The first polling reaction to yesterday’s Osborne statement is coming in. This was Tweeted an hour ago.

@Sun_Politics: Sun/YouGov poll: 1st verdict on Aut Statement – only 24% say Osborne doing good job, but they don’t blame him for growth collapse…

…asked to name 2 causes; 44% blame Eurozone crisis, 32% say Labour’s leftover debts, 31% blame banks, and 28% think Coalition’s cuts.

Have a good evening.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonPB

And does the speaker make it worse?

It was inevitable, I suppose, given the dreadful economic forecasts yesterday, and the strike today that PMQs would be noisy and angry. Things are getting very polarised.

As to who won it depends on what you consider important? In terms of the media coverage Cameron’s description of his opponent as “Irresponsible, left wing and weak” is going to make the headlines.

This was the PM using bluster to deal with a sustained series of questions from EdM for which he had some trouble answering.

Ed, though, falls down because he doesn’t have a style of addressing the house that is commanding and which communicates. He’s very poor at expressing himself verbally.

All this was over-shadowed by an even more miserable performance than usual by John Bercow who just intervened time any time again sounding even more pompus each time.

For me the big news from PMQs was Cameron’s apparent commitment to cut all the trade union officials in public sector work places who are paid for out of the public purse. It didn’t sound as though this was planned and came out in response to a question.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonPB

Is that the challenge for the unions

As well as the straight “do you support the strike” questions there’s a fair bit of other data that gives a pointer as to how successful today’s day of action will be.

TNS-BMRB had just 12% saying they will be affected a lot and only 4% of private sector workers claim to know a lot about why the strikes are happening.

So the unions would seem to have a big challenge getting their message across.

Another issue comes from ComRes: 56% agreed that public sector workers “have to take their share of the economic pain which means accepting reductions in their pension provision”.  Just 28% disagree and 16% say they don’t know.

On Ed Miliband’s position YouGov found 23% think saying he he should support the action with 33% saying he should oppose them. Amongst Labour supporters 41% think the strikes should be supported with 14% opposing.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonPB

Who’s going to come out of this on top?

With the big strike on public sector pensions due to start in only a few hours it’s quite hard from the polls to work out how the public actually feel.

Some surveys, like TNS-BMRB, this afternoon has support evenly split between the strikers and the government (40% vs. 37%). Other polls, notably YouGov and ComRes have those opposed to the strikes in the the lead.

Thus YouGov at the weekend had 50% opposing headteachers taking stike action against 38% who supported it: 49% opposing teachers going on (41% supported), while the split for civil servants 51-39.

ComRes had broadly similar figures – 47%, do not believe that public sector workers are right to strike, while 38% believe they are right to take that course of action. Interestingly ComRes had 51%, thinking that the strikes are unlikely to succeed and so should not go ahead. 

Whatever this is going to be a PR battle on both sides and it’s hard to see who will come out on top.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonPB