When I last wrote about it the public were quite evenly split, following a shift towards more people wanting attention on growth.

Since then, the government’s emphasis on reducing the deficit regained support in the first quarter of this year.

Perhaps this was helped by Labour’s announcement in January that they wouldn’t necessarily reverse the cuts – though I doubt this did too much to public opinion, and suspect the changing mood was more down to a relative lack of bad news on the economy and the government seeming fairly stable.

But since the budget and double-dip, the mood has shifted.

The proportion wanting more attention on growth, even if the deficit gets worse, is now 11pts greater than the numbers who want to focus on reducing the deficit.

This is a 15pt shift from the position two months ago, and 20pts from where we were in July last year:

In December last year, Daniel Finkelstein argued that the view that we should borrow more to borrow less “is never going to work politically. Ever.”

As Jonathan Freedland wrote in reply, that categorical assertion may be too strong. It might have been the case that the option was unacceptable to too many people then, but “where the economics leads, the politics will surely follow.”

Regardless of the economic validity of focusing more on growth than the deficit, the public have become more receptive to a different economic approach.

But Keynesians should still be cautious: fewer than half support their approach, and even the return to recession didn’t make a huge difference to opinion. The ground may be becoming more favourable but it is still far from secure for an Hollande-style refutation of austerity.

Even by the standards of political outrages, the Jeremy Hunt news has the feel of a story that would only interest politics fans. It’s about something that happened in the past and has since stopped, it’s about rules rather than incompetence or greed, and it only affects most people’s lives at some future point.

But the proportion of the public who currently think Hunt should resign is very high. In fact, compared with other ministerial resignations and near-misses of recent years, Hunt has the highest number saying he should go:

(NB, of these, only Liam Fox and David Blunkett resigned – see below for links to data)

I find it particularly striking that Hunt’s resignation scores are higher even than those for Charles Clarke around the foreign prisoner debacle.

Yet, I’m still not convinced this tells the whole story.

One factor is certainly that the current government is more unpopular than most of those in charge during the previous crises.

And given that, I have a feeling that some of the response to the Hunt story is driven more by a feeling that the government deserves a good kicking, rather than a real evaluation of what he is supposed to have done.

This is borne out by the proportions who say they don’t know whether or not particular ministers should resign. Around a quarter say this about Hunt, more than all the others, suggesting that fewer people have thought about this story enough to have a strong opinion:

So it’s true that among those who have a response to a question about Hunt, most think he should go. But the high proportion of those who don’t have an opinion suggests this is still a story that hasn’t fully caught the public imagination.

Data

The polls each ask the question in slightly different ways. Most are very similar, though the Jacqui Smith one is phrased in an odd way that asks two separate questions at once.

They’re available at:

David Blunkett (first resignation)

Charles Clarke (speculation, but no resignation)

Liam Fox

Jeremy Hunt (YouGov)

Jeremy Hunt (ComRes)

Theresa May (speculation, but no resignation)

Jacqui Smith (speculation, but no resignation)

Since each of the last six polls, including today’s, has been within margin of error of a Boris lead of 5pts, it’s possible that the narrow lead just reflects random variance.

But digging beneath the numbers suggests a more decisive trend.

Between January and mid-April, Boris began scoring much better among 2010 Tory voters than Ken did among 2010 Labour voters. The gap became as wide as 14pts.

An explanation for growing support among previous Tory voters could be Lynton Crosby’s style of ‘get out the base’ campaigning.

But in the last two weeks, while Boris has neared the limits of support from 2010 Tory voters, the Ken campaign has made up more ground among Labour voters. The gap has now reduced to 7pts:

This may in part be a product of Labour’s current support in London now being at its highest point this year, 50%.

But even if Labour don’t increase their national support in the capital any further, there is still more space for Ken to increase his share among previous party supporters than there is for Boris to do the same.

The other voters

Last month we saw that Boris had just made a significant gain among people who wouldn’t vote Labour or Tory in a general election.

