Cicero Policy Briefer

Issue 12, May 2007

Polls apart: Analysing the forthcoming elections

By Nick Moon, Managing Director, GfK NOP Social Research

Despite all the complaints that he has become out of touch, Tony Blair showed he still has at least one finger on the popular pulse when he recognised that a prime motivating factor in the forthcoming Scottish election was to give him a good kicking on his way out of the door. There is no doubt that many Scottish voters will be attracted by the idea of helping him on his way like a Glasgow pub bouncer seeing off an unruly customer, and it’s not just the Scots who are thinking like that—we can see similar factors at work in the Welsh elections, and in the English locals as well.

It is hardly surprising that a government that has been in power for 10 years should be unpopular. One that was swept to power on such a wave of optimism was bound to fail to live up to that promise eventually, and especially since it was concerned above all else not to be a one-term government. Blair’s strategist Philip Gould was fond of recounting the story of Bill Clinton who, when asked “What do we do first?” after George Bush had conceded, replied, “Make sure we win next time.” The political pragmatist Clinton had recognised that four years (or even five) is not really enough to get anything done, and if you want to make changes you have to win at least two in a row.

Gould brought that message back from the US, and Blair signed up to it entirely. Very much aware of how previous Labour governments had been constrained by their failure to serve two full terms, he was determined not to suffer the same fate. This was a very sensible strategy to take into the 1997 election, but it seems not to have been modified despite the extraordinary victory—and it can be argued that the seeds of Labour’s current difficulties were sown once the chance to do something radical with that mandate was turned down in favour of caution.

In 1992 a deeply unpopular Conservative government was re-elected because they, and their press allies, succeeded in frightening the electorate about Labour’s inability to run the economy. With almost nothing else in their favour they put all their eggs in this economic basket, and it worked. Black Wednesday of course cut that ground from under their feet, and so they had nothing at all in 1997 that would seriously deter people from voting Labour. And then of course Labour got in, and we found that they could run the economy—and the Tories’ last weapon had been proved to be a dud.

General economic well-being and the general uselessness of the Tories saw Labour safely through two more elections, and coupled with the peculiarities of the distribution of votes and seats, made an even longer period of Labour domination look possible, especially when the Tories elected an Old Etonian as their next leader.

And yet here we are with Labour way behind in the polls, likely to lose control of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and pretty much any remaining councils in southern England. Where did it all go wrong?

One argument is that this is the wrong way of looking at it, and the right question is: why did Labour stay ahead in the polls for so long? Labour took the lead in the polls in the autumn of 1992 and, apart from a very short-term blip at the time of the petrol crisis in 2000, stayed ahead until the end of 2005. Thirteen years of non-stop poll leads is quite remarkable—Mrs Thatcher’s governments were often miles behind in the polls in between elections—and it had to come to an end eventually.

What is interesting is not that it has finally come to an end, but that there appears to be such a groundswell of anti-Labour feeling, and this is where I feel the price may be being paid for a lack of ambition (or a swing away from traditional Labour values—take your pick) since 1997.

The more we idolise a new boyfriend/girlfriend the worse it seems when they let us down like all the other ones have—and the electorate has just found Labour in bed with its best friend. Or possibly both its best friends.

We can look back fondly at Kennedy’s Camelot because he died while the honeymoon was still in full swing, but if you are going to promise a new kind of politics, and to be cleaner than clean, then you are pretty much setting yourself up to fail if you stay in power for ten years.

So Labour is indeed going to get that kicking on Thursday, but what does it mean in the longer term? The short answer is not a lot, as local election results have very little relevance for a general election, and the Welsh and Scottish ones not much more so. There is a very real possibility that the current Tory lead is a chimera, founded more in dislike of Labour, and that once the Tories have to develop policies and justify them much of their current support will drift away.

There is a very real chance that the next election will look like 1992, with a deeply unpopular government that has outstayed its welcome being faced by an opposition that most people are suspicious of.

Scottish Independence

Arguably more interesting than the polls about the election in Scotland are the polls about Scottish independence, which provide a good example of the answer you get depending on the question you ask. On the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union, SNP leader Alex Salmond claimed that the long-term trend was in favour of independence, while Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander claimed they merely showed trendless fluctuation.

One of the difficulties in spotting trends is that the polls keep asking different questions, with the issue of independence within or outside the European Community complicating matters. The best example to back up Alexander’s claim is the ICM series for The Scotsman, which since 1998 has asked the simple question: “How would you vote in an independence referendum?” The proportion answering yes has been 48 per cent, give or take 4 per cent, in 10 of the 12 polls in the series, with one being higher than that range and one being lower. There has been more variation in the percentage saying no, because of considerable variation in the numbers of don’t knows.

In a September 2006 poll with basically the same question YouGov also found 44 per cent saying they would vote yes, with 42 per cent saying no. In January 2007 YouGov found the positions reversed after asking a slightly different question. Responding to “Do you support or oppose Scotland becoming a country independent from the rest of the United Kingdom?”, 40 per cent supported the idea and 44 per cent opposed. In both cases the gap between the two sides is so small that both polls are within sampling error of an even split.

However, when offered a different choice of a referendum on “whether to retain the Scottish Parliament and Executive in more or less their present form or to establish Scotland as a completely separate state outside the United Kingdom but inside the European Union” in both April 2003 and March 2007, fewer than 30 per cent in each case said they would vote for a separate state, while just over half wanted the status quo. In January 2007 YouGov offered an even more complex split, with independence inside and outside the EU, a Scottish parliament with more, fewer or the same powers as now, and abolition of the Scottish parliament. The results were broadly similar, with 31 per cent wanting a separate state and 51 per cent wanting a Scottish Parliament. In March 2007 Populus asked a similar question, and found 27 per cent wanting separate statehood.

So almost half would vote yes in an independence referendum, but fewer than one in three want independence. This suggests that there is a lot of confusion about what independence actually means, and this may have significant implications for the SNP. There are a lot of people who want more independence for Scotland, but not many who want to sever the ties with Britain completely, so expect the SNP to big up any polls like the ICM referendum series, while Labour will happier with those that mention separate statehood. Labour has recently been asking Scots why they should want to leave Britain altogether, and while this may not help them keep control of the Scottish Parliament, it may cause longer-term problems for the SNP.

Nick Moon is the Managing Director of GfK NOP Social Research and can be contacted here.

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