Nearly everyone in Westminster says the same thing when you ask them if there will be an election early in 2009: Brown should call one but he won’t. The thinking goes that the worst probable result for Labour early next year is a narrow Tory majority and the best one is Labour as the largest party in the Commons. By contrast in 2010, Labour could get absolutely shell-shacked.
The new YouGov poll today has Labour no longer rising in the polls, it is steady on 35 while the Tories are up one to 42—Jonathan Isaby thinks that this trend is enough to see off the prospect of an early election. But there is reason to believe that these numbers will get substantially better for the Tories over the next 12 months. As Andrew Grice writes in The Independent:
“cabinet ministers do not expect the “Brown bounce” in the polls to last once the toll of job losses and company closures mounts in the new year. They expect the Tories to enjoy a bigger poll lead by next summer, killing off any prospect of a 2009 election. “We cannot go on defying the laws of political gravity forever;” one said. “2009 is going to be a very rocky road for us.”
Anthony Wells, in a fascinating post at UK Polling Report, points out that while people expect the economy to get worse they are far more optimistic about their own personal situation:
“The difference is sharpest in Populus’s questions – the net score for expections of the economy as a whole is minus 35, for “me and my family” it’s plus 7 (51% think they personally will do well in the next 12 months, 44% badly). In TNS’s regular surveys of consumer confidence for Nationwide the net score for the public’s expectation of the economy in 6 months is minus 23, but for people’s own household it is exactly neutral (16% think they’d be doing better, 16% worse).”
This suggests that there will be a lot of people, who to their surprise, will be adversely affected by the recession. One imagines that they will angrily turn on Brown when this happens.
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