Partly, this would be so I could say “Silence!” like Darth Vader when my chosen pollster said, “but my Lord, we only need to poll 1,000 people to get a representative sample?”

But mostly it would be because polls with huge samples allow you to cut the data up and still get a large number of voters and a small margin of error.  For example, the last Populus poll for The Times had 394 Labour voters in it.  Ashcroft’s otherwise similar poll has 6,077 Labour voters.

For Ashcroft, this poll is about UKIP voters, who he describes in the following way:

“These voters think Britain is changing for the worse. They are pessimistic, even fearful, and they want someone and something to blame. They do not think mainstream politicians are willing or able to keep their promises or change things for the better.”

Over 90 per cent of UKIP’s 2010 voters think that things in Britain are worse than a decade ago, and a similar proportion – 84 per cent – of what Ashcroft calls “UKIP considerers” think the same.  Around 35 per cent of those UKIP considerers think that they will be personally worse off in ten years’ time.  Nearly 70 per cent of UKIP’s 2010 voters think the economy will be doing no better in a few years’ time.

Does Lord Ashcroft’s poll confirm his claim that UKIP voters are disappointed with how the country is changing and pessimistic about the future?  Yes.  But because his poll is about UKIP and the internal debate in the Conservative Party, he doesn’t notice that those 6,077 Labour voters he polled are just as pessimistic: 86 per cent of Labour voters think things in Britain have got worse in the last ten years, 38 per cent think they will be personally worse off ten years hence.

Two points follow from this.  Firstly, the unusual people are actually those who are sticking with David Cameron to 2015, and they are unusual in their optimism.  A majority of this group expect to be better off in ten years time, 68 per cent think that the country will be better in a decade and 84 per cent expect the coalition’s economic decisions to produce significant results in the next two or three years.  A Centreground/YouGov poll this summer found a similar Tory optimism – possibly naivety – about the extent to which further public sector cuts will be necessary.

Secondly, if you’re not one of these unusual optimists, then you may act on your pessimism in different ways.   For example, you may consider switching party: one in ten 2010 Conservative voters now say they will vote UKIP and more than one in four 2010 Lib Dem voters now say they will vote Labour (the Lib Dem to Conservative and Conservative to Labour shifts in this poll are both in single digits).

Ashcroft’s other claim is that UKIP voters “do not think mainstream politicians are willing or able to keep their promises or change things for the better.”  This seems to discount the possibility that you can be cynical about a party and still say that you would vote for them.  On Lord Ashcroft’s numbers, a quarter of all of UKIP’s voters at the last election think that even if UKIP did get into Parliament, it wouldn’t achieve anything. Ashcroft’s polling also suggests that one in three people saying they currently intend to vote Labour won’t say that Labour is willing to take tough decisions for the long term and won’t say that their chosen party is competent and capable.

My bet for 2013 and beyond would be that UKIP will matter significantly less than whether or not David Cameron can spread optimism to non-Tories and whether Ed Miliband can convince all those currently saying they back Labour that the party is definitely ready for office.

It would be easy to tell David Cameron and Ed Miliband apart. In September 2010, it would have been easy to tell Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband apart. But as the Liberals have pursued ever more differentiation from their coalition colleagues, that Miliband-Clegg Turing Test has got harder. On Leveson they are now pretty indistinguishable. Tonight an organisation called “Labour for Democracy” is being launched by one of Nick Clegg’s neighbouring Labour MPs, Paul Blomfield and Ed Miliband’s PPS, John Denham, to promote these potential common causes and overlaps between Labour and non-Labour “progressives”.

Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing for either party, it does add an interesting dimension to any future Liberal-Labour coalition negotiations, especially if Nick Clegg were one day replaced with someone moving even closer to Ed Miliband, such as Vince Cable.

For the sake of argument, imagine that Labour won the most seats at the next election but needed the Liberal Democrats to get a majority. Instinctively we think coalition negotiations would always be tense and hard fought but, free from the Conservatives’ economic plans, what would Vince Cable demand that Ed Miliband would never accept? It’s not completely facetious to imagine the debate as coming down to “Yes, Vince, but I think we should have an even more active industrial policy”; “No Ed, but I want to implement Leveson within 100 days, not just within the first year” and so on.

So would the end of this Coalition mean the end of the coalition-at-war stories that have filled our papers for two years? The “Orange Book”, economically liberal, Liberal Democrats don’t seem to be popular enough in their own party to exert much pressure on the leadership. However, if the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party were cut down to a smaller group, almost all in the South, some regional and local demands might start to trump their national policies.

