It is clear that Andy Burnham is popular. With a net approval rating of +11, he is by a decent margin the most popular party leader currently going, above Kemi Badenoch on -4, Ed Davey on -6, Zack Polanski on -24 and Nigel Farage on -28.

But the bigger news is what Burnham’s arrival has done to the Labour Party itself. Labour, which was polling at around 20% or below in early July, is now on 27% and has led in our last three polls. That is its best polling performance since early last year.

Why has Burnham’s popularity translated into Labour votes when Badenoch’s improving ratings have not yet produced the same movement for the Conservatives? One simple answer is speed. Burnham has changed how voters see Labour so dramatically, and so quickly, that they cannot help but notice themselves reassessing the party.

Every couple of months at Opinium, we ask voters whether ten positive statements applies to Labour and the Conservatives. When a party is in opposition, we also ask whether it is ready for government.

Across these measures, Labour has experienced an extraordinary improvement between the end of June and the middle of August. Its average net score has risen from -31 to -9, a shift of more than 20 points in less than two months.

That does not mean all the damage of the Starmer premiership has disappeared. Labour remains around 16 points below where it was during the 2024 general election campaign. Plenty of people still think worse of the party now than they did when it first took office.

But, in a nutshell, Andy Burnham has already undone roughly half the damage done to Labour’s reputation during Starmer’s time in office.

This recovery is being driven slightly more by negativity falling away than by positive sentiment increasing, but not wholly so. Agreement with the positive statements has risen by around 9 points, while disagreement has generally fallen by 13. Burnham is primarily taking the toxicity out of the Labour brand, but he is also actively increasing the number of people who see the party positively. Both matter.

The biggest change concerns party unity. Before Burnham took over, Labour’s net score on being united rather than divided stood at -49. That is comparable with how divided voters thought the Conservatives were during the most tumultuous periods of Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

Within a handful of weeks, Labour’s score has improved to -12: a colossal 37-point shift.

To an extent, this is what happens when an unpopular leader goes. A party that has spent months tearing itself apart over whether to remove its leader will inevitably look more united once that argument is over. Burnham is also enjoying a honeymoon period and, by the time of our polling, had faced very little serious internal pushback.

Nonetheless, the change is real and extraordinarily apparent to voters. The fighting, the division and the endless argument over Starmer’s future have gone. For now, Labour looks (reasonably) united behind its prime minister.

Two other changes also stand out. Labour’s net score for “knows what it stands for” has risen by 24 points, from -30 to -6. Its score for having “a clear sense of purpose” has also improved by 24 points, from -33 to -9.

Burnham looks like he has arrived with a mission. He appears to have something to say, something he wants to do and a clear idea of where he wants to go. The party appears to be lining up behind him, and voters can see it. The difference between the government now and only a couple of months ago is remarkable.

This helps explain the contrast with Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party. Perceptions of both her and her party have improved, but they have done so gradually. The negativity is slowly leaving the Conservative brand, yet the movement has been subtle enough that voters may not consciously recognise their own changing attitudes, and accordingly haven’t got round to asking themselves whether they will reconsider voting for the party.

With Labour, the change went “bam” almost overnight. A new prime minister, seemingly totally detached from the previous government, has seized the agenda and made a shedload of big announcements that force voters to reassess Labour’s leadership, purpose and direction.

The public do not just think that Burnham has seized the agenda; they can see that everyone else thinks so too. The shift has been large and fast enough to become something everyone just knows, changing not only how voters view Labour but how they think everyone else views the party too. Perhaps it would be more surprising if their stated voting behaviour did not move accordingly.

Subscribe now

See the latest data in full here.

The fallout over the Defence Investment Plan has brought defence spending to the top of Andy Burnham's in-tray, exposing tensions between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury. In his resignation letter, John Healey stated that “the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” Now he is the chancellor the exchequer.

The row has largely been framed as a dispute over money. But if the public already supports higher defence spending, why has the government struggled to act so far?

A majority of the public (55%) believe the UK currently spends too little on defence, compared with just 13% who think defence spending is too high. Defence ranks behind only the NHS as a spending priority, ahead of education, pensions and infrastructure. This is not a marginal position and reflects a broad shift in how voters think about security.

Confidence in Britain’s preparedness for a major military conflict is low, with just over half (51%) saying we are badly prepared for a conflict. Despite this, government research indicates that the level of hostile activity has risen by over 50% in the last year alone, and ministers like Al Carns have repeatedly warned that “the shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door.”

Voters are not ignoring the problem. The risks have increased, and the UK is not ready to combat them.

This stance extends beyond traditional warfare. Over three in five (62%) are concerned about foreign or external actors attempting to influence public opinion or political discussions in the UK. Just 7% think that traditional military threats, such as armed conflict involving military forces, are a greater threat to the UK’s security, whilst 27% think that non-military threats, such as cyberattacks, misinformation campaigns or foreign interference are a greater threat. This is particularly striking given recent investigations evidencing Russian intelligence involvement in attacks such as the attempted arson attacks on Starmer-linked property, alongside broader efforts to sow division through fake online networks.

This is indicative of how people now understand conflict; it extends past the battlefield alone. It now accounts for information warfare, threats to infrastructure, and economic disruption. Indeed, when we asked voters what the priorities of the Defence Investment Plan should be, the most popular answer was cyber security and AI capabilities, followed by drones and autonomous systems, highlighting broader concerns about hybrid warfare.

The question is, then, why broad public support has not translated into a stronger political consensus or action around increasing defence spending.

The reality is that public support for any policy weakens when the focus shifts from principle to the trade-offs required to deliver it. Only 13% support higher taxes to fund increased defence spending, and 6% support borrowing more.

The most popular option is to fund the increase through lower spending on welfare and benefits, which 27% of people select. This drops to 18% and 10% amongst Labour and Green intenders, respectively.

Labour voters most commonly believe that reduced spending in other areas of government should fund the increase, although there is no consensus on specifically which areas should be reduced. This ambiguity matters – voters support the principle of increased defence spending, but their preferred trade-offs are unclear or politically difficult. Cutting welfare risks alienating Labour’s core voters, whilst alternative funding routes lack clarity, and have led to a stalemate on the issue of increased defence spending.

For the government, this becomes a communication problem as much as a fiscal one. Voters do not oppose higher defence spending in principle but are less certain about the trade-offs required to deliver it. Without a clear explanation, defence risks being seen as simply another pressure on public finances.

This is partly because defence spending is often discussed in narrow budgetary terms, reduced to trade-offs between welfare and other budgets. In practice, meeting the 3.5% commitment would require far more than isolated cuts to welfare.

The government, therefore, needs to make the case not simply for spending more, but for what that investment will deliver. Voters are unlikely to be persuaded to make trade-offs based on GDP targets or abstract claims about national security alone. The case must be made in tangible terms: safer personal financial and healthcare data, more reliable public services and energy supplies, fewer disruptions to food and fuel through global shipping routes, and greater protection from foreign actors seeking to inflame tensions and stoke disorder within our communities.

Indeed, our recent polling suggests that voters are receptive when defence spending is presented concretely: 32% believe the additional £15 billion in defence investment pledged in the recent Defence Investment Plan was about the right amount, with 24% believing it was too little, and just 18% believing it is too high.

However, the challenge reappears when the focus shifts back to delivery and trade-offs, with opinion being highly divided over the decision to cancel road and energy infrastructure projects to fund the plan, with 44% saying this is the wrong approach and 33% saying it is the right approach. This reinforces the pattern; support for increased defence spending is straightforward in isolation but becomes murky when voters are asked to confront the practical consequences and competing priorities involved.

The public has already accepted that Britain faces a more dangerous world. The challenge for Andy Burnham and John Healey is persuading voters that the costs of preparing are worth paying for.

Since Andy Burnham’s path to Downing Street began to look increasingly clear, Westminster has turned to what a Burnham government would actually look like. Who would fill the great offices of state? Above all, who would he choose as chancellor?

Much of the case for Burnham rests on the idea that he is Labour’s best hope of seeing off Reform UK, cemented by his success in the Makerfield by-election. But how the former Mayor of Greater Manchester will do that across the country is far from straightforward.

At May’s local elections, Labour’s vote halved all over the country, with support leaking to Reform in some places and the Greens in others. Any future Labour leader therefore faces a strategic choice about where to prioritise rebuilding.

That’s why Burnham’s choice of chancellor will matter.

Who serves as chancellor is not just an economic statement of intent, but a political one. It is the first unmistakable sign of what Burnham the prime minister believes Labour’s electoral coalition should look like.

Polling from Opinium suggests that, in Burnham’s case, voters would read exactly that into his decision.

There has been plenty of speculation that Burnham could turn to Wes Streeting or Ed Miliband. You can make an electoral case for both, but they also send very different political messages.

Among the public as a whole, Streeting comes with less baggage: 27% of UK adults say he would be an acceptable chancellor under a Burnham government, compared with 34% who say he would be unacceptable. Miliband performs worse: just 24% would find him acceptable, while 43% would find him unacceptable.

The starting point is simple. Ed Miliband is a harder political sell to the wider electorate than Wes Streeting. But that’s not the whole story.

The fractured electorate leaves Burnham with three different audiences to think about: Labour’s surviving voters, those currently intending to vote Reform and those intending to vote Green.

Among Labour’s current voters, both men perform well: 51% of current Labour voters say Miliband would be an acceptable chancellor, against 26% who would find him unacceptable. Streeting also enjoys comfortably positive numbers among Labour’s remaining coalition (45% acceptable, 28% unacceptable).

If Burnham’s task were simply to keep the one in five people still prepared to vote Labour happy, he could plausibly choose either. But it isn’t.

His real decision is which former Labour voters he wants to win back. That’s where the polling is particularly revealing.

If Burnham believes Labour’s route back to power lies in appealing to voters who have moved towards Reform, Ed Miliband becomes an extraordinarily difficult appointment to justify. Among Reform voters, 61% say Miliband would be an unacceptable chancellor, with just 15% saying he would be acceptable.

