Yesterday’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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