Latest news with #IpsosMori
Telegraph
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
This is why Reform is on the cusp of victory
New polling by Ipsos-Mori has Reform on 34 points, currently heading for a working majority in Parliament at the next election. If this came to pass, it would mark the most extraordinary result in British politics in at least a century. Can we really trust polls like these? Let us consider reasons to be sceptical. The first is that all polls like this – standard, nationally representative surveys of a few thousand voters – only capture national vote share. They do not project the corresponding outcome of seats. While we can make rudimentary assumptions of a party's likely representation in Parliament, they are still assumptions. A 34 per cent vote share would return a huge number of seats, but we cannot know whether the spread of votes would be broad enough to secure the number of seats implied by this poll. A party might receive 34 per cent of the vote share, but their support might be concentrated in small geographical areas. In such circumstances, Britain's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system would limit them to a small number of seats. We know Reform will get little support in the big cities; this will artificially inflate Labour's seats next time and limit Reform's. The second reason to be sceptical of these polls is that, this far out from an election, they cannot be treated seriously as predictions. Polls are merely snapshots of public opinion at an exact moment in time. Things were different three months ago; they will be different in three months from now. Sometimes, with polls like this, there is a third reason to be sceptical: you get 'rogue' polls which put one party in an unusually high or low position. Sometimes polls randomly tap into a sample which is out-of-line with public opinion for some reason. This is why you must consider the average of all polls of a given period, and also consider whether polls reflect trends. In considering this specific point, let us now flip the analysis back over. Let us consider why this poll should be taken seriously: there are several reasons to do so. You cannot credibly write this poll off as 'rogue'. This result of 34 per cent broadly reflects other polls coming out at the moment. While it is a little higher, it is not much higher, and it confirms a clear trend that Reform is on the march. It obviously also reflects recent election results. At the mix of national and local elections in May, Reform secured a new MP, a new Mayor and a raft of new councillors across the country. They received 31 per cent of the vote share in the local elections. Ipsos-Mori's poll merely puts Reform on a slightly higher vote share than they secured several weeks ago in real elections. You must always take polls seriously if they reflect what is coming out in focus groups at the same time. Ed Shackle, Public First's head of qualitative research, confirms this to be the case. All the current momentum is with Reform. He notes that, while you used to get some hesitation from voters about admitting they were considering a Reform vote, this is gone now. People increasingly sense that Reform is surging, and it is exciting to get on the bandwagon. While Reform is surging in less-affluent areas on the coast and in towns and small cities across provincial England, their support is up across the board in the focus groups. They are currently hoovering-up most of the votes of disaffected people across the country. This recent polling result has also come after a wave of stories on issues where Reform is strong: immigration and crime, most notably. For the last few weeks, the media has been awash with stories of grooming gangs, serious crimes alleged to have been committed by asylum-seekers, the continued arrival of small boats, and all the rest. This cannot but help Reform's standing in the polls. While I am personally sceptical of anyone's ability to make a judgement on the national mood based on their own personal, random conversations, when these conversations are entirely in line with the polls, you have to wonder. And the conversations I have with ordinary people in my own personal life confirms that huge numbers of people are seriously thinking about voting for Reform. Overall, then, we should take this poll seriously; Reform is very obviously the most popular party in the country at this moment. But we still have four more years before the next election and an awful lot will change. Above all, given their recent record, it is reasonable to assume Reform will blow themselves up with internal rows and blatant incompetence. If they can make it through to the end of this year in a similar polling position but without a terrible internal trauma, it will be worth taking them very seriously.