Streeting performs better by comparison: 25% of Reform voters say they would find him acceptable, against 42% who would not. Those aren’t spectacular numbers, but no potential Labour chancellor performs especially well among Reform supporters. Relative to the alternatives, Streeting is comfortably Burnham’s strongest option. Indeed, across the ten names tested by Opinium, he records the highest acceptability rating among Reform voters.

But politics always involves trade-offs.

Because if Burnham instead concludes that Labour’s future depends on rebuilding its progressive coalition – winning back Green defectors rather than Reform ones – the picture flips almost entirely.

Among Green voters, Miliband is comfortably the strongest choice: 36% say they would find him an acceptable chancellor, against just 26% who would not. Streeting, by contrast, performs particularly poorly, recording the highest unacceptability rating among Green voters of any of the potential chancellors we tested (39%).

His choice of chancellor isn’t simply a choice between personalities. It’s a choice between electoral strategies.

Choosing Streeting would signal that Burnham believes Labour’s path back to office runs through the parts of the political map coloured turquoise. Choosing Miliband would suggest he has reached a different conclusion: that Labour should instead rebuild the progressive coalition that has fragmented under Starmer’s leadership, even if that means deprioritising defectors to Reform.

Both carry risks. But what Burnham probably cannot do is convince both groups simultaneously.

Labour’s recent electoral difficulties are so painful because the coalition fractured in several directions. Reassembling at least some of it means making choices, not pretending those choices don’t exist.

If Andy Burnham walks through the door of Number 10, the first person he invites next door to Number 11 won’t simply be running the Treasury.

They’ll be telling many former Labour voters which of them the party has decided it wants back.

Subscribe now

See the full data tables here.

Nigel Farage has resigned as an MP to fight a by-election in Clacton, amid renewed scrutiny of his finances. That makes this a useful moment to look back across nearly two years of polling and ask a simple question: what actually moves Reform UK’s numbers, and what moves Farage’s?

The answer is not quite the same thing.

It is hard to imagine Reform having the impact it has had without Farage. He is still the party’s most recognisable figure, its chief communicator, and the person most voters associate with it. But the polling since the 2024 general election suggests that Reform’s support can now be partly detached from Farage’s personal ratings.

All other parties should take note of this.

There are periods where Farage gets hit personally, but Reform’s vote share holds up. There are periods where Reform rises because of structural political forces rather than anything especially positive about Farage himself. And there are periods where the two move together, especially when Reform looks like it is winning.

The biggest driver of Reform’s rise has been the perception that it is the future party of the right. At first, that meant becoming the obvious home for right-of-centre protest voters after the Conservatives’ defeat and Labour’s dismal first months in office. Then it became something bigger: the idea that Reform could replace the Conservatives altogether. Eventually, after the 2025 local elections, it became the idea that Reform might not just be the future party of the right, but the future party of government.

That matters because success begets success.

Every defection, every local election win, every by-election breakthrough, every story asking whether Reform could win power made it easier for voters to see Reform as a viable choice. The party’s polling strength then became part of the reason for its polling strength.

The other major factor is issue ownership. On immigration, asylum, small boats and a broader set of cultural issues, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have found an easy way to rebuild credibility with the voters most attracted to Reform. That gives Reform a chunk of support which looks stickier than a normal protest vote. These voters are not simply parking their vote with Reform because they are annoyed (although they very much are!). Many appear to think Reform is closer to them on the issues that matter most, the same way people might back Labour on the NHS or the Conservatives on tax, for example. Many of these voters are now ‘Reform people’.

But Reform is not impervious to bad headlines.

The party’s vulnerabilities are clearer now than they were a year ago. The first is competence. Once Reform started winning councils and being talked about as a party of government, it was no longer judged simply as an insurgent party. It was judged on whether it could run things. Stories about council finances, candidate vetting, suspensions, local rows and internal discipline all matter more once voters are being asked to imagine Reform in power.

That seems to align with why Reform has lost a quarter of the votes it had at its peak. That is where Reform’s polling as a party can be hit first. Maybe it is not the future party of government after all.

Farage’s vulnerabilities are slightly different. The stories that seem to hurt him most personally are those that raise questions about judgement, integrity or leadership. Financial controversies actually do appear damaging, as we are seeing. So too do stories that place him personally in the orbit of Trump, Putin, Ukraine or the United States. Those stories do not necessarily undermine Reform’s core issue appeal, but they can make Farage himself less popular.

This distinction matters. The Rupert Lowe fallout in March 2025 seemed to damage Farage’s personal ratings more than Reform’s vote share. The current finance stories appear to be doing the same. Reform voters may still like what the party stands for, even if some become less enthusiastic about Farage himself.

The bigger danger for Reform is when personal damage to Farage combines with political damage to the party.

That may be what we are beginning to see now. Reform’s latest voting intention figure with Opinium is back down at 26%, its joint lowest since before the 2025 local elections, while the Conservatives have reached 19%, their best vote share since before those same elections. Farage’s net approval has also fallen to its lowest point of this parliament.

This does not mean Reform is going to collapse overnight. It still has a large base, a strong position on its core issues, and benefits from a fragmented party system. But it does suggest Reform is not having it all its own way.

The phrase that keeps coming back is success begets success. So it seems, defeat begets defeat too.

The 2025 local elections gave Reform a huge boost because they proved the party could win for the first time. The 2026 local elections gave it a smaller boost because they confirmed rather than transformed its position. But the Gordon and Denton by-election loss, and then the Makerfield by-election loss, mattered because they punctured the sense of inevitability.

If Reform looks like the coming force, it benefits. If it starts to look beatable, that benefit weakens.

For now, the big question is whether the Conservatives can take advantage. Labour’s attacks on Reform often focus on the things Labour dislikes most about Farage, but often it’s not the language that persuades Reform voters. The Conservatives are the more obvious place for Reform defectors to go back to, if they can give voters a reason to believe they are recovering and are in fact the next government-in-waiting.

That is why the current moment matters.

Farage is personally under more pressure than at any point since the general election. Reform’s polling has softened. The Conservatives are showing the (very early) signs that they can fight back on vote share and not just on Kemi Badenoch’s approval ratings. But Reform still has the central advantage it has built over the last two years: many voters see it as the party that speaks for them on the issues where the old parties have failed.

So the question is not simply whether Farage survives this row. It is whether voters begin to apply Farage’s personal weaknesses to Reform as a party. If they do, Reform’s polling problems could deepen, and that could snowball. If they do not, Reform might even see Farage as replaceable.

That has been the story of the parliament so far. Reform is not just Farage. But Farage still matters, for now.

Subscribe now

Appendix: the key phases of Reform UK and Nigel Farage’s polling

1. The first positive period up to January 2025

Polling summary: Reform slowly saw its polling numbers rise after the 2024 general election, first overtaking the Conservatives in Opinium’s 8–10 January 2025 poll. Farage’s own ratings also improved, rising from an early-parliament low of net approval -19 in August 2024 to -7 by 22–24 January 2025.

This was the first phase where Reform began to look like more than a general election protest vote. Labour was struggling with early negative stories, the Conservatives were leaderless for part of the period, and Reform did a strong job of capturing unhappy voters on the right.

The key story was the fulfilment of a prophecy that had lingered since the election: could Reform replace the Conservatives? Councillor defections, claims of rapidly expanding membership and growing media attention all helped make Reform look like the coming party of the right.

Farage also tried to lean into the idea that Reform was becoming a serious professional political party. Giving up ownership of Reform, giving members more control and promising more rigorous vetting all mattered because they addressed the obvious criticism that Reform was merely a personal vehicle.

2. Reform as Labour’s main challenger before the 2025 local elections

Polling summary: Between 22–24 January and 23–25 April 2025, Reform stayed in the mid-twenties, around 26–27%, just behind Labour by one or two points. The Conservatives were stuck lower, around 20–22%. But Farage personally lost popularity, falling from -7 in early February to around -16/-17 by spring.

This is where the Reform/Farage distinction becomes important. Reform’s success became self-fulfilling: Labour warned more about the Reform threat, the party prepared a major local election campaign, and Conservative panic helped keep Reform’s polling in place.

But Farage himself had a rougher period. The Rupert Lowe fallout in March 2025 appears to have hit Farage’s leadership ratings more than Reform’s vote share. It raised questions about discipline, loyalty and Farage’s management of the party.

Ukraine also mattered more for Farage than Reform. Farage tried to avoid simply echoing Trump’s criticism of Zelensky, but the debate still revived older stories about his foreign policy instincts and proximity to Trump/Putin-adjacent politics. That created personal vulnerability for Farage, but it didn’t quite have the same blowback for the party as a whole.

3. The 2025 local elections and Reform’s summer high

Polling summary: Reform overtook Labour in the 30 April–2 May 2025 poll, 27% to 26%, then opened up a clearer lead during May, reaching 31% against Labour’s 25% by 28–30 May. Reform later hit peaks of 32% in July, 34% in early October and 33% in early November. Farage also bounced to around -6 in May and again reached similar highs in late summer.

The May local elections were a massive boon to both party and leader. Reform made major gains, won Runcorn and Helsby, took control of councils including Kent and Durham, and benefited from commentary suggesting Farage as prime minister was no longer a wild notion.

The summer then reinforced the story. There was a steady flow of Conservative-to-Reform defections, including Jake Berry, Nadine Dorries and Danny Kruger. Reform looked like it was preparing for government: running councils, making major policy announcements, and holding a conference focused on governing.

Labour’s problems also mattered. Angela Rayner’s resignation during Reform conference was a gift to Reform (if a little disruptive to their conference), and Labour’s attacks at their own conference did little to dent Reform.

Smaller rows, including Zia Yusuf’s resignation and return earlier on in the summer, did not seem to seriously damage Reform. Immigration, asylum, ECHR and deportations remained the politics that mattered most.

4. Reform plateaus, then declines before the 2026 local elections

Polling summary: Reform was consistently around 31% from November 2025 to February 2026. It then began to fall, hitting 26% on 15–17 April before recovering slightly to 28% on 6–8 May. Farage’s ratings also declined from around -10 in November to -21 in mid-April, before a small pre-election bounce to -17.

Reform still had positive stories, especially continued Conservative defections such as Nadhim Zahawi, Andrew Rosindell and Suella Braverman. But by this point the benefits were more limited. The “Conservative collapse” story had already been priced in, and some defectors brought baggage of their own.

