eat the bankers
An interesting polling exercise undertaken by the Liberal Conspiracy website has revealed that voters overwhelmingly blame the banks, not Labour, for our current economic crisis. The poll challenges the view pushed by the coalition whilst also giving Labour much to think about.
The poll asked voters who they thought was to blame for the current state of the UK economy. But crucially they widened the list of potential answers from just the political parties to include other factors, such as banks, trade unions and even global influencing factors. The vast majority of people who voted either Labour or Liberal, or who did not vote at all, surprisingly answered that the banks were to blame. Only tory voters strongly backed the view that Labour was to blame. And a significant proportion of Tory voters also blamed the banks.
So what does this mean? OK, I concede that not everyone is itching to vote Labour or that they think the party that was in power for thirteen years has no responsibility for the current situation. Voters did indeed seem to lose trust with Labour on the economy, but not for the reasons the coalition would have us all believe. Some senior Labour figures, Alistair Darling among them, push the view that Labour lost trust on the economy because it didn’t have a tough enough cuts plan. But with the banks firmly in the voters’ sights, it seems that the criticism of Labour policy is that it was not tough enough on the banks.
In short, voters blame the banks for causing the crisis and Labour for letting them. To win back trust will not be easy as doing so involves admitting it failed to regulate the banks properly. The coalition would do well to realise this and to take the actions necessary to prevent it ever happening again, as I believe Labour would be doing this time around. To focus purely upon an overly aggressive public sector cuts policy is too narrow and too short-sighted.
