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LAB gets the best figures yet in the “Blame Game”

March 6th, 2012

Is the Osborne narrative being less believed?

Starting just a month after the 2010 general election YouGov has been asking in the same standard format the question who do you think is most to blame for the current spending cuts?

I have long regarded this as one of the key political trackers because a central part of the coalition’s strategy has been to justify all the austerity measures by putting the blame on the last Labour government. For the most part it has succeeded.

You hear this almost every time ministers are put under pressure on their economic strategy and the fact that this is now being less believed is significant.

In the first year the number saying Labour was almost always in the 40s and it reached a high of 49%. At the start of 2012 the split was 39% blaming Labour to just 22% saying the coalition.

Now the latest figures from the pollster have the Labour blame number at 36% which is a record low. The gap between that and those saying the coalition is now just eleven points – the narrowest since the election.

@MikeSmithsonOGH
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  • http://awkwardedmilibandmoments.tumblr.com/ Anorak

    No it wasn’t strictly logical, but it did point out the hypocritical nature of the church.

    Beams and motes and all that.

  • Socrates
  • Anonymous

    743 not sure it did unless the official policy of the Church is to allow child abuse

  • Socrates

    Well, I can’t speak for the Church of England, but it’s certainly a hypocrisy worth pointing out in terms of the Catholic church. Look at the effort they have put in to stop affiliated hospitals covering contraception in their employee insurance relative to that of investigating child abuse.

  • Anonymous

    Normally Tim is good at linking things for comic and serious effect. He just overstretched here I feel!!

  • Anonymous

    ”
    This policy vacuum can’t last forever.”

    Ed plans to go on and on and on :D

  • Anonymous

    At the risk of being drawn into a very difficult area, I don’t feel that theres much of a risk that homosexual urges leading to men in catholic areas being drawn to the cloth. Being celibate as a cover for being gay.

    Then of course repression of sexuality can lead to various unhealthy thoughts. and so on.

  • Save Ed

    Nothing sucks like a …

  • Icarus

    Thanks Socrates but she was a 60 year old woman!! 

  • Marquee Mark

    Labour’s problems REALLY start when the policy vacuum ends.

    Random thought: if nature abhors a vacuum, it must REALLY hate that Mr. Dyson….

  • Anonymous

    I went on a “child Protection” course a while back…. 

    According to the trainer (a police officer from CEOPS), the children of single mothers were far and away the most likely group of children to be abused – typically by the mother’s “boyfriend” or other step-father figure.  Indeed, he said that many paedophiles actively target lone mothers with an aim of gaining access to their children and will be prepared, in some cases, to spend many years ”grooming” their child(ren).  

  • http://www.youtube.com/ajs41#p/p Andy JS

    The Bradford West by-election will be held on 29th March so 3 weeks of campaigning.

  • http://www.youtube.com/ajs41#p/p Andy JS

    The idea that “grooming” is a modern phenomenon doesn’t seem credible to me. It must have existed in previous decades and centuries but no-one thought anything much of it.

  • http://twitter.com/MorrisF1 Morris Dancer

    Ed Milibandus stercum est?

    Thanks for the Dundee tip yesterday, Mr. Flashman (deceased).

    Incidentally, a clever chap known only as Nigel has pointed out in the comments to my pb2 piece that qualifying for Q1 will be very tight next year. In addition, the 3 non-HRT/Marussia Q3 places will probably also be hotly contested.

    I won’t be offering an Australia qualifying tip due to the timezone difference, but it’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out.

  • Anonymous

    On a bit of a footie roll (well 2 for 2 : WBA, Dundee Utd). 

    Am putting half the returns on Southampton tonight (similar odds)

  • francis

    moses,

    The problem is how do the other parties respond and put the blame back where it belongs.

    In the times of austerity, the partisan animal that is Labour knows how to wind people up. They will keep their funding useless and unwanted pet projects, spend masses of money marketing and then cut the ESSENTIAL services and blame the other parties. It like playing the race card time and time again to get what you want. However the race card does not work quite as much as it did and I think the memories of the Labour machine are still around.

    The effects of mass immigration however caused much of the underfunding that Labour complain about.

