Post-election polling

Time for one last politics post before I leave Durham tomorrow! Various polling companies have started to pick up their series again, so the post-election picture is now emerging. Political support has a lot to do with belief - belief in whether someone can win, and belief in whether a government can do what it claims it will do. It's therefore unsurprising to see that with the government thrown into turmoil by the election result and Labour presenting a more-or-less united front for the first time in years, Labour's momentum (so to speak...) has continued; they now have some of their best polling in twenty years. Quite a turnaround from a few months ago, when they had some of their worst!

I'll borrow some economic analysis at this point (mostly from Stephen Bush, the New Statesman writer). To make matters worse for the government, the fall in sterling is starting to make stuff more expensive. With wages fairly stagnant for the last few years - something that didn't matter with ultra-low inflation - this means people are feeling the squeeze. In other words, the economic situation is pivoting in favour of change (and this is because of Brexit). For this reason the government are now arguing about spending more again in order to reduce the pressure. Now, the deficit has actually been cut back to pre-2008 levels, but the debt is much higher than it was then (and, the thing that really matters, so is the amount due in interest payments each year: £50B, a.k.a. 1/3rd of an NHS) ... so none of the justifications for austerity - the need to run a surplus and pay off some of the debt - have gone away. Nevertheless, there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a decent amount of wriggle room in which to increase annual spending and still meet the new, much less ambitious target of a surplus by 2025, as long as the economy keeps growing...

Of course, the best thing to conclude from big, rapid changes in support is just that the situation is volatile and so can change quickly. What happens next will depend very much on how Brexit is handled and how the economic situation changes thereafter.