YouGov asked a representative sample of the UK about the BA strike over the weekend. Mainly it was about apportioning blame. As a former researcher myself, I was tickled by the results.

The researchers found 32% of people blamed the Trade Union, 20% the BA management and 38% both of them. This rather reminds me of being a younger sibling in the 1950s: whatever happened, sooner or later my Mum would say “Oooo, yer just as bad as each other”.

You can make these numbers mean anything you want, really. The Daily Mail will probably go for ‘seven out of ten say Unite wrong’, and the Mirror ‘Majority blame BA’s Walsh’. But the figures are fascinating in that they show the same proportions across the UK population with which we became so familiar during the General Election.

About a third of people (Union-bashers) would just like the Charlie Whelans of this world to go away. Some (but by no means all) are unreconstructed Thatcherites, and I suspect the majority are over fifty. That is, they can remember the Callaghan era, and they don’t want it back – especially with the IMF looming over us yet again.

A fifth of people represent the core Labour vote: their Movement can do no wrong, LibDems are just traitors to the cause, all Tories burn babies to keep warm, and strong unions are vital to the working person’s standard of living. This is the constituency to which Ed Balls talks. (Interestingly, the same YouGov study singled Ed the Red out as the worst possible leader the Party could have).

And finally, four out of every ten people think either (a) everyone in the unions and parliament and business is a greedy, argumentative pillock who can’t focus on what’s best for the Country; or (b) this kind of stuff is class warfare which we should’ve gone beyond by now. This group are mainly Cleggerons…for the time being. Put another way, they are those sensible folks who expect good governance and want to be left safe from the prying of an incompetent State.

Thus taking ten as a rough parallel for the UK voting population, we can see that 3 are real Tories, 2 are old Labour, four are Cleggerons, and 1 floats between one side or another on a pretty random basis.

That being the case, if Cameron and Clegg can manage to ignore their activists and make a direct appeal to the voters – who knows, even as a new Party? – they could condemn Labour to eternal opposition, whatever the voting system.

Three things will stop this happening. First, things getting much worse very quickly from now on. This usually causes diehards to retreat still further up their backsides. Second, unpopularity as austerity bites – handing votes to those still somehow convinced that Labour is ‘on their side’. And third, civil unrest leading a decampment of some Cleggerons to the Tory hardliners.

I still feel confident there is a much bigger, fourth reason why all such speculation is fairly academic: and that involves enough of the electorate working out just how little idea anyone in government has about how to solve the UK’s approaching crisis.

Pretty soon, it will become clear that these are just more Establishment talking heads, evading issues and speaking media-speak and doing things on the sly. Stealth taxes are dead – long live stealth cuts. And so forth.

But were we not facing the wages of previous sin, the numbers suggest that in future it would be hard for any existing Party to win outright.

However, reality must intrude: the words ‘not’ and ‘existing’ are the ones about which one must harbour profound doubts.