Ahead of the Autumn Statement next week, Survation conducted a 12,000 sample MRP survey of voting intentions related to a series of economic issues on behalf of the UK Spirits Alliance. The overall analysis found that two thirds of voters put the cost of living as one their top threes issues which will most affect how they vote at the next election. Labour leads on the cost of living issue and the economy generally. With 52% of voters associating the Conservatives with “more taxation” they have managed to lose their unique selling point as the low tax party to Labour.

Drilling down into the data for the views of voters in the Chancellor’s own new boundaries seat – Godalming and Ash – reveals that even in the Surrey Tory heartlands the majority (52%) think they’re paying too much tax, unsurprisingly 57% would support a duty cut and nearly two-thirds (62%) associate the Tories with high taxes. Following the corporation tax hike 55% don’t think the Tories support small business. Not an image the Chancellor will want in his constituency…

In the PM’s new boundaries seat of Richmond and Northallerton 55% want duty frozen or reduced, three fifths associate the Tories with high taxes and half (50%) don’t think the Tories support Small and Medium Businesses. The former Chancellor turned PM has only himself to blame.

Next week we are not expecting tax cuts in the Autumn Statement – we are told that can only happen when inflation is slayed. If the PM wants to disassociate high taxes from the Tories and win back the Blue Wall heartlands at least they should resist raising taxes on the wine and spirits that Tory voters drink. If they want to compound their problems with their core voters, hitting them with hike on their gin and tonics should do it… 

A new poll from Survation shows Labour and the SNP are virtually neck-and-neck in Scotland, with top psephologist Sir John Curtice now claiming every Scottish constituency will be a marginal seat at the next General Election. A YouGov poll last week had the two parties within four points of each other…

Now Survation says this:

• SNP – 37%
• Scottish Labour – 35%
• Conservatives – 17%
• LibDems – 6%

Just a two-point gap at the top…

Curtice says, according to current constituency boundaries, that would give the SNP and Labour 24 seats each:

“There’s certainly is all to play for so far as the representation of Scotland at Westminster at the next general election with potentially important implications for the overall outcome of the next UK General Election…

“Pretty much every seat in Scotland will be a marginal seat, and therefore a relatively small increase in the SNP lead, and all of a sudden those high expectations for Labour would not look quite so realistic. But equally, if the Labour Party could actually overtake the SNP in voting intentions in Scotland, something they’ve not yet managed to do according to any poll, then they could indeed, quite clearly be the dominant party so far as Scotland’s representation at Westminster is concerned.”

Music to Starmer’s ears. He better start learning the names of Anas Sarwar’s colleagues…

New polling, released this morning by Techne, puts Labour on 45% to the Conservatives on 30%. This represents a Labour lead over the Conservatives of 15%. It’s the joint lowest margin recorded by the pollster since Sunak became Prime Minister.

Techne aren’t the only pollster reflecting this trend. Last week, Opinium recorded a Labour lead of just 11%, whilst on Monday, Redfield & Wilton reported a 14% margin – both of which are also the smallest since Sunak took over. Going by the polling average in February, a 14% Labour lead represents a drop of 8% in just two months.

As the “noisy” scatter graph from above UK Polling Report shows a narrowing lead for Labour trend has developed this month. Before Tory MPs get too excited, this is what it probably means in terms of seats:

All of this explains why Savanta polling director, Chris Hopkins, told the i that the days of 20 point Labour polling leads are “gone” and “If it gets much smaller I think possibly we start to get into hung parliament territory”. The SNP’s electoral collapse further complicates electoral calculations. Survation recently put the SNP’s lead over Labour at 5% – the smallest since the 2019 election. There’s still a long time to go until Autumn 2024…

Senior Labour figures are not happy with shadow mental health minister Rosena Allin-Khan. Khan has been hyped as a potential future leader by soft left voices for years, and her coming second to Angela Rayner in the 2020 deputy leadership has only emboldened those backers. This afternoon anger is finally bubbling to the surface after Survation published a poll for LabourList testing out perceived leadership qualities of Labour figures. Accidentally, one section had been labelled “ROSENA QUESTIONS”.

The Times’ Henry Zeffman was the first to spot Survation’s cock up, with the New Statesman’s Rachel Wearmouth piling on pressure by reporting “Lots of shadow cabinet ministers angry with what appears to be leadership manoeuvres from Rosena Allin-Khan”.

A clarification from Survation’s Damian Lyons Lowe has done little to stop the runaway train of anger from Starmer loyalists, with Lyons Lowe claiming “this was an error due to the survey script using questions from a template from work done for the 2020 Deputy Leadership election”. Unfortunately for Rosena, this doesn’t prove a wholly solid defence. Lowe goes on:

“ These questions are for some new @LabourList polling that will be out next week.”

