YouGov has Labour and the Tories at their closest since October 2007

raggedclown

The collapse in the Tory lead has happened even before the cuts take effect. I am amazed that the Lib-Dems are still in double figures.

Verity

Gosh! Why are you posting this as a surprise?

You thought the shaky - not to say sleazy - "coalition" was going to last given that they had no remit from the voters?

They're finished. Sooner than I expected. I would have given them until November. But they were never going to be a government.

Now what?

PuppetMaster

Is this Tory voters deserting the Tories because they've realised the cuts will be very small, power will continue to be transferred to Brussels and taxes will increase? Or is it floating voters, floating away as that's what they do?
So we have four more years of polls to ponder. Will the voters vote for the big state, high tax, high spending party, or will they vote for the fractionally smaller state, high tax, high spending party? My spine is tingling with excitement already. Will there be a huge upset? Stay tuned, you don't want to miss anything.

Roger Davies

It's a poll not an election, so I guess people say the first thing that comes into their welfare subsidised heads.

charles hercock

So what

The coalition need to think about popularity again in 2014

Austin Barry

Wow, people are having real difficulty choosing between two groups of multi-culti, EU-submitting, Islam-fellating, scrounger-perpetuating, immigration-flooding, politically correct tossers and another. Who'd've thought?

Michael landers

After reading the comments about this poll. I think the Spectator is doomed, if that the standard of intelligence its readers have.

Chris lancashire

In the words of Ed Balls, So what?

Trevors Den

My reading is that labour are 12 points behind. Whats the fuss?

Vulture

What Austin says, with knobs on.

None of the three parties have any sort of answer to the profound crisis of this country - a crisis perhaps more perilous than any in our history, including 1940.
As Austin says, it can loosely be summed up
as the three headed monster EU-Islamigration.

With a toxic combination of jelloid Dave, a deputy dawg who changes his national loyalty at half-time because his team is losing and an ever more disilusioned Tory Right, Ed Millipede will be the next PM.

Apres him - the deluge.

Roy Smith

Cameron deserves to sink. He could have won the election with a landslide and kept it there if he'd have just gone with what the people wanted. Some right wing common sense, some clean air, a good wash and scrub-up to clean away the diabolical stench of Labour's delusional, anti British, bankrupting, policies.

michael

Everybody has just been threatened with a whacking tax bill.

RKing

Gosh Golly !!
What can we do?
This must be serious with only four years to the next election.

davidk

The Tory-Limp poll figures will crater by the end of the year. Get used to it. The bigger issue is whether the recession is capped and growth occurs prior to 2014/15. If not, prepare for opposition for a generation.

alexsandr

I seem to remember people saying YouGov was seriously biased towards the left before the election. Are they still?

Nicholas

Vulture is correct. The death wish of this country is to vote in another dose of authoritarian socialism delivered by ideological dogmatists from the last useless cabinet. If this same politically immature, emotionally overwrought mediocrity of half-wits manage to seize power again - watch out. We will probably have to suffer decades of the misery and repression of the Cold War East European experience before the ridiculous rose-tinted Leftism is exorcised from this land. Everywhere you look there are burgeoning East German block wardens just longing to tell us what to do, how to think and to poke their noses in to make sure we do. Cameron promised to get rid of this. Still waiting.

It would be nice if the next PM at least looked and sounded like a fully grown, mature male adult with a sense of reason and reality. Even better if he were to be a man of the right prepared to call a spade a spade and lead this country out of its socialist narcolepsy. Someone who would actually roll up their sleeves and tear apart the Left's hegemony rather than billing and cooing to it.

We have had the words Mr Cameron now we need the action - and you do too if your party is going to survive.

Ronnie

It's an opinion poll, not an election result. Labour doesn't even have a leader yet!!!

The two parties are shown neck and neck, maybe that explains why we have a coalition government. Doh!

Verity, stop it. Surely you can hear the laughter, even in your Mexican fastness?

Simon Stephenson

michael (9.27am) makes the most penetrating comment:-

"Everybody has just been threatened with a whacking tax bill."

I would expect support actually to have strengthened amongst the 10% of voters who actually vote for who they see to be in the best interests of the country, in the hope, obviously, that those living happier lives will include themselves.

The 60% who vote tribally won't really have changed.

And the remaining 30%, who take their affiliation to a political party about as seriously than they take their affiliation to a soap powder, will have indicated their preference for whoever "does it" for them at the time of the poll. Which, in a time of difficulties, is less likely to be the party that actually has to make the decisions than the one who dishonestly claims that things would be hunky-dory if only it was them having to make the decisions.

A direct democracy of the unaware and the uninvolved can't possibly work either in theory or in practice.

Verity

What Austin and Vulture said. Dave was always going to be a loser. He was a loser for four and a half years in he run up to the election.

What malign cabal engineered his continuation as tragically inept leader of the Tories? And why?

