MOST adults are now planning to vote Labour in the next election because of the Tories’ disastrous mini budget, a leading pollster has said.
Adam Drummond, head of political and social research at Opinium, told GB News: “It’s definitely the biggest lead we’ve ever shown for Labour in the whole time that I’ve been working in this field.
“The other remarkable thing is that basically, a lot of the time, the Tories are normally ahead on things like growing the economy and tackling debt and deficits and so on. Labour tends to be ahead on things like improving public services and inequality.
“Now as you’ve just seen there’s a big shift towards Labour, big Labour leads on every aspect of the economy at the moment and that’s all really happened since the mini budget.”
In an interview during Breakfast with Isabel Webster and Stephen Dixon, he added: “When the mini budget happened, you had that big negative reaction in the market, so you had the pound tanking a bit, and fears about interest rates.
“Ultimately, I think what the public wants in terms of the economy is calm and steady growth and for the boat not to be rocked too much.
“At the moment, whatever you say about what Labour’s proactively offering, they are very much giving off that kind of vibe that they all want to study ship and not rock the boat too much.”
Asked who the public wants as Prime Minister, he said: “So generally, we tested the various other kind of really prominent Tory figures, including Boris Johnson, Kwasi Kwarteng, obviously in there as well, because quite prominent at the moment and generally all of the all the figures we tested come out with net negative figures among the public.
“That’s sort of what you’d expect, because at the moment, most of the public aren’t Conservative voters.
“The interesting group to look at is Conservative voters, among them, they come out sort of naturally positive. Most of the rest of them come out quite negative.
“Michael Gove, for example, even though he’s had a very interesting week a the Tory conference, he comes out very negative, he has this kind of Tony Blair-like reputation and was quite popular among political elites – but among the general public, he’s not really popular at all.”
On the disastrous mini budget, he said: “Basically the whole mini budget thing…it didn’t have to happen at that point.
“Truss was kind of unfortunate in that obviously the royal succession happened almost immediately after she became Prime Minister. That’s a hell of an intro for any Prime Minister to deal with.
“She did roll out the energy package, which from what we tested was quite popular, but then that’s immediately gone off the news straight away with the mini budget.”
