Polls – Cameron has no room for complacency
There are two polls in tomorrow’s Sundays. Both give the Tories a 12 point lead, and both put Labour on 28 per cent to the Conservatives’ 40 per cent. In both cases Labour’s support is up.
A week of Conservative media dominance is now on the cards, and we will need to see what the polls look like in a couple of weeks when the conference season is behind us, but if I was Cameron I would think these polls were good but not a cause for complacency. A twelve point lead is healthy but gives Labour a lot to fight for. ConservativeHome tonight reports UK Polling Report calculating a Commons majority on these figures of 36. That is the sort of thing that can be progressively ground down.
It comes after a YouGov poll earlier this week that had a much smaller lead for the Tories.
Cameron is rightly being pushed onto the defensive over his lash-up with his band of right wing allies in Europe. A British conservative party that prefers this rag, tag and bobtail outfit to the German and French parties of government deserves to be asked some tough questions about what it really stands for.
Labour now has to struggle free from the straitjacket that it has allowed itself to get into over spending cuts, which is to the Tories’ advantage, and get the fight onto growth and investment, on which the Conservatives are much more exposed.
The public finances are in the state they are in because economic growth has collapsed. That hits tax revenues. The cost of bailing out bankers and shareholders in turns adds to this. But the answer is not cuts – which would make things even more dicey for the economy – but to urgently restore economic growth. We’re in the position we’re in because of the collapse in investment, not a swollen public sector.
The levers exist, through the bailed-out banks and with intervention into areas of the economy (like house-building) where investment has collapsed, to set a completely different agenda to restore growth and investment.
The polls are still not so clear-cut that the Tories should bank on winning. Labour is the underdog but it can and should transform the terms of the economic debate, an argument that can be won.
todays interview with david cameron in which he refused to 100% support a referendum on the lisbon treaty if it is ratified reveals that deep divisions in the conservative party that still exist over the issue of europe. todays interview shows the true colours of conman cameron. However, this is an issue i fervently believe labour needs to exploit in order to reveal the deep divisions among the tories and demonstrate how conman camerons conservatives are not fit for government.