The negative story for the party was twofold. First, Reform was now under scrutiny as a potential governing party. Coverage increasingly focused on whether it could run councils, manage finances and vet candidates. That hit Reform as a party because it challenged its claim to competence and being a potential party of government.

Second, Farage personally faced more financial and ethics scrutiny, including stories around Bitcoin, declarations and donor questions. His own interventions also sometimes appeared unpopular, such as the Ipswich Town row.

This is also where defeat begets defeat. The Gordon and Denton by-election loss pierced Reform's sense of invulnerability. It also coincided with Donald Trump's strikes on Iran, which shifted attention back to foreign affairs. During a period of intense criticism of Trump, Reform's increasingly pro-US positioning may have made Farage's long-standing association with Trump more politically salient, with negative perceptions appearing to rub off on the party itself for the first time, rather than just on Farage personally.

5. Challenging circumstances since the 2026 local elections

Polling summary: Reform did receive a post-local election boost, rising to 29% on 3–5 June, but this was much smaller than the post-2025 boost. It has since fallen back to 26%, its joint lowest since before the 2025 local elections. The Conservatives, meanwhile, reached 19% in early July, their best Opinium figure since before the 2025 locals. Farage’s personal rating hit a new low of -23 on 24–26 June.

Reform’s local election performance was still strong enough to generate a bounce. The party came through another set of elections as a major force, while both Labour and the Conservatives continued to look vulnerable. Reform also continued to dominate immigration and cultural issues, including on social housing, policing and foreign worker policies.

But the Makerfield by-election appears to have unwound much of that benefit. It was a high-profile defeat, and the campaign itself was not good for Reform. Combined with a good Conservative performance in Aberdeen South, it weakened the idea that Reform’s rise was inevitable.

Then Farage became the dominant story. The £5 million gift, standards investigations, undeclared benefits, outside earnings and renewed questions about his finances all came together. Farage has now resigned as MP for Clacton and says he will recontest the seat, while denying wrongdoing.

That is the current test: whether Farage’s personal problems remain mostly personal, or whether voters start applying them to Reform as a party.

See the full data at opinium.com

Generative AI tools are getting more powerful by the week, and they’re now a routine part of how content is created online. What started as a novelty – funny pictures of politicians, selfies transformed into faux oil paintings – has evolved into darker territory. One of the most sensitive developments is the ability to generate sexual images of real people, so-called ‘undressing’, without their consent. The practice raises questions that straddle long-standing concerns over image-based abuse, as well as debates surrounding AI governance and the age-old question of freedom of expression.

Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, generated an estimated three million sexualised images in just 100 days, including 23,000 images of children. Cases like these have pushed the issue of AI-based sexual abuse firmly onto policymakers’ desks.

On the flip side, some policymakers, tech execs and free-speech advocates warn that heavy-handed rules on the regulation of AI could become a trojan horse for censorship, risking people’s freedom of expression. US lawmakers, for example, have criticised the EU’s content moderation laws for threatening free speech norms, warning that they might dampen innovation or inadvertently suppress lawful content in the name of safety.

In the UK, it is illegal to create sexual images of someone using AI without their consent. The Online Safety Act, however, does not permit Ofcom to investigate xAI, prompting questions about what more needs to be done to close the gaps between existing legislation and fast-moving new technology. With this backdrop, we polled the public to see how they think this issue should be handled: does the legislation go far enough, who should be responsible for preventing harm, and where should the line sit between protection and personal freedom?

A rare consensus

The public response is strikingly clear. Nearly three quarters (73%) of UK adults approve of making the creation of non-consensual AI sexual images illegal, with 10% unsure and 6% disapproving. And despite the zeitgeist being one of polarisation, views here barely fractured along party lines. Support for the policy spans the political spectrum, even if slightly softer amongst those intending to vote Reform in the next election.

When asked if the legislation goes far enough, nearly half (44%) of people said that it strikes the right balance, whilst 34% believed it doesn’t go far enough, 17% were not sure, and just 6% said it went too far.

Appetite for action

When turning to specific policy tools, there was a clear appetite for intervention. Around seven in ten people backed measures that would place firmer obligations on tech companies and regulators: 72% support requiring tech and social media companies to introduce stronger safeguards to stop illegal or harmful AI-generated content, whilst 75% endorse minimum safety standards for AI tools before their release. Similar numbers endorse giving regulators greater power to investigate and fine companies breaking the law (71%) and introducing mandatory education in schools about the risks (70%). Even a blanket ban on creating any sexual content using AI – whether consensual or not – attracts 70% support. By contrast, just 17% of people supported a more hands-off model whereby companies set most of their own rules without government involvement.

Safety or freedom?

At the heart of these questions lie bigger tensions shaping the debate over AI governance. Two thirds (66%) of people say that AI-generated content poses significant risks that require tight regulation, whilst just 10% say these concerns are overstated, and strict regulation unnecessary. A similar proportion (69%) favour introducing stronger rules now rather than waiting to see how the technology develops (10%).

When framed as a direct trade-off, 66% say regulation is necessary to protect people from harm, compared with just 12% who say that regulating AI-generated content risks restricting personal freedoms. Transparency also commands broad backing, with 73% supporting mandatory labelling of AI-generated content, and just 9% viewing it as unnecessary.

Where the blame lies

Responsibility, however, is more contested. Nearly half (46%) say that companies developing AI tools should be legally responsible for misuse, compared with 19% who place the burden primarily on individuals. Asked more broadly who should take the lead in preventing harms, two fifths point to technology companies (40%), one in five (19%) say national governments, one in ten (11%) say social media companies, and just 4% say it should be families and individuals.

Taken together, these findings capture the wider balancing act now underway. The debate is bigger than one law, one platform, or one LLM. It’s about where the line is drawn between freedom of expression and protecting people from harm; between allowing exponential innovation and intervening before things go wrong; between blaming bad individuals and blaming a broader system design. Add in the fact that AI systems are global whilst laws are local, and it’s hardly straightforward. But the mood in the polling is clear. Faced with real harms, people lean toward putting rules in place.

See the full data tables on Opinium’s website here.

During the middle of the Makerfield by-election campaign, Opinium conducted a poll in partnership with Forward Democracy between 3rd and 11th June. At the time, we found Andy Burnham was the most likely winner of the contest, with Labour on 46%, Reform UK on 41%, and Restore Britain on 7%.

What the polling suggested was that Burnham was doing a very good job of consolidating the anti-Reform vote. Voters who had backed third, fourth or fifth parties at the 2024 General Election appeared to be breaking heavily towards Labour in the by-election.

However, the polling also suggested this was largely offsetting Labour losses to Reform UK. In other words, Labour’s vote share appeared relatively flat not because Labour was holding every voter it won in 2024, but because Burnham was replacing some of those losses with tactical support from voters who had previously backed other parties.

Now that we have the final result, it is clear Burnham did much better than that. Not only was he successful in hoovering up tactical votes from across the political spectrum, he also appears to have stemmed much of the Labour-to-Reform switching that many expected to be a key element of the contest and actually brought many dissatisfied Labour voters who stayed home in 2024 back to the polling stations.

As part of our post-election analysis, we wanted to go a little further and look under the bonnet. By breaking the poll down into individual groups or cells of vote switchers, we can get a better understanding of what was actually happening during the campaign and what ultimately drove the final result. It can also help us think about how to interpret polling in similar contests in future.

What the poll showed

Before diving in, there are two important caveats.

First, all polling comes with margins of error, and once you start splitting a sample into smaller groups those margins become relatively larger. Second, turnout is one of the hardest things for polls to measure accurately. Some people who tell pollsters they will vote ultimately do not, while some people who say they voted last time in fact did not.

For those reasons, the analysis below should be viewed as indicative rather than definitive. Its value lies in helping us understand the broad dynamics of the race rather than providing an exact account of every vote cast, although it does attempt to model what may have happened.

The table below shows how different groups of 2024 voters told us they intended to vote in the 2026 by-election, and these are essentially the numbers published in our Makerfield poll last weekend.

What immediately stands out is that, in our poll, voters who backed the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens in 2024 appeared to be breaking in favour of Labour over Reform.

At the same time, however, there was evidence of a Labour-to-Reform shift. The poll suggested that some Labour voters were switching directly to Reform.

Taken together, this explains the story our polling was telling during the campaign. Labour’s vote share was holding up, but only because Burnham was successfully replacing losses to Reform with tactical support from voters who had backed other parties at the previous General Election.

In short, Andy Burnham was successfully assembling a broad anti-Reform coalition, but Reform was still making meaningful inroads into Labour’s 2024 vote.

Reweighting the poll

Now comes the more complex bit.

Having the final election result allows us to conduct a simple experiment. What happens if we force the vote switcher matrix (as we shall grandly call it) to fit the actual outcome of the election?

To do this, we reweighted the matrix so that it reflects the final by-election result while also accounting for the actual number of non-voters. In effect, we are asking what these same voter flows would need to look like if we use our polling as source material but match it to the final result.

The outcome is fascinating.

Two important differences emerge.

First, the amount of direct Labour-to-Reform switching would have to be substantially lower than our poll originally suggested.

Second, and much more importantly, the number of 2024 non-voters who appear to have turned out for Labour this week is substantially higher. In our original poll, people who had not voted in 2024 but intended to vote in the by-election were splitting relatively evenly between Labour and Reform. Once we reweight the matrix to the actual result, that split looks like it has to be much closer to two-to-one in Labour’s favour.

Taken together, this suggests that turnout was just as important as vote switching.

This is helpful for putting the poll in context. The original poll correctly identified that Burnham was building a tactical anti-Reform coalition. What the reweighting suggests is that Labour’s eventual margin of victory was increased by something else happening alongside that substantial tactical voting: that the other key group in this race were those who stayed home in 2024.

False recall and the return of Labour voters

One possible explanation for the difference between the poll and the pattern suggested above is false recall of past vote, something already raised by election guru Professor Sir John Curtice.

In Makerfield, this has its own specific dynamics.