A shadow cabinet source, however, points out to Guido that Rosena Allin-Khan’s big financial backer, David Kogan, is a director of LabourList, and gave her £7,500 in February according to her register of interests. So while Allin-Khan may not be directly behind the cock up, one of her key backers responsible for commissioning the polling may have ulterior motives…

The anger continues. The Sunday Times’ deputy pol-ed Harry Yorke is told “the growing consensus in the shadow cabinet is that Rosena Allin-Khan should resign or be sacked over this”. Politico’s Eleni Courea is told by a shadow cabinet member that “they were once sitting on a train to London from Manchester when Rosena and her team boarded and sat a couple of rows in front… and overheard her asking them go round and “say something you’ve done this week to help me become Labour leader”.” When Guido asked a shadow cabinet source their response to the Survation defence, the reply was the eternally pithy: “bollocks.”

It seems the Tories must now accept that even the PM’s internationally recognised performance during the Ukraine crisis is not enough to restore the party’s post-Partygate poll plunge. Any improvement – at one point drawing level with Labour – over the past month has once again been erased by the economic outlook, Rishi’s Spring Statement flop and the renewed Partygate headlines amid the first fines being issued. Labour’s increasingly consistent national lead at the moment makes the local elections look dire for CCHQ. Recent polling for the Country Land & Business Association (CLA) reveals that the Conservatives and Labour are now almost neck and neck in the Tories’ traditional rural heartlands. The polling has them just about leading…

This is partly because the Tories’ usual base, as well as recent swing voters, have given up on the party for the time being. The number one issue in the countryside is affordable housing (69%), followed by better digital connections (35%) – faster broadband and better mobile signals. The majority of those polled said the likelihood of young people obtaining local employment had decreased in the last 5 years and a whopping 79% thought lack of affordable housing was driving young people out of the countryside. So much for country folk being opposed to housing development… 

Jonathan Roberts at the Country Land and Business Association tells Guido: 

“This isn’t about asking for more money – if anything it’s about government getting out of the way a little.  We have so many disused old farm buildings that could easily be converted into modern work space to support local businesses – but getting planning permission can take years.  Many villages could do with five or ten new houses to support the local economy and give local families an affordable home, but applications for small developments are usually dismissed out of hand. Your rural staycation holiday is charged at a VAT rate of 20%, almost twice what many holiday destinations abroad charge. The list is almost endless.

“Government should show a little ambition and stop treating the countryside as a museum.  The rural economy is 18% less productive than the national average. Closing that gap adds £43 billion to the economy, creating jobs and opportunity in parts of the country that are too often left behind.”

If the Tories lose the rural vote they will lose the country. To summarise: the Tories are in deep trouble and have just two years – potentially less – to turn this around…

Data [PDF]: CLA_Survation_Polling_April_2022.

This weekend’s papers were full of briefing and counter-briefing by friends and foes of Boris. MPs, whatever they may claim, are keen students of polling, particularly if they hold a marginal seat. This sensitive topic was the subject of a Sunday Times article, the reporters having clearly been briefed that Rishi Sunak supposedly has the best chance of reaching voters in the “Red Wall” seats that flipped to the Tories in 2019, and also outstrips his closest rivals in the South Eastern “Blue Wall” Tory heartlands. This seems counter-intuitive, and the spin became even more incredible when the story went on to claim that an unpublished private poll from “Focal Data” for the Hanover Communications public affairs firm had found that Sunak would beat Starmer, whereas Boris would cause an historic record-breaking swing to Labour and put the opposition party in government. The article claimed that:

“The poll echoes a Survation survey for the Labour Party, shared with MPs last week, which found that only by keeping Johnson in place could Starmer win the next election. If the Tories swapped Johnson for Sunak or Liz Truss, Starmer would lose.”

Only one problem with that claim: Survation say there is no such poll. The CEO of Survation Damian Lyons-Lowe tells Guido:

Survation have not conducted “hypothetical leader” private polling for the Labour Party as reported in The Sunday Times… We also don’t view simple “leader name switching voting intention” to be of much predictive value.

The mystery of these unpublished polls gets murkier. The CEO of Focaldata, Justin Ibbett, also denied having conducted such a poll, and points out “if we were briefing it we’d ensure they got our name right, Focaldata is one word.”  Who benefits from briefing the Sunday paper most closely read by Tory MPs with fake polls that falsely inflate the electoral prospects of Rishi Sunak?

UPDATE: Justin Ibbett, CEO of Focaldata, who tweeted on Sunday that he had not conducted a poll regarding a “hypothetical leader” now says his firm did:

Survation have re-confirmed that they have not conducted any such poll. We have changed the headline accordingly. Guido has asked for a copy of the Focaldata’s polling data tables which, under British Polling Council rules, have to be supplied within 2 working days of a poll being leaked or published.