This is the first poll conducted since the murder in Woolwich, although I would not necessarily expect any impact on voting intention yet. Events like disasters or terrorist attacks can have a political impact if a government is seen to have handled them in a competent manner, or just by virtue of taking other stories off the front page, but time will tell.

I expect we will see some more detailed polling on attitudes towards terrorism over the weekend.

As you can see, there isn’t actually any obvious trend in the polling, each company’s figures seem to be roughly steady. The main variation there is actually between Panelbase, who do regular polling for the Sunday Times, and the polling done by Ipsos MORI, TNS BMRB and other companies, with Panelbase tending to show a much tighter race than the others. One can only speculate what the reasons might be. Panelbase take the slightly strange decision of only including people certain to vote in a Scottish Parliament election in their samples for referendum voting intention, which could have an impact. There could also be a mode effect – Panelbase use online fieldwork, MORI conduct interviews by telephone, TNS BRMB use face-to-face polling (a method that has otherwise all but vanished from British political polling). It is no doubt something we will return to closer to the actual referendum.

UPDATE: With remarkable timing, the Sun Politics team have put up tonight’s YouGov figures (for Great Britain!) just as I put up a new post. Tonight’s daily poll stands at CON 27%, LAB 38%, LD 10%, UKIP 16%. The Conservative 27% matches their lowest score this Parliament with YouGov (previously seen just after the locals at the start of the month). Usual caveats apply, it may be a blip and be back to normal tomorrow, but coming after that Survation poll at the weekend it could be we are seeing damage from the latest bout of infighting. Keep an eye on it.

In many ways the high UKIP score here shouldn’t come as a surprise, for methodological reasons Survation tend to show the highest levels of UKIP support so if ICM have them at 18% and ComRes at 19% I would have expected Survation to have them in the low twenties. Striking it may be, but the increase in UKIP support is actually in line with what weve seen elsewhere, just using a method that is kinder to UKIP.

More interesting is the drop in Tory support, down five points on Survation’s poll in April. The poll was conducted on Friday and Saturday so at least partially after the “swivel eyed loon” story broke (it came out in Saturday’s papers, so broke about 10pm on Friday night). All the usual caveats I apply to any poll showing sharp or unusual results apply. Sure, it might indicate a shift in support, but just as likely its a blip – wait to see if it is reflected in any other polling. As Twyman’s Law of market research says “anything surprising or interesting is probably wrong”.

Two further comments, I’ve written before about people making the error of looking at the changes in a poll over a month and assuming that events in the last few days are the cause. Survation’s last poll was at the end of April before the local elections, so changes are just as likely to be down to the local elections and the Conservative infighting over Europe as anything more recent.

Secondly there is a tendency for the media and the denizens of Twitter to get all excited about unusual polls that give newsworthy stories when this is, of course, the exact opposite of what you should do if you actually want to understand public opinion. The correct approach is to look at the broad underlying trend and ignore the odd looking polls, the media normally do the opposite. The trend is that UKIP support has jumped substantially following their local election success, and that the Labour lead has been narrowing. The Conservative figure here may yet suggest a new direction, but let’s wait and see.

Last night I grumbled about the problems with polls purporting to show what issues affect people’s voting intentions. YouGov have asked it in a way that gets round one of those problems, that of giving a single issue false prominence, by asking people to pick from a list of all sorts of issues. Same-sex marriage remains an issue that only a small minority (7%) pick out as one that will affect their vote, and by 58% to 42% those people say they would be more likely to vote for a party that supported gay marriage. More people, 28%, say that Europe is one of the three or four issues they think would affect their vote at the next election, with most of them saying they would be more likely to vote for a party that promised a referendum.

Even asked this way strong caveats still apply – people still are not very good at understanding the motivations of their own decisions, and people still really don’t vote on individual policies or policy areas. They vote on broad perceptions of party, of competence and of the leaders. Individual issues play into those perceptions of course (does this party consider the same issues to be important as I do? Do they have similar values and beliefs?) but so do things like strength and weakness, competence, unity and so on.

It also gives the opportunity to point out something else that, while I think is beginning to get through to the commentariat and politicians, still needs to be repeated whenever possible. Only 49% of UKIP voters named the issue of Europe. In other words, 51% of UKIP voters don’t even consider Europe to be in the top three or four issues that affect their decision. The simplistic view that UKIP support is all about Europe and, by extension, it is policies on Europe that will suddenly win back UKIP voter is just that – simplistic.

