Brown To The Left…
… and Cameron’s to the Right.
Gordon Brown is now seen as being much farther away from the position of the average voter than Tony Blair was when he was Prime Minister…
The poll… shows that voters have sharply revised their view of Mr Brown over the past year, seeing him as much more left-wing than in early September 2007, at the end of his brief honeymoon as Prime Minister. This is the biggest change for any leader or party over the period.
However, Mr Brown is narrowly nearer both to the Centre and to the average voter than David Cameron, who is seen as shifting to the right…
The poll therefore shows that, despite the shift away from the average voter by Mr Brown and Labour, Mr Cameron and his party still have a long way to go to be where the average voter is. On a five-year comparison, the Tories have, however, moved 0.30 nearer the Centre, Labour 0.12 farther away. (The Times)
However, there is one huge issue over this poll: because it has been created entirely on a Left-Right one-dimensional sliding scale.
[Sidenote: Clegg is seen as only very slightly more towards the centre than Brown in this poll.]
This is a rubbish scale. Politics is so much more complicated than can ever be expressed in one dimension. Even the two dimensional scale leaves much to be desired, but it is as good as we can get. To start with, it includes “Libertarian” and “Authoritarian”, which can cross the Left-Right axis. So, if they want this sort of poll to be taken seriously, they need to plot it on the two-dimension scale.
As it is, this poll shows little about how the public actually view the parties.
This entry is filed under Conservative Party, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour Party, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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