Will the coalition get blamed when the cuts are specific?
The first reaction to the cuts statements
There was a little bit of polling last night about the spending review but most of the fieldwork for the YouGov daily poll took place before the CSR statement was made.
An interesting angle comes from the firm’s Anthony Wells – who runs UKPR. He wrote:-
“The most interesting question there though was who people thought was to blame. 30% said the coalition and 34% said the last Labour government. Compare that to the regular YouGov tracker on who people blame the cuts in general, which is still finding 48% blaming Labour the most and only 18% blaming the coalition most. My suspicion is that this is because people blame the last Labour government when it is just generic cuts, but once specific cuts are announced they may begin to apportion more of the blame more upon the present government as they are the ones who chose to make these particular cuts.”
The latest YouGov daily poll had CON 42%: LAB 39%: LD 11% – once again the online firm showing bigger shares than the other pollsters for the reds and the blues and lower shares for the yellows and “others”. This is mostly down to the weighting system used for the News International polls.
My guess is that there’ll be a deluge of data over the weekend.