This is a joke, right? There's going to be a punch line coming along, and we're all going to have a good laugh and then elect a Conservative as Leader.

General Zod

who cares about a poll four months after an election? The Tories are going to be further behind this time next year. From the beginning of 2013 they need to change that around.

Edavid Milliband won't make that task particularly difficult.

Peter From Maidstone

Many people in the country shouldn't have the vote, and this poll just shows that many people still shouldn't have the vote. Why would those who don't have to work for a living, or those who have non-jobs paid for by taxpayers want to support any cuts in their lifestyle.

Fergus Pickering

Ah, Peter, didn't John Stuart Mill suggest that voters would have to pass an exam in order to vote? Diificult questions presumably, like 'Who is the Prime Minister?'. That should weed them out.

Ricky

It's hardly surprising when subversive anti-government forces in the mass media are working flat out to promote their beloved milch cow - the Labour Party/TUC and are ferociously determined to deconstruct the Conservative party and this government.

The worst offender is the Evil Empire, formerly known as the BBC - who only interview the Left or the Far Left for balance on most issues. How many government ministers or representatives of the Coalition have been even interviewed by the Guardianistas at the Politically Correct Liberation Front - the Evil Empire on major issues?

The Evil Empire also likes to interview their own in-house "experts" rather than actually get the government's point of view. So they do a lot of self congratulatory talking amongst themselves, whilst they indoctrinate the sheeple.

The BBC has been obsessing about all matters connected with the Labour Party and careful editing, montage and selective clips are used to damn the Tories at every turn.

The Evil Empire is pro Union millionaires, anti private sector capitalism, pro terrorism (IRA/Hamas); judeophobic and christianophobic, pro Islam and actively promotes favoured minorities whilst merrily living high on the hog on the licence fee paid by the few of us not on benefits.

Mr Hunt, it's the BBC - or your elected government. The choice is simple.

Dan Grover

Who cares? I think it's about time the coalition realised they're a one-term government and just do as much as they can, for the good of the country.

Simon Stephenson

Peter from Maidstone and Fergus Pickering

Nevil Shute wrote a novel called In the Wet, in which he described a voting system in which everyone gets one vote, but that there are more votes (up to a maximum of seven, I believe) available for those who have achieved other qualities in their lives.

Such an idea, of course, will never even get an airing while we hold on to the presupposition that the current singular-vote system cannot be improved upon.

Verity

Simon Stephenson, Nevil Shute's novel comes up on this blog every now and then. If I remember correctly, you got an extra vote for being, or having been, in the military. Fair enough. But you also got an extra vote for degrees.

Think of all the sociology graduates, and media studies graduates ... with two or three votes more than normal, sensible people who work in the car repair industry and the construction trade. All those people with degrees in oh,I don't know, the quango disciplines and the international "caring" boondoggle disciplines ... No! It may have been a good idea when Nevil Shute first thoght of it (although I don't think it was ... I believe in one citizen, one vote) but the entire educational system is so degraded now that Shute's idea is a template for a dictatorship.

jane

I cannot believe the comments on these posts.God help us all if this is what 40% of british people think,what a narrow minded bunch of selfish,opiniated and misguided t***s!!

laverda

A large number included in youguv figures are postal voters,labour profile and can't read or write English, so just do what they're told. YouGov is labour, same as the BBC.

Nicholas

jane - eek! You mean that 40% of people don't agree with your narrow-minded, selfish and misguided opinion and are therefore t***s (togs?)! Better start a mums pressure group to bleat something must be done about it. I'm sure the has-beens of the late cabinet still leading (New/Old) Labour will listen.

Simon Stephenson

Verity : 6.51pm

Fair enough, I'm not suggesting Shute's as the perfect model, merely that perhaps we would benefit from having some discussion about possible deviations from the principle of one citizen - one vote. The discussion may not lead to a consensus for changing the present system, but I'd expect the opening up of the issue to lead to ideas about how we might improve the efficacy of what we've got - ideas that would forever remain dormant if we just accede to the view that this is as good as it gets.

Barbara

I for one can't see anything in either of them and that goes for all three. They've all betrayed the people of this country over the years. Got no confidence in any of them, they are all filled with poisonous party dogma at any costs. The present coalition are bent on destroying the welfare state, yes, it needs changing but the way it's done is what matters. Their way is not right, its to aimed at the poor who cannot fight back. The Lib Dems should be ashamed of themselves for supporting the Tories in their ripping up of this nation which is victimisation big time. They will regret this action like they regretted the 1980's and lived with the results for 13 years. Will they never learn. Yes we need change to sections of government like welfare but it needs to be done carefully. Yes we need to repay out debt, but those who caused it should pay the most, not on the backs of the poor. They were not included in the fat cats rewards from their folly. This country is further down in the mire with this coalition, unity especially, we are getting more divided by the day.