Times
21-06-2025
- Automotive
- Times
Boris Johnson's failed £1bn EV charger fund killed off by Labour
Boris Johnson's near-£1 billion fund to roll out charge points on motorways has been killed off after failing to attract applications from service station operators. The £950 million Rapid Charging Fund was unveiled by the former prime minister in 2021 to support the plan to install more than 6,000 super-fast charge points across England's motorways by 2035. The scheme was designed to provide a springboard for the UK to 'lead the western world in the provision of rapid and ultra-rapid public chargers'. Government sources confirmed this weekend that the fund had finally been scrapped in favour of a £400 million initiative designed to avoid the pitfalls of Johnson's scheme, which was shunned by motorway services operators. It comes as: ⬤ the government confirmed that company car tax breaks for electric vehicles (EVs) will be extended until 2030;⬤ polling by Ipsos Mori showed that worries about a lack of charging infrastructure are the main barrier to drivers switching from petrol or diesel cars to an EV; and ⬤ experts say UK EV public charging costs are the highest in Europe, with drivers paying up to £670 a year more compared with petrol or diesel. Johnson's Rapid Charging Fund formed part of his ten-point plan for a green revolution. Funding was designed to provide 'support on rapid charge points on motorways and major roads to dash any anxiety around long journeys'. The initiative is understood to have failed to garner interest from motorway service operators such as Moto, Welcome Break and Roadchef as pilot schemes proved commercially unattractive. Among the complaints about the scheme were being bogged down in bureaucracy and being asked to commit to long-term power agreements that could lock in high costs years down the line. This weekend's confirmation of the decision to scrap Johnson's fund follows reports this year that ministers were looking into a revamp. The £400 million scheme for the deployment of charging infrastructure, announced during the Comprehensive Spending Review this month, is part of a broader package to support the uptake of zero-emission vehicles. Ministers this weekend confirmed that company car tax breaks for EVs would remain in force until the end of the decade, although discounted tax rates would rise to 9 per cent by 2030 from 3 per cent currently. The Department for Transport said: 'We're investing over £4 billion to support both industry and consumers in making the switch to electric vehicles, including by continuing to offer lower tax rates for EVs than those for traditional combustion engines.' A perceived lack of charging points remains a major barrier to switch to an EV, however. New polling by Ipsos Mori found that while 53 per cent of car owners said that they plan to replace their car by 2028, only a quarter expect that this replacement will be an EV. Concern about range is 'significant', the polling found. 'But underneath this concern our data suggests a level of nervousness and sense of a lack of information about EV charging, especially in public locations. It may be more accurate to talk about 'charge anxiety' rather than 'range anxiety',' Ipsos Mori said, in a report prepared for the Motability Scheme. For those with disabilities, the concern is more stark, with 69 per cent of respondents from within the Motability Scheme saying that they were worried about the distance an EV could travel on a single charge. Sales of battery electric vehicles grew 25.8 per cent in May and represent more than one in five (21.8 per cent of all new car sales), according to industry figures. Separate analysis concludes that the UK has become a global leader outside China in the uptake of EVs. But it warns that the cost of running zero-emission vehicles could outstrip that of a petrol or diesel powered alternative. UK EV public charging costs are the highest in Europe, according to a report by BNEF, a researcher owned by Bloomberg. This means that drivers will pay between £300 to £670 more a year depending on charger speed compared with petrol, the report's authors found. Drivers with off-street parking or those able to charge at home fare better, however. Despite UK residential electricity being among the most expensive in Europe, EV drivers would save an average of about £290 a year if vehicles were charged at home, the report found. Analysis by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit in 2023, cited by the government this year, found that new petrol cars could cost approximately £700 a year more to run than electric models.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
English-speaking countries more nervous about rise of AI, polls suggest
People in English-speaking countries including the UK, US, Australia and Canada are more nervous about the rise of artificial intelligence than those in the largest EU economies, where excitement over its spread is higher, new research suggests. A global split over what has been dubbed 'the wonder and worry' of AI appears to correlate with widely divergent levels of trust in governments to regulate the fast-developing technology. The polling of 23,000 adults in 30 countries, shared exclusively with the Guardian by Ipsos Mori, also showed a quarter of people globally still do not have a good understanding of what AI is, despite it being widely described as the most transformative technology in decades. On Wednesday, Abba's Björn Ulvaeus revealed he was writing a musical with the assistance of AI, describing it as 'like having another songwriter in the room with a huge reference frame'. Britons appear to be among the world's most worried people about the rise of AI, with two-thirds of people in Great Britain saying they are nervous about the technology being deployed in products and services, and less than half trusting the UK government to regulate AI responsibly. By contrast half or less than half of people in France, Germany and Italy said products and services using AI made them nervous. 