Labour takes a 6 point lead with Lord Ashcroft’s polling.

 

Lord Ashcroft poll has published his second weekly phone poll on Westminster VI and it great news for the Red team

As the good Lord himself says wisely

This looks like quite a reversal in the week since the inaugural Ashcroft National Poll found the first Tory lead since 2012. What is going on?

Ten general election voting intention surveys have been published between last Monday’s poll and today’s. Of those ten, two showed a Tory lead, one was a tie, and seven put Labour ahead. Baffling though this may look, it is not completely inexplicable. Statistics being what they are, and with all polls subject to margins of error, it is likely that these results are scattered around a mean; this currently looks like a very small advantage to Labour, and one which has undoubtedly narrowed since the half-way point in the parliament. While the Conservative share has held fairly steady over this time, Labour have receded. That said, there is also some volatility in voting intention related to the European election campaigns: over the last week Euro polls have been published suggesting leads for not two but three different parties.

All of these things are good reasons to look at the longer term trends in polling rather than individual surveys 

My own take is that Labour is probably 2/3% ahead, but with margin of error/sampling variations and a general polling trend not favouring Labour and somewhat favouring the Tories we’re going to be seeing a volatile period in the polling for a while, as the Tories and Lab alternate the lead, until we see a new trend emerging, but for the time being, I wouldn’t advise the Blues or Reds to get over-excited or despondent by any one poll.

TSE