

Ipsos-MORI/Observer: Lab (39%) Con (36%) Lib Dems (15%)

15/06/07

YouGov/Sunday Times: Con (37%) Lab (35%) Lib Dems (14%)

03/06/07

Populus/Times: Con (36%) Lab (33%) Lib Dems (17%)

 
 

2 comments

Chris's picture

Sun, 2010-01-10 12:33 — Chris (not verified)

Good comment above.

David Wearing1's picture

Fri, 2010-01-08 16:45 — David Wearing1

True, but the casual belief that Blair's New Labour was some awesome vote winning machine, only driven into the ground by GB, is not supported by the evidence either.

Blair won in 1997 with only 44 per cent of the popular vote and fewer individual votes than were cast for John Major’s decidedly unpopular Tories when the latter narrowly won their surprise victory in 1992. That Blair owed his 1997 win more to anti-Tory sentiment than any appetite for his “third-way” revolution was further evidenced by the fact that between 1992 and 1997 the Tory vote collapsed by an massive 4 million.

Major’s 1992 victory had come in the wake of a recession and the disastrous implementation of the “poll tax”, and Labour’s failure to secure victory even in these favourable circumstances provided much of the justification for the party’s subsequent lurch to the right under Blair. Yet in his 2001 election victory, after 4 years of relative economic stability and a near total-absence of effective political opposition from the Conservatives, Blair won fewer popular votes than Neil Kinnock had won in the 1992 defeat. And the trend continued. In 2005, Blair won fewer popular votes than the Tories had in their seminal 1997 meltdown.

Labour fell behind the Tories as soon as the latter found a plausible human being to stand in front of them and help pretend they were normal. If Labour wants to beat them, or at least stop being loathed by the public, it has to ditch New Labour, not just Gordon Brown. Because the trend is abundently clear. The public never loved New Labour, and liked it less and less the more it saw of it.

I wrote more on this here
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_blair_...

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