ComRes: Tories 8% ahead

A ComRes poll for tomorrow's Independent puts the Conservatives 8% ahead of Labour - in line with YouGov and more reassuring than ICM.  Full details in the morning; ConHome is off to bed.

8am, 29 January:

The Independent's coverage of its poll includes the following interesting breakdowns:

BY SOCIAL CLASS: The Tories lead by 47% to 26% amongst AB voters but by just 35% to 34% amongst C2s.

BY AGE: The Tories have a massive 50% to 28% lead among those aged 65 and over and the party also leads amongst 18 to 24 year olds.  Labour, however, leads among 25 to 44 year-olds.

BY REGION: The Tories enjoy big leads in the South East, South West, Midlands and Wales.  The party is neck-and-neck with Labour in the North.  Labour is only ahead of the Conservatives in Scotland (where it trails the SNP).

Comments

[Tony Makara]

Eight sounds great! Especially compared with the position last summer. Labour are on their last legs with lightweights like Purnell and Smith in the top jobs. The longer they delay the next election the greater the scale of their defeat will be. I just worry about the mess David Cameron and George Osborne will be left to clean up!

[Politico]

I wonder how much this will dive once labour starts the machine on Conway....

Again, this party shoots itself in the foot.

[Steve]

If McLabour win the next general Election England will never recover.

[Ledger]

The key thing about the poll is that it shows the lead slipping, just like all the other polls.

[Diablo]

Cameron has to back track on Conway. He has made a very grave misjudgement of how this will be perceived by the "average" Sun reader. "No ifs or buts", this is a major cock up. The Abrahams/Watt episode will be forgotten and even Peter Hain will be seen just as a bit useless in filling in forms but at least he eventually resigned as a Cabinet Minister.

The Brown spin machine will keep this story churning for weeks to come. You better have some of the same or similar dirt on Labour MPs doing the same thing or we are in for a big kicking.

No doubt Mr Brown's mate Paul Dacre is lining up much more of the same over the next few weeks. So, nip it in the bud and forget Conway's closeness to David Davis et al.

[Patrick]

Mr Cameron has made a dreadful mistake and handed a gift to Labour. It is a classic example of how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This theft of our money will resonate with the British Public and ignite the old charges of Tory sleaze. The Press will not let this go and nor should they. Four votes for the prospective Conservative Party candidate here in Mid Wales have just been lost. Same old Tories.

[voxpop]

Whilst it is good news to see us still 8% ahead I wonder what the fallout from the Conway sleaze affair will be? There are further examples of what appears to be embezzlement of public funds in today's papers and Cameron really must come down hard, nip this in the bud, and sack Conway.

Only then can we reclaim the moral high ground over this appalling and corrupt Labour administration.

[Do not feed the Taxman]

Patrick 09.18, Labour have been stealing our money for the past 11 years in extortionate taxes.

[Josh]

The Tories enjoy big leads in the South East, South West, Midlands and Wales.

Did I read that right? Wales?

The same Wales that elected a Labour government with a massive plurality in May?

[R.Baker.]

Conway must go.What possible excuse can we offer the voter over this theft of their money?PMQ each week will bring this into the fore and quickly destroy our hard earned lead over Broon's heavily labouring machine.Declare Conway as a cheat now, or lose everything later on.It should really have been a no brainer to DC.

[Curly]

Don't feed the tax man @ 09.43

Does the latest brainstorming session reopen the debate on local taxes, or does it reopen old wounds?

[Robert McIlveen]

Josh - if you look at the tables on ComRes' website they put Wales and the Southwest together (which is as odd as putting Wales and Scotland together if you ask me) which probably explains the lead in "Wales" - although we must be doing something right there!

[Adam in London]

Don't get too excited about Wales - it isn't counted as it's own region in the polling. Instead it's combined with the South West. The 'super-regions' for this poll are:
- South East, London, & East of England
- Midlands
- Wales & South West
- North of England
- Scotland

The Conservatives are ahead in the first three, level pegging with Labour in the North, and the only party other than the SNP to advance in Scotland.

I'd say this poll is very good news - it shows that we're not simply piling up votes in the heartlands, but are vitally moving ahead in the rest of the country as well. The only cloud on this silver lining is Scotland where the SNP are dominating the political landscape and could simply bulldoze us.