'In the Anglosphere (US, Great Britain, Canada and Ireland and Australia) there is much more nervousness than excitement,' said Matt Carmichael, a senior vice-president at Ipsos Mori. 'In European markets we see less nervousness, but also just a mid-range of excitement. Some markets are much more positive than nervous, especially in south-east Asia.' Only Americans, Japanese people and Hungarians trust their governments less to regulate AI than Britons. The UK government recently delayed a bill intended to regulate AI companies in order to align itself with the stance of Donald Trump's administration in the US. Trust in government regulation is lowest in the US, where the president's election campaign was bankrolled by Silicon Valley technology oligarchs including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and he recently proposed a bill preventing new state-led regulations of AI. By contrast last June, the European Union passed the bloc-wide EU AI Act, which bans AI that poses an 'unacceptable risk', for example, systems used for social scoring, and requires systems to declare when AI has been used to manipulate or generate content. People in India, where the use of misleading AI-generated deepfake videos marked last year's general election campaign, are also among the most nervous about AI being used in products and services. The polling also revealed widespread opposition to AI's use in creating news articles, films and adverts but an equal acceptance that AI will become the primary producer of these things anyway. The highest levels of excitement about AI were found in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand where levels of trust in government regulation were also highest. Polling in those countries was only representative of the more 'connected' urban and educated populations but it showed almost double the levels of excitement as in the whole populations of the US and Great Britain. People in Great Britain were among the most pessimistic about how AI will worsen the job market, with nearly a third fearing AI will replace them entirely at work. Globally, just 31% of people think the job market in their country will improve because of AI and 35% think it will get worse. But perception of its impact varied widely. Nearly three-quarters of people in Thailand believe it is very or somewhat likely that AI will replace their current job in the next five years, compared with only 14% who believe their job will go in Sweden and one in four in the US, Great Britain and Australia. Across all 30 countries, the polling showed very few people want AI created-online news articles, films or adverts, but most people think it is likely AI will become the primary producer of all of these things as well as making television programmes, screening job adverts and even creating realistic sports content such as tennis matches between AI-generated players. Carmichael said this could play out either with increasing public acceptance as AI-generated content becomes more widespread or alternatively a 'backlash'. Some of that resistance is currently being seen with the campaign by musicians in the UK, including Kate Bush and Elton John, for greater protections against copyright infringement by technology companies building large language models (LLMs). There have also been lawsuits in the US where novelists from John Grisham to Ta-Nehisi Coates have been suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
English-speaking countries more nervous about rise of AI, polls suggest
People in English-speaking countries including the UK, US, Australia and Canada are more nervous about the rise of artificial intelligence than those in the largest EU economies, where excitement over its spread is higher, new research suggests. A global split over what has been dubbed 'the wonder and worry' of AI appears to correlate with widely divergent levels of trust in governments to regulate the fast-developing technology. The polling of 23,000 adults in 30 countries, shared exclusively with the Guardian by Ipsos Mori, also showed a quarter of people globally still do not have a good understanding of what AI is, despite it being widely described as the most transformative technology in decades. On Wednesday, Abba's Björn Ulvaeus revealed he was writing a musical with the assistance of AI, describing it as 'like having another songwriter in the room with a huge reference frame'. Britons appear to be among the world's most worried people about the rise of AI, with two-thirds of people in Great Britain saying they are nervous about the technology being deployed in products and services, and less than half trusting the UK government to regulate AI responsibly. By contrast half or less than half of people in France, Germany and Italy said products and services using AI made them nervous. 'In the Anglosphere (US, Great Britain, Canada and Ireland and Australia) there is much more nervousness than excitement,' said Matt Carmichael, a senior vice-president at Ipsos Mori. 