Since then, his score among those voters has stayed at the same point. This is currently about a fifth of the London electorate (those who’re likely to vote), so a gain for either candidate of a few points among this group would show in the overall numbers:

So, with 10 days until the election, Boris still looks more likely to win. But the Labour campaign has a larger pool of former voters to try to win over, and a small movement to Ken would swing the result.

But the impact on the party leaders’ ratings hasn’t been that straightforward. Surprisingly, Cameron emerged largely unscathed, although the others got a boost.

For this comparison, I’m looking at data from three Populus polls. Each asked respondents to score how ‘positive’ they feel about the leaders, on a score of 0-100.

The first poll comes from December ‘10/January ’11, the second from February ’12 (before the worst week), and the third from March/April ’12 (after the worst week). The groups I’m looking at are based on vote at the last election, so these should be comparable across the three polls – though they often won’t be current party supporters/voters.

Looking at each of the leaders in turn:

Cameron

Despite the impact on the Tories’ vote intent score, Cameron himself seems to have been barely hit by the worst week.

But what’s striking is his score had already fallen sharply among his own party’s voters. While he still remains the most popular leader among his own voters, the gap now is much smaller than it was 15 months ago.

Miliband

As might be expected, Miliband’s scores have gone up among all groups since the worst week, with the largest overall increase.

Like Cameron, he experienced a dip in support among his own voters after the end of ’10, but unlike the Prime Minister, his score has increased again in the last month.

Miliband is now more popular than Cameron among 2010 Lib Dem voters – and is nearly as popular as Clegg among that group.

Clegg

Like Miliband, Clegg has seen a general – albeit smaller – lift after the worst week. He remains the least popular party leader, although still not by much.

His boost over the last month, particularly among 2010 Lib Dem voters, seems to reflect the effectiveness of the Lib Dem’s pre-Budget leaking. Clegg looks to have taken the credit for the popular side of things and escaped the associated blame for the rest of the goings-on.

It’s also interesting to see that he’s now, finally albeit narrowly, more popular among 2010 Lib Dem voters than he is among 2010 Tory voters!

But there’s been some truly awful reporting today of the latest London mayoral poll, and it’s time to look at weighting and so on.

According to today’s Evening Standard, their new ComRes poll shows “a dramatic slide in Mr Livingstone’s support after his argument with his Tory rival over tax in a radio station lift”.

They go on to say that those “interviewed before “liftgate” last Tuesday morning were split 50/50 between the two candidates. But those surveyed afterwards divided 60/40 in favour of Mr Johnson.” ITV also reported it with the same angle.

This all sounds very plausible and interesting, but it’s in fact a bad misrepresentation of the poll.

The issue is, the poll was never designed to show how opinion changed after shoutyBorisgate. Of course it wasn’t: the poll was set up without anyone knowing there would be any event to compare ‘before’ and ‘after’.

If you do know that an event is coming, say a leaders’ debate, you can run two separate polls, with comparable samples (or even, with the same people), and see how the results compare.

But this ComRes poll doesn’t do that. Instead, a little over three quarters of the poll was conducted before the interview, and the remainder after. Nothing looks to have been done to make sure the samples before and after were comparable.

So we’ve got two groups of people. In terms of how they voted in the last general election (nothing to do with Ken and Boris), the first group has 29% Labour voters and 27% Tory voters. The second group has 26% Labour voters and 32% Tory voters. A Labour 2pt lead vs a Tory 5pt lead.

We then ask them how they’d vote in the London election, and are supposed to be surprised when the group with more Tories say they’re more likely to vote for the Tory candidate!

You could in principle do something about this. You could try to weight separately the two groups to make them representative of the country. In practice this might not work very well because one of the groups may not have enough people from some sub-group to be able to weight it well – particularly if the latter part of the sample is made up of hard-to-sample groups, like young people without phone lines, or older people without the internet. There would also sometimes be a problem with margin of error if one group is quite a bit smaller than the other.