    Perhaps its time to let devolution goes it’s full course because that for now has backfired spectacularly on Labour, and even if the UK remains in tact, EVEL at a bare minimum for a short while make it more difficult for them to gain power again.

    I have spoken to many Tories and even some Lib Dems agree that perhaps it’s time to let Scotland go.

    The only union we are preserving is the fiddled 1998 union, Labour broke the 1706 Act of Union with devolution. Why preserve an unfair union. The devolved assemblies continue to usurp Westminster and there is no second chamber. Why? Because Labour thought in its own partisan interests that these would be permanent Labour fiefdoms, however Labour is more interested in itself now than in preserving the union. It is time to destroy Labour once and for all and the only way is independence.

  • http://twitter.com/MorrisF1 Morris Dancer

    Cheers, I’ll put a smidgen on them as well.

  • Plato

    Many of us are familiar with the creepy uncle concept…

  • Icarus

    You mean sex offenders have to fill in those forms for monitoring purposes – age, colour, religion, sexual preference!

    I thought that if you were short of one or other group you had to go and try really hard to find the ones you were missing to balance things up. In your example atheist, homosexual child abusers!

  • http://tomknoxbooks.com SeanT

    Homosexuality is nowadays justified on the basis that it is innate and “natural”: it occurs in hundreds of species, not just humans.

    On the other hand, pedophilia, bestiality (interspecies sex), murder and cannibalism are also encountered throughout the animal kingdom.

    Their naturalness is NOT seen as a defence.

    Why? 

    Sexual Morality is as much about fashion as it is about principle. Nowadays its cool to be cool about gayness. Being uncool about gayness is uncool. We’ve come full circle from the Ancient Greeks, who felt quite similarly. In between there have been hundreds of civilisations that persecuted gays with great brutality.

    Gays are the new black. If you see what I mean.

  • antifrank

    Girls could marry until 1929 at the age of 12.  What we now call grooming was previously known as courting.

  • Anonymous

     ”Gays are the new black.”

    Back to the book titles?

    Ovaltine is the new Smack

  • Plato
  • Plato

    When Rubenesque comes back into fashion – that’ll be 500yrs done ;^)

  • Anonymous

    Socties change over time, and sexual morality can wax and wean. The greeks and romans seemed to have a ‘anything goes’ principle almost.

    Curiously, in the US theres does to be an under trend against sexual liberation, where people seem to be getting more consverative.

    If anything it’s happening, or starting to here as well, look at TV drama for example, where the level of sex on screen seems to be much smaller than in the past, and it’s US subscription.cable channels which seem to be the most liberal in sex. Is it the Daily Mail wail effect in action I wonder?

  • old_labour

    Do not forget the silly young man who served 5 days fro throwing a sickie while on jury duty so that he could see the musical “Chicago” in the West End.

    I do not believe something like that should follow him to the grave.

  • Plato

    CB cut for 40% taxpayers is happening

    RT @BBCNormanS: Osborne: “I think it’s fair to ask the top 15% [of earners] to make a contribution”

  • antifrank

    He had it coming! He had it coming! He only had himself to blame.  And if you’d been there - if you had seen it – I betcha that you would have done the same!

    (PS new thread)

  • Anonymous

    The Spectator says that one caller said -
    ‘”You’re not going to be the Prime Minister of this country, by any
    stretch of the imagination and I’d put my life on that, that is not
    going
    to happen and if Labour are going to win an election it’ll need to
    be somebody else like Peter Hain or somebody like that.”

    I think its time to fess up and admit that some of these calls were plants.  It was stupid to bring up Peter Hain, that was a give away. The only problem with that theory is that I do not think CCHQ have the brains.  Ed Balls on the other hand…

  • old_labour

    Whores, Heroin And Hindsight

  • Anonymous

    “I didn’t. Did I?”

  • Anonymous

    No – probably down to sample variation. Yesterday’s YG showed a 5 point Lab which is roughly MOE on their 1/2 Lab lead averaging overall. I’d expect that may have a slight effect of results like this, but overall you’d have to look at the polls more long term rather than jump to conclusions.

  • MrsB

    Not quite what I expected but I got there in the end

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