wojtek
(from The Guardian)
Londoners make their mark in first mayoral election
The London mayor: special report
Alan Travis, Home affairs editor Friday May 5, 2000
Although Ken Livingstone's opinion poll rating inevitably slumped from the 68% high recorded by ICM on March 6, the day he left the Labour party to run as an independent mayoral candidate, the surveys repeatedly showed that he attracted an unprecedented level of support from all parts of the political spectrum.
As a BBC/ICM poll published last night again confirmed, those who backed Livingstone were not doing so primarily because they "wanted to give Tony Blair a kick", or because they thought he had been treated unfairly by Labour, but because they said they saw him as the "best champion for London".
Despite the repeated disclosures about his personal finances that undermined his "bloke in the pub" image, the political rows over his claims that capitalism kills more people each year than Hitler, and his apparent support for the City of London rioters last June, the polls continued to show that Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters were not going to peel away in large enough numbers to send Livingstone into a dive in the ratings in the final days of the campaign.
Indeed, his level of support never dipped below the bedrock 49% of first preference votes he recorded in last November's Guardian/ICM poll. Even then, it was clear that Frank Dobson, as the official Labour candidate, was in danger of being pushed into a humiliating third place and left out of any second-round run-off if Livingstone failed to secure outright victory on the first count.
But perhaps it is the breadth of cross-party support that is most remarkable about Livingstone's campaign and which may contain the clearest guide to his future conduct as mayor of London. For, completely contrary to the class warrior image that the hard left likes to portray, Livingstone has actually managed to straddle the class divide in London more effectively than Dobson or Norris ever achieved.
As the last Evening Standard/ICM poll published on April 27 showed, Livingstone had the support of London's middle classes with 57% of ABC1 voters - the professional and managerial classes - and took the lion's share, 44%, of support of the C2DEs - the manual workers and those living on state benefits.
Intriguingly, this presents him with the very New Labour dilemma, if he wants to be re-elected in four years, of how to retain his radicalism without turning London's middle classes, many of them Tory voters, against him.
The key may lie in the finding of the ICM poll for last night's BBC election programme, Vote 2000, that 89% of those who voted for Livingstone thought he would be best at standing up for London. Interestingly this poll also found that only 45% of those voting believed that the mayor should decide how improvements to the tube should be funded - the prime issue in the campaign - and 32% were happy to see the government determine the issue.
The same survey show that the voters are split over Livingstone's ambition to be allowed back into the Labour party: 38% want to see him readmitted while 34% believe he should be kept out. Similarly, a significant minority - 32% - believe Tony Blair had every right to campaign against Livingstone but 53% disagree with this view.
As for Dobson, his opinion poll ratings barely moved throughout the campaign. Despite his mid-campaign rebranding as "Frank" he found himself in a dogfight with Norris for the privilege of occupying a very poor second place. The ratings have wandered between 22% and 14%.
It seems that the real lesson from the polls might be that the public in London made up their minds when the battle for the Labour nomination took place, long before the official launch of the campaign in March.