But the ComRes poll doesn’t even look to have tried this. Instead they’ve taken a representative sample, and pulled it apart into two groups, regardless of whether those groups are representative of, well, anything.

So, there is pretty much no basis for saying that today’s London poll shows anything about the impact of two men having an argument in a lift, or even how opinion has changed since then.

Even without all this methodological stuff, it should be obvious that a row that almost no-one saw was never going to have swayed opinion as much as the poll apparently shows.

Incidentally, another example of this came up just a couple of weeks ago. Another ComRes poll apparently showed a 17-pt lead for Labour in interviews conducted after the Tories’ cash-for-access scandal.

The normally excellent John Rentoul blogged on it, making the same mistake as today’s Standard. The fact that no subsequent polls picked up the same giant lead suggests that this was indeed purely a consequence of how the sample was divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’.

I do wonder why ComRes persist in putting these columns into their databooks.

Coverage of public opinion on climate change is never just about reporting numbers. Without appreciating the need for journalists to tell a story, we can never really understand why climate change polls are reported as they are.

Over the last decade, two distinct narratives have been told about what the public think of climate change. Each of these narratives has been so dominant for a time that it has been difficult for alternative views of public opinion to get much attention.

The first, which dominated for most of the noughties, was that climate change was increasingly settled in the public’s minds as a great concern. Polls on climate change were rare for much of the decade, but when they did appear in the media, the coverage tended to acknowledge that the public was worried, although perhaps unsure about the risks or about possible solutions, as in this Observer article.

As a result, there was little prominent dissent from the view that climate change was becoming a more important issue for most people, along with a belief that the world needed to take decisive action.

The rise of scepticism

But by the end of 2009, this prevailing narrative about public views on climate change had given way to a very different account.

It happened quite suddenly, around the time of the COP15 in Copenhagen. Now, the dominant frame was that growing numbers of people doubted the existence of serious man-made climate change, and that there was increased resistance to measures to tackle it.

Opinion polls were important to the development of this new account. For about a year, from late 2009, polls were repeatedly used to show the same narrative: that fewer people were now worried about climate change.

The sheer weight of polls, reported across the media, gave the overwhelming impression of an ongoing change in opinion. But this was misleading: in fact, there appears to have been a one-off fall in concern about climate change, which happened between November’09 and January ’10.

The difficulty in understanding opinion lies in the fact that media outlets want to report their own polls, as an exclusive story. They’re much less interested in repeating polls that another newspaper or broadcaster have commissioned.

So over a period of several months, we saw different polls in outlets from the Daily Mail to the BBC and Guardian, which essentially restated the same phenomenon as if it were a new finding. The result was a powerful new narrative, that concern about climate change was experiencing an ongoing decline.

There are two reasons why it’s useful to see this as a new dominant narrative about public opinion, rather than as straight-forward reporting of opinion.

The first is that the decline in concern about climate change was reported selectively. At the same time as this concern fell, people also became less worried about (almost) everything else, including immigration, and law and order.

By focusing on climate change, the media missed the much bigger fact that people had become less worried about everything that wasn’t the economy.

The second point lost in this new story is that ‘belief’ in climate science is often a poor guide to people’s desire for action to be taken to avert climate change. A fascinating poll in January ’10 found that, among people who said climate change was an unproven theory, nearly two-thirds were still satisfied with the Copenhagen Accord’s aim of reducing emissions.

Today’s dominant narrative

So the new narrative of public opinion on climate change looks to have been overstated, selective and misleading. But it still was utterly dominant, and continues to be influential.

There is no evidence that concern about climate change fell further after early ’10, and there is growing evidence that it has recovered some of the ground. This has prevented further reports of polls that show falling numbers worried about climate change. Yet, the story has adapted and survived.

Now, the focus has shifted to apparent resistance to measures to tackle climate change. What’s interesting is that this goes beyond the Mail (energy bills) and the Telegraph (windfarms).

