Fresh Poll Keeps Labour Ahead of the British Election Pack

AFP ^ | April 29, 2005

[West Coast Conservative]

Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party held its lead in the opinion polls, five days before the British general election, despite controversy over Iraq.

A daily Populus tracker poll for The Times and ITV television put Labour at 40 percent, compared with 31 percent for the main opposition Conservatives and 22 percent for the Liberal Democrats.

The findings, based on interviews with 1,428 adults between Monday and Thursday, suggested that a furore over the legal advice on which Blair took Britain into the Iraq war has not hurt Labour's chances.

Twenty-one percent said they were less likely to vote Labour after Conservative leader Michael Howard branded Blair a "liar," but 44 percent said they might snub the Conservatives on account of Howard's negative claim.

Sixty-one percent agreed that, by calling Blair a liar, the Conservatives were "resorting to name-calling" and showing they had nothing positive to say to win people's votes, against 34 percent who disagreed.

Only 29 percent thought that Blair was any more of a liar than most politicians, against 66 percent who thought he was no more likely than the average politician to tell untruths.

[1066AD]

Basically says 62% of the electorate is between centre-left and left nowadays. What a decline.

[goldstategop]

The Conservatives' Michael Howard hasn't exactly been an inspiring figure. They sound like a Me Too Party. Who wants pretend Labour when you can vote for the real thing? We're looking, if the numbers hold up next week, at another Labour landslide win.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Canard]

"Basically says 62% of the electorate is between centre-left and left nowadays. What a decline."

The British electorate has always been there, there's never been an election that wasn't won in the centre. If anything more of the electorate is less leftist and more centrist than in the eighties (see the decline of trade unionism, etc).

What has changed is that Labour has taken over the mantle that the Conservatives held for most of the last century of being the party that attracts those centre voters, the people who don't necesarily buy into the whole philosophy of the party, but who see them now as the party that will manage the economy better, that will provide services better, that won't screw up anything that they care about too bad.