'In European markets we see less nervousness, but also just a mid-range of excitement. Some markets are much more positive than nervous, especially in south-east Asia.' Only Americans, Japanese people and Hungarians trust their governments less to regulate AI than Britons. The UK government recently delayed a bill intended to regulate AI companies in order to align itself with the stance of Donald Trump's administration in the US. Trust in government regulation is lowest in the US, where the president's election campaign was bankrolled by Silicon Valley technology oligarchs including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and he recently proposed a bill preventing new state-led regulations of AI. By contrast last June, the European Union passed the bloc-wide EU AI Act, which bans AI that poses an 'unacceptable risk', for example, systems used for social scoring, and requires systems to declare when AI has been used to manipulate or generate content. People in India, where the use of misleading AI-generated deepfake videos marked last year's general election campaign, are also among the most nervous about AI being used in products and services. The polling also revealed widespread opposition to AI's use in creating news articles, films and adverts but an equal acceptance that AI will become the primary producer of these things anyway. The highest levels of excitement about AI were found in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand where levels of trust in government regulation were also highest. Polling in those countries was only representative of the more 'connected' urban and educated populations but it showed almost double the levels of excitement as in the whole populations of the US and Great Britain. People in Great Britain were among the most pessimistic about how AI will worsen the job market, with nearly a third fearing AI will replace them entirely at work. Globally, just 31% of people think the job market in their country will improve because of AI and 35% think it will get worse. But perception of its impact varied widely. Nearly three-quarters of people in Thailand believe it is very or somewhat likely that AI will replace their current job in the next five years, compared with only 14% who believe their job will go in Sweden and one in four in the US, Great Britain and Australia. Across all 30 countries, the polling showed very few people want AI created-online news articles, films or adverts, but most people think it is likely AI will become the primary producer of all of these things as well as making television programmes, screening job adverts and even creating realistic sports content such as tennis matches between AI-generated players. Carmichael said this could play out either with increasing public acceptance as AI-generated content becomes more widespread or alternatively a 'backlash'. Some of that resistance is currently being seen with the campaign by musicians in the UK, including Kate Bush and Elton John, for greater protections against copyright infringement by technology companies building large language models (LLMs). There have also been lawsuits in the US where novelists from John Grisham to Ta-Nehisi Coates have been suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
Times
04-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Confidence is slumping. Will interest rate cuts stop the rot?
Confidence is a strange thing. In everyday life, its meaning is straightforward enough — being associated with trust, faith and being comfortable in your own skin. Confident people tend to do well in life, unless confidence spills into over-confidence. In economics, confidence is also important. Consumer confidence is typically linked to people's willingness to spend, so retailers and others keep a close eye on it. Business confidence, similarly, tells us whether firms are likely to invest, recruit, or both. I mention it because confidence is having a bit of a moment, and not in a good way. The widely followed GfK consumer confidence index fell four points to -23 last month, amid warnings from the index's compiler that it could be on the brink of collapse. People were surveyed in the first half of April, after Donald Trump had unveiled his 'liberation day' tariffs and as households and businesses faced a series of price and cost increases. All the spending-sensitive measures in the index — people's own financial situations over the past and next 12 months; their perceptions of the general economic situation; and whether it is a good time to make big purchases — were down. Only the savings index was up, suggesting that people feel they need to squirrel more away. Confidence as measured by GfK is down by ten points compared to July last year, the month of the general election, though above its all-time low of -49 in September 2022, during Liz Truss's brief and turbulent premiership. YouGov's consumer confidence index for April, published three days ago, was also down sharply. Its April fall, 4.6 points, was the biggest since April 2020, when the country had just embarked on the first Covid lockdown. • Trump tariffs dent overseas demand for British goods Even more dramatic was a finding from Ipsos Mori. The polling firm measures economic optimism by asking people whether they expect the economy to improve, stay the same or get worse over the next 12 months. The previous low points on this index, which nets out positive and negative responses, are where you might expect them to be. Thus, January and March 1980, during Margaret Thatcher's first and deepest recession, stand out — as do March, May and July 2008, when the global financial crisis was getting under way. People were also very pessimistic in March and June 2022, when inflation was on its way to double digits. None of these low points was as bad, though, as the current very low level of economic optimism. Only 7 per cent of people think the economy will get better over the next 12 months, while 75 per cent think it will get worse. The net figure, -68, is the worst ever. