Ed Miliband’s margin over the Conservatives is narrow, but enough to give the red rose party an outright majority
Ed Miliband will be striding into Downing Street on Friday — if Legal Cheek readers get their way.
Our 24-hour poll conducted yesterday and this morning — attracting nearly 750 responses — shows the Labour Party winning 35.3% of the vote in tomorrow’s UK general election, narrowly pipping the Conservatives, which came in on 33.8%.
The Liberal-Democrats will be pushed into fourth place behind the Greens, according to the survey. Some 9.8% of respondents backed Natalie Bennett’s Green Party, while only 8.7% gave the nod to Nick Clegg’s Lib-Dems.
The Lib-Dems have historically been a favourite with some students, until the party famously ditched its opposition to university tuition fees during the last coalition government.
Graph: Legal Cheek general election poll results
The survey indicated that Legal Cheek readers have little time for the purple revolution proposed by Nigel Farage and his Ukip party. Only 3.3% of respondents backed the pint-guzzling EU bashers.
An imponderable left by the survey results is the impact of the Scottish Nationalist Party. Nationwide polls across the population have consistently indicated a hung parliament being the likely result, not least because of an expected landslide for the Scots Nats north of the border. Most Legal Cheek readers are based in England and Wales, but some Scots did respond, with Nicola Sturgeon’s merry band of separatists picking up 3% support in this poll.
The majority of the 735 respondents were students; slightly more than 54% said they were studying law. The next category was qualified barristers, with marginally more than 12% of the total saying they were from that side of the legal profession. An additional 4% of respondents were pupil barristers.
The largest branch of the profession also weighed in — more than 10% of respondents were solicitors with another 10% being trainees. Other respondents included legal academics, recruiters and even the judiciary.
Graph: Legal Cheek general election poll respondents
The Legal Cheek poll results came just hours after a fellow legal affairs publication flagged the fact that the older, top end of the solicitors’ profession was definitely blue.
A Legal Week poll (£) of law firm partners resulted in 70% of respondents backing the Tories.
And yesterday, the Times Higher Education Supplement released a survey showing that law school lecturers were even keener on Labour than Legal Cheek readers. Some 40% said they would back Miliband’s party, with the Tories and Greens each on 19%, and the Lib-Dems languishing on 6%.
While hardly scientific, when the Legal Cheek poll results were fed into the BBC’s election result calculator, a top outcome popped out the other side for Labour’s bacon-butty-scoffer-in-chief.
According to Auntie’s computer, Ed Miliband’s party would waltz into No 10 with an outright majority of 54. The Legal Cheek House of Commons would look like this:
That would mean former human rights law specialist solicitor Sadiq Khan slipping onto the woolsack as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. In turn, it would be good-bye to incumbent Chris Grayling.
With Grayling perched on a constituency majority of about 15,000 in the Surrey seat of Epsom and Ewell, it is unlikely that he will be turfed out of the commons altogether.
However, with the glory days of the Ministry of Justice behind him, Grayling might be tempted to return to his former career as a television producer — or challenge a certain B Johnson for the Tory Party leadership.