You might expect Labour, with no permanent leader in place, to be lagging in the polls. But the latest Guardian/ICM poll shows quite the reverse. The poll puts Labour neck and neck with the Tories on 37 per cent, the first time an ICM poll has shown the two parties drawing level since the phantom election of October 2007.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Guardian’s report almost entirely ignores this finding, focusing instead on news that 44 per cent belive the coalition is doing a good job in securing economic recovery, against 37 per cent who believe it’s doing a bad job. However, it is hardly surprising that voters are in wait-and-see mode on the economy, not least because the VAT rise and those 25 per cent cuts are still to come.
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With some cabinet ministers such as Chris Huhne convinced that the cuts will make the coalition deeply unpopular, it must be troubling to see a leaderless Labour Party drawing level with the government. Labour havng avoided a collapse in support means that Simon Hughes can plausibly claim, as he has done in a BBC interview, that a progressive coalition after the next election is still “on the agenda”.
There’s better news for the Tories in the daily YouGov/Sun tracker, which puts them on 42 per cent, with Labour on 37 per cent and the Lib Dems on 14 per cent. But based on either poll, it looks like the next Labour leader will be in a far stronger position than many originally expected.
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