First poll of Wales since Liz Truss made PM puts Conservatives in ‘electoral wipe-out territory’
The first poll of Wales since Liz Truss became Prime Minister puts the Conservatives “close to a 1997-style electoral wipe-out” according to an expert.
ITV Cymru Wales and Cardiff University’s latest opinion poll reveals that the majority of people in Wales don’t trust Liz Truss’ government to make the right decisions for the country.
The Barn Cymru poll, conducted by YouGov for ITV Cymru Wales and Cardiff University, shows 66% of people lack faith in the new PM’s government.
Although 12% of those surveyed thought Truss – who won the Conservative Leadership contest on September 6 – would make a good prime minister, nearly half of the respondents thought she’d be a poor or terrible PM.
Looking at Westminster voting intentions, the poll has Labour on its highest share of the vote since March 2018 and the Conservatives on their lowest since June 2016. This brings the gap between the parties now to a substantial 23 point lead for Labour, the highest in almost a decade.
Dr Jac Larner, from Cardiff University’s Welsh Governance Centre, said: “If the Westminster voting intention figures were to play out in a real general election, the Conservatives in Wales are close to a 1997-style electoral wipe-out territory.
“In Senedd voting intentions, we see a similar pattern with Conservative figures dropping to their lowest levels since the summer of 2019, although there are more modest changes for Labour here.
“Plaid Cymru return to being the second largest party in the constituency and list votes, though this is less a result of their numbers growing but more the Conservatives considerable drop.”
Westminster Voting Intention
Conservative – 23% (-3)
Labour – 46% (+5)
Liberal Democrats – 5% (-2)
Plaid Cymru – 15% (-1)
Reform UK – 5% (+1)
Green Party – 3% (-1)
Other – 3% (+1)
Senedd Constituency Voting Intention
Conservative – 20% (- 4)
Labour – 40% (+ 3)
Liberal Democrats – 6%
Plaid Cymru – 22% (+ 1)
Reform UK – 5%
Green Party – 3% (-2)
Other – 4%
‘Insight’
Owain Phillips, ITV Cymru Wales’ Programme and Digital Editor added: “This poll is the first time we’ve surveyed Welsh respondents since Liz Truss became Prime Minister and it suggests she’s got work to do in convincing voters here.
“We’re pleased to be working with Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre who again have provided valuable insight and expertise in interpreting the results of the poll.”
Barn Cymru is a collaborative partnership between ITV Cymru Wales, the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, and the leading polling agency YouGov. The poll aims to provide an insight into people’s beliefs, attitudes and opinions and to gain real-time feedback on public views in Wales.
YouGov polled a representative sample of 1,014 Welsh voters, aged 16+, between September 20-22 for ITV Cymru Wales and Cardiff University
This is a government by the rich, for the rich – and its wealth won’t be trickling over to Wales
Ifan Morgan Jones
There is a saying in Welsh, ‘i’r pant y rhed y dŵr’ – the water flows into the dell.
Essentially this means ‘the rich get richer’.
Whoever came up with this saying understood the reality of so-called ‘trickle down’ economics.
In reality, money doesn’t trickle down, it trickles up. It’s the rich who have the gravitational mass and that’s why it’s up to the state to reverse the laws of capitalist physics and pump some of that money back down to the poorest.
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘fiscal event’ today is a budget for the rich, by the rich.
The higher rate of income tax for the very richest earning £150,000+ has been abolished. So too has a cap on bankers’ bonuses, while a rise in corporation tax has been axed.
Meanwhile, the Chancellor has announced new restrictions on welfare for those working part-time, and a clamp down on the rights of trade unions to strike for better pay.
The UK is already one of the most unequal nation-states in the world and this budget seems clearly designed to entrench that inequality deeper still.
But we also have to remember that financial inequality in the UK is also regional inequality within the UK.
The UK includes the richest part of western Europe – London – and also its poorest – the west of Wales and the valleys.
Only 0.3% of people in Wales will benefit from abolishing the additional highest rate of tax. That’s 4,300 people out of a population of 3.2 million.
Meanwhile, the other 3.195 million will now have to contend with another bout of austerity as the UK Government will have less to spend on public services.
The cut in stamp duty will also artificially inflate house prices yet further, making it harder for the poorest to live in their own communities. All this in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
Rebuke
In July of just last year the previous Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, made a speech saying that “for too many people, geography turns out to be destiny”.
He said that GDP in Wales was lower than in the former East Germany, which only reunited with the rest of Germany in 1990.
This was a result of former leaders investing too heavily in London and the South East to the detriment of other parts of the country, he admitted.
Of course, Boris Johnson never actually did anything about this. Levelling up as a slogan ultimately achieved nothing but provide cover for a plan to recentralise funding power from the devolved governments to Whitehall under the guise of the ‘Levelling Up Fund’.
But at least there was a quasi-recognition that there was a problem there that needed to be tackled.
That has gone now. Prime Minister Liz Truss simply does not recognise inequality as an issue as Boris Johnson did in that speech.
Speaking to the BBC, she said: “To look at everything through the lens of redistribution, I believe, is wrong. Because what I am about is growing the economy, and growing the economy benefits everybody.
“This is a really important point. The economic debate for the past 20 years has been dominated by discussions about redistribution. And what has happened is, we have had relatively low growth, and that has been holding our country back.”
But this is simply incorrect. To begin with, there is no correlation between nations having more redistributive policies and a lack of growth. None at all.
Secondly, if you cut taxes for the mega-rich while cutting welfare for the poorest, you’re not benefitting everybody. You’re making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The UK’s own inequality is a rebuke to the very idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. In Wales’ case, a geyser of wealth from the SE of England has left us battered and forgotten on the rocks.
As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times described the UK: “Essentially, [we] are poor societies with some very rich people.”
Liz Truss may well eke out some growth out of her new policies. But whose growth?
It won’t be trickling down to the people of Wales. I’r pant y rhed y dŵr.
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