One Year On - Is Labour’s Polling Plunge Terminal?

A year ago Labour swept to a landslide victory in the General Election, winning 411 seats and a majority of 174, while the Conservatives slumped to their worst-ever defeat, with just 121 seats. Reform UK, currently riding high in the opinion polls, won only five seats.

But the vote shares at that election, the least proportional UK election on record, tell a different story. Labour won their Parliamentary landslide with just 33.7% of the vote, the Tories were on 23.7% and Reform on 14.3%.

Since then, if you believe the polls, the vote shares of both Labour and the Conservatives have continued to fall, while Reform are now polling at or around where Labour was just a year ago – leading some pundits to suggest that Reform look to be on course for a big win next time, while Labour are already doomed to defeat.

This analysis is somewhat premature for three reasons:

1. What we can learn from history
2. The outlook for the UK economy
3. How Labour strategists are already reacting to Reform’s poll surge

First, while there is no denying that Reform’s current poll ratings are very strong, we have been here before. In 1981 the insurgents of that era, the SDP, were briefly at over 50% in the polls to Mrs Thatcher’s 23%. Yet, just two years later, with the opposition vote split between the SDP and Labour and with a boost behind her from the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher stormed to a landslide win. A similar but less exaggerated pattern that would be repeated between 2010 and 2015 when David Cameron’s Conservatives trailed Labour for most of the Parliament but swept past Ed Miliband in the final months to victory in the 2015 election.

The reality is that polls at this point in the election cycle are not much of a guide to how the next election will play out. Both the Thatcher and the Cameron governments had to do unpopular things early and Starmer’s Government is no different this time. That will naturally effect the polls in an adverse way for the ruling party.

Second, I still believe that “It’s the economy, stupid” – the phrase coined by James Carville in 1992 when he was advising Bill Clinton on his successful run for the White House – the belief that the primary concern of voters is the state of the economy. Of course many of today’s UK voters have other things on their mind, such as immigration and the NHS, but when we get to 2028 or 2029, many will be more focussed on the pound in their pocket.

For now many voters still feel scarred by the impact of inflation and high interest rates, but no one can predict with any certainty how they will be feeling in three- or four-years’ time. If interest rates continue to come down and the economy is improving, a majority of voters may not be in the mood to kick Labour out of office after just one term. It wouldn’t be unprecedented if they did, but it would be unusual.

Third, there are a lot of bright people in today’s Labour party who are clear-eyed about the scale of the challenge that Reform’s right-wing populism poses and are already working on strategies that they believe could halt Nigel Farage in his tracks. Keir Starmer is one of them, as he muses on what he describes as “a new phase for the government – a shift away from fixing inherited problems to delivering change and renewal people can feel”.

Labour have recognised early on that Reform could well be the biggest party that they will need to defeat, and they will be relentless in painting Farage as both a dangerous extremist and economically incompetent and irresponsible. They will argue that behind some superficially attractive one-liners there is little of substance and few real answers to the main challenges that the country is facing – beyond a Liz Truss-style approach to tax and spend, that could blow up in the voters’ faces.

It would be foolish to say that Labour has the next election in the bag, but just one year into the current Parliament is far too early to consign Labour to the rubbish bag of history.