Support for Britain’s Labour opposition has surged to a three-year high, a Reuters/Ipsos MORI poll showed yesterday, with the ruling Conservatives suffering as gloom about the economy deepens.
This month’s Reuters/Ipsos MORI political monitor showed support for Labour up 4 percentage points to 43 percent, while Conservative support dropped 5 points to 33 percent, the lowest level since the party took power last May.
The Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the Conservative-led coalition government, rose 2 points from last month’s two-year low to 13 percent.
“Satisfaction with the government and its leaders has declined significantly since December,” said Ipsos MORI’s Helen Cleary, adding that the approval rating of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was at its lowest since he took office in May.
Figures issued two days earlier showed a 0.5 percent contraction in the British economy in the last three months of last year, shaking faith in the government’s economic plans.
The poll showed 53 percent of the public believed the economy would get worse in the next 12 months, compared with 24 percent who believed it would get better, the most pessimistic outlook since March 2009.
The fall in support for the Conservatives may prove ominous for the party in local elections in May, which will be an important gauge of public support for the government since it took office.
Its flagship policy has been a series of austerity cuts aimed at tackling a record peacetime budget deficit of about 10 percent of national output, a move welcomed by financial markets eager to see Britain as a good debtor and able to borrow cheaply.
However, public pain over cuts in jobs and services could strain the coalition and put the austerity plan at risk.
The Reuters/Ipsos MORI poll was conducted before GDP data showing a shrinking economy were published on Tuesday, meaning economic pessimism could be worse than shown in the survey’s findings.
“The gloomy economic situation is clearly reflected in the poll findings, with economic optimism the lowest we’ve recorded in almost two years. Interviewing took place after a series of bad economic news, but before the latest GDP figures, which may have had an even bigger impact,” Cleary said.
It has been a tough start to the year for the coalition.
Besides the unexpected fall in economic output at the end of last year, the inflation rate is running at almost double the Bank of England’s 2 percent target.
The Conservatives were hit last week by the resignation of communications chief Andy Coulson, a member of Cameron’s inner circle and a former editor of the News of the World newspaper, which is being investigated over phone hacking.
Coulson was seen as having the common touch needed to sell to a skeptical public an austerity plan implemented by a government headed mostly by people from privileged backgrounds.
Labour’s authority on economic issues may have been boosted by the appointment of Ed Balls as its finance spokesman last week after the resignation of Alan Johnson, a self-confessed novice on economic policy.
Balls has had years of economic experience from working at the finance ministry under former British prime minister Gordon Brown.
The freefall in support for the Liberal Democrats appears to have leveled off.
Voters had been angry at the party’s decision to go back on an earlier election pledge to oppose higher university tuition fees.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees