A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left. Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

More about the YouGov poll

I've now added links to the full datasets in the post below.

My instincts that the union data may be a bit flaky are confirmed by the sample sizes: 583 men versus 250 women (so are unions like UNISON and USDAW with large numbers of women members properly represented?) and 441 ABC1 social classes versus 392 C2DE - so this was basically a poll tilted towards white collar trade unionists, as you would expect from an internet poll - lots of folks from the ex-MSF bits of Amicus, the ACTS section of TGWU, and the APEX bit of GMB will have completed it - but how many nurses, bus drivers, dinner ladies or shop assistants?

My hunch is that incredible number of GMB NULO Branch and TGWU Parliamentary Staff Branch members took part in this poll!

Figures for "undecideds" are:

Party members - 18% still undecided - with a further 26% open to switching who they back (particularly Hain and Harman supporters)
TU members - 22% still undecided - with a further 23% open to switching who they back (again, particularly Hain and Harman supporters)

so there is still a huge potential for churn and change between now and the final outcome.

On the social class breakdown there are some interesting policy differences:

Middle class Labour members: anti-Trident, narrowly pro-Iraq withdrawal, pro-nuclear power, anti-80 day detention, anti-TU influence on govt, against the Hodge proposals on housing allocations.

Working class Labour members: pro-Trident, heavily pro-Iraq withdrawal, pro-nuclear power, pro-80 day detention, pro-TU influence on govt, less pro-tax increases than their middle class counterparts, less anti-grammar school than their middle class counterparts, in favour of the Hodge proposals on housing allocations, less pro-green taxes than their middle class counterparts, less hostile to Bush foreign policy.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"On the social class breakdown there are some interesting policy differences"

Yeah, but on some issues (e.g. taxation) the differences were virtually insignificant. There wasn't actually a definite pro-Trident majority among working class members.

8:37 pm, June 03, 2007

 
Blogger Tom said...

"anti-TU influence on govt"

Hmm. But They seem to stick up for union policies a lot more than their counterparts, from what I read above...

10:45 pm, June 03, 2007

 

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