Ouch

Here:

Just 13% of voters agree that the August Bank Holiday should be renamed “Margaret Thatcher Day”, a new poll from Lord Ashcroft has found. The proposal was among the ideas proposed in the “Alternative Queen’s Speech” put forward by a number of Conservative backbench MPs last month.

Despite being promoted as proper conservative policies designed to win back disillusioned voters, Lord Ashcroft concludes that many of the proposals have little support and score highly on what he called the ‘Meh Index’ – the proportion who have no opinion on the idea one way or the other.

The findings include:

· Just 13% agree that the August Bank Holiday should be renamed “Margaret Thatcher Day”, with two thirds opposed. Conservative voters disagree with the idea by a 23-point margin.

· Only around a quarter of voters support allowing employees to opt out of the minimum wage, scrapping the Department of Energy & Climate Change, and privatising the BBC.

· Many of the proposed ideas score highly on Lord Ashcroft’s ‘Meh Index’: 48% of voters have no opinion either way on removing some UK waters from the Common Fisheries Policy and abolishing the office of Deputy Prime Minister; 45% have no view on requiring developers to hand over residential roads to local authorities.

However, some proposals were received more positively, for example:

· 90% support ensuring that offenders committing the same offence for the second or third time serve a longer sentence than they did for their original conviction; 87% approve of deporting foreigners found guilty of a criminal offence; 80% agreed that people wishing to claim asylum in the UK must do so within a set time after their arrival.

Furthermore, voters who were told that the ideas had been proposed by Conservative MPs registered lower levels of support for the policies than those voters simply told that they were ideas that some people had suggested ought to become law. 

Leading john b to comment:

Recidivism is already a substantial aggravating factor in sentencing, and sentencing in general is getting more rather than less severe. So it would be incredibly rare for a recividist to get a lower sentence for the same offence. The only cases where the new measure would be relevant would be for people who (eg) stole a million quid on their first offence and shoplifted a chocolate bar on their second.

Foreign criminals who are jailed are deported as a matter of course unless the Home Secretary decides it’s an exceptional case – even when they have ILTR, have a partner and children who are UK citizens, and have been jailed for minor offences. Trenton Oldfield and Jimmy Mubenga are obvious examples just from the last two weeks’ news. The only cases that would be covered by this one would be foreigners with ILTR and UK family ties, caught for minor offences that doesn’t even carry jail terms.

Set time for refugee claims is also already applied in practice: illegal entry without an immediate claim for asylum, and making an asylum application in a situation where the alternative would be removal, are both automatic criteria for fast-track detention and deportation.

In other words, the only Tory Right suggested policies which are popular are the ones which already happen, but which people wrongly believe don’t happen because of the crap they read in the media and are shovelled by politicians.