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I may have over-complicated this a bit. Let's have another try...

Current Labour VI divides as 83% 'Wrong to Leave', 11% 'Right', 6% DK. This is straight from the 'hindsight' question in the YG tables linked above.

But if we then turn to the main Voting Intention part of the same poll, Labour is currently taking an increased share of the 2016 Leave vote: 29% of it after excluding Don't Knows, or 20% of the total sample. A few calculations are needed to work this out, but YG's figures in the same poll show that 23% of the current Lab VI were Leave voters in 2016 (and 51% were 2016 Remainers).

However, per the 'Hindsight' question, only 11% of the same polling sample who now intend voting Labour also think that the vote to Leave was 'Right'. It follows that a majority (of at least 12/23rds*) of those who both voted Leave in 2016 and now back Labour don't think that the decision to Leave was Right. 

*it could well be more than 12/23rds, but cannot be less.

As I mentioned yesterday, this tracker has seen some significant movement in recent months, but this is the largest lead for 'Wrong' by some distance. And it's now 73/27 for 'Wrong' among voters aged under 65.

Two things that I've noted from the tables: there now seems to be a significant lead for 'Wrong to Leave' with C2DE voters, who until very recently always showed a majority for 'Right', and voted 65/35 for Leave in 2016. Also, 'only' 70% of Leave voters now think they made the right choice, with 19% now saying their decision was 'Wrong'; six months ago (19 May) we had 80% of Leave voters still thinking they had made the right choice, and only 12% with 'bregrets'. 

You seem very keen to close down discussion of polling on Brexit. Clearly a majority do see Brexit as 'Wrong' - unless you dispute YG's findings over the hundreds of times they have asked the same question.  

The YouGov 'Hindsight' tracker is surely the longest-running tracker question ever - so clearly the folks at YouGov see it as being relevant just as I and many others here do. My point is that it has seen significant movement over the past 12 months: these are the figures for the same time of year going back to 2016:

In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the EU?
   ( Right/Wrong)
Oct/Nov 2016  51/49
Oct/Nov 2017 48/52
Oct/Nov 2018 47/53
Oct/Nov 2019 47/53
Oct/Nov 2020 44/56
Oct/Nov 2021 44/56
Oct/Nov 2022 40/60

@ Sotonsaint

"Maybe an interesting exercise for someone to do (not volunteering) is to look at a few local by-elections in the 90s when Blair was hugely popular vs. Major. We know LAB won thousands of council seats in the May contests of the mid-90s but not much about by-elections."

I think I may have covered this above at 17:26...


"Sum of local by-elections Jan-May 1997: CON 28%, LAB 37%, LDEM 30%

Actual general election result 1997: CON 31%, LAB 44%, LDEM 17%"

And this was in the context of a polling lead which declined from about 25% in March 1997 to around 18% in late April, with Labour's GE polling average falling from 53% to 48% over the same period. 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_1997_United_Kingdom_general_election

Re the Local By-election results:

The article linked below by our former host on UKPR1 is probably still as relevant as when he wrote it (2009) : "Can local by elections predict general elections?"

Anthony Wells puts the level of LibDem overperformance and Labour underperformance as around 6% to 10%, and I suspect that about the same applies now.

ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/1880

That works out as a 17.5% swing on GE2019, so again is right in line with the current polling average of a Lab lead of 20-21%. 

It is less than 2 months since Truss led Starmer on head-to -head ratings : see this from R&W on 7 September.

redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/magnified-email/issue-49/

"In our first poll since Liz Truss became Prime Minister, the Labour Party maintains its 12-point lead over the Conservatives, the joint-highest lead for Labour that we’ve recorded. However, perhaps in part due to a willingness to see how she will fare, Truss has reclaimed a marginal 2% lead in head-to-head polling against Labour Leader Keir Starmer for better PM of the UK."

No country has ever been "forced to accept" the EU's entry conditions. The UK elected a party committed to joining in 1970, and voted to stay in in a referendum in June 1975 - in which the South-West of England voted "Yes". 

And as for your comment about "rose inted spectacles": perhaps rather than giving out personal insults, you could address the point at hand. Denmark and Sweden are under no pressure to join the Euro, nor Ireland to join Schengen. That's true, irrespective of what kind of spectacles you may be wearing. 

There are some freakish-looking cross breaks in the tables behind this poll.

R&W have unusally high LD vote retention from 2019 (70%), with 8% of 2019LDs going to the Tories and 16% for Labour. Several recent polls have shown Lab taking more of this vote than the LDs . The age cross-breaks show Labour doing better with 45-64 year olds than with 18-24s. Also, the regional cross-breaks show the Tories with a substantial lead in the North-East, but all other regions and nations back Labour. In fact the combined South of England samples show Labour 18 points ahead, meaning that this poll is the first (ever?) to show Labour faring better in the South (outside London) than for GB as a whole. 

This clearly isn't the real position - all other polls show the Tories faring better in the South than GB as a whole - but currently only by about 10 points, typically, rather than the 20-25 points which has been the norm for the past 40 years or more. 

Is this as well as Labour have polled in this region of the country since their landslides of 1997 and 200

Yes - I think so, though I don't have details of regional cross-breaks going back for years to make an exact comparison. The Tories led in the three South of England regions at GEs 1997 and 2001 by around 8-9 points overall. So where we currently have polls showing Labour 10-20 points ahead across these regions, it would require a very large swingback for the Tories to get back to where they stood in the Blair landslides.