Turnout in the constituency was 59.7% in 2019, which fell to 52.5% at the 2024 General Election, and then rose again to 58.7% in the by-election.

That suggests there is a sizeable group of voters who voted in 2019, stayed home in 2024, and then came back out in 2026.

Many of those sorts of people in our poll may still think of themselves as Labour voters even though they did not actually cast a vote in 2024. When large numbers of supporters of one party stay home - and conversely, when they come back out to vote again - standard vote share change figures can make it look as though support has moved directly between parties when that is not necessarily what’s happened.

This is why the Labour-Reform battleground in Makerfield may be even more complicated than it first appears. Some of the voters who look like Labour-to-Reform switchers in our poll may actually have been Labour supporters who actually stayed home in 2024 and then did the final jump to Reform only this week. Likewise, Labour’s additional gains in the by-election are likely to be the return of those same voters rather than direct conversions from other parties.

However, as we weighted the results to past vote, this phenomenon would end up exacerbating the former and downplaying the latter, hence downplaying Andy Burnham’s vote share.

But returning to the election itself, if that is what happened, then Burnham’s success was both a tactical voting success and a turnout success.

What really won Labour the by-election?

As already mentioned, one of the key stories of this by-election has been clearly confirmed by the complete collapse of the Conservative, LibDem and Green vote. Andy Burnham did a remarkably effective job of consolidating the votes of those who didn’t want Reform’s Robert Kenyon to win. Voters from smaller parties moved heavily towards Labour.

Where the polling appears to have understated Labour’s performance was turnout. Once we reweight the model to the final result, the biggest trend we see is not direct switching between Labour and Reform, but the number of Labour supporters who stayed home in 2024 and appear to have come out in 2026 for Burnham.

The evidence therefore suggests that Burnham’s victory was built on two foundations.

The first was tactical voting. Burnham successfully assembled a coalition of supporters from smaller parties who were willing to back Labour in order to prevent a Reform victory.

The second was mobilising Labour’s latent support. A significant number of people who did not vote in the 2024 General Election appear to have come out and voted in the by-election, and they seem to have done so disproportionately in Labour’s favour because they are best thought of as dissatisfied Labour supporters (but Labour supporters nonetheless).

Ultimately, that combination may be the single biggest reason why Burnham not only won Makerfield, but won it handsomely.

Methodology note

The vote switching matrices presented in this piece are modelled estimates derived from Opinium’s Makerfield by-election poll.

The original matrix is based on respondents’ recalled vote at the 2024 General Election and their stated voting intention during the 2026 Makerfield by-election campaign. Respondents who said they were unlikely to vote in the by-election, or who did not provide a voting intention, are treated as non-voters in the 2026 matrix.

The reweighted matrix takes those estimated voter flows and adjusts them to align with the actual 2026 by-election result and observed turnout. It should not be interpreted as a direct observation of how voters behaved, but rather as an illustrative model designed to explore which voter movements would be most consistent with both the polling and the final result.

As with all subgroup analysis, individual cells are subject to larger margins of error than the overall poll and should be interpreted as indicative of broader electoral trends rather than precise measurements.

Subscribe now

See the full data tables from the original polling at Opinium’s website here.

Andy Burnham is quickly emerging as the obvious replacement for Keir Starmer. In a head-to-head leadership contest between the three likely forerunners, 29% of the public would want Burnham to win, compared with 16% for Starmer and just 8% for Wes Streeting. But beneath that headline is hesitation, with just under a quarter (23%) saying ‘none of the above’, with the same share unsure. When asked more broadly who should replace Starmer if he resigns, 20% chose Burnham, with a comparable amount (22%) saying ‘none of the above’ and 33% unsure.

As Tony Blair noted in a reflective, albeit awkwardly timed, essay this week, the instinct to reach for a Burnham reset as a silver bullet for Labour’s governing problems misses the core of what has gone wrong. The problem is not only in the leadership, but in the condition of the party itself. Labour’s 2024 victory owed much to Conservative unpopularity, rather than a clear long-term vision of its own. That absence cannot be resolved simply by changing leader.

Leadership versus brand

The Labour brand is in poor shape. Voting intention sits at 20% in our most recent poll, behind Reform’s 27%. The coalition that delivered the sweeping 2024 victory remains splintered, with little evidence yet of a clear strategic offer that could rebuild it. Labour has lost nearly half of those who took them into office, with just 56% of 2024 Labour voters saying they will opt for them again in the next election.

The prime minister’s approval ratings reflect this. Keir Starmer’s net approval stands at -43. But the bigger issue is the reputational damage done to the party, something any future leader will have to repair. On almost every attribute measured, Labour scores negatively, with remarkably low ratings on being united (-48) and representing what most people think (-40).

Notably, the party scored -36 on having a clear sense of purpose, and -33 on knowing what it stands for. This is not just short-term dissatisfaction. Labour is not only weak on delivery but unclear on direction. The party struggles to project a consistent sense of what it is trying to do or what its broader strategy is, feeding into perceptions of disunity, weak leadership and poor trustworthiness.

The Burnham question

It is in this context that Burnham’s relative appeal must be understood. He does significantly outperform the party. His own net approval sits at -13, which places him well ahead of Starmer, Reeves (-40) and Lammy (-29). On individual leadership attributes, he also looks stronger, with positive scores for competence (+17), likeability (+16) and the ability to get things done (+14).

He leads the field on providing hope and optimism. On paper, he offers improvement. But it’s an open question whether these good ratings will survive a few months in office, any more than Keir Starmer’s did. Burnham may be an improvement on the incumbent prime minister for a time, but will not necessarily resolve the underlying question of what Labour stands for.

Enter Makerfield

Burnham’s path to leadership runs through the crucial by-election on 18th June. He needs to win the seat to stand. That alone raises the stakes, but the conditions in Makerfield are shaped by what is already happening to Labour’s coalition.

The Gorton and Denton by-election offered a clear warning. Labour finished in third place, behind both the Green Party and Reform. There was a decisive swing of 26.4% of votes from Labour to Green. Our national-level polling suggests a similar pattern of fragmentation, with 14% of 2024 Labour voters planning to vote Green.

Makerfield will test whether that pattern holds.

The arithmetic is tight. Pollster John Curtice has suggested that the overall balance between left-leaning parties (Labour, Lib Dem, Green) is equivalent to that of right-leaning parties (Conservative, Reform, Restore). This makes the structure of the contest overall as important as the level of support for any one party.

There are two competing dynamics. If the right vote splits between Reform and Restore Britain, Labour may have a clear path to victory even on a relatively low vote share. But the left vote is just as open to splitting. If the Greens run a strong campaign, as they did in Gorton and Denton, Labour faces a continued challenge for its own base.

The question for Makerfield is what impact Burnham himself has on the contest. The stakes are higher, with the premiership of the country at stake. The contest is more visible, and the candidate is stronger. Those factors may encourage tactical consolidation behind Labour. But the underlying conditions have not shifted: weak party loyalty, multiple competitors and an electorate open to switching, alongside constituency factors such as its Brexit vote and Reform’s strength in the local elections.

Beyond Burnham

This brings the argument back to its starting point. Burnham may win Makerfield. He may win the subsequent leadership contest. But can he save Labour?

The data suggest it will be tough: Labour is not dealing with a short-term leadership problem, but a fragmenting coalition, a weak party image, and a lack of clear strategic direction.

Leadership change offers a route to improvement but does not guarantee it. The question is less whether Burnham can lead Labour, and more whether he can create a long-term vision for Labour to lead the country.

Subscribe now

See the full data on Opinium’s website here.

Last week Opinium tested a range of potential candidates for Labour leader. While we looked at the public in general, getting into the weeds of the data does tell us something interesting about the potential candidates and the path Labour could choose.

It is clear that the Prime Minister has a serious popularity problem, and he really has been very vulnerable to a potential leadership challenge for a very long time. Since the beginning of August, Keir Starmer has permanently been on net -40 or under, except for a brief couple of weeks during his early response to the crisis in Iran. For the best part of 300 days, Keir Starmer has been at a popularity level equivalent to Theresa May, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson all at the points at which they left office. So it really should be no surprise that we are here. Usually, prime ministers just do not survive very long when things are like this.

The question is: what is to be done? And while members’ polling is incredibly important for informing who is most likely to win a leadership race, it is often just as important to inform MPs, members and others in the party about what voters outside the Labour movement think. This week, the decision has clearly become: wait for Andy Burnham, or go with Wes Streeting?

Now, there are a couple of ways of doing this.

The most straightforward one is simply asking the question: if Starmer resigns, who do you think should replace him? We offered a range of potential candidates, and when we did this the answer was pretty clear, although the numbers are naturally low until a race actually gets going. Almost one in five (18%) UK adults believe that Andy Burnham should replace Starmer as leader, followed by Angela Rayner (5%), Ed Miliband (4%), and then finally Wes Streeting (3%), tied with Rachel Reeves (3%). But this is often driven by the salience of whoever is in the news that week.

Realistically, people’s views are complex, they change, and at this stage what we really want to do is get underneath the surface of what the underlying perceptions of the different potential contenders are. Then we know what the starting point is: who is handicapped from the beginning, who has plenty of space to grow into the race, and who is already starting well ahead.

This is where we prefer to ask about acceptability as a potential leader. Is any given contender acceptable or unacceptable as a future Labour leader?

The starting point is actually quite obvious. If Andy Burnham can get back into Parliament, he is quite clearly the potential contender with the initial advantage: 43% of all UK adults think he would be acceptable as the next Labour leader, while only 23% say they would find him unacceptable.

By comparison, Wes Streeting is starting further behind, but voters are open to him. Just over a quarter (27%) of UK adults think that Streeting would be an acceptable future Labour leader, while 35% currently say they would find him unacceptable.

Now, that might not sound especially strong, but when you look at the wider mix of potential contenders you can see that having only 35% of voters ruling out a potential future Labour leader is pretty good going, considering the current unpopularity of the government (which Burnham benefits from not being part of). Consider the 53% who would count Rachel Reeves as unacceptable as a future Labour leader, and the 45% who say the same about Angela Rayner. It shows that the public and voters are still more than open to Wes Streeting as a potential future prime minister, even if he does not quite have the headline lead at this early stage.

