Combined view of the three leaders moves to record low.
After I’d Tweeted the latest YouGov leadership numbers I was asked whether the overall aggregate negative of 121% was a record. I stand to be corrected but I cannot find a period in modern UK political history when all three leaders have registered such poor numbers at the same time.
Generally when one or two are down then the other is up. What we are seeing is quite exceptional.This view is echoed by the Spectator:
Everyone's a loser
Have the opinion polls ever looked more discouraging, overall, for the Tories during this government? Not that I can remember, although I'm happy to be corrected...But Ed Miliband, for all his bravado in the Observer today, shouldn't get too excited just yet...the public appear similarly mistrustful of both the Tories and Labour at the moment...
One final point: the proportion of people telling YouGov that they will vote ‘Other’ at the next election is at its highest level (17 per cent) for all of this Parliament.Individual polls always have to be treated as just that, but it does add to a trend that the gap between the governed and governing is ever widening. One major, albeit largely unacknowledged, reason is we are outsource more and more of our sovereignty away to an unelected bureaucratic body, our own MP's are left with an ever diminishing pool of power as highlighted by Dr Richard North:
Having offshored most of Britain's governmental powers, some to Brussels and others to amorphous, anonymous groups such as the Bank of International Settlements, there is so little left of public policy-making in the UK that the elites are driven ever-more to micro-managing an increasingly limited spectrum.I link to it in the side bar, but it's worth reproducing the words of the infamous document 1971 FCO 30/1048 (my emphasis):
So emerged the "schools 'n' hospitals" meme, as the only two issues of any substance over which British politicians still had any influence – issues which have dominated successive elections. And so it is that today The Boy returns to the Failygraph to write about – you guessed it - schools 'n' hospitals.
...the transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential.
Parliamentary sovereignty will be affected as we have seen. But the need for Parliament to play an increasing (if perhaps more specialised) role may develop. Firstly, although a European Parliament might in the longest term become an effective, directly elected democratic check upon the bureaucracy, this will not be for a long time, and certainly not in the decade to come.
In the interval, to minimise the loss of democratic control it will be important that the British Parliamentarians should play an effective role both through the British membership in the European Parliament and through the processes of the British Parliament itself.The document suggested that problems of "public anxieties" masquerading as concern for "loss of sovereignty" would only become fully evident at the end of the [20th] Century. This situation has now come to pass and despite the reluctance of the MSM to acknowledge where the power has gone as the big three UK Parties operate as a closed shop. In the real world "public anxieties" are at an all time high as predicted.
It can't (and won't) continue like this
