It sounded like a good idea at the time

“Is public opinion turning against the cuts?” asked the New Statesman this morning, as a poll by YouGov gave Labour a seven-point lead over the Conservative Party, which leads the UK’s coalition government.

Samira Shackle writes:

“This is the second poll this week to show Labour with a substantial lead over the Conservatives – a ComRes/Independent survey on Tuesday gave Ed Miliband’s party an eight point lead. Does this mean that public opinion is beginning to turn against cuts? The poll also gives the government its lowest approval rating yet, at -25 per cent ( 31% approve, 55% disapprove).”

Frankly, it would be surprising if people weren’t going off the idea of huge reductions in public expenditure. Cutting the deficit isn’t so appealing when it’s someone you know who has lost their job, or when you’re stung by a VAT increase or lose a hitherto relied-upon public service.

Nick Sparrow, a former Conservative Party pollster and founder of ICM, saw this shift in public mood coming some months back when we met for an interview.

Asked for his opinion on how successful the coalition had been on selling the need for cuts to the public, Sparrow said:

“Generally I don’t think we can think of people having a kind of menu list of individual policies that they either support or oppose; they have a general kind of mood as to the direction that policy should take in the future, and you could see that in the rise of New Labour – coming at a time when people were willing to accept that they might be taxed more and that the government would spend that money to improve public services.

“That all sounds well and good until you reach the point where people understand the drawbacks of the policy mood – in Labour’s case, when people perceived that the government was spending a lot more, that they were being taxed a lot more, but actually public services weren’t getting any better.

“At that point the policy cycle shifts in another direction, and I think where the Conservatives, or the coalition, got elected, the policy cycle really was pointing in the direction of lower taxes, reduced government spending and an acceptance that public services would have to be cut in order that the country, as a whole, balanced its books.

“Again, it’s possible to see that at some point people will start to recognise the drawbacks of that policy, and the beginnings are there already. The government continually stressing that they have to deal with the deficit left by Labour is them fighting against what otherwise might be a quite sharp reversal [in policy mood], with people saying ‘Well, I understood that services had to be cut, but actually I don’t want to see less police on my streets’, or ‘I don’t want my rubbish collected every two weeks instead of every week’.”