As Labour begins to put the detail on top of the core narrative of securing the recovery, protecting frontline services and building the new industries of the future, we are already starting to see a Tory party run fast out of ideas as well as direction.

For Young Fabians, sometimes unfairly derided as being a little shy to campaign on the ground, this is a time to step in and do some scrutiny of the Tory parties policy and detail. That’s why we’re re launching, Young Fabian Policy News and have included a brand new feature ‘Opposition Policy Watch’ to look at some of the thinking coming from the Tory right and put it to the test.

If you’d like to contribute to future editions of Young Fabian Policy News please get in touch and if you’d like to receive further information from the Young Fabians, you only need to join.

The press are right to say that this election will be a big choice, a big battle of competing ideas and visions. I think Labour has done the thinking and the graft in policy terms, I don’t think that the Tories have and it’s up to all of us to expose that.

But whilst it is true to say that Labour is winning the battle of ideas, we must also win the argument on the doorstep. There is no substitute for hard graft and thinking in the policy sphere, but there is also no substitute for knocking on doors and speaking to voters to communicate those ideas and I know that Young Fabians across the country will be helping Labour campaign on the ground as well as win the battle of ideas.

I’m pleased with the direction of travel of the national voting intentions. But the point I made to Kunal was that the media are reporting a minimal amount of data from the marginal seats in comparison to these headline figures, coupled with comments about uniform swing and the likely balance of seats in the next parliament. The reality is that Labour can be narrowing the overall gap in intentions but that it could be making little difference to the outcome of the election if those people aren’t living in the right constituencies. My hunch was that were we to see more polling from the key seats, we’d probably find the Tories with a wider gap than the 7/8 per cent that has been accepted right now as roughly the difference nationally. Morale-wise, this close to the election – and given how the parliamentary party in particular has reacted to polls in recent years – it’s perhaps best that we don’t see such polls and stay focused on the task in hand …

However, there are some out there and today I’ve come across an interesting analysis by Anthony Wells for UK Polling Report of Ipsos-MORI’s aggregated data for 2009 (that is, all their polls combined), followed up on by Andrew Sparrow. What we see is the Tories – last year, so not accounting for the recent downturn in their fortunes – having a 5% larger lead (a somewhat formidable 21% lead) in Lab-Con marginals. The swing to the Tories in these seats is greater than the swing in safe Labour seats and quite significantly better than that in safe Tory seats.

In other words, they appear to be winning over voters where it matters. There’s one reason for that: a certain Lord Ashcroft. Which is why it’s so important his personal tax situation is clarified.

The lesson is that we mustn’t get complacent about the direction of travel and about the electoral system working in our favour. And we mustn’t stop the fight.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to some recent ICM polling of marginals for the News of the World.

9 points separate Labour from the Conservatives. A drop to a single digit Conservative poll lead is the kind of news that Labour supporters could use to keep them warm during the cold months ahead (it is a mark of our times that we seem to have to measure political hope by falling Conservative poll leads).

The political poll watching website, Politicalbetting.com is a treasure trove of information and analysis to put polls in their proper context. Yesterday they blogged on whether the Pre-Budget Report had really made a difference to voter intentions. Mike Smithson ended his analysis with:

Looking back over the past fortnight the polling oddities seem to have been the last Sunday YouGov poll in the Sunday Times and Tuesday’s ICM in the Guardian. Both showed the Labour share increasing and it looked as though the PBR had had little impact.

So it this poll something to be get really excited about? Polls can be misleading, especially when it is the media driving how they’re understood by the public at large. This might be just another ‘oddity’. But there’s something particularly interesting about this latest poll.

Whilst the other polls have fluctuated throughout, ComRes hasn’t had the Conservatives on less than double-digit leads since May. Whilst this latest poll doesn’t see the Conservatives drop away from the magic 40%, it does see Labour take all the gains in it’s share of the vote. So I’m looking out for the analysis of this poll which is likely to be key reading.

In the end polls are just polls but it’s clear that Cameron’s team are not as confident as they feel they should be at this point in the cycle. That’s good for politics as it’ll mean more political debate (we now know we’re going to get televised leader debates for the first time). But if people are still in two minds about who to vote for, then the kind of electoral pact the Party decides to offer the public will matter more than ever.

Update: ComRes has put up their research on their website. Interestingly their poll sees:

by a margin of 49 to 45 per cent, people disagree with the statement that “the Conservative Party offers an appealing alternative to the Labour Party.”
Meanwhile, by a margin of 52 to 44 per cent, the public agrees with the statement that: “a Conservative Government would mainly represent the interests of the well-off rather than ordinary people.”

But the same poll has this too:

By a margin of 55 to 38 per cent, people support the Tory policy of raising the threshold for inheritance tax should be raised to £1 million.

Seems people are genuinely confused about the main parties at the moment.