And when you dig down into different voter groups, you can start to see where Streeting’s relative strengths and weaknesses lie.

The clearest example is among current Reform voters. Now, many of these will be ex-Conservatives rather than ex-Labour voters, but there are still many there to be won back for Labour. Among current Reform voters, Streeting records a net acceptability score of -22 (24% acceptable, 46% unacceptable). While still negative overall, that is notably softer resistance than many other senior Labour figures face with the same group of voters.

But the leadership race will have to answer the question Labour has not really had the chance to ask itself since last week’s local elections: does it want to chase Green votes in inner cities, or fight to win back Middle England? While Andy Burnham remains the favourite because he’s not in the Commons, at this stage Wes Streeting may have more room to do the latter than many of his rivals currently in a position to run.

Subscribe now

See the full data on Opinium’s website here.

National politics still overwhelmingly dominates how people vote, even at local level. Across England’s five largest parties, at least eight in ten voters say they would support the same party in both a general election and a local election. The local elections taking place this week, as much as voters need their local representatives to look after their bin collections and fix the potholes, are far from detached from the wider national political climate.

But there is volatility beneath the surface. The traditional coalitions underpinning both Labour and the Conservative Party continue to fragment in multiple directions, while the historically smaller parties, particularly Reform UK, are beginning to develop unusually cohesive and durable voter bases. The results we’ll see is because Labour and the Tories do not yet have the information on where to properly fight back.

That matters because the key story in English politics is no longer simply declining loyalty to the two major parties. It is the asymmetry of that decline. Labour and the Conservatives are increasingly the residual of formerly broad coalitions, while Reform is building something far more consolidated and electorally efficient.

The topline local election figures already hint at this fragmentation. When we asked English people who didn’t rule out voting at the last election, Reform leads on 23%, but beneath that the rest of the political landscape is remarkably compressed: the Conservatives sit on 16%, Labour on 15%, the Greens on 14% and the Liberal Democrats on 13%, even before accounting for the 10% of voters who remain undecided.

In political terms, that is an extraordinarily fragmented electoral landscape. Outside Reform, no party is establishing itself as a dominant focal point for discontent or opposition. Instead, voters are all over the place.

The most revealing data comes not from current voting intention alone, but from examining what has happened to the voter coalitions assembled at the 2024 general election. This is where the scale of the fragmentation becomes clearest.

Most striking is the disintegration of Labour’s 2024 coalition. Only 42% of those who voted Labour at the last general election in England say they would still vote Labour at local level. The rest are splintering in several directions: around 20% now back the Greens, 12% the Liberal Democrats and 10% Reform UK.

The problem for Labour is not simply that support has fallen. Midterm governments almost always lose support. The challenge is that Labour’s losses are left, right and centre. Some voters are peeling away to left progressive politics, and others to anti-establishment populism. But losing that many of your voters is incredible.

By contrast, the Conservatives remain weak, but their situation is different. Only 61% of Conservative voters from the last general election say they would currently stay with the party at local level. Most of the losses are going to Reform UK (22%), with a smaller number drifting towards Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens (8% collectively).

That still represents a serious problem for the Conservatives. There are two aspects to it: Conservative losses are at least flowing in a relatively singular direction, whether or not that means it should be clearer how to win them back remains to be seen. But for Labour, the divide all over the place might mean it is hard to know how to win them all back, but also means there will be some places where Labour holds on because the voters aren’t going in a single direction. But the major exception seems to be to the Conservatives.

Indeed, this also helps explain why the Conservatives are not recovering more strongly despite Labour’s visible difficulties. They are struggling to win back Reform defectors, but they are also failing to emerge as the principal destination for disillusioned Labour voters (only 3% intend to vote Conservative locally).

Even so, there are some limited consolations for the party. Conservative voter retention is not dramatically lower than that seen among the Liberal Democrats or Greens, whose own 2024 coalitions hold together at rates of 65% and 68% respectively from the general election. The difference is that the smaller parties have no clear other vessel for their support and therefore the impact of their disintegration is less clear than that of the large scale Conservative voter switch to Reform.

Which brings us more neatly to Reform UK.

The most remarkable feature of the data is the solidity of Reform’s support. If we fast-forward to current Reform voters (those intending on voting for Reform at a general election this week), 86% say they would also vote Reform at local level. This is the highest figure for any major party. Even among those who voted Reform at the 2024 general election, 78% remain loyal in these local contest.

What this suggests is that Reform’s support is not behaving like a soft protest vote, at least not for the time being. Instead, it increasingly resembles a stable political identity with a highly cohesive electoral base.

That distinction matters enormously under these electoral systems. While Labour and Conservative voters fragment in multiple directions, Reform voters are concentrating behind a single banner. In first-past-the-post and block-vote systems, concentrated support is politically highly valuable.

This is why Reform is poised to make such significant councillor gains. The electoral system rewards parties capable of consolidating support efficiently across wards, particularly when opponents remain divided. Reform does not necessarily need overwhelming dominance to secure large breakthroughs. It simply needs the anti-Reform vote to continue splintering.

The deeper problem for both Labour and the Conservatives is that the electoral system which historically protected them will increasingly begin to work against them when their vote share is at this level. For decades, both parties benefited from broad but imperfect coalitions that translated efficiently into seats and councillors. Now those coalitions are fracturing faster than new ones are being rebuilt.

That does not mean the current landscape is fixed. Much of this volatility is ongoing, and local elections are not perfect predictors of general election outcomes. But what this week’s contests strongly suggest is that England’s party system is entering a more fragmented and unstable phase.

The immediate story may be Reform’s advance. But the longer-term strategic question for every major party is how to respond to this geographical and structural new world: where are the principal challenger to Reform, and where can they consolidate anti-Reform voting behaviour?

Until Labour and the Conservatives answer that question, they risk remaining trapped in a fragmented political landscape where broad but crumbling coalitions are repeatedly outperformed by a reasonably small, more disciplined and more cohesive voter bloc. Right now, Reform UK will probably benefit from that, but it is up to the other parties to find a way back in the time they have left in this parliament.

Subscribe now

See the full data from Opinium’s latest poll here.

The return of the Mandelson vetting scandal could hardly have come at a worse moment for the prime minister. Postal ballots are already landing back from households across the country, and the rest of the electorate heads to the polls in person next Thursday. In that context, this is not just another difficult couple of weeks in Westminster, it is a grenade thrown into the electoral cycle that was already shaping up to be punishing.

It also serves as a reminder of just how deep a hole the prime minister had been in before the brief respite of the Iran crisis. Between August last year and March this year, he spent well over 200 days at net -40 or below on his approval rating. In that period, he repeatedly hit new lows: matching the depths Rishi Sunak reached after D-Day (-42), Boris Johnson after Partygate (-44), and Theresa May after the failure of her meaningful votes (-46). The new benchmark is now even lower, with Keir Starmer hitting -49 following the by-election defeat in Gorton and Denton.

Against that backdrop, what we saw over Iran was less a turning point and more a temporary deviation from a very well-established trend. The underlying political reality has not shifted. If anything, this week’s events represent a reversion to that long-term position rather than a fresh collapse.

In truth, the Mandelson scandal was always likely to prove politically fatal (at time of writing, to be confirmed). The Iran crisis provided a brief window in which some within Labour could plausibly argue that things might not be as bad as they seemed. When you are stuck in a -40 hole, finding three in ten voters willing to say you are doing a good job at anything is something you cling to. That is what the prime minister achieved with his stance on Iran.

To be less glib, there was something real underpinning that. Labour is in an extremely difficult long-term position on foreign policy. There’s a strategic balancing act that is hard to resolve: trying to win back Green-leaning voters who think he did not go far enough in criticising Donald Trump, while also appealing to Reform-leaning voters who see cooperation with Trump as necessary. Within those constraints, being able to land the message that the UK was kept out of direct conflict was probably as good as could be expected. On communication terms, it was one of the more effective performances we have seen.

But it was, ultimately, a false dawn.

Domestic politics almost always trumps international affairs, and the data bears that out clearly. When we ask about the government’s performance across different areas, there is a stark divergence. On representing Britain’s interests internationally, the government records a net score of -17 (31% saying it is doing a good job, 48% a bad job). On handling domestic affairs, that drops to -34 (25% good job, 59% bad job).

Crucially, the prime minister’s overall approval rating tracks much more closely with perceptions of domestic performance than international. In other words, while the Iran crisis may have provided a modest lift, it was never going to offset the much deeper dissatisfaction with how things are being handled at home. The idea that the prime minister had somehow escaped either the Mandelson crisis or the pre-existing polling malaise was always wishful thinking.

It is also worth remembering that the current crisis predates the escalation in Iran. Only a couple of months ago, Labour lost a by-election to the Greens, shedding thousands of votes both to challengers on the left and right. That came in the immediate aftermath of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, being forced to resign over this same issue (someone who has also made reappearance this week). This has been a live political problem for some time.

That context matters because it makes the current deterioration in Starmer’s numbers less surprising. The wisdom of recent political decisions – including the sacking of Olly Robbins, widely seen as reopening the issue and contributing to this week’s vote on a potential Privileges Committee investigation – may not be something we as pollsters can fully adjudicate on. But what we can see clearly is the impact on public opinion.

The prime minister’s handling of the Mandelson vetting controversy is being judged harshly. Over half (54%) disapprove of his response, compared to just 15% who approve, a net rating of -40 after rounding. That alone would be damaging enough, but the erosion of support among his own voters is particularly striking. Among those who voted Labour in 2024, 43% disapprove of his handling of the crisis, while only 29% approve, giving him a net score of -14 with his own base.

For a government heading into the largest set of elections for years, that is a serious warning sign. It suggests not just dissatisfaction among swing voters, but hammers home the weakening of the shaky coalition that delivered power for Labour in the first place.

At the same time, the crisis has created a clear political opportunity for the opposition. Kemi Badenoch has been able to operate on terrain that plays to her strengths, and the data suggests she has done so effectively. Her response to the Mandelson scandal attracts a positive net approval rating of +8, with 30% approving and 22% disapproving.