On the Labour side, Ed Miliband would have the “Labour for Democracy” group – almost all of whom backed him for the leadership – who like the idea of Lib-Lab cooperation. They might form the sort of pro-coalition praetorians that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have not always been able to assemble under the current government. But the interesting group are those who, not because of tribalism or their being “Labour against Democracy”, had significant policy disagreements with the Liberal Democrats well before they went into coalition with the Conservatives.

Where are the flashpoints? I’d flag crime, electoral reform, the House of Lords, Trident, the Middle East, and the use of military force as all “ones to watch”.  There are also a long list of very difficult decisions facing the next Labour Government and, assuming that the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer were to be given to a Labour MP, it would likely be Labour ministers’ responsibility to ensure that MPs – Labour, Liberal, For Democracy, Against Democracy or none of the above – stuck to each hard decision once it had been taken.

How Ed Miliband manages the Leveson negotiations in the next few months – who his ambassadors are, how much he is helped or hindered by his supporters in Labour for Democracy – may be an interesting dry run for a much more important set of negotiations in a few years’ time.

The full report is available here, with summaries of the chapters by Steve Van Riel, Centreground’s head of research, set out below.

The Economics questions that no economist can answer for you

By 2015, for 13 years in a row the British state will have spent more than it raised in taxes. The interest we pay on that debt will have risen to £60bn a year – twice the size of the tax credits budget – and will continue to rise unless that government takes determined action. 2.9 million children, up from 2.5 million in 2010, will have entered relative poverty according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Some decisions in economics are easy. Would you like the economy to grow? Would you like higher wages and lower prices? Should we reduce unemployment? The answer is the same whether you are Labour, Tory or a Liberal Democrat. Once you have made the decision, getting that growth or reducing that unemployment is then very complicated: requiring abstract theories and hard-to- interpret data.

But there are also choices that are difficult, not because they are complicated, but because they mean weighing different risks and choosing between different people. One choice is whether you take risks in the hope of higher growth. More bank lending will tend to be riskier but better for growth. Reduce public debt and you make the economy more resilient because you increase our capacity for short term spending to create jobs when times are tough – but is the associated pain, as the public spending squeeze continued into the next parliament, a price we would be willing to pay in the short term? Target tax cuts or government backed loans can help support industries at a crucial moment in their development while spending on infrastructure can raise growth rates overall. But growth is not guaranteed: sometimes these risks will not pay off and money which could have been spent on reducing poverty has been wasted.

Even harder are the choices where we have to ask people we like to work harder or longer or to live in a community that is changing in a way they do not like. Such demands – whether for higher taxes, more housebuilding, more airport capacity or more immigration – might be necessary to achieve levels of growth or social goods like a reduction in child poverty. But, unless you dislike an awful lot of people, it is very unlikely that such demands can be confined only to people you do not like and still be enough to meet all of Britain’s economic challenges. Similarly, we might want to reshape the economy in some way, but what price – in terms of lower growth or new powers being sometimes misused – are we ready to pay?

As a political movement, there is not a huge amount we can do right now to improve the quality of the technical advice the next Labour Chancellor receives. What we can do is to decide where we stand on the tougher, riskier decisions. Build a consensus for a decision, and the next Labour chancellor might be able to take it and survive the inevitable political pain of that choice’s downsides. Leave the argument until you arrive in government and they – and we – might not. You do not need a qualification in economics to answer these questions, but trying to answer them is a minimum qualification for those who aspire to change a country.

The full chapter is available here.

Public services and political choices

The next Labour government will not be able to use spending to blunt the sharp choices in the public sector. The deficit is one reason, and a very big one: by 2015, Labour would have the option of doubling the education budget, were that money not already necessary to pay the interest on our public sector debts. But the deficit is not the only reason: new money that can be found will likely be quickly drained in an ageing society when the average cost to the NHS of each of the growing number of retired households is nearly double that of non-retired households. Given the spending reductions taking place right now, little more will be got from reducing waste and inefficiency in 2015: in many places we may inherit services pared back to the bone.

When money is tighter, suddenly that demand for more school sport is also a demand for less spending on science equipment, funding for lung cancer is not funding for breast cancer, more time pursuing violent crime means less time pursuing property crime, and so on.

There will be some areas where it is appropriate to be conservative: to say that the current service is quite good and any proposed model of giving away power is quite risky. But when we are outraged by the failures of the current system, then we are pushed into a more radical position. We know that we will now only rarely have the option of trying to be radical by spending more. That leaves structural change as the only radical course.

