Tories Ahead in Hartlepool

Just a few weeks ago I blogged on the battle for Hartlepool ahead of the parliamentary by-election being held on 6th May and how many Conservatives will be looking at it as an opportunity to further cement its destruction of Labour’s so called ‘Red Wall’. New data out today suggests they would be right to feel confident.

Survation polled 502 adults living in the constituency for the Communication Workers Union by phone between 29th March and 3rd April.

It’s important to emphasise at the outset, as Keiran Pedley from Ipsos Mori has done via twitter that given the sample size it “has a decent margin of error” with a month to go until the vote.

Caveats added, the poll puts the Conservative candidate, Jill Mortimer on 49% of the vote, up 20 percentage points on the party’s performance at the 2019 General Election. Labour’s Paul Williams is, according to the poll, on 42%, up four points from 2019.

Just to put this into some historical context, if the Conservatives were to take the seat, as this poll suggests, it would, as George Eaton from the New Statesman has noted  “be only the third time in the last 50 years that a governing party has *gained* a seat.”

To compound the headaches for the Labour leadership, are the figures looking at how favourably those polled in Hartlepool viewed Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. 49% said they had a favourable view of the Prime Minister, with 30% having an unfavourable view. In comparison, just 24% had a favourable view of the Labour Leader, with 39% having an unfavourable view.

Other key findings include that 67% of those polled said that investing more in public services should take priority, compared to 24% who said paying off the deficit should do. 42% supported a 10% pay rise for nurses, with 43% supporting a 3% rise. Just 2% said nurses did not deserve a pay rise.

Asked about their views on the Royal Mail, 57% supported the idea of it being nationalised and run as a public service, with 29% supporting its continued privatisation.

69% supported the idea of providing free broadband internet to UK homes and businesses by 2030.

Writing for The Times Red Box, Dave Ward, General Secretary of the CWU Union has declared that:“Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have shown themselves to be far too timid when it comes to answering this call.” He continues: “Having spent the last year obsessed with telling people that he isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, the country has been left shrugging its shoulders and asking, “Who are you, then?” Failing to take a position on the biggest issues of the day is not clever politics.”

 

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