Soft lead for the BLP

Useful polling here, as reported in the Guardian, about the issue of voter attitudes to the Tories and Labour. The figure I find most interesting is satisfaction with Starmer. From a significant high when he gained the leadership of the BLP it has fallen to a point where he’s about as unpopular as Corbyn was for much of the time. Granted he remains well ahead of Sunak. 

And for the party:

Polls have shown that Labour has had a commanding lead since 2022, fluctuating at about 20 points ahead of the Conservatives. While these leads are weaker than those Blair enjoyed between 1994 and 1998, they still point to a majority Labour government after the next election.

And given Liz Truss is in the news, wow, did she ever gift Labour something when she was PM. 

YouGov data shows that Labour has been ahead on handling the economy since October 2022 – when Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget was announced.

Pointing to this fiscal event, as well as the damage done by the Partygate scandal, the politics professor John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, agreed that the current polling position mainly reflected a drop in support for the Conservatives rather than a sharp rise in support for Labour – but that this would not make much difference to the likely outcome of a Labour government.

Okay, all this is quite radically different from when Johnson won the last election with a significant Tory majority and the prospect of that majority seeing them coast to a further victory at the next election. But difficult not to have the sense that all this is not due to Labour or Starmer, so much as the utter chaos that is Tory politics. And that underscores the fact that what Labour offers is so limited, so partial, so hesitant, that while near enough anything would be an improvement on the Tories it seems to offer nothing for when the election after the next one comes around.