There are also occasions when we might consider making a distinction between what people want, and what they actually need. So no one will ever campaign for a hospital ward to close, but there may be times when it makes more medical sense to have a central group of specialist surgeons performing a complex operation more regularly, rather than having someone in each local hospital perform that surgery once a year. The problem is that if you spend your time in opposition suggesting that everyone’s wants will be acceded to, you have very little to stand on if you later try to make a distinction between wants and needs. The political question is: given a finite number of conflicts a re-electable government can enter into, where do we care enough to say no to the wants of sections of the public, management or staff?

Occasional crises – as can happen whenever you try and give power away – and regular protests can throw a government, make it reactive and ineffective. The best inoculation against such an eventuality is to decide, as a party, what risks we are ready to take and what fights we are willing to have.

The full chapter is available here.

Is the state really much more capable than people thought? From ID cards to Crossrail, deficit reduction to child poverty, the Olympics has been a rebuke to pessimism about government’s ability to do big, difficult things. When it’s all back to normal in two weeks time, when we’re back to arguing with the council about when our bins get collected or being told we can’t see a GP for a couple of weeks, the thought will remain that it is at least possible for this whole system to work better.

Contrast that with the International Olympic Committee. Heavy handed briefing about sponsorship deals. Adding tedious bureaucracy to the ceremony itself. Leaving seats empty. The IOC has met the low expectations of bureaucracy: tin-eared, slow to react, doing things to suit their internal systems and traditions, regardless of what the public might think.

The difference is fear. If London had collapsed on day one, the British media would not have been sporting about it: they would have kicked all five Olympic rings out of Seb Coe, David Cameron and anyone else they could have got their hands on. If Danny Boyle had either bottled it or gone too far, there would have been a lot more Aidan Burleys on Friday night. Good. That’s how it’s supposed to work in a democracy: being on a big stage should have a clarifying effect on the mind, especially if people can throw things. It should produce better results.

The IOC are insulated from all of that. If you’re annoyed with the IOC, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change its policies. They aren’t alone, of course: the eurozone crisis is no one’s sole responsibility, so it continues on from month to month. No matter how bad things get in Syria, the United Nations officials will be treated with the same respect. The Olympics shows what the state can do but also what a difference terrifying accountability can make.

Then the really hard thing to do is to still be bold even when it could all go so very wrong. But in Danny Boyle’s confident opening ceremony, just as in Tony Blair’s decision to bid for the Games, that confidence was there. Britain might sometimes seem like a nation of satirists but it’s nice to think that, as well, we can sometimes be impressive at leaving the satirists with nothing much to say.

This Italian-style debate on Lords reform doesn’t seem to have a place for anyone who thinks politicians are generally neither corrupt nor stupid, that the desire to win elections produces more good than harm and that the best brake on governments doing bad or stupid things is that same desire to be re-elected. But all the talk of bringing down the Coalition over Lords reform – from Tory rebels and Lib Dem insiders – makes both anti-politics campaigns look obsessively political: calculating narrow advantage, preoccupied with esoteric problems and continually talking about politics itself. So unusually and coincidentally – but rather pleasantly – it turns out that that being quite pro-politics today means sharing the same place as the public: not feeling very passionate about Lords reform and spending more time thinking about sunnier climates.

Figure 1. Thinking about the way the government is cutting spending to reduce the government’s deficit, do you think this is…
Necessary or unnecessary? (%)

The Cabinet Secretary thinks cuts are going to continue to 2020. The Prime Minister knows that means the next Conservative manifesto is going to have to set out some significant second term savings. Is there a political message would allow him to keep making the general case for deficit reduction and – at the same time – ensure the specific measures involved don’t undermine the Conservatives’ chances for a majority in a 2015 General Election? So far, the Government’s first line of defence has been TINA: There Is No Alternative. YouGov have been running a regular poll question asking “thinking about the way the government is cutting spending to reduce the government’s deficit, do you think this is “necessary or unnecessary”. Since the start of 2011, the necessary camp has been well ahead but a little before George Osborne’s last Budget, the gap began to close (Figure 1).

In a poll commissioned by Centreground Political Communications, undertaken by YouGov and reported in yesterday’s Financial Times (£), we looked at what specific measures the Government has taken and whether people thought they were necessary or not (Figure 2). The PM’s emphasis so far has been on cuts to housing benefit and this poll would suggest that these calls will resonate, at least with Conservative supporters. As you might expect, Labour voters are more sceptical about all the Government’s plans – except, interestingly, when it comes to restricting child benefit for families with a higher rate taxpayer.

