Some very interesting polling news from the FT this morning, showing that the Conservatives – despite what the left-wing media will tell you – have done more than enough to cancel out Labour’s majority in the north of England and may even be winning there.
I don’t expect that cities such as Liverpool, Manchester or Middlesborough will be returning many Conservative MPs in 2010 but what this polling shows is that among C1 – classified as “lower middle-class” although I’m not keen on this type of stuff – and C2 (skilled manual workers), the Conservatives are now in the lead.
And both in the north of England, which kept Labour in power in 2005, and in the Midlands the Conservatives now have an overall lead in the polls – in the case of the Midlands, it’s a pretty thumping one too.
Strangely, none of this information appears to have been reported by the BBC, which usually defends itself by saying it doesn’t report “routine polling data”. I seem to remember it gleefully reporting routine polling data when Tony Blair was on the way up and John Major was on the way out – has politics or society really changed that much?
More likely, the BBC has become more aware of the self-fulfilling nature of polls and has come under severe pressure from PM – and the actual PM – to report more serious news - such as the buying out of ConservativeHome by Lord Ashcroft, for example.
For DC, surely this is gold dust ahead of the Conservative Conference – in Manchester. Okay, he’d be a fool to be triumphal about it – but also a fool to ignore the powerful message it sends out to the north of England; that the Conservatives can genuinely be their voice in Westminster.
September 27, 2009 at 9:28 pm
[...] aware than ever that politics is self-fulfilling and by buying into this silly poll (I though they didn’t report routine polls anyway) they are just playing PM and the PM’s game for them. At our [...]