Poll of polls: Labour 33%, Con 32%, UKIP 16%, LD 8%, Green 6%

My first ever poll of polls (An average from all of the opinion polls taken this week) shows a 1% lead for the Labour Party. Figures varied from a 7% Labour lead in Populus, and in the 11th October YouGov poll a 5% Labour lead, to the Tories leading in several polls at the beginning of the week. This 1 point lead would theoretically, be enough on a uniform swing to see Ed Miliband into number 10 in May, but it would be the worst ever share of the vote for an incoming Government.

Something else that I also tried to do was to extrapolate YouGov's regional figures over the week, by combining the sample sizes from all of the polls released this week by YouGov-giving a total sample size of about 1000 for each region. For the Midlands and Wales, this is impossible as the two are combined by YouGov, but it is possible, and very interesting, to look at the regional extrapolations for the South, North, Scotland and London. Here are the regional extrapolation figures:

London: Labour 44%, Conservatives 33%, UKIP 11%, Lib Dems 8%

Scotland: SNP 39%, Labour 29%, Conservatives 19%, Lib Dems 5%, UKIP 4%

The North: Labour 44%, Conservatives 28%, UKIP 15%, Lib Dems 7%

The South: Conservatives 40%, Labour 26%, UKIP 18%, Lib Dems 7%

A word of caution about some of these figures. Much of the data taken to extrapolate these figures was from the early week YouGov polls when the Tories had a lead. That may well have changed since then. Certainly, if yesterday's Survation poll showing UKIP on 25% nationally and on 37.4% in the South is correct, we should be able to detect this sooner or later in the YouGov regional figures.

Another word of warning: whilst ths SNP may at this time have a 10% lead over Labour in Scotland, it is highly unlikely that, when asked to choose a Westminster Tory or Labour Government, that Scots will abandon Labour on the scale suggested by these polls. My own suspicion is that Labour will recover to around 35% in Scotland by the time of the election. Nevertheless, Scottish Labour should be deeply concerned by these figures, which are a snapshot of public opinion currently, rather than a prediction of what may happen next May.