That is significant because it suggests a functioning opposition (something oddly remarkable in recent times). At a moment when the government is under pressure, the Leader of the Opposition is being seen to perform her role of holding an unpopular government to account. In political terms, that compounds the government’s difficulties: it is not simply that the prime minister is struggling, but that there is a credible and visible counterpoint.

All of this feeds directly into the outlook for the local elections. There has been no shortage of predictions. The broad expectation for some time has been that Labour will lose twice as many councillors as the Conservatives, primarily because they are defending far more seats. What is perhaps less fully appreciated is what happens if that ratio gets worse for Labour.

Poor local election results for both traditional major parties are already largely priced in. For Labour, however, there is a scenario in which it could emerge as the significantly worse loser. If the Conservative vote holds up better than expected, if they are more successful in defending their councillors, and Labour is left uniquely exposed, that creates a very different political narrative.

In that scenario, the story is no longer one of general fragmentation across the political spectrum. It becomes a story about Labour’s failure in the face of a crisis of the prime minister’s own making. Combined with the his already dire personal ratings before the Mandelson scandal, that would turn up the heat on Keir Starmer even further.

Simply put, the underlying problem at the heart of the Labour government has never really gone away. The Iran crisis briefly obscured it, but it did not resolve it. What we are seeing is the reassertion of a long-running political reality at precisely the moment when it matters most.

Subscribe now

See the full data on Opinium’s website from the 15th April and 22nd April 2026 polls.

It’s tempting to see recent polling merely as a series of negative reactions to short-term problems. A spike in bills, a foreign policy crisis, a leadership crisis. One negative polling response after another.

But this endless run of bad news matters, so we should take it in the round. This instability is a new normal, and it is reshaping the political environment. Now, pessimism isn’t emotional, it’s a rational response to the environment people see around them.

A politics with no up sides

Opinium’s latest voting intention figures make this clear. Reform leads on 27%, with Labour second on 21%. The Conservatives trail on 17%, with the Green Party on 15%, and the Liberal Democrats on 12%. That isn’t just fragmentation. Voters are up for grabs in a highly volatile political scenario.

The state of the party leaders is little better. Every major party leader is net negative. Keir Starmer sits at -38 net approval. Nigel Farage at -16. Kemi Badenoch and Zack Polanski both sit at -9. Ed Davey at -5. Even when leaders aren’t deeply unpopular, few people warm to them.

The “best Prime Minister” figures reinforce this problem. ‘None of the above’ is often the most common answer.

Cost of living is the great domestic challenge

What sits behind this political flux domestically is cost of living.

Almost nine in ten (87%) say the overall cost of living has risen in the past year. Groceries, energy bills, and council tax are all seen as up. After years of similar polling numbers, it’s not surprising this no longer feels temporary for most households. It feels permanent, structural even.

Looking ahead is no better. Over four in five expect costs to keep rising over the next 12 months across all the household bills we asked about. When people believe tomorrow will be worse than today, it’s no wonder there is little positivity in our politics.

Even when politicians try to help, such as the most recent targeted support, it struggles to shift the dial. On the emergency energy measures linked to the Iran conflict, more people say the help isn’t enough (39%) than say it is about enough (29%).

The latest in volatile geopolitics

The picture is even worse at an international level. When it comes to foreign affairs, anxiety is high, and people don’t have huge confidence in the government’s handling of it.

Iran is overwhelmingly seen as a threat. Israel is also viewed more as a threat than an ally. The more telling signal is the US, with the public split almost evenly between seeing it as an ally (34%) or a threat (33%). If forced to choose, the public sees no good option.

Confidence in the government’s handling of international affairs is weak. On representing Britain internationally, more people think the government is doing a bad job than a good job (net -17). The same is true for handling Europe (-14), China (-9) and Donald Trump (-19).

On Iran specifically, people disapprove of every major leader’s response and strongly fear escalation. Most worry Britain will be drawn further into conflict (77% are concerned), and a majority (57%) oppose deploying Royal Navy ships to support the US mission to help escort oil and gas tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

Which brings us to a broader problem with public political discourse. It suggests a public unconvinced that risks are being managed well, and unclear on how to weigh the trade-offs involved.

This is what feeds the pessimism across the economy, geopolitics, and British institutions.

If this is the way politics is, political actors don’t need to promise transformation. They need to find some way to make the future feel less out of control, or at least present options that people can understand the pros and cons of and choose between.

Because the real danger isn’t pessimism. It’s when pessimism means the public check out entirely.

Subscribe now

As originally seen in Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data on Opinium’s website here.

Foreign policy can define a premiership. Just ask Tony Blair, whose decision to join the Iraq War became the defining controversy of his time in office, overshadowing much of what he achieved domestically.

Two decades later, the legacy of Iraq still looms over British foreign policy. It shapes how the public views military intervention, how politicians justify the use of force, and how closely Britain should align itself with the United States when faced with conflict.

Now, Keir Starmer faces his own international test. The decision by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to launch military strikes against Iran has forced Britain to confront uncomfortable choices about its role on the international stage and the durability of the so-called “special relationship.”

The UK has not joined the miliary action. But our latest polling with The Observer suggests the public approaches the conflict with deep scepticism towards the strikes themselves, the motivations behind them, and the looming prospect of Britain becoming more deeply involved.

Public opinion is broadly opposed to strikes

Just 22% of UK adults said they support the action taken by the United States and Israel against Iran, and more than double (45%) oppose them.

Support for the strikes varies sharply along political lines. Those who voted Reform in 2024 were by far the most supportive of the strikes, with 51% supporting them, compared to 26% who opposed them. At the other end of the spectrum, 2024 Green voters were the least supportive, with just 9% supporting the strikes compared to 68% who opposed them. Labour voters also lean strongly against the action, with 57% opposed and only 14% supportive.

Voters are also sceptical about the motivations behind the intervention. Just 16% believe that Trump acted for mainly the right reasons, whilst 42% think he acted for mainly the wrong reasons.

Notably, a third of the public (32%) say the US bears the most responsibility for the strikes while 13% blame Israel. Only 18% primarily blame Iran.

There is similar uncertainty about the legal basis for the strikes. Fewer than one in ten (9%) UK adults believe the military action was legal under international law. Two in five (39%) believe it was outright illegal, while a further quarter (26%) believe the legality is disputed. This uncertainty reflects the position of Starmer himself, who attributed his reluctance to intervene immediately to doubts over the legality of the strikes.

The public supports limited intervention in the conflict

When asked what Britain’s role in the conflict should be, voters show a strong preference for limited involvement.

The most common response is that the UK should not get involved at all (22%). 16% say Britain should prioritise protecting the UK’s economic interests, 12% say we should provide humanitarian assistance only, 11% say we should prioritise diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the conflict, and only 6% support the UK joining the US-Israeli military action.

The distinction between defensive and offensive action is reflected clearly in the data. Just over two in five (42%) support UK facilities being used for defensive strikes, and support drops significantly when the question turns to offensive operations, of which just 24% support.

When asked under what circumstances Britain should launch offensive strikes against Iran, the public holds clear red lines. Support is highest when Britain itself is directly threatened: 47% support offensive strikes if Iran attacks UK territory, and 42% if Iranian forces attack UK military personnel overseas.

However, support falls sharply in more indirect scenarios. Only 15% support strikes if Iran threatens global shipping routes, or attacks civilians in the Middle East. Just 10% support strikes if Iran launches attacks on US forces, dropping to 7% if Israel is attacked.

In other words, the public’s threshold for military intervention is pretty high. Defensive action in response to direct threats retains legitimacy, but intervention driven by alliance obligations alone commands far less support.

What this means for the ‘Special Relationship’

These attitudes raise an uncomfortable question for British foreign policy. How strong is public support for the “special relationship” with the United States?

The concept remains central to the language of diplomacy, but public opinion appears far more ambivalent. Perceptions of the United States as an ally have weakened in recent years. Whilst the US still has a net positive perception (+10) as an ally rather than a threat, this is significantly lower than historic levels and reflects growing scepticism about American leadership in global affairs.

The traditional logic of the special relationship assumes that Britain broadly aligns with US foreign policy. But public opinion on Iran suggests that this assumption may no longer hold so easily.

A difficult moment for Starmer

For Keir Starmer, the political backdrop is not especially comfortable.

His approval ratings on the conflict sit at net -11. Just 27% believe the government is doing a good job representing Britain’s interests on the world stage, compared with 51% who think it is doing a bad job. A similar pattern emerges when voters are asked about the government’s handling of relations with Donald Trump.

This leaves Starmer caught in a difficult position. On one side stands Trump, pressing for greater alignment and criticising Britain’s hesitation. On the other stands a British public that overwhelmingly prefers caution.

If the era after Iraq produced a more hesitant Britain, the crisis with Iran suggests that instinct has only deepened. The political class may still speak the language of global leadership, but the public is far less certain about how far Britain should go in supporting the United States.

Subscribe now

As seen in the latest Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the original data on Opinium’s website here.

Gorton and Denton was always going to test Labour. A working-class constituency, represented consistently by Labour since 1935, became a live experiment: is Labour still the natural home of working-class voters, in an era of a Reform insurgency on the Right, and growing Green momentum on the Left?

By the end of the night, the answer looked uncomfortable. Labour finished third on 25.4%, behind the Green Party (40.6%) and Reform (28.7%). The key question now is whether this was a local mishap, or a warning signal of a deeper structural shift on the Left.

Opinium’s constituency polling for Forward Democracy and the Byline Times had already hinted at the seat’s volatility. It showed Labour’s vote as soft, and that voters were open to switching. Two-thirds (66%) of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters were prepared to switch to the Green Party if they were seen as best placed to beat Reform. By contrast, just 41% of Green Party and Liberal Democrat voters said they would switch to Labour in the same scenario. This suggests that the Green Party are perceived as more than a protest vote, but, increasingly, a credible alternative to Reform.

The obvious next question is whether this dynamic is confined to one constituency, or whether it reflects a broader national shift. Our latest polling with The Observer suggests the latter. Reform continues to lead nationally on 30%, down slightly since the start of February. Labour trails 12 percentage points behind on 18%, tied with the Conservatives. The Green Party remain on 13%, with the Liberal Democrats on 12%.