Figure 2. Below are a list of tax and benefit changes that the government have announced. In each case, regardless of whether you support or oppose the measure, please say whether or not you think that change was necessary? (Was necessary %)

Why focus on measures that score better with the Conservatives’ current supporters than with the ones they would need to win a majority in 2015? It’s not normally wise but here’s one possible defence: we polled people about how what proportion of the cuts they thought were yet to take place. 31 per cent of current Conservative Party supporters thought the cuts were largely over  (Figure 3). That makes them unusual – even compared to Conservative 2010 voters – and, according to the Cabinet Secretary at least, wrong. It must be worrying for the Conservatives that they do not know how this group will respond if and when it becomes more publicly obvious that cuts are a chronic, not an acute, problem facing the public sector.

Figure 3. Thinking about the government’s programme of spending cuts, which of the following statements do you think is most accurate? (%)

We tested two different ways of justifying the government’s tax rises and spending cuts using split samples: (1) that “there is no alternative” or (2) that these are “the right choice for the country’s future” (Figure 4). The tax rises consistently received lower support, giving some additional political context to yesterday’s decision to cancel a planned increase in fuel duty. But when it comes to the different ways of making the government’s case there is small but consistent difference: statements based on the future received a few more percentage points in support, almost across the board. This week David Cameron argued that his welfare proposals were “not about high-level accounting to get the books in order…. [but instead] about the kind of country we want to be – who we back, who we reward, what we expect of people, the kind of signals we send to the next generation.” Could arguments like this replace “There Is No Alternative?” It’s a more difficult and nuanced case to make but, our poll suggests, it could be more effective for the kind of long term task the Government has set itself.

Figure 4. Some people have argued that… To what extent do you agree or disagree with this view?

On behalf of Centreground Political Communications, YouGov interviewed 1,716 people between 17th – 18th June 2012. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

A majority of voters believe restrictions on housing benefit and disability benefits are necessary according to a poll published today, commissioned by Centreground Political Communications and undertaken by pollsters YouGov.

Housing benefit, disability and child benefit cuts deemed necessary – but 50p top rate cut not thought necessary

- A majority (51 per cent) in our poll said restrictions on housing benefit and disability benefits were necessary. But while Conservative voters were very likely to say they were necessary (73 per cent), Labour voters were not (35 per cent).
- By contrast, restrictions on child benefit for households with a higher rate taxpayer were seen as necessary by 72 per cent of the public – including 68 per cent of Labour voters.
- But all the spending cut measures were more often judged necessary than the Government’s tax increases – the increase in VAT (27 per cent) and the so-called “granny tax” (32 per cent). However, the 50p tax cut was deemed necessary by only 23 per cent of those polled.

Are voters ready for cuts all the way to 2020?

- After warnings from the Cabinet Secretary last week that cuts may last until 2020, our poll finds 33 per cent of the public expecting that most of the cuts are still to come – while 18 per cent think they are largely complete.
- Our poll tested two different ways of justifying the government’s tax rises and spending cuts (1) that there is no alternative or (2) that they are “the right choice for the country’s future”. Using split samples, it was possible to identify a small but consistent advantage to a message based on the future – statements based on the future received a few more percentage points in support, almost across the board.

Centreground Political Communications Chief Executive Darren Murphy said

“The public are convinced of the need to make some difficult choices to reduce Britain’s deficit for the future – although perhaps not as far into the future as some in government predict. David Cameron’s political strategists should be telling him that public support depends on the government sounding less defensive: making a case for deficit reduction as a choice about Britain’s future, not just as a necessary evil, as the Coalition sometimes does.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. Full poll results are available here.

2. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1,716 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 17th – 18th June 2012. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

3. Centreground Political Communications Ltd are an international campaigns consultancy specialising in understanding people’s views and values and designing communications strategies and campaigns to win, hold and lead popular opinion. Built around a team of senior strategists who worked with Prime Minister Tony Blair, our mission today is to help our clients—political, corporate and charitable—find the centre ground and win it convincingly to their cause.

4. Darren Murphy is the chief executive of Centreground Political Communications Ltd. He spent eight years as a special adviser in Tony Blair’s New Labour government, including as political communications adviser to the Prime Minister, working inside government as well as on Labour’s successful 1997, 2001 and 2005 campaigns. After leaving the government, he spent six years as a political consultant, specialising in services to governments, advising heads of state and government, party and political leaders in Europe, Africa and Asia on political strategy, elections, campaigns and strategic communications.

English: CONSTANTINE PALACE, STRELNA. British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a plenary meeting of the Russia - EU Summit. Русский: СТРЕЛЬНА, КОНСТАНТИНОВСКИЙ ДВОРЕЦ. Премьер-министр Великобритании Энтони Блэр на пленарном заседании встречи на высшем уровне Россия – Европейский союз. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I spent ten years as Tony Blair’s chief of staff enduring EU, NATO, G8, Commonwealth and other summits and watched their proliferation in my thirty years in public service from occasional special events to a monthly routine in the case of the EU. Leaders now almost see more of their European colleagues than they do of their cabinet colleagues or even their families.

