Contradictions

The Guardian has a poll showing that the Lib Dems are now the fourth party behind UKIP (my emphasis):

Nick Clegg faced a double blow on Saturday night as one of his closest advisers admitted that the coalition's spending cuts had been too deep and a new poll showed the Liberal Democrats were now the fourth party in British politics behind Ukip.

Odd then that the excuse on this occasion for the Lib Dems is that spending cuts are too deep, when UKIP have a policy of far more robust cuts:

Recognise the dangerous levels of national debt and accept there is no alternative to major cuts in government spending. We do not accept that service improvements require ever-increasing government expenditure, and believe there is substantial waste and inefficiency that can be eliminated while vital front line services remain fully protected. UKIP also believes profligate government spending is killing off the productive activity that provides tax funds, and that easing the burden will be the route to revitalising the economy

Obviously it's now conference season so much manoeuvrings and nonsense on stilts appealing to the party faithful takes place, but it does take a strange distorted twist of logic to argue that the reason the Lib Dems are behind in the polls is because they're cutting too much when the party they are comparing against has policy of doing far more.

Record Low...

Mike Smithson at Political Betting has an interesting post on the latest polling figures of the 3 leaders of the main parties (my emphasis):

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.

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.

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):

...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

Nor Shall My Sword Sleep In My Hand:

The final results of my little poll last week on England's national anthem was as follows

• God Save The Queen 14%
• Land Of Hope And Glory 25%
• I Vow To Thee My Country 8%
• Jerusalem 42%
• Ode To Joy 1%
• Other 4%

Many thanks to all those who took part, we have a clear winner in the marvelous Jerusalem. I'm not sure how some England football players would get on with the words - Wayne Rooney singing; 'And did the Countenance Divine' anyone?

Anyway here's a rousing rendition of the winner from Last Night of the Proms, enjoy:

England's National Anthem

I'm currently watching the football, and the singing of 'God Save The Queen', whilst earlier England sung the WI hymn Jerusalem in the Commonwealth Games and became intrigued enough (because I'm too lazy to blog about anything else tonight) to do a fun online poll as to what England's national anthem should be.

Vote in the right hand column.

That Tory Lead

Another poll and more bad news for the Tories, their lead is now down to 5 points. This is worrying for Cameron, a point he acknowledges by unusually consulting his shadow cabinet:

The shadow Cabinet — which has been bypassed for most of Cameron’s tenure — is now being consulted. It met for more than two hours on Tuesday — after the Cameroon powwow in Notting Hill — and had, unusually, a proper discussion of the political situation. One member tells me that almost everyone spoke at the meeting. That this is considered news says a lot about how the shadow Cabinet is normally conducted.

James Forysth's article tries to analyze the question of 'why has the Tory lead halved since December?' (my emphasis):

All of the most trusted members of Cameron’s inner circle were there — George Osborne, Steve Hilton, Andy Coulson, Michael Gove — but the atmosphere was not one of jubilation, or even excited determination. The predominant mood was despair. Osborne put their worries into words: What’s going wrong? he asked. Why are we slipping in the polls, even when Brown is so unpopular?

Forysth makes some good points that the Tories have had a bad start to the year, they made some unforced errors, have lost momentum and don't seem to have a focused message:

Rather, it is to do with the campaign. The Labour message is clear and repeated while the Tory one is opaque. One shadow Cabinet member told me this week that he wished the Tories had a slogan as effective as Labour’s ‘a future fair for all’. Candidates report that voters can remember Labour policies but not Tory ones.

Even the party’s own press people complain — in private — about a lack of clarity. ‘Everyone struggles to articulate what we are really for,’ one told me. ‘We don’t really have a message or a purpose.’ When the salesmen believe they don’t really have a product, then they are much less likely to persuade the media or voters.

All true but there's one subject that doesn't get mentioned.

Here's the Tory lead over Labour since 1st January 2009 up to the latest poll, the vertical line indicates the 1st poll taken after 3rd November 2009.

Here's the Tory lead from 1st January to 3rd November 2009 with an added trend line. all pretty stable, the average lead over Labour is 14 points.

So lets do a comparison between 5 months before 3rd November and 5 months after. Below is 5 months before, slight downward trend nothing significant and the average lead is 14 points.

Then 5 months after the 3rd and...er...whoops, the trend line shows a marked and significant downward turn, the average lead has dropped to 10 points, and is still falling.

The 3rd November was of course the day when Cameron u-turned on a Lisbon referendum, which caused unhappiness at the time within his own party. It's notable also that 12 days after the 3rd the Tories' lead went down to 6 points for the first time in a nearly year (when the banking crisis hit), at the time it was dismissed as an outliner, but now looks to have been a sign of the trend to come.

Cameron has clearly taken a significant hit over Lisbon, though I still think he will scrape through; when voters' start thinking at the ballot box if they want 5 more years of Brown. But ironically by trying to avoid the EU issue Cameron has made a rebellion in his own party more, rather than less likely, because his majority will be smaller than it otherwise could have been.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

As others have noted today, the Telegraph reports:

Ken Clarke, the shadow Business Secretary, is to hold secret talks in Brussels with Jose Manuel Barroso to assure the European Commission President the EU has nothing to fear from a Conservative government.
The two-day visit to Brussels, which begins on Tuesday, by the most pro-EU member of David Cameron's cabinet-in-waiting is seen by European officials as a signal that a new Conservative administration will work with the EU executive rather battling against it.

It's all so dreary and predictable that I've not much to add, apart from this from the Spectator (my emphasis):

The new Guardian ICM poll has the Tory lead down to seven points and the party on 37 percent....this poll will heighten the sense of nervousness on the Tory side. Even before this poll came out, David Cameron had called a shadow Cabinet meeting for tomorrow which will be held at CCHQ and is scheduled to last for two hours.

Despite facing the most incompetent and hated Government in recent times, the Tories' poll lead has been on a steady but consistent downward trend since last November.

Is it any wonder?

49% of Brits 'disenchanted with EU'...

...according to a new survey on teletext

Britain has not benefited from European Union membership, according to nearly half the population, a new survey has indicated.

The latest "Eurobarometer" poll showed 49% denying any advantage in membership and only 36% seeing benefits.

So only just over a third see benefits to the UK's membership, still stubbornly low despite most of the UK's media ignoring the implications of the EU if they can get away with it.