If David Cameron expected voters to respect him for firming up his commitment to a referendum on the European Union, YouGov’s latest polling for The Times will disappoint him. Most Britons, including a majority of those who voted Conservative in 2010, think he is acting out of tactical calculation rather...

Sometimes sudden shifts in poll numbers matter less than the slow steady movements. Dramatic mood swings are liable to be reversed; gradual change is often sustained.

This blog discusses a creeping change in attitudes that is invisible from week to week, and barely noticeable from month to month, but which...

Starting in the early hours of tomorrow morning, we shall be bombarded with analyses of the local election results. Are the gains and losses for each party above, below or on a par with expectations? Is Ed Miliband on course to become Prime Minister? Has UKIP overtaken the Liberal Democrats?

My, we are a gloomy lot. Last week, I discussed the possible impact of a triple-dip recession. Last Thursday’s GDP figures suggest that Britain’s economy has so far avoided this fate. However, it is also clear that the government’s hopes of steady growth of 2 - 3% a...

Let me declare my interest at the outset. ASH, the anti-smoking campaign, is a client of YouGov; I am also a trustee. So, for once, this blog goes beyond data analysis. It includes YouGov research, but also sets out my personal views.

The reason for doing this now is that...

On Wednesday, the day before the rest of us, George Osborne will know whether Britain’s economy has succumbed to a triple-dip recession. By convention, the Office for National Statistics gives ministers 24 hours’ notice of its data, so they can prepare their response to the figures when they enter the...

We love the idea of punishing bad behaviour by the press - but public support for the principle of underpinning this by law is more muted.

Yesterday YouGov conducted the first survey of attitudes to Parliament's decision to back a Royal Charter to oversee a new system of...

All the main parties are nervous about the politics of immigration, and figures in YouGov’s latest poll for the Sunday Times suggest why. Few of us think that immigrants generally play a positive role in British life. The incessant, and often badly-informed stories, year after year, about crimes...

The politics of gender have bubbled to the surface of political debate. Some Tories are worried that women are deserting them in such numbers that the party will lose the next election.  One widely reported ICM poll last week showed that while 36% of men would vote Labour, the figure...

It looks as if the Conservatives have gained from the Prime Minister’s speech on the European Union – but only slightly. In YouGov’s latest poll for the Sunday Times, the party scores 35%, its highest rating since mid-November. This compares with 31-34% in the previous 17 polls that...

For the first time in the current parliament, more people would vote for Britain to stay in the European Union than to leave. The six-point margin is not large. Future polls may well tell a different story. But as David Cameron prepares to deliver his long-awaited speech on Britain and...

Like other polling companies, YouGov has started monitoring voting intentions ahead of next year’s elections to the European Parliament (EP). And, like other companies, we have found that Ukip’s support is significantly higher when people are asked for their EP vote than when they are asked how they would vote...

Public opinion is on the move on Europe. YouGov’s latest poll for the Sunday Times confirms that if David Cameron called a straight in-out referendum some time in the future, Britain would vote to remain a member of the European Union, probably by a large margin.

As recently...

As governments down the years have discovered, welfare is a political minefield. Most people think they pay more into the government’s welfare pot through taxes than they draw out in benefits. They find the system horrendously complex but have the strong, if vague, feeling that the insurance principle was abandoned...

January 2, 2016

Looking back on 2015, the odd thing is that David Cameron's triumphs should provoke such surprise. The events that gave him total command of British politics have been enjoyed as a fairy tale by some and lamented as a nightmare by others. Either way, we have all...

Beware. Interpreting public opinion on immigration can be a tricky business. Knowing what POLICIES the public want is straightforward enough; the tough bit is making sense of the POLITICAL IMPACT of the issue.

Consider policy first. YouGov’s latest poll for the Sunday Times produced some emphatic results:

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Pollsters, like economists, social scientists and other data-watchers, thrive on change. When the numbers move, we have plenty to say. Sometimes, however, people, and therefore the data, let us down. This is one of those occasions. As far as the big picture is concerned, public reaction this year to Britain’s...

An important part of the political battle following the publication of the Leveson report is to win over public opinion. YouGov has conducted the first post-publication survey for the Sunday Times.

First, given the controversies that have attended the polls that YouGov conducted beforehand, a word of caution....

Oscar Wilde famously described fox-hunting as ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible’. As far as many voters are concerned, when MPs debate how to rein in newspapers following the publication of Leveson’s report, it will be a case of the unspeakable in pursuit of the incredible.

In general, the...

Conservative eurosceptics and Labour tacticians should beware. British hostility to the European Union is not as simple or complete as some of them think. YouGov’s latest survey for the Sunday Times suggests a nuanced set of attitudes, even to the current EU budget negotiations.

Two weeks ago, after the ...