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The Political Pulse
Latest opinion research and analysis from Mark Gettleson
Tuesday 27th September 2011 | 14:03
Political Insiders slam 'Promise of Britain'
A small majority of our political insiders saw Ed Miliband’s proposed reduction of the tuition fees cap to £6,000 as ‘bad politics’ (52%) with 42% seeing it as ‘good politics’. There were far more who pitched themselves strongly against it as a strategic move (21%) than were in strongly in favour (10%). This chimes in closely with figures we released yesterday, suggesting our insiders viewed Labour’s opposition to the Coalition’s programme of deficit reduction as damaging to their wider brand, particularly to their economic credibility. There have also been many conversations around Labour conference that £6000 will be insufficiently psychologically different from the current policy to give a real sense of political differentiation.
Our insiders were fairly evenly split on Ed Balls’ speech yesterday, with 40% feeling he had done a good job so far this week of improving Labour’s economic credibility, with 44% disagreeing. Again, many more were pitted strongly against the Shadow Chancellor (20%) than were strongly in favour (7%).
Finally, our panel panned Labour’s conference slogan ‘Fulfilling the Promise of Britain’, with 63% seeing it as ‘bad’ (including 39% ‘very bad’) and just 18% ‘good’ (4% ‘very good'). This would suggest that political insiders raise an eyebrow towards Ed Miliband’s overt strategy of pitching the Labour Party as champions of a 'new bargain', some kind of British progressive version of the American Dream. Without ‘the beef’ of eye-catching policy to drive the narrative, the strategy seems to fall flat.
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