The Guardian’s recent reporting of a poll on energy sources is informative. The poll found windfarms to be easily the most popular source of power, with about three times as much support as coal. The article could have been headlined “Overwhelming local opposition to nuclear and coal power, poll finds”.

Yet, the poll also found an increase in opposition to all forms of power – including wind – and instead the headline was “Local opposition to onshore windfarms has tripled, poll shows”. The dominant story of the last two years informed how the findings were interpreted, even in the Guardian.

We should never expect polls in the media to provide a completely objective account of reality. They are commissioned, prepared and reported with the aim of generating news stories. That news will almost inevitably reflect the dominant narrative of the time, and polling should always be seen in that light.

The change may just be random fluctuation: with London polls still only coming about once a month it’s hard to be sure. But it would also make sense that we’re seeing an impact from the accusations about Ken’s tax dealings, which broke before the poll was conducted.

Regardless of what’s caused any swing, the combined polls this year demonstrate two key issues that are determining how the race is working out.

Converting party supporters

Given that Labour’s vote is generally much stronger than the Tories’ in London – yet Boris and Ken are roughly level – it’s not surprising that Boris is doing better among his party’s supporters.

So, one problem for the Ken campaign is that it isn’t getting support from all Labour voters. In the latest poll, Ken is 10pts behind Boris among their own parties’ supporters. While this isn’t new, the gap seems to have widened this month:

Labour’s vote across the country has increased by several points since the March poll was taken. Given the closeness of the London race, this could make a crucial difference, but the lower conversion rate of Labour voters into Ken voters could reduce the benefit to the campaign if the same reluctance applies to ‘new’ Labour voters.

Winning other voters

There’s a striking difference in where each candidate’s support comes from. Despite Ken’s relative weakness among Labour voters, a much higher proportion of his voters are also Labour supporters than Boris’ voters are Tory supporters.

In fact, less than two thirds of Boris’ support comes from Tory voters, while five in six Ken voters are also Labour supporters.

The issue is that Boris is winning support outside his party base far more successfully than Ken is, and the latest poll puts this support at its highest point so far:

In itself, this isn’t a disaster for the Labour campaign. Ken could win with Labour voters and just a few other second choices.

This would be particularly true if the Labour vote increases from its current 46%: the lowest it’s been in London this year. But it also relies on Labour supporters voting for Ken in higher numbers than currently seems likely.

So the Ken campaign is facing problems on two fronts: both among Labour voters and among people who don’t support either candidate’s parties.

Because of Labour’s strength in London, the race is still very close despite these problems. As things stand, the Ken campaign only needs to improve a little among either group for a victory to become likely; Labour’s increased support since the budget may indeed already be making things even closer.

Normally reliable admirers of the government’s political tactics are astonished that the Chancellor is planning the cut. In his Telegraph blog, Dan Hodges suggested the move would spell the end of Osborne’s career. The Express’s Patrick O’Flynn tweeted that it would be ‘political disaster for the Tories’.

Recent polls suggest they are absolutely right. From what we have heard so far, the change to the top rate seems on course to be extraordinarily unpopular.

The latest poll on the change, from YouGov, found that only 1 in 4 support a cut, with more than twice as many opposed (this asks about a cut to 40p rather than the likely 45p; I doubt that would make much difference). But this only begins to touch on how politically difficult the cut would be.

It’s no surprise that the Lib Dems’ remaining supporters really don’t like the proposal, indicating problems for the Coalition ahead.

But what’s striking is that the plan doesn’t seem to have majority support even among Tory voters. The political justification that it would offer red meat for unloved Tory voters doesn’t appear to bear much weight:

In fact, a more detailed look at views of the plan suggests even bigger political problems for the government.