More revealing than the headline figures about Labour’s shaky monopoly on the Left, however, is what is happening beneath the surface. Labour’s electoral base is fragmenting. Just 52% of 2024 Labour voters would vote for them in the next general election, leaving nearly half of its previous coalition up for grabs.

Two parties are benefiting. 18% of 2024 Labour voters now plan to vote for the Green Party, with 16% planning to vote Reform. Tactical voting adds another dimension to the picture, with the national data showing parallels with Gorton and Denton. Labour and Green Party voters are open to one another. Almost half (47%) of those intending to vote Labour would consider voting for the Green Party in the future, and slightly fewer (45%) of those intending to vote for the Green Party would consider Labour. When asked what they would do if their preferred party were highly unlikely to win in their constituency, one in five (21%) Labour voters said they would switch to the Green Party, and the same figure (20%) of Green Party voters said they would vote Labour. These figures could be consequential under first-past-the-post where margins of this size determine who wins a constituency. [LH1]

It is also worth examining why voters are considering the Green Party in the first place. Among those who say they are or would consider voting for the Green Party, concern about climate change and the environment topped the list (39%). But their appeal extends beyond the party’s political roots, with voters citing improving the future for younger generations (28%), the cost of living and the wider economy (28%), the NHS and public services (28%), and, notably, general dissatisfaction with Labour (27%). This matters because it suggests the Green Party’s appeal is no longer confined to a single issue but is bleeding into core concerns about the economy and public services.

None of this guarantees that what happened in Gorton and Denton will be replicated nationwide. By-elections are shaped not only by national politics, but also candidate quality, ground campaigns, and local dynamics. But the structural conditions that produced this result – flimsy loyalty to Labour, growing credibility of the Green Party, and voters willing to vote tactically to stop Reform – are not unique to one seat.

If the Green Party can entrench the idea that they are the most viable anti-Reform challenger in a meaningful number of constituencies, Labour might find itself squeezed across the political spectrum, losing strategic ground in areas that once formed its core.

For years, British politics has been framed as a contest anchored around Labour as the principal vehicle of the centre left. But Gorton and Denton challenges that assumption, and it may serve as a cautionary tale to where Labour’s focus should lie going forward.

Subscribe now

As seen in the latest Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data from last week’s poll on Opinium’s website here.

Britain is once again gripped by a crisis amongst its political leadership, with Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer trying to pick up the pieces of his premiership. Sometimes perceived as an uninspiring technocrat who came to power with the promise of delivering change and stability, he is now at the cusp of continuing the Tory legacy of chaos and leadership challenges.

Over the weekend further releases of the “Epstein Files” by the US Department of Justice, revealed deeper links between Epstein and the disgraced former Labour politician Peter Mandelson. This reignited the anger about the decision to appoint Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States back in February 2025, when some links between Mandelson the deceased financier were already known. Everything culminated in the Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation.

In a time when the British public grapples with a cost-of-living crisis, domestic and international political uncertainty, and has to navigate the complicated relationship with its neighbours and ally across the pond, there is a serious question, about where this scandal actually sits in the mind of voters?

Opinium polling reveals that this topic has massive cut through. Over four in five (82%) claim to have heard of the release of the new files and 80% claim to have heard reporting on past contacts between Mandelson and Epstein. At the same time less than a third (32%) claim to have heard about the UK government agreeing to fortnightly talks with the EU to negotiate a post-Brexit “reset” in relations.

Though most people find that it was a mistake to appoint Mandelson, and Starmer should have known better (56% agree), his approval ratings overall have remained nearly unchanged (net -44 on 04 February vs net -41 on 21 January).

Opinium polling shows that Starmer has been persistently unpopular since he took office and his approval rating has remained below net -40 since early August 2025. This is historically unusual, as predecessors have either left office shortly after crossing this threshold or have been able to recover their score.

In the last few days three of his key aides resigned, and although a plurality believes the Mandelson controversy reflects equally negatively on Starmer and his advisers in Downing Street (45%), more people believe it reflects mostly negatively on Starmer personally (18%) than on his advisers (11%).

Keir Starmer has been in poor standing long before this weekend’s revelations. But so far, he has managed to stay in office.

Keir Starmer defiantly said on Tuesday, he “will never walk away from a mandate” and lead Labour into the next general election. Whether out of political cunning or personal conviction, his political rivals have backed the Prime Minister for now, and he staved off calls for his resignation in spite of disastrous approval ratings.

Subscribe now

As seen in the latest Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data on Opinium’s website here.

Foes seem to circle around Keir Starmer. Despite being a prime minister with the most sizable majority in the House of Commons since Tony Blair in his heyday, the poor state of the party’s polling and that of his own leadership merely evidences the phrase that regularly appeared in our political lexicon shortly after the 2024 general election: his majority is a mile wide and an inch deep. The prime minister has a lot of serious government and policy problems to tackle, but the major problem he is struggling to overcome is his political problems, and the polling is an everyday reminder of this.

The prime minister’s vulnerability is evidenced by the amount we’ve heard recently from potential leadership contenders. Wes Streeting has for a long time been putting pressure on No 10, even more so since the huge row between the two blew up last year. Angela Rayner has recently made a big play at highlighting her own parliamentary support with the aim of returning to front-line politics. All of this in a week where Andy Burnham made an abortive return to Parliament, blocked by the prime minister’s allies, which merely displayed their weakness rather than their strength.

The fundamental problem Starmer faces is that the political problems have piled up and left him looking adrift. On the very simple question of direction, more than three in five UK adults think the Labour government under Keir Starmer is going in the wrong direction (62% wrong direction vs 23% right direction).

The problem at its absolute heart is the government’s economic policy. Here the picture is even worse for the prime minister, and ultimately his chancellor too, whose reputation is now pinned to Starmer’s. Two thirds of the public now think the government’s overall plan for the economy is unclear (66% unclear vs only 20% clear). The fact that only one in five people think they know what the government’s plan for the economy is, regardless of whether or not they agree with it, is ultimately a huge political failing. One of being unable to navigate all the competing demands that government throws at you to get your message out there and set a direction of travel.

It is then unsurprising that over half of the public think the government is doing a bad job on all six key performance indicators we tested last week. To highlight the most damning numbers, the government is now seen as doing badly on rewarding hard work (64% doing a bad job vs 17% good job), helping people who are struggling (63% bad job vs 23% good job), and delivering long-term economic growth (62% bad job vs 19% good job).

This then brings us back to the immediate problem within Starmer’s own party. The voters that put this government in – 2024 Labour voters – are almost evenly split in their support for the government they elected. Labour voters are now heavily divided on whether the government is going in the right or wrong direction (49% right vs 40% wrong). Almost half (49%) think the government’s plan for the economy is unclear (vs only 40% clear).

This creates a huge constituency within his own party for change. And this is why potential leadership contenders are circling like vultures. They sense the mood, they see the polling, and realise there is a lot of discontent within the Labour family, and more widely the country, for them to tap into. Something drastic will have to change for the prime minister to avoid one of them chancing a leadership contest in May.

Subscribe now

As originally seen in Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data tables here.

For much of 2025, many were prepared to write off Kemi Badenoch. At the time, there probably were enough polling numbers flying around as a basis for doing so. Her numbers were going in the wrong direction through the first half of the year, and doubts about the future of her leadership and the Conservative Party were widespread.

Since October, however, that picture has changed dramatically. Badenoch’s leadership looks locked in until the next general election. The important caveat for the Conservative leader is that this reset is still at an early stage and must continue apace.

Badenoch’s approval ratings have been on a clear upward trajectory since the autumn, beginning in the immediate aftermath of her party conference speech. It was a moment that prompted many to look again at her leadership. That momentum has continued through the end of 2025 and into this year. While her net approval remains negative, it has improved substantially from its mid-2025 lows and now places her among the stronger-performing party leaders (at the very least, she is on net -8, ahead of Nigel Farage on net -12).

For Conservatives, there are genuine reasons to be encouraged. What we are now seeing looks less like a temporary bounce and more like a reset. Directionally, things are moving the right way.

Digging into the detail helps to explain why.

The recovery in Badenoch’s standing is being driven primarily by so-called “hard” leadership traits. Since the autumn, voters have become more willing to see her as “decisive” (net score of +7), “brave” (+5), “competent” (+1), and as “someone who sticks to her principles rather than simply saying what people want to hear” (+7). Of these, the “principles over popularity” perception remains her strongest and most consistent defining trait and asset.

This is not a new part of her brand, but it is one that has clearly reasserted itself after a difficult period, and the remarkable sacking of Robert Jenrick reinforced this at the start of this year. Even at her low point earlier in 2025, being “principled” held up better than most others, never going lower than a score of net -5. Since October, it has provided a stable foundation upon which her broader recovery coalesces.

However, the same data also highlights a potential imbalance. Badenoch’s gains are concentrated much more heavily in leadership credibility than in relatability. Attributes like being “in touch with ordinary people” (-21), “representing what most people think” (-19), or “shares my views” (-21) continue to lag behind.

That pattern is not unfamiliar for Conservative leaders, and it is not necessarily fatal. Her recovery wasn’t about changing those perceptions, but avoiding any sign of weakness. In particular, perception of her as a “strong leader” noseddived to net -20 in the summer and has rebounded right back to net -1. But this overly shapes the kind of leadership profile that Badenoch is building: if we were talking in Machiavellian terms, she has clearly concluded it is better to be feared than loved.

This leads us to the limits of how far we should push the narrative that she has undergone a complete transformation. While there has been a strong recovery from the low point of mid-2025, some of the numbers remain fragile. Voters are much more open to Badenoch than they were, but confidence in her “ability to get things done” (net -8) and to be “trusted with big decisions” (-10) are improving but still something she will need to build on in the coming months.

This fragility is most visible in perceptions of her as a “prime minister in waiting” (still net -20). This score took a significant hit during 2025 and, although it has improved since the autumn, it remains well below where it would need to be for us to say she looks like a future occupant of No 10 in the eyes of the public. The days when she was written off are over, but now the hard part begins.

