If David Cameron expected voters to respect him for firming up his commitment to a referendum on the European Union, YouGov’s latest polling for The Times will disappoint him. Most Britons, including a majority of those who voted Conservative in 2010, think he is acting out of tactical calculation rather than because he feels deeply about the issue.

Slowly but inexorably, our gloom about our living standards has been lifting. It's not that confidence has come roaring back. Pessimists still outnumber optimists. However, increasingly, we feel that the worst is behind us.

We have a legal duty to provide protection to those who have a well-founded fear of persecution; a principle that the British public broadly supports, even if politicians and the officials who carry out their mandate don't.

Starting in the early hours of tomorrow morning, we shall be bombarded with analyses of the local election results. Are the gains and losses for each party above, below or on a par with expectations? Is Ed Miliband on course to become Prime Minister? Has UKIP overtaken the Liberal Democrats?

So the consultation is over. The relevant minister is convinced. The Liberal Democrats support a new law – indeed they were the first major party to embrace it, back in 2009. Yet the issue remains in the balance. So let me help ministers by setting out the pros and cons.

The past five years of economic troubles have left their mark. There is no obvious end to them in sight. And these troubles are reflected in people's lives, not just GDP statistics. Graduates saddled with debt and finding it hard to get a decent job; couples waiting a decade longer than their parents to buy their first home, and so on. Long-term pessimism may be misplaced, but it is not surprising.

The ten things you need to know on Sunday 21 April 2013... 1) THE TRIPLE DIP? It's been a bad week for the chancellor, with Tuesday seeing the I...

An overwhelming majority of people do not think they could live on £53 a week - but rich people are more likely than poor people to believe it is pos...

We love the idea of punishing bad behaviour by the press - but public support for the principle of underpinning this by law is more muted.

Sectarianism is there and it is still both a significant problem and a major stumbling block to moving the country forward. While this was most obviously demonstrated by the sectarian killings that dominated the local news for so long, it was also clearly evident when we analysed the key drivers for Iraqi's voting preference.

All the main parties are nervous about the politics of immigration, and figures in YouGov's latest poll for the Sunday Times suggest why. Few of us think that immigrants generally play a positive role in British life. The incessant, and often badly-informed stories, year after year, about crimes committed by black offenders, migrant families who 'jump the housing list' and 'welfare tourists' who come here to hoover up generous benefits - they have taken their toll.

The Al Qaeda movement doubtless remains lethal, virulent and wholly requiring of the coordinated international response that just prevented Mali from collapse and subjugation. But it is also being incrementally pushed into an age more like the 1990s...

The build up to the big speech and the speech itself mark part two of one of the biggest political debates in modern political history.

It may be an unfashionable take given trust in our parliament fell to new depths in 2012, with less than a quarter of people tending to trust the UK parliament to make important decisions, but politics does a lot of very important things- and therefore so do MPs.

For the first time in the current parliament, more people would vote for Britain to stay in the European Union than to leave.

We have found that Ukip’s support is significantly higher when people are asked for their EP vote than when they are asked how they would vote in a general election.

As governments down the years have discovered, welfare is a political minefield. Most people think they pay more into the government’s welfare pot through taxes than they draw out in benefits.

David Cameron got an apparent boost for the 'cake and eat it' approach to Europe last week, when finance ministers of the European Union (EU) agreed on the terms of an embryonic Eurozone Banking Union.

Interpreting public opinion on immigration can be a tricky business. Knowing what POLICIES the public want is straightforward enough; the tough bit is making sense of the POLITICAL IMPACT of the issue.

As far as the big picture is concerned, public reaction this year to Britain's continuing economic troubles has been remarkably static. 2012 has been groundhog year.

A majority, 52%, think MPs should NOT 'have a say in the system of press regulation', as this 'threatens the principles of a free press'. 31% disagree. In other words, the centre of gravity of public opinion is for a new law to ensure that press regulation works - but for the regulation system itself to be designed and managed away from Parliament.

The British public overwhelmingly want to see state-backed regulation of the press. Also, the public do not want to see state-backed regulation of the...

There's a perceptible preference in British public attitudes for a return of sovereignty on questions of human rights, and a significant consensus that believes the European Court of Human Rights does less to protect Britain's interests and more to protect its criminals.

Letting go and giving stakeholders a louder say in how things are run is now - paradoxically - a core component of staying in control for many large organisations, whether capitalist or communist, or a fashionably modern mixture of both.