Support for the change is higher among younger people: the group least likely to vote at an election. Older people are most strongly opposed to the plan*:

Indeed, the electoral problem seems even greater when we look at geography. The Midlands is packed with key battleground constituencies – crucial for the Tories if they are to win a majority at the next election – yet has very little support for cutting the top rate:

By way of benchmark, it’s instructive to look at the reaction to a budget a decade ago, when Gordon Brown increased National Insurance contributions by 1p to boost NHS funding.

The situation was almost an exact mirror of the current one: in good economic times, a Chancellor put up an earnings-based tax. Now, in bad times, a Chancellor looks likely to cut a similar tax.

Brown should have had a harder time than Osborne: you would never expect tax cuts to be less popular than a tax hike. But public opinion to the two changes is almost diametrically opposed, with an ICM poll finding 76% support for the NI increase.

The key difference is that the 2002 NI increase won support as it was seen as forcing the majority to make a sacrifice for a common good. A similar argument could in principle be made for the income tax cut, on the basis that the majority must bear the cost of lower taxes for higher-earning wealth creators, in order to encourage growth. But it’s hard to see that many people currently buy this view.

If Osborne is to overcome the latent opposition to a tax cut this week, he badly needs to win that argument. As things stand and if the top rate is indeed cut, it’s hard to doubt that the Coalition has tough times ahead.

–

(*) The data for this and the next chart come from the three most recent YouGov polls to include the question, in order to increase base sizes for the sub-groups. The full data for the previous polls are available here and here.

The first is that the principles of the protest were surprisingly popular. We saw in October an ICM poll that found a majority sympathetic to the protesters’ aim of ending ‘a system that puts profit before people’. Fewer than two in five said that the protesters were naive in looking for an alternative to capitalism.

A new YouGov poll has reinforced this. Asking simply whether people support the ‘aims’ of the protesters – not spelling out what those aims are – the result is an impressive 17-point lead for those supporting the protest against those opposing its aims:

The surprise isn’t that the country thinks that the current economic system is unfair. We already knew that there is an overwhelming view that those who play by the rules don’t get rewarded.

What is impressive is that Occupy London succeeded in tapping in to this. Despite not making specific proposals for reforming the economic system, and having their message diverted by fights about tactics, the protesters’ desire for something better than the current system was recognised and shared by a large proportion of the population.

Whether this support meant that the protests changed anything is another question. The same YouGov poll also finds that 71% think that it didn’t achieve much or anything at all.

This seems harsh. While difficult to measure, one likely success is that the protest prompted media debates about whether the economic system can be reformed, which created political space to consider it in a way that hadn’t previously existed. It may also be true that the protests inspired and informed new activists, who will continue to fight for economic and political reforms.

Opposition to the tactics

But while the protests may have achieved some things, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the tactics of Occupy London got in the way of its achieving more.

Given that the protesters had public support for their aims, it doesn’t reflect well that large majorities wanted the protests to end. YouGov found that two-thirds support the legal action to remove the St Paul’s protest, and other polls showed similar approval for ending the protest. The widespread view seems to have been, “Ok, we agree with you, but you’ve made your point and now you’ve become a nuisance”.

Yet, this was inevitable from the moment the protesters found themselves camping outside St Paul’s, and it exposes competing objectives in the movement.

If the protest was intended to provide a space for democratic debate among activists, or even to be a mothership for other protests, it made sense for it to run indefinitely. But if that were the case, there was no reason for it to be in a location as prominent – as annoying – as St Paul’s.

On the other hand, if the protest was intended to spark a media and political debate, holding it in a controversial location like St Paul’s was a great way of getting publicity. But once the initial headlines passed – and the story inevitably became about the camp attracting people with mental health problems, or the conflict with the Church – trying to run a protest indefinitely at St Paul’s increasingly distracted from the protesters’ message.

Protest camps will continue long after Occupy London becomes a hazy memory, but there are lessons from the tent city at St Paul’s. From the movement’s perspective, a positive conclusion is that it demonstrated public support for discussion about alternatives to the current system. But there is also limited patience for those who would disrupt everyday life for months on end to make their point, even when their message has a receptive audience.