Likewise we are zooming ahead with ABs and C1s, and actually have a narrow lead amongst C2s. Lots of good news.

[Michael Hunt]

The Conway situation will not help.

If he is not sacked, at least show the World the Tories take the matter seriously.

[Opinicus]

38% is not enough

the poll of polls is back under 40 again and to be certain we need 43.

we are not going to win without engaging the missing voters

If we dont set up a clear and commanding lead we are going to be firefighting all the way through to May 2010

[Richard Woolley]

How can it be good news when Labour leads amongst the 25-44 age group? These are the voters or perhaps non-voters of the future. The over-65s amongst whom the tories have a big lead are obviously going to pass away over time.
The tories should be at least 15 points ahead of Labour given that this is one of the most incompetent governments of all time. Remember that Blair had a 30 point lead over Major in the mid-90s. Perhaps if it offered bigger tax cuts and had opposed the Iraq War it would be doing a lot better.

[David Jones]

Let us not forget that the next general election is most likely to be in May/June 2010 now - that's nearly 2 and a half years away!

Good news regarding the lead amongst 18-24s. This should be worked on. Remember - the 1979 victory came about in part because of the Tories' popularity with the young (who wanted jobs, etc). Being the party who will protect our ancient and fundamental civil liberties (a very conservative thing to do really) as well as finding ways of growing the economy for the long term (investment in new high speed infrastructure?) would help.

The future is bright - but we're not quite there. We are however in a far better position to win a general election than at any time since the late 1980s.

[Barnet Blue Boy]

Big majorities over Labour in Wales! Come on, do we really believe that! ComRes hae been the most eratic and unreliable pollster, and whilst i'd luv to beliee them, i can't help but take this with a pinch of salt......do we have any stats?

[David]

38% is dismal. When Major was in government, Labour were polling at over 50%.

When Major won in 1992, I think he had a majority of 21. This included 12 Conservatives elected in Scotland, in a sense this provided Major with his majority.

As someone who used to live in Scotland, I believe there are seats there that the Conservatives used to win, which are now gone forever.

The Conservatives still can't stay consistently above 40%. It's going to take a miracle for them to win.

[RichardW]

As a member of the 18-24 age group I can certainly agree with the statement that a majority are now pro-conservative. However, the important thing is less that the conservatives are now dominant in this age group which will have great future importance. Rather, that we are the age group who have grown up under New Labour and have known little else.

It is a rather great indictment of the New Labour project which Blair said was always going to be partially founded on "Education, Education, Education" that the people it was meant to benefit most do not support it.

[Tony Makara]

"the 1979 victory came about in part because of the Tories' popularity with the young (who wanted jobs, etc"

David Jones, all the more reason why the party should do more to put forward ideas for job creation. It is not enough for some Conservatives to sit back and say it is not the job of the state to create work and that its all down to the market. I'm not advocating expanding the public sector but looking at other ways trying to create jobs. New business should be allowed to operate completely free of taxation for a given time. Firms that employ people straight from the dole queues should be rewarded for this by way of tax cuts. Business that offers jobs to the youth with a guaranteed training element should also receive support. Youth unemployment is up 20% under Labour and it is certainly higher when we consider how the New Deal has been used to fiddle the figures. So youth employment must be encouraged, must be rewarded and must be a major policy of the future Conservative government.

[David Lindsay]

You call this news? If all you needed were big leads in the South East, among ABs and among the over-65s, then you'd certainly be in office after last time, and you'd probably never have left it in the first place.

[Andy Stidwill]

I agree with the last comment. The only real news here is the point regarding ABs, who were drifting off to Labour in the last couple of elections. The points about older voters and voters in the south east are exactly the same as they've always been in the past.

[Yet Another Anon]

As someone who used to live in Scotland, I believe there are seats there that the Conservatives used to win, which are now gone forever.
Rural Scotland and parts of Edinburgh used to be rocksolid Conservative, the safest Conservative seats in the UK - that started to change after the 1959 General Election. In those days the Conservatives had seats in Glasgow, before 1997 there were Conservative seats in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Perth & Kinross and Stirling were both Conservative holds in 1992 and throughout the 1980s and before.

Of course there was a time when Labour losing Blanaeu Gwent would have been unthinkable, many Liberal Democrat seats are ones that not so long ago were considered safe Labour or Conservative seats.

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