Has there been evidence of an improvement for Labour since Brexit, with centrist Remain Tory voters moving over to either Labour or the Lib Dems in these South of England seats? Put another way, how far do we have to go back to pick up the trend of improvement for Labour? Did Corbyn delay the centrist Tory Remainer flight in the South and a bit of a dam has now been breached post Starmer?

I think there has been a gradual long-term shift. Even the GE2010 results in the South of England offered more hope for Labour than those of 1987 or 1992. But there have been clear (English) regional differences at GEs 2017 and 2019, with some South of England Conservative-held seats (as well as London seats) swinging Con>Lab against the national trend. Wycombe and Runnymede and Weybridge were examples of this. I don't think it's possible to say whether Corbyn may have 'delayed' this - particularly since Labour did get some notable results in the South of England under his leadership.  


Has the recent collapse of Tory VI been felt more keenly in the South, with Tory support holding up better in other regions?

The swings have been higher in the South for the past year or more. And at the height of the recent collapse in Tory support under Truss, they were clearly losing most votes exactly where they were strongest. In the most recent polls they still seem to be down by around 20-24 points in the South, compared to GE2019. R&W's figures (above) suggest that the swing is being boosted in the South by the substantial LD>Lab movement, and I think other pollsters cross-breaks tend to back this up. This is also part of the reason for the remarkable swings in the South-West (per R&W). 

Edit: the most recent polls from Delta, YG and R&W (all in the past week) all show a higher swing in the 'Rest of South' samples by about 4% compared to the GB headline. So for example, Deltapoll's 51/26 is roughly an 18% GB swing, with a 46/31 South sample (which is a 23% swing). 

Do we know much yet about how demographic changes are helping Labour in the South, with the much talked about exodus of younger, middle class left leaning people from London to neighbouring southern towns now having a clear effect?

I doubt that it is specifically those leaving London, but more the wider effect of the same changes which have turned London Labour's way - especially in the past 7 years. Seats with a younger population and a high proportion of graduates are increasingly difficult for the Tories to hold. However, the Tories still seem to fare well in places near to London (or even in London) where those factors don't apply. So there are neighbouring seats which have trended in opposite ways, such as Portsmouth North and Postsmouth South. 

Could it be that what we're seeing here isn't just short term volatility in the face of topical political and economic events, therefore quickly reversible, but instead something much more structural and long lasting? These seats are changing politically for good.

I think so. There has been a clear trend across several elections, which appears now to be accelerating. But the political geography of the South of England is still a problem for Labour. Their vote tends to be concentrated in the larger towns, so that the Tories would almost certainly get more seats even if the two main parties took equal vote shares in the South. 

Interesting to compare R&W's poll now that Sunak is PM with their hypothetical poll done about 5 days ago: this showed a reduced Lab lead of 20 points (50/30), whereas we now have an actual lead of 32 points. Probably just a useful reminder that people's answers to hypothetical polling questions are often unreliable.

And as for 'Sunak leads Starmer by 1%' :
This was what R&W found with the same question, asked 7 weeks ago:

"In our first poll since Liz Truss became Prime Minister, the Labour Party maintains its 12-point lead over the Conservatives, the joint-highest lead for Labour that we’ve recorded. However, perhaps in part due to a willingness to see how she will fare, Truss has reclaimed a marginal 2% lead in head-to-head polling against Labour Leader Keir Starmer for better PM of the UK."

redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/magnified-email/issue-49/

Hypothetical polling from R&W suggests that he might have been able to boost the Tories to 34% against 49% for Labour. It's 30/50 with Sunak, and 16/62 with Truss still as PM.

redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/gb-hypothetical-voting-intention-20-21-october-2022/

And on the assumption that it will be Sunak as he next PM, I think it's worth looking at their figures for Sunak v Starmer compared to the previous R&W on 19 Oct

Con 30% (+11)
Lab 50% (-5)
LD 8 %  (-4)
SNP 4% ( - )
Ref 4 % ( - )
Grn 3% ( -1)

The Lib Dems' loss of support isn't just random variation. They are on 11% with the same sample in the scenario that Truss stayed as PM. 

Speaking of Dan Hodges, he's him 7 weeks ago telling his Daily Mail readers that the last Tory leadership Election which put Truss in 10 Downing Street has served the Nation well.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11176731/DAN-HODGES-divisive-contest-served-Liz-Truss-nation-well.html


"for one thing, it has found Rishi Sunak out. And he deserved to be found out. The early favourite, he ran a campaign of staggering political ineptitude.

Not to mention dishonesty and petulance. It began with him pledging: ‘I will not engage in the negativity that you may have seen and read about in the media. If others wish to do that, then let them. That’s not who we are. We can be better.’  
It ended with his campaign issuing a press release accusing Liz Truss of being ‘divorced from reality’. But if the contest found out the former Chancellor, it also gave his opponent time to find herself. In the early debates, Truss was hesitant and wooden.

By the end she was more confident and authentic.....this eight-week contest has served her – and the nation – well.

Once the fateful decision to oust Boris had been made, the imperative wasn’t to find a swift replacement.
It was to find the best replacement. Ignore the critics and naysayers. The Conservative Party has done just that."

"Penny's a fighter not a quitter. "



So was Liz...


www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/19/im-a-fighter-not-a-quitter-truss-channels-peter-mandelson-at-pmqs