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, economists should, perhaps, be less coy about predicting recession, which most are not. According to the Treasury's latest compilation of independent forecasts, published in the middle of last month, nobody was predicting an outright recession. The lowest growth forecast for this year was 0.5 per cent, the highest 1.6 per cent. The picture is similar for next year, with the lowest forecast 0.6 per cent and a highest of 1.5 per cent. The recent pattern of consumer confidence and economic optimism is a puzzle. Yes, there are many uncertainties around, but in no way does the outlook look the worst in the 47 years that Mori, now Ipsos Mori, has been asking the question. Similarly, while things were chaotic in September 2022, when the prime minister either did not know what she was doing or should not have been doing it, consumer confidence should not have been the weakest in the 51 years that GfK has been surveying it. There have been many scarier periods in recent decades, with higher inflation and much worse prospects for jobs, than those of the past three years. So why has consumer confidence been so weak? There are three reasons, I think. One is that, while the way in which people get their information has changed, they are probably better informed than they used to be — though at any time you would have had to have been on a very remote island to avoid coverage of Trump's tariffs. A second factor is that people may be more sensitive to economic pain, and the prospect of it, than they used to be. We respond more negatively to adversity than previous generations. There is also the 'Oh no, not another one' effect. Falling consumer confidence is cumulative. The weak readings in 2022 came after post-pandemic hopes of better times ahead were snuffed out by high inflation. The current weak readings come as America's trade war threatens to snuff out an incipient recovery in the economy. • This is one special relationship we could do without Business confidence, interestingly, is less volatile and not as gloomy as that of households. Although Lloyds Bank's business barometer fell by ten points last month, it remained significantly above its long-run average. The Institute of Directors' economic confidence index, measuring the optimism of business leaders, showed a surprise rise last month, to its highest level since September last year, just before Rachel Reeves's budget. The improvement in confidence appears to have been a timing issue: businesses were surveyed during the period in which the US president had not just announced his tariffs but also suspended most of them for 90 days, which directors saw as an encouraging sign. The resilience of business confidence is encouraging, but we should nevertheless be concerned about the consumer confidence weakness. Spending was just getting going, with three consecutive monthly rises in retail sales. If it falls back now because consumers are gloomy again, growth will suffer a setback. Fortunately, there is something that can be done. This week, the Bank of England's monetary policy committee (MPC) will decide on interest rates, and it will be a surprise if it does not cut them. • Spring sunshine gives retailers an unexpected boost It has been traditional to see lower interest rates as an unequivocal boost to economic activity, and a way of ramping up spending by households and firms. The situation now is not as straightforward as it used to be, with more owner-occupiers owning their homes outright than with mortgages, but it is still generally the case that rate cuts should boost spending. The question is by how much they should be cut. A few days ago, I chaired a Mouradian Foundation webinar with two former MPC members, Michael Saunders and Sir Charlie Bean. Saunders, now a senior adviser at Oxford Economics, thought that the MPC should cut by a quarter-point, 25 basis points, this week, which is what the markets expect. Bean, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, who admits to being generally hawkish, said that the tariff threat to growth would prompt him to vote for a bigger cut: half a point, 50 basis points, taking Bank rate down to 4 per cent at a stroke. It was an interesting debate. A half-point cut would certainly make people sit up and take notice, though it could look difficult in presentational terms when announced just before a rise in inflation when the April figures are published later this month. A quarter-point reduction would be consistent with what New Zealand's central bank has described as a 'least regrets' approach, said Saunders, ensuring as far as possible that any decision made now will not have to be reversed soon. And the Bank can also come back with another cut next month. We shall see. There are likely to be votes for both 25 and 50 basis-point cuts from the MPC this week. Markets expect the 25-point cutters to win out, but it could be close. Rate cuts will not immediately transform the uncertainty felt by consumers, given that the source of much of this uncertainty is out of our hands. But they will help. PS Blaming your predecessors is the oldest political trick in the book — but when done to excess, it can backfire and risk making you look ridiculous. Labour skirted close to both these things when taking over from the Tories in July last year and claiming the worst economic inheritance since the Second World War. It clearly wasn't, and the new government's attempts to paint it as such contributed to the mood of gloom over the economy in the run-up to and after the October budget, when growth flatlined. If you want to see something really ridiculous, however, look to the White House. Donald Trump's claim that the 0.3 per cent annualised fall in US gross domestic product in the first quarter was the fault of Joe Biden was barking mad. It was due, as everybody knows, to a surge in imports trying to get in ahead of Trump's tariffs. • US economy shrinks for first time since 2022 For a masterclass in selective use of statistics, have a look at the White House's list of economic achievements in the president's first 100 days, including job creation and industrial production. Using Trump's logic, all those can be put down to the economic momentum he inherited from his predecessor.
