Liberal Conspiracy have done someone fascinating polling.
Bored by the continual claims that people blamed Labour for the crisis - based on surveys that simply ask people to choose between the political parties they blame - they did a poll that asked who people blamed and included others options including banks and trade unions.
The results are telling:
Everyone blames banks more than Labourt - bar Conservatives, which is fine as they won't vote Labour anyway.
As Sunny Hundal for Liberal Conspiracy concludes:
The point is this: a significant percentage of voters lost trust with Labour on the economy — not because it didn’t have a “tough” (as Alistair Darling called his) deficit-cutting plan.
Many lost trust in Labour’s handling of the economy because it didn’t regulate banks properly, and let them take the economy down. They blame the banks for the financial crisis, but Labour for letting the crisis happen in the first place.
These people are a significant majority of the voters. How will Labour respond to them? That should be the main question for the party now.
And the answer should be clear. And it does involve rejecting Blairism.
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Many in the last Labour Government were in awe of the bankers (remember Gordon Brown’s endorsement of ‘Fred the Shred’ Goodwin) and the so called contribution that the finacial sector made to the economy and in particular the tax coffers. We were told that the UK had a comparative advantage in finance and consequently the demise of our manufacturing base should not worry us too much in what was hailed as the post industrial society. How wrong was that!!.
The majority of us will be paying the price for the reckless policies of the bankers for many years to come and unfortunately it will continue to be easy for the ConDems to blame Labour for this huge mess, whilst at the same time refusing to introduce meaningful regulation for the banks (many Tory MPs have a banking/financial background). Hopefully other economic factors will come to the fore and crowd out the public’s adverse attitude to Labour’s stewardship of the economy, but I have my doubts in the short term.
Classic case of “if you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer”.
The question should be: “who do you think is the most responsible for the fact that the UK is doing much more poorly than any other industrialized country in the world as it emerges from the 2008/09 recession?”.
That would be interesting.