Moving on to those wider perceptions of how the Conservative party is seen, only 10% of people now see the party as united, 73% divided. YouGov have been asking the same question since 2003 and this is highest proportion so far seeing the Tories divided, more than under Iain Duncan Smith. The party is not seen as widely divided as Labour was towards the end of Tony Blair’s leadership (6% united) or under Gordon Brown (just 3% united at its worse), but it is certainly in that sort of territory. Also note, however, that while perceptions of division are widely seen as negative they are not necessarily fatal – in 2004 over 60% of people saw Labour as divided but they still won the 2005 election. Personally I think there is some truth in the idea that division drives away voters (constant infighting makes a government look incompetent, and we know perceptions of competence are a key driver of voting intention), but its not as simple as division equals defeat.

A majority (54%) of people continue to support the introduction of gay marriage. Asked if the subject should be decided by a referendum or by Parliament it only narrowly follows my past comment that people support a referendum on absolutely anything you ask about – just 39% think there should be a referendum on gay marrige, compared to 34% who think it should be left to Parliament.

On Europe, referendum voting intention asked using the wording in the Conservative party’s draft bill has 36% of people saying they would vote YES (to stay), 45% saying they would vote NO (to leave). Asked about the Conservative rebellion over the Queens speech people are pretty much evenly split on whether they are more sympathetic towards David Cameron or Conservative MPs (most are sympathetic towards neither!). Conservative voters are far more on David Cameron’s side – 52% are more sympathetic towards Cameron, 19% his rebellious MPs.

The other questions in the poll asked best Prime Minister (I think the first time ComRes have asked it recently, and a welcome break from their tyranny of agree/disagree statements) with Cameron on 32%, Miliband on 24%, Clegg on 6%.

There is also a question where 49% of people agreed that “If a party wants my support at the next general election, it is important to me that they offer a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU”. The question of whether people actually care about Europe and referendums and whether it will actually change votes is a key issue at at the moment. Unfortunately is it not as easy as this to actually answer it – but that it were!.

Regular readers will know that questions attempting to measure the salience of particular issues at election are a particular bug-bear of mine, one that I’ve written about in the past. There are multiple problems with questions like this. The first is that questions like this take an issue out of context and give it false prominence – that is, if you ask about an issue in isolation (and sometimes on the same page as a grid of other statements asking about the same issue!) people may think they are important, but come an actual election there are all sorts of other issues like the economy, crime, the NHS, pensions, taxes and so on that people may see as even more important. The second is that respondents to surveys are not stupid – they know that such poll questions are used by papers to show unhappiness with a policy and will use it to register their support or opposition to a policy regardless of whether it would actually change their vote. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that as people we are often not very good at actually understanding the drivers behind the decisions we make, normally rather overestimating how rational and calculating we are. Key driver analysis of British Election Study data tells us that things like party identification, perceptions of the leaders and perceived competence are the things that drive votes… not policies on individual issues.

The simplistic view of how policies affect voting intention – if people like a policy it wins votes, if they don’t like a policy it loses votes is just that – simplistic. Individual votes don’t win or lose votes. However, they presumably do play into wider perceptions of parties and leaders and how people rate them. So the issue of Europe may well have an impact in terms of whether parties and leaders are seen as caring about the same issues as the public do, being willing to listen to the people, whether they are strong or weak leaders with a vision or purpose, whether parties are united or competent. How it might affect people’s vote is not a question that can be easily answered, let alone with a single question.

UPDATE: There is also an ICM poll in the Sunday Telegraph. They don’t have normal voting intention (instead having the ICM wisdom index thingy that asks people to predict the shares of the vote rather than ask how they themselves would vote – the figures this month are Conservative 29%, Labour 32%, Lib Dem 16%, UKIP 15%) but do have EU referendum voting intention, asked using the wording in the Conservative party’s draft Bill. 46% say they would vote NO (to leave), 30% would vote YES (to stay).

UPDATE2: The fortnightly Opinium poll for the Observer bucks the trend of a narrowing Labour lead, but does also have its own UKIP high. Topline figures are CON 27%(-1), LAB 37%(+2), LDEM 7%(-2), UKIP 20%(+3)