Wednesday 19 September 2007

A question of trust

"Is it any surprise -after Iraq and ten years of spin and lies - that the public don't trust Labour on Northern Rock?", asks Stephen Glover with a mixture of synthetic anger and wishful thinking in today's Daily Mail. Sorry, Stephen, better luck next time. First, today's ICM poll for the Guardian records Labour on 40% and the Tories on 32%, with Brown enjoying huge public confidence as PM and Cameron sinking below Ming Campbell in personal approval ratings. Then, a Times/Populus Poll not only finds that most voters blame Northern Rock or the American mortgage market for the problems of the last few days, it shows public trust for Brown/Darling on the economy at 56% compared to 18% for Cameron/Osborne. Clearly the public still trust Labour in a crisis, and were deeply unimpressed with Cameron's pathetic attempts to talk the economy down last weekend.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's not an accurate view, but (despite appearing in the Daily Mail) it's not entirely synthetic anger and wishful thinking, either. Last night, all three news bulletins interviewed people who were waiting to get into Northern Rock branches yesterday to withdraw their money. Both the BBC and ITV showed people saying they didn't trust the government. Five out of the six people shown on C4 explicitly stated they didn't trust the government because of either Blair or Iraq (the fifth said he didn't trust any politicians). It seems to be a prevalent view amongst those who continued with plans to withdraw cash from NR, and was prominently featured on the news - the Mail's error was to translate that to the populace at large (so, it's only wildly rather than completely inaccurate - quite an achievement on the Mail's part).