Tories slump in ICM poll: has George Osborne blown it?

David Cameron’s Conservatives have slumped to their worst poll rating for 18 months in the final Guardian/ICM poll of 2014. It puts the Tories on 28 per cent, down three points. Labour are ahead of them by five points on 33 per cent.

Labour have actually increased their share by only one per cent and it’s Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems who are the chief beneficiaries. They are up three points on 14 per cent, level-pegging with Ukip who have been ahead of them for several months in almost all polls. The Greens are on five per cent.

The poll suggests Chancellor George Osborne's Autumn Statement two weeks ago was a political flop. Far from being the game-changer that would set the Tories on the road to victory in the May 2015 general election, it gets the thumbs-down from the majority of voters.

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Nick Clegg will feel vindicated in his decision to take a campaigning trip to Cornwall rather than take up the Deputy Prime Minister’s spot on the front bench when the Chancellor delivered his Autumn Statement to the Commons.

Similarly, the Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable will be pleased that his broadside – “The Tories would like to cut spending rather more brutally than we think is necessary or desirable” - has resonated with voters.

Labour will be cautious about making too much of a single poll: they have enjoyed five-point leads over the Tories with other pollsters this year, but have seen those leads quickly fade – and indeed today’s YouGov poll for The Sun has the Tories tied with Labour on 33 per cent.

But Miliband will be encouraged that only a minority of those questioned by ICM backed Osborne plans to tackle the national deficit solely through cuts to state spending.

The publicity given to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s shocking analysis issued on the day of the Autumn Statement – that public spending would have to be cut back to levels not seen since the 1930s – has clearly had an effect on the electorate.

“Pressed on whether ‘the Chancellor is taking the tough decisions that Britain needed to live within its means’, only 35 per cent of voters agreed, whereas 55 per cent were instead inclined to say that Osborne was going too far, and imposing cuts that will endanger important public services,” the Guardian reports.

Some observers believe Osborne is cutting for ideological reasons as much as for practical ones. John McTernan, a former aide to Tony Blair, writes for the Progress website: “One of the most important questions in politics is: ‘Are you doing this because you want to, or because you have to?’ This is revealing because it goes to motive – which leads straight to values.

“I think we are justified in concluding that Osborne is cutting spending because he wants to, not because he has to. He is genuinely a low-tax, small-state politician. Good for him. It is always refreshing to see an ideological politician in the midst of the blandness we normally suffer.

“The problem for the Tories is that we do not live in Texas. We are not a country with an antipathy to the state or to welfare. We are natural pragmatists – ideology is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. And there is no appetite for public spending to be similar in size to an era when there was no NHS, no welfare state as we know it and most left school at 14.”

Miliband clearly agrees with McTernan: at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday he accused the Tories of being intent on taking Britain back to the 1930s, saying: “It’s not about balancing the books but slashing the state.”

As Fraser Nelson blogged for The Spectator, “Labour clearly feels that this 1930s gambit is working for it, enabling it to paint the Tories as the fiscal extremists.”

But it’s not just Labour supporters who question Osborne’s strategy. The ICM poll shows that concerns at the degree of cuts are shared by Ukip and Tory supporters. Almost a third (31 per cent) of those who had backed the Conservatives in 2010 said the Chancellor was going too far.

ICM also asked voters how they thought Britain should set about repaying its debts: only 16 per cent believed that “pure expenditure cuts, with no tax rises, is the best way to go”.

There’s more disappointment for Osborne in two other new polls. Ipsos-MORI in the Evening Standard shows people’s optimism about the economy has dropped to its lowest since last year.

The monthly ComRes/Independent telephone poll (which has Labour three points ahead of the Tories, 32 to 29 per cent) also asked voters about Osborne’s cuts. “Some 30 per cent of people agree that government spending should be reduced until the deficit is cleared and the budget in surplus, even if this means severe cuts to public services, but 66 per cent disagree with this approach,” ComRes reports.

John McTernan believes Osborne has blown it. “Single-handedly he has just destroyed the last chance the Tories had of electoral recovery,” he writes. Possibly. There’s still nearly five months to go.

HEALTH WARNING: ICM tends to give the Lib Dems better results than other pollsters because of its methodology. As Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report points out, ICM "weight" their results by assuming that half of the don’t knows will end up voting as they did in the last election. This has made ICM more accurate in the past, but Wells wonders whether come May that “will still hold true under the sort of political realignment we seem to be seeing this parliament”.