YouGov’s latest survey for the Sunday Times shows that Labour seems to be gaining very gradually as the economy improves. The rate of recovery in both is very slow; but YouGov's first poll to be conducted free from the short-term effects of the conference season shows Labour at its highest level since the immediate aftermath of the London G20 summit. Post-conference polls by other companies confirm the underlying trend. This is not a sudden thing, but the culmination of a trend that has been underway since the late spring.
The significance of this is that, if these trends continue, then the Tories would fall short of an overall majority. On normal assumptions of a uniform swing, the Tories need an 11% lead in the popular vote to reach the 326 seats they need for an overall majority - exactly the lead in the current YouGov poll. In reality, I expect the swing in the Lab-Con marginals to be slightly higher than that in Britain as a whole; so the actual target for a bare overall majority may be a lead of 8-9%; but, if current trends continue, achieving that is now in doubt.
Of course, the economy may not be the cause of Labour's gradual recovery; and/or the economy may go sour in the next six months; and/or other things may happen to end or reverse the current trend - and, anyway, Labour still has a long way to go before it stands a chance of being the largest party after the next election (it needs the Tory lead to fall below around 5% to have a real chance of achieving this objective) ... but the coming election could be more exciting that seemed likely a few months ago. Among other things, a Tory minority government might have difficulty securing parliamentary approval for its full programme, especially on Europe, and possibly tax and spending.
The voting trends are borne out by the tracker questions on the party leaders, the best team for standard of living, state of the economy and, above all, house price expectations. All are grim for Labour - but not as grim as they were a few months ago.
In some ways this is good news for Gordon Brown. There was some talk before Labour's conference that if Labour was trailing as badly in the polls around now as it had been before the summer holidays, then there might be a renewed attempt to depose him. In fact, Labour's support is fractionally up. However, we should note that as many as 30% of Labour voters think the party would do better if it replaced Brown. Normally, supporters of each party are more loyal to their leader than that.
