Latest polls

Tonight’s YouGov poll for the Sun has topline figures of CON 36%, LAB 34%, LDEM 5%, UKIP 14%, GRN 6%. The unusual three point lead Tory yesterday clearly wasn’t a one off. I will urge all my usual caution, two polls in a row do not necessary make a trend. However, of the last seven YouGov polls they’ve now shown three Tory leads, three draws and one Labour lead so something may indeed be afoot.
As ever, keep watching the broader trend and see what the rest of the week brings. I can’t see any obvious reason for a big shift in support over the last few days, so if there is a change, it’s likely to be the slow drift in public support that’s difficult to be certain about rather than an obvious step-change.

We have three GB polls today, from Populus, Ashcroft and YouGov.

• The twice-weekly Populus poll has topline figures of CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5% (tabs).
  
• The weekly Lord Ashcroft poll has topline figures of CON 34%, LAB 31%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 7% (tabs). Labour have dropped five points since Ashcroft’s previous poll, but this will be largely a reversion to the mean after they jumped up five points a week ago.
  
• Finally the daily YouGov for the Sun has topline figures of CON 35%, LAB 32%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 15%, GRN 6%. The three point Tory lead is the largest that YouGov have shown since back in January 2012.
  

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/

Does anyone know how accurate these polls have been in past elections?

Nems wrote:Does anyone know how accurate these polls have been in past elections?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8667801.stm

I despair at all the parties tbh and have no idea who to vote for.

eddie wrote:I despair at all the parties tbh and have no idea who to vote for.

I do not think are of any good but I choose the best of a bad bunch, which can bring the best economic plans, which to me is the Tories. Have economic stability provides a nation with money in their pocket and less worries.

Well, don't know if anyone else actually goes round campaigning, but I do, and the things that have struck us is Lib Dem support doesn't exist, people are absolutely furious about the state of the NHS, especially when it came out that Rifkind's company was given a contract at a cost of £7Million more than the NHS wuold have done it for, and the fact that families are absolutely NOT better off, the AVERAGE wage has risen because the RICH are getter more, the voter on the doorstep still feels, and is, a lot worse off and is bloody angry about it. The support we are getting is brilliant.

The gap between the rich and poor has shrunk, from where it grew actually under Labour, but lets just ignore these facts eh Sassy.

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[*]Under Labour, income inequality, that is the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor, was the largest in modern times.”
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Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative Party Conference, 8 October 2012.
 
After Ed Miliband told the Labour Party conference last week that “I will never accept an economy where the gap between rich and poor just grows wider and wider,” Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith hit back this week by telling his party’s delegates that Labour had done just that while in Government.
According to Mr Duncan Smith, the previous Labour administration had overseen the widest gap in income inequality “in modern times”. Is he right?
Analysis
It isn’t clear exactly what Mr Duncan Smith means by ‘modern times’, however data is available from the Institute for Fiscal Studies going as far back as 1961, which is when their records began. 
By looking into their reports, we can indeed see that Labour’s third term saw a sharp rise in income inequality, as well as a fall in the income of the poorest fifth of the population. 
In 2009 they reported that: “income inequality has risen (on most measures) in each of the last three years and is now at its highest level since our comparable time series began in 1961.”
Moreover, under Labour, income growth at the very top and very bottom of the distribution sharply diverged, with the lowest growth in incomes occuring at the very bottom of the distribution over this period, and the fastest growth at the very top. 
To reach this conclusion, the IFS employ something called the Gini coefficient. Developed by an Italian economist, the Gini coefficient is a common measure of inequality in income and wealth and assesses the extent to which the distribution of income among households deviates from a perfectly equal distribution.
It ranges from 0 to 1: a coefficient of 0 would mean income is shared equally between all individuals, whilst a coefficient of 1 would mean one person within the population holds all the income, whilst everyone else has none.
As we can see in the chart below, in 2009 Britain’s coefficient was 0.36. By comparison, according to OECD stats, the figure is 0.408 in the United States,  0.23 in Sweden, 0.283 in Germany and 0.327 in France. So Britain ranks highly among European countries, but is within the average of OECD countries. 

As Full Fact reported in December 2011, inequality can be measured in two ways. One is to take the entire population and compare the incomes of the richest and poorest on these terms. The other is to limit the sample to the working-age population, thus excluding the retired and those that have yet to enter the workforce. Both are statistically acceptable. 
The Gini coeffiecient is far from perfect, as large demographic changes – such as an increase in children below working age or retired households – could also affect income distributions.  
The Office for National Statistics report on the effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes may complete the picture for us. It uses a different measurement of inequality that takes into account the effects of tax and benefits, and found that in 2010/11 inequality for post-tax income was 9 points higher in non-retired households compared to retired households. 
So how is Britain doing now? 
Well, it looks like things may be changing. In 2010-11, the Gini coefficient fell from 0.36 to 0.34, the largest one year fall since at least 1961. This means the Gini has returned to its 1997-98 level. One of the reasons for the sharp fall in inequality is that during the recession, the falls in income were proportionately larger for richer households.