ICM/Guardian poll: support for Labour drops amid criticism of Ed Miliband Labour's poll rating has dropped three percentage points on last month's, reducing its lead to the slenderest of margins over the Conservatives, according to Guardian/ICM research. The party led by the under-pressure Ed Miliband registered support of 32%, retaining a single-point advantage because the Tories have failed to improve on the dismal 31% that they recorded in October. Miliband, facing anonymous criticisms of his leadership, saw his personal ratings plunge to a record low in polling conducted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, plumbing depths that have previously been the preserve of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. But more striking than Miliband's problems is the rejection of the political class a whole. Barring two brief spells of exceptional strength for the Lib Dems and their predecessors - the first in 1985-86, the second in the general election of 2010 - the combined Labour-Conservative vote share of 63% is now lower than it has ever been in the 30-year history of the Guardian/ICM series. The combined three-party Labour-Conservative-Lib Dem score has been continually close to rock bottom in 2014, and this month - at 74% - it is close to the all-time record low set in May 2013 and June 2014. These were months when Ukip support swelled in the aftermath of electoral successes in, respectively, the county council and European elections. The Lib Dems remain stuck on 11%, once again pushed into fourth place by Ukip, which, in the runup to next week's Rochester and Strood byelection, holds on to the 14% that it scored last month. In a good month for minority parties, the Greens climb two points to 6%, while "others" also notch up 6%, which includes 4% for the combined Scottish and Welsh nationalists. For Miliband and his increasingly jittery party, things have gone from bad to worse, with 63% of those surveyed now rating him as performing badly; just 21% see him as doing well. At a time when he has been facing calls to go, this gives him a new record low net score of -42, which is three points worse than the previous record low of -39 that he scored in June. It leaves him tied with the record -42 that Clegg recently set in ICM's online conference season survey. Cameron is seen as doing a good job by 43% of respondents, compared with the 46% who rate him as doing badly, implying a net score of -3, a slight improvement on the -7 that he scored in an online ICM survey in October. Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who scored -1 in that exercise, comes out with a net +6 in the latest polling, with 44% rating him as doing well and 38% badly. ICM asked voters how settled they were in their current voting intention to establish how far voters will drift back towards their traditional affiliations and found a narrow majority of 51% saying they were now "very certain" that their mind was made up. Farage will be delighted that this certainty is much more marked among his supporters than anyone else's, with 69% of those plumping for Ukip declaring that they were now very certain. That contrasts with 49% of Labour and Conservative voters and a mere 30% of Lib Dems. Martin Boon, director of research at ICM, said this was a very interesting result and a striking contrast with what ICM had found in the runup to the last general election. Only 60% of Ukip-inclined voters in 2010 turned out for the party on the day. Now, however, nine out of 10 are saying that they are at the least quite certain to do so. Either we are witnessing the kind of rumbling that helped skew pre-2010 polls at the time of Cleggmania or we are seeing a more profound shift in the way that many disaffected voters view politics, which could work to the enduring benefit of Ukip. With the Green party as well as Ukip on the rise, the survey tested the frustration of voters as a whole with the old party system. A majority (56%) remain unconvinced that new parties will change anything, believing that they "won't make much difference, because they will still face all the same old problems." However, a substantial minority of 38% disagree, believing that "there is so little to choose between the old parties that new parties are needed to offer any real hope of change." Among Ukip supporters, this is the view taken by 68%. But there is a glimmer of hope for Labour in the changing priorities of voters when they were pressed to name the one thing politicians could do to win back their trust. In the spring, an online ICM survey found that "curbing immigration" was the most desired single step. When exactly the same question was asked in the latest telephone survey, "extra funding for the National Health Service" was revealed as considerably more important, the priority of 31% of voters, compared with just 19% who put more emphasis on curbing immigration. Labour will be pleased, too, that the salience of the minimum wage has increased - rising from fifth to third place among the various populist measures offered. Tax cuts for middle earners come in fourth, the priority for just 13%, while the Tory/Ukip preoccupation of a referendum on Britain's EU membership is the top choice of only 10%. These results echo separate polling from YouGov last week, which compared a very similar set of policy options and concluded that the NHS was the one priority that trumps the promise of reduced immigration. ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 1,002 adults aged 18+ by telephone on 7-9 November 2014.