By Prof Paul Whiteley - 5th February 2010
A BPIX poll for the Mail on Sunday carried out just after Tony Blair’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry reported that 80 per cent of respondents thought that he had lied about the Iraq war. So his reputation was not enhanced by his performance at the inquiry. However, since the war is now largely history what really matters politically is its effect on influencing public perceptions that the fight against terrorism can be won.
This issue was examined in the same survey with a question that asked if respondents thought that the war had increased, decreased, or made no difference to the threat of terrorism to Britain. The chart shows the responses to the question categorised by the respondent’s voting intentions in a general election. About ten times as many people felt that the war had increased the terrorist threat (61 per cent) as thought the opposite (6 per cent). So there are very few optimists left in the electorate.
Secondly, party loyalty, which normally has a big influence on respondents’ thinking about issues of this type, appears not to have changed this perception among Labour voters very much; four times as many of them thought the threat had increased rather than decreased. Not surprisingly, Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters were overwhelmingly of the opinion that the war had made things worse. Some 38 per cent of respondents thought that Gordon Brown would have taken Britain into Iraq if he had been PM at the time, with 23 per cent thinking the opposite.
From the public’s point of view, the war was a disaster – and the government must be hoping that it can be kept off the political agenda in the run-up to the election.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd