Labour and the Tories need to revive their core values

Targeting "Mondeo man", "soccer mums" and "Waitrose women" is no longer their most vital task

In my last post (you can read it here) I reported new data that should terrify both Labour and Conservative enthusiasts. Not only are both bumping along with their lowest ratings that polls have ever recorded; many of their remaining supporters are worryingly lukewarm.

(The genesis of the project that produced these findings was a discussion over coffee with David Aaronovitch. His take on the results can be read here)

This post explores that issue further. At last year’s election, the combined support for Labour and the Tories was 59 per cent – easily the lowest since Labour overtook the Liberals a century ago. In January this year the total dipped below 50 per cent. For the past three months it has hovered around 40 per cent. Have we entered an era in which voters behave like footloose consumers? Are we concerned less with each party’s values than how it would score if Which? magazine was looking for a “best buy”?

Here is data that throw light on this. They suggest that values and the policies that flow from them still matter. They help to explain the rise of Reform UK and the Greens, and to some extent the revival of the Liberal Democrats. Labour and the Tories are suffering precisely because they now fight elections as consumer campaigns – and fail. They are no longer considered “best buys”.

This is what I did. I selected ten questions that pollsters have asked since last year’s election about controversies at the heart of politics, and logged the views of supporters of each of the five Britain-wide parties. (Details of the questions asked and links to the full results are at the end of this post. Many other results from a range of different pollsters are available, but I have found none that contradict the lessons to be drawn from any of the figures I have analysed.)

The chart below summarises the findings, it shows where supporters of each party stand on each issue on a scale of “left” to “right”. I use quotation marks to indicate the tenor of today’s general arguments, not a rigid, permanent ideological stance. For example, the positive case for immigration is generally heard on the left, while politicians who oppose it are mainly on the right. In the chart below, I draw on an Opinium survey which asked respondents whether they thought immigration into Britain is “generally beneficial” to society (the “left” stance) or “generally a burden” (the view from the “right”).

To take voters at the opposite ends of the spectrum, Green supporters side with the “beneficial” view by 55-27 per cent, a net “left” score of 28, while Reform supporters divide 78-3 per cent for immigrants being more of a burden – net “right” score 75. In between are Labour supporters (net “left” 10), Lib Dems (net “left” 9) and Conservatives (net “right” 46). The chart shows these net scores. And so on for each of the ten issues.

Here are some lessons from those findings.

1. Britain’s voters still divide between broadly “left” and broadly “right”. On most issues, the gap between the left and right camps is wider than the range of views within the two camps.

2. On nine of the ten issues, Green voters are the most left-wing; on seven of the ten, Reform voters are the most right-wing (and on five of the issues, most notably attitudes to nationalism, well to the right of Conservative voters)

3. There is little evidence to support the view that Reform voters are culturally on the right but ideologically on the left. On tax-and-spend, social care, socialism and capitalism, they are to the right of Tory voters; on welfare benefits there is little to choose between them.

One possible wrinkle in this analysis is the way many voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands now vote reform. It’s this shift that has fed the suggestion that many Reform voters are ideologically left-of-centre. There is no sign of this in the chart above. Rather, switching party seems to be a lagging indicator. It is the end of the journey for these Labour-to-Reform voters. Ideologically, they have been moving right for some years. They stayed Labour for a time out of habit. But their traditional allegiance weakened and eventually they moved away. Hence the absence of any clear evidence today that Reform’s voters tilt left, and the futility of Labour building its electoral strategy on trying to win them back.

The big takeaway from all this is that values and policies do correlate with party allegiance, often strongly. Yet this is NOT what most Labour and Conservatives say when asked for the most important reason for their choice of party. In case any readers do not instantly recall the chart in my last post, here it is again:

There seems to be a contradiction between the two charts. The first demonstrates the strong links between parties’ policies and their supporters’ values. The second suggests that for the three parties with the most MPs, these links are not strong at all. What is going on?

Let’s start with the current standings of the parties. A “poll of polls” gives the current state of play:

Reform 31 per cent, Conservative 17. Total right-of-centre 48

Labour 22, Lib Dem 14, Green 9. Total left-of-centre 45.

The left and right totals are well within the range of the last five general elections: right 45 per cent, left 48, both plus or minus six. It’s not that there has been a vast change, let alone a collapse, in the overall relationship between left-versus-right opinions and left-versus-right votes. It is that many voters have defected from the old duopoly to other parties on the same side of the left-right divide – and a high proportion of those who have not defected are lukewarm about staying. These defectors and weak loyalists have not turned into apolitical consumers; they retain their views of the kind of society they want, but fear the party they used to support has lost its bearings.

Does all this mean that the old Labour-Tory duopoly has gone for good? Not necessarily. The broad contours of the left-versus-right argument have not disappeared. Among other things, this should inform the ways that parties campaign. The concept of the consumerist target voter in the middle of the spectrum – Mondeo man, soccer mum or whatever – made sense in the past when most voters had firm loyalties and the battle was decided by the minority who didn’t. That view is out of date. To be sure, there will always be voters who shop around. But the larger and more immediate task for both Labour and the Tories is different. It is to rebuild their base.

In some ways this should be an easier task for the Conservatives. As an opposition party unencumbered by the burden of running the country, they have more freedom to do fresh thinking and develop new policies. They also have an obvious target: voters who have drifted to Reform. Can they win back the voters they have lost without collapsing into civil war? We shall see.

Labour has the trickier task. It is hemmed in by weak public finances. It also has five rivals for the progressive vote: Greens, Lib Dems, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales.

A Labour optimist would point to year one successes: extra money for the NHS, a jump in the Minimum Wage, more free school meals, plans to build more homes and improve Britain’s infrastructure, a windfall tax on energy companies and so on. Voters remain unpersuaded. Nor have they been impressed by Labour’s five “missions”, six “milestones” or six “first steps”. Your starter for ten: name them.

It’s not that lists of promises or achievements can’t work. They can – if they come together as a memorable menu of progressive change. Instead, Labour has served up an unconvincing diet of reassurance, telling us what it won’t do: raise income tax, National Insurance or VAT, restore freedom of movement, rejoin the EU’s Single Market or Customs Union, or offend Donald Trump. We can debate the rights and wrongs of each of these things. The point is that when ministers take decisions that disappoint their base, they need to work harder to assert their progressive credentials.

Unfortunately, ministers seem to spend more time suppressing those credentials. They impose savage cuts to international development, retain a harsh rhetoric on immigration, and crash their welfare strategy, from winter fuel payments to disability support. In retrospect, both welfare U-turns were probably inevitable, but they showed us a government cowering in fear, not marching confidently towards a progressive future. No wonder that some left-of-centre voters find solace in the Greens, Liberal Democrats or Corbyn’s new party – while others reluctantly stay with Labour for now, grumbling that it isn’t great, merely that it is better than the alternatives.

Shortly after last year’s election I cited a poem from the 1920s by Roy Campbell about the Bloomsbury Group. He contrasted its radicalism towards life, love and art with its timidity towards politics. As ministers contemplate a difficult autumn, they could do worse than frame Campbell’s poem and put it on their desks:

You praise the firm restraint with which they write —
I'm with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?

Sources:

Immigration

“Left”: Immigration is generally beneficial for society

“Right” Immigration is generally a burden on society

https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/opinium-voting-intention-14th-may-2025/

Ideologies

Socialism: “Left”: favourable; “Right” unfavourable

Capitalism, nationalism: “Left”: unfavourable; “Right” favourable

https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Internal_Ideology_Favourability_240829.pdf

Climate change

“Left”: Government should do more, even if some cost or inconvenience to ordinary people in short term

“Right”: Government should NOT do more if this means cost or inconvenience to ordinary people

Death penalty

“Left”: should not be introduced, even for the most serious crime

“Right”: should be reintroduced for the most serious crimes

Links to EU

“Left”: Favour closer links, even if UK must give up right to set some rules

“Right”: Not have closer links, even if this means some cost to UK economy

Tax v spend

“Left”: Current priority more investment in public service, even if this means higher taxes;

“Right”: Current priority cutting taxes, even if this means cutting spending on public services https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Persuasion_ReformCurious_March2025_Tables_UK_W_OOruNyk.pdf

Social care:

“Left”: Government should spend more on social care benefits

“Right”: Government should spend the same as now or less

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52312-where-do-britons-stand-on-tax-and-spending-ahead-of-the-2025-spending-review

Welfare benefits

“Left”: The main problem is people in need not getting enough

“Right”: The main problem is people receiving more help than they need

https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/opinium-voting-intention-27th-november-2024/