Labour surge past Tories in new poll, while Ukip slump

The latest Ashcroft National Poll, released yesterday, gives Labour its highest share of the vote since last summer. Ed Miliband’s party is on 36 per cent, four points ahead of the Tories.

Ukip are the big losers, down five points at 11 per cent - “the lowest I have yet found in may national polling,” says Lord Ashcroft. The Lib Dems are up two points at seven per cent while the Greens and the SNP are unchanged on eight and four per cent respectively.

Before Team Miliband gets too excited, the usual health warning is necessary: this is only one poll and it’s a snapshot not a prediction, as Ashcroft regularly reminds us. The latest Populus and YouGov polls both have the Tories and Labour on level-pegging – a far more typical result.

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To put the new Ashcroft poll in perspective, remember that only six weeks ago, on 12 January, the Tories were given a six-point lead by the same pollster. And a new ComRes poll for the Daily Mail gives the Tories a two-point lead – their best showing for ComRes since 2010. (Con 34, Lab 32, Lib Dems 8, Ukip 13, Greens 8.)

However, it’s worth noting that the vagaries of the electoral system mean that a four-point lead presents Ed Miliband with a more exciting prospect than a six-pointer for David Cameron. The Tory leader would still be short of an overall majority in the Commons, while Miliband could hope to govern alone – especially if you follow the advice of Mike Smithson at Political Betting and focus on Ashcroft’s regional breakdown.

In England, Labour lead the Conservatives by 38 to 32. Which means Labour have apparently turned around the 11 per cent lead the Tories enjoyed in England at the 2010 election. If the polling is accurate, that’s a “massive swing” which, says Smithson, would leave Miliband with a comfortable Commons majority “even if his party lost all its 41 Scottish seats”.

But what is happening to Ukip, down five points with Ashcroft and four points in the ComRes poll? Here there does seem to be a pattern developing.

Lord Ashcroft says focus group research suggests a couple of reasons for the party’s downward drift. “Undecided voters increasingly (and spontaneously) say they know where Ukip stand on immigration and Europe but at a general election they want to vote for someone with more to offer.”

Some also suspect that “unpleasant or even sinister elements lurk behind the reasonable and entertaining Mr. Farage, a suspicion that may have been reinforced over the last few days.” [The recent Channel 4 docudrama imagining life under a Ukip government didn't help - and nor did the revelation that the Chelsea fan involved in the racist incident on the Paris Metro had once been photographed with Farage outside a London pub.]

YouGov’s Peter Kellner tackles another question thrown up by the new polling: why are the Tories not benefiting from the positive economic news?

“This ought to be boom time for the Tories and not just Britain,” says Kellner. “The economy growing, inflation falling, record job numbers – no government could ask for more with an election just ten weeks away. Yet support for the Conservatives is becalmed.”

The reason, he says, is that “too few people feel that they are seeing the benefit of a reviving economy. More people feel they are worse off than better off – whether they compare today’s living standards with five years ago (43 per cent say worse, 27 per cent better) or even one year ago (by 36-23 per cent). To be sure, these figures are better than when we asked the same questions last spring; but the public mood is one of gradually declining pessimism, not rampant optimism.”

The Tories’ standard-of-living problem is compounded by another issue. “The party is still widely regarded as a party of the rich. Each piece of good economic news is as likely to provoke resentment – ‘Cameron and his mates may be doing well, but we’re not’ – as gratitude.”

Labour are struggling to capitalise on that sentiment and the result, says Kellner, is deadlock,

“The challenge for the Tories is to convert encouraging statistics into a sense of rising prosperity among millions more voters – and to persuade them that a Conservative victory would be good for the many, not the few.

“Labour’s challenge is different. If everyone who believed in the party’s good intentions backed it, victory would be assured. Its task is to persuade more voters that its head is as impressive as its heart: that it actually knows how to achieve its social objectives while helping businesses and families to prosper.”