The challenge for 2026 is to convert improved authority into broader confidence that she is a good fit to be the prime minister, particularly on perceptions that she is worthy of voters’ trust, that she will deliver on what she says, and that she is ready to govern.

In that sense, the October conference moment looks like the beginning of a process that the Conservative leadership will hope is only just starting. The reset is real, and it is reflected consistently across her approval and attribute measures. But it is still very much ongoing.

For now, the direction of travel is clearly positive. Kemi Badenoch is rebuilding. The task for the year ahead is to ensure that this recovery broadens beyond strength and principles, and into the kind of reassurance that persuades voters she is not just a strong leader, but a future prime minister.

Subscribe now

See the latest data on Opinium’s website here.

The United Kingdom’s stance towards the United States has long been shaped by an underlying assumption: whatever disagreements might arise, the US was fundamentally a strong and dependable ally. At least as far as the British public is concerned, that assumption no longer holds.

New polling from Opinium shows that UK public opinion towards the US has undergone a significant reset since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Today, just 42% of the public view the United States as an ally, while 32% see it as a threat. This places the US in a uniquely ambiguous position: much less positively regarded than close partners in both the Anglosphere (such as Australia) and Europe (such as France and Germany), yet obviously nowhere near in the league of strategic adversaries like China, Iran or Russia. However, crucially, it is now the only major Western partner where a substantial minority of the public actively perceives it as a threat.

This isn’t simply a blip in one poll. Under Joe Biden, pro-US sentiment reached a recent high point in spring 2024, with nearly seven in ten Britons viewing the US as an ally and only 7% seeing it as a threat. That goodwill appears to have been driven by perceptions of NATO unity, cooperation over Ukraine, and a sense of the US acting as a predictable and aligned partner. Since then, that reserve of trust has been drawn down following Trump’s return to office, and rapidly so, thanks to the tariff war followed by a steady stream of eye-catching headlines from across the Atlantic.

The result is a structural change in how the US is viewed, at least while Donald Trump remains president. Even when perceptions recover temporarily after moments of tension, they now do so at a far lower ceiling than during the Biden years, or even during Trump’s first term. There is now persistently elevated concern at what Washington will do next. The US is no longer treated as a default ally; instead, it is judged far more cautiously.

This shift matters well beyond foreign policy elites. Attitudes to the US now divide UK voters almost as sharply as views on the UK’s own foreign policy. Conservative and Reform UK voters remain broadly pro-US, while Labour and Liberal Democrat voters are much more evenly split on where the UK’s relationship with the United States lies. Green voters stand out as overwhelmingly hostile. In other words, the United States has become a live domestic political fault line.

Perceptions of Donald Trump help explain why. While many Britons accept the idea that Trump is a strong and effective leader, far fewer see him as trustworthy or aligned with UK interests. Just 30% of the public consider him a friend of Britain’s, compared with 42% who disagree. The issue is not simply policy disagreement, but serious uncertainty about his motives.

That scepticism is particularly visible in reactions to US military action in Venezuela. UK public opinion is more opposed than supportive, and doubts about its legality are widespread. This is not simply pacifism; rather, it reflects serious distrust in US leadership.

For policymakers, the implications are serious. UK governments can no longer assume that alignment with Washington will be met with automatic or broad public consent. Decisions involving trade, defence, sanctions or military cooperation with the US now carry greater political and communications risk, particularly when they are closely associated with Trump himself.

The “special relationship” still matters. But in the eyes of the UK public, it is no longer unconditional. It is a change that is reshaping the political space in which foreign policy is made and defended.

Subscribe now

As seen in this week’s Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data tables on Opinium’s here.

Download a briefing note from the Opinium Political & Social team here.

With the news that twelve prisoners have been accidentally released in the past three weeks – on top of the 91 accidentally freed between April and October – it might not be surprising that confidence in the British justice system is in question. Add to that the 417-day average waits faced by adult rape survivors between an offender being charged and the case being completed in the Crown Court, and it’s clear something isn’t working.

As such, the results of our latest polling with The Spectator that explored public opinion on the justice system were disheartening but unsurprising. Simply put, the people would agree with the basic premise that the justice system just isn’t working very well.

Over half (57%) of UK adults believe the prisons are doing a bad job, potentially spurred by the ever-frequent headlines that a mistakenly released prisoner is at large. Views weren’t much brighter for the Ministry of Justice, courts or police either, with 37%, 46% and 40% respectively saying they are doing a bad job. Faith in the system appears to be rock bottom.

Unsurprisingly, the response was heavily shaped by political preferences. Conservative and Lib Dem voters were more gloomy than average. Reform and Green supporters were the most negative of them all. Labour voters were generally more upbeat about the system, with a notable exception of prisons where pretty much every group agrees they aren’t doing a good job.

Against this backdrop, David Lammy’s controversial justice reforms arrived with a thud, not least because the Crown Court backlog sits at 78,000 cases, expected to rise to 100,000 by 2028. Something needs to give to ensure victims and witnesses don’t have to wait years for justice.

The reforms will remove the automatic right to a jury trial for offences carrying a maximum sentence less than three years. Defendants will also lose the right to request a jury trial in cases that could either be decided by a judge alone or a jury. Jury trials will be reserved for only the most serious crimes – murder, rape, and the like – whilst magistrates will be granted expanded powers for sentencing. According to the government, around a quarter of all cases could be fast-tracked under these reforms, and roughly half of all current jury trials will instead be heard by magistrates or a judge alone.

Critics, however, argue that this is the wrong target. They cite the post-pandemic productivity slump (the backlog has doubled since 2019), years of neglect of the justice system by former governments, a shortage of publicly funded solicitors, judges and interpreters, and courtrooms unusable because they need physical repairs, as causes of the dysfunctional justice system. In other words, they say juries aren’t the problem.

The public is split on the issue. Just over a third of UK adults (37%) oppose the reforms, whilst 29% support them. A sizeable chunk feels neutral (22%) or simply don’t know (12%). The previous partisan pattern persists, with those intending to vote Labour in the next election more supportive, whilst Reform and Green voters are the least supportive. This uncertainty suggests that people agree the system needs fixing – they’re just unsure over precisely how it should be fixed.

The concerns aren’t only about efficiency. Legal experts warn that juries are central to ensuring fair trials, being more representative of society than a single judge can be. Jury-less trials might risk personal bias or legislative overreach seeping in, which may disproportionately affect minority groups. Removing juries also removes the need to explain legal jargon in accessible terminology, a shift which might make the justice system more closed-off and less accountable to the public over time. Not to mention the potential teething issues that will likely make things worse before they get better.

All this lands at a politically awkward time for the government. In the wake of Rachel Reeves’ November 26^th Budget – which our polling indicated was the most unpopular fiscal event since the catastrophic 2022 minibudget – Labour’s public standing has become increasingly fragile. This reform is yet another tricky policy to justify and implement before May’s local elections. Scrapping a civil liberty that traces back 800 years to the Magna Carta surely can’t be a crowd-pleaser.

Subscribe now

Opinium conducted a nationally and politically representative study amongst 2,050 UK adults aged 18 and over between 3 - 5 December 2025. See the full data tables here.

References:

Twelve more prisoners released in error, with two still missing, says Lammy - BBC News

Breaking Point | Rape Crisis England & Wales

https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/voting-intention-26th-november-2025/

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone following the latest headlines, but the Autumn Budget appears to have landed with a heavy thud among the electorate. While the government knew it was introducing difficult measures against a backdrop of unpopularity, the reaction to this Budget stands out as particularly negative; the closest we’ve seen to the blowback that followed the minibudget three years ago.

Even before Rachel Reeves delivered her second Budget as Chancellor, public scepticism about Labour’s openness and honesty was already firmly in place. Polling conducted in the week leading up to the Budget showed that almost two thirds (64%) of voters felt Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership had not been fully transparent about the UK’s economic challenges. That lack of trust created a difficult backdrop for any major fiscal event, and the data now confirms what many probably expected: that the Budget has done the government absolutely no favours whatsoever.

In the days following the Budget, public reaction hardened further. Four in ten (40%) believe the Budget will actively harm the UK economy, while nearly half (48%) expect to be personally worse off as a result of the measures announced. These are striking figures and they signal deepening anxiety about the financial prospects for both the country and the people in it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this negativity has translated into firming up the already heavily negative perceptions of the Chancellor herself. Rachel Reeves’ job satisfaction ratings are at rock bottom, with 58% now saying they disapprove of the job she is doing, compared with just 16% who approve: a net score of –42. This is deeply negative territory and raises questions about how Reeves can rebuild public confidence in her stewardship of the economy.

Most striking of all is the public’s overall verdict on the Budget: almost half (48%) say it was a “bad budget”. That makes this the worst-rated fiscal event since the disastrous 2022 minibudget, a comparison No. 10 and No. 11 will be keen to avoid taking hold considering the same could be said about her Spring Forecast earlier this year, which has now been overtaken by her second Budget. The polling underscores how fragile the public mood is and how little political goodwill the government currently has to fall back on.

Even before the Budget, two thirds questioned how honest Starmer and Reeves were being about the challenges ahead. Nothing that’s happened in the fallout from this Budget is going to have turned that perception around.

Subscribe now

As seen in the latest Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the full data tables here.

The tragedy of the income tax pledge is that it blocks one of the least messy ways for the government to raise money, leaving the Chancellor cobbling together a smorgasbord of unpopular tax rises that offer no political relief at a time of severe unpopularity.

The tragedy comes in a variety of forms for the government. First, as we referred to in last week’s Lansons–Opinium Political Capital, the general election was a high watermark for anyone in public life who wanted to argue that public services needed greater investment. At no other point were people more likely to accept that this investment requires higher taxes. Yet Labour responded to attacks from Rishi Sunak with a pledge not to raise any of the greatest revenue-raisers open to the government; 16 months on, the problem at the heart of the government’s fiscal plans continues.

Now, unlike before the general election when the electorate were open to the argument, voters are now much more anxious about rising taxes. But raise revenue the Chancellor must, and with income tax ruled out some alternatives must be found.

One of the measures reportedly being explored is increasing council tax rates on higher-value properties. Measures like this are at least politically possible, whereas income tax rises were politically closed off. A fortnight ