Now, Corbyn Has the Upper Hand
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Although conducted before the Panama Papers revelations, polls from YouGov have suggested that David Cameron’s plummeting approval ratings have now fallen below those of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for the first time – and are now surely expected to go from bad to worse. The Prime Minister is suffering his lowest approval ratings since July 2013, with 34% of people saying he is doing well in his post and 58% saying he is doing badly, leading to a net approval rating of -24.
These statistics make it clear that the British public are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with Cameron’s leadership, and his out-of-touch approach. This sentiment is perhaps best epitomised by a petition calling for a General Election to be held in 2016 – 4 years earlier than scheduled – which has amassed a princely 147,000 signatures and, at the last count, is receiving in the region of 700 signatures an hour. The petition makes its claims on the grounds that the public were deceived by the Conservative Party in the run up to the 2015 election. Under legislation introduced by Cameron himself after winning his first term, all petitions with over 100,000 signatures will be considered for debate in the House of Commons. Perhaps he’ll be regretting this now, as petitions lambasting his governance keep popping up frequently. Whilst a general election this year remains highly unlikely, it does – along with his approval ratings – bear the hallmarks of a Prime Minister struggling to hold on to his power in both his own party (largely due to his stance on Europe) and with the wider voting population.
Over in the red camp, it would seem that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t faring much better, with a net approval rating of -22, which comes from 30% of people saying he is doing well and 52% of people saying he is doing badly as leader of the Labour Party. Fortunately for Corbyn though, he now has a golden opportunity to steal an extra few key percentage points over the disgraced Prime Minister before the United Kingdom’s local elections in May.