“This programme asks whether summits have got out of hand. Will they be replaced by conference calls or Skype? I asked foreign secretaries from Peter Carrington and Douglas Hurd to David Miliband and Prime Ministerial aides from Charles Powell to Alastair Campbell for their views. We all agree on one point: the only thing worse than going to too many summits is not being invited to the crucial summit where decisions affecting your country are made.”

The documentary, Summit Fever, can be listened to via the BBC’s website – here – or listened to again (including by international listeners) when it is re-broadcast on Sunday 3 June at 17.00 BST.

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It found:

o   Few respondents say they know about the police commissioner elections and what the role will involve (18%) but, when asked, less than a third (28%) say they intend to vote for a police commissioner from the party they would normally support.

o   26% expect to vote for an independent candidate for the role of police commissioner and a further 4% said they would probably vote for a candidate from a different political party in these elections to the one they normally support.

o   Nearly one in three Conservative voters (30%) say they expect to vote for an independent, compared to 20% of Labour voters and 28% of Liberal Democrats.

o   Over 65s (39%) and AB voters (36%) were more likely than the other age groups and social grades to say they were probably going to vote for an independent candidate.

o   Labour supporters were more likely to say they expected to back the party they normally support in the police commissioner elections (40%).  Overall, Labour was chosen more often than any other political party as being the “most likely to have the best candidates for the role of police commissioner” (19%).

o   Only 3% said they thought the Liberal Democrats were most likely to have the best candidates for the role of police commissioner, fewer than for UKIP (5%).

o   When asked what qualities they think a police commissioner should have, the most selected option was that they are tough on crime (47%), followed by experienced of working in law enforcement (44%), a willingnesss to try new and innovate measures (33%), ability to work with lots of different communities (29%) and an independent candidate outside of political party machines (24%).

Chief Executive of Centreground Political Communications Ltd Darren Murphy said, “These elections are unique in our democratic history. The challenge for the political parties is to engage the public interest in new ways whilst not appearing to be politicising policing.”

ends

The poll details are here:

Summary of poll findings

Centreground Police Commissioners 8 May 2012 copy

The decisive factor in the result was the voters’ assessment of the characters of the candidates. Even after 12 years many in the UK political establishment find it difficult to concede that the mayoral election is entirely about personality, and the entirety of personality, or if they, do, they dismiss this as if it diminishes the validity of the result. But the personality of the candidates reflect the vision, motivation and values of those who stand behind the candidate almost as much as the candidates themselves.

Ken Livingstone was weighed in the balance here and found wanting. But what made this election different was the ways in which the voters discovered the information that allowed them to make the decision.

LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 04: Boris Johnson (R) speaks after the announcement of his victory in the London Mayoral elections as as Ken Livingstone (C) talks with Liberal Democrat Candidate Brian Paddick (L)at City Hall on May 4, 2012 in London, England. Conservative Mayor Mr Johnson won a second term as London Mayor after a close run election campaign with Labour's Ken Livingstone coming second in the polls. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

One of Livingstone’s biggest handicaps was the long lingering tale of his tax affairs. That Livingstone did not kill the story – after all nobody seriously suggested he did anything other than pay all the tax he was required to – showed his campaign to be, at heart, incompetent and he personally to be of limited political capacity – as he kept promising to publish figures which never appeared in a full and accurate form.

But credit must also go to the Tories and their campaign chief, Lynton Crosby, for the way they kept the story running. Their attack website kept churning out material that kept the embers aglow between the times when mass media covered the story and, bizarrely, Livingstone’s response to this was to close his attack site down, as though his opponents would be morally obliged to follow suit.

The Tories showed they understand that the best political attacks are not those loved of Gordon Brown – that the beans do not add up – but those which reveal a deeper moral or political truth about opponents and their values.

Crosby came to Britain from Australia in 2005 and ran the Conservative election campaign that year. He appeared in London with a reputation of being one of the nastiest operators Down Under and he certainly misjudged the UK campaign quite badly – getting Michael Howard to bang on about immigration to the point where many voters were frightened away from what they saw as something that edged towards monomaniacal extremism.

Now, though, he seems to have learned to leaven the nasty stuff with humour. Some Tories want him to be placed in charge of the Conservatives’ re-election campaign. Labour should be worried.

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• Profile: Ken Livingstone, fails in last campaign(itv.com)

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• Ken Livingstone is right: it’s him or Boris Johnson. That’s why I’m voting Boris (oyiabrown.com)