It's not looking good for Labour. Their strategy of spend, spend and spend to avoid all cuts, especially cuts to Welfare and the public sector has backfired.
Plan A is working. The electorate understood that we had to start living within our means, which meant reducing the size of the public sector which under Labour had expanded to a point where we could n longer afford it.
Labour said this would not work and only push unemployment up. How wrong they were. Office of National Statistic figures show that in 2009 22.1% of all jobs in the Country were public sector jobs.
This is now down to 19% or 5.67m. At the same time there are over 1.4m new private sector jobs, taking the total number of jobs in the private sector to 24.17m, a new record. The economy is rebalancing and it's working.
These figures are not going down well with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls who had predicted unemployment soaring and a rising benefits bill. Unemployment is actually lower now than when Labour were in power. See here.
The only solution they could come up with was not to reduce the size of the public sector. That's not much of an economic policy
As far as how this affects the publics perception of Labour, the news there is not good here either. The public agree with the Conservatives cap on benefits, Labour don't. The public agree with the need to live within our means, Labour don't.
The public still blame Labour for most of the difficulties too. It does not too good for you if the public blame you for the mess the country was in and doesn't agree with your solutions, probably because your solutions caused the problems in the first place.
See here. You will see that the public are at odds with Labour over Welfare and the size of the public sector. You can't win an election if people think you are only on the side only of those on welfare or in the employment of the Government.