All across the political spectrum
Peter Hoskin 2:01pmYesterday's polls may seem like yesterday's news – but it's actually worth returning to YouGov's effort from, erm, yesterday. It contained some distinctive questions, and results, all set around the left-right spectrum. How left wing is the Labour party? How right wing is David Cameron? That sort of thing.
Of course, as Anthony Wells has already pointed out, the old labels of "left" and "right" are of decreasing relevance nowadays. But they do still tell us something about popular perceptions of the parties and their leaders. So here are the top line YouGov results in graph form:
From which, a few points stand out: Ed Miliband is regarded as more left wing than his party; David Cameron is seen as only marginally less right wing than his party; and both the Lib Dems and Clegg are thought to be pretty much bang in the centre of it all.
Here at Coffee House, we've also sliced the results a different way to produce the graphs below. What they show is the proportion of people who believe they share the same politics with the three main parties and party leaders. Here's the one for the parties:
And for the party leaders:
I'll let CoffeeHousers make their own observations, but it's telling that more self-confessed left-wingers identify with Miliband than with the Labour party. For Cameron, slightly more centrists identify with him than with the Tory party.
Poll analysis over.
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Rhoda Klapp
February 1st, 2011 2:30pm Report this commentAsk a silly question, and you get a silly answer. Ask a slanted unqualified question with no definition of terms, and you get a mishmash. This was an exercise for the bubble folks. It bears no relation to actual people or the reality of life in the UK.
Nobody in the political establishment or the commentariat saw Egypt/Tunisia coming. That is how well tuned in you all are. Without wanting to be over-dramatic, you will not know it is happening here either, until the net goes down. Well, OK, it might not happen, but the folks in the bubble are always the last to know anything. It's not left and right any more, the two are indistinguishable. It is us and them.
and I'll go to bed at noon
February 1st, 2011 2:44pm Report this comment@Rhoda K
On the surface, your analysis is pretty accurate. However, based on other comments you've made on this website, far from being beyond left-right politics, I rather suspect that the "us" you're referring to means the right (which includes all decent, sensible people) and "them" means the left (entirely made up of sinister metropolitan elites). Sounds like just as much of a bubble perspective to me. I apologise if I've assumed wrongly.
No-one can deny the existence of a self-serving, unaccountable, clueless political class in this country - Peter Oborne in particular has written brilliantly about this. The mistake is to assume these people are ideologically motivated, instead of being driven by good old-fashioned lust for money and power (and just good old-fashioned lust, in some cases).
libertarian
February 1st, 2011 2:57pm Report this commentI have to say I agree with Rhodda
All politicians and parties at international,national, regional and local level are "post democratic" statist/corporatist. Left and Right are dead as terms of identitity
yank
February 1st, 2011 3:16pm Report this commentTo continue with R.K.'s rant, it was amusing over here yesterday, the video clip that was passing around from 1994, with a gaggle of well known television talking heads yapping cluelessly about this newfangled "internet" thingy.
And they were completely clueless. Personal computers had been a fixture in the business world for at least a 1/2 decade by then. I'd been emailing internationally for nearly as long.
And the bubble denizens had not a clue what was going on. They were literally asking the kids off camera to explain it all to them... like it was noookoolar physics or something.
And so stymied, they just bemusedly shook their heads and moved on to the next world crisis that they were to expertly comment on.
A group spectacularly ignorant and poorly educated, and completely insulated from the real world.
Nothing much has changed. Same bubble denizens... same cluelessness.
Rhoda Klapp
February 1st, 2011 3:58pm Report this comment@ and I'll go to bed at noon
I am of a right-wing bent, on the libertarian side. But that is not the basis of this argument, it is that the elite so eloquently described by Oborne before he went daft is in total control, and that what 'we' want, whether left or right, has been taken out of our hands by, yes, a group who at best are doing 'what's best for us' or at worst what is best for themselves. And corporatism and statism are involved. Just because you profess to be right-wing does NOT mean you want your interests sold out to a bunch of greedy bastards who only see you as a resource to be exploited. If we differ left and right, it does not matter so long as the current political class holds all the cards. They despise us. I only hope one day they are called to account for it, and for their incompetence.
ollie
February 1st, 2011 4:30pm Report this commentIt seems opinion poll questions are getting increasingly spurious. Surely only one question matters, the one about "if there was a general election tomorrow..."
Governments cannot and must not base their decisions on the latest opinion polls.
Cynic
February 1st, 2011 4:53pm Report this commentWhat I can't get over is the amount of blue both Cameron and his party get! Are these respondents hand-picked, deluded or what?
Luke
February 1st, 2011 6:42pm Report this commentThe most startling finding is the one you don't mention. That David Cameron is seen as more rightwing than Ed Miliband is seen as leftwing
Paddy
February 1st, 2011 7:17pm Report this commentRhoda Klapp: Agree entirely. "It is not left and right any more.....the two are indistinguishable.....it is us and them".
TGF UKIP
February 1st, 2011 10:36pm Report this commentYup and that is the whole problem with this Tory Party. Margaret Thatcher gave every indication of being "one of us" Cameron on the other hand is indubitably "one of them."
Benoir Fandango III
February 2nd, 2011 9:31am Report this commentWhilst I agree that the left-right label barely applies anymore, I don't see what the them-us label offers either. In this increasingly corporatist state it's the spectrum of (self-perceived) have's and have-not's that will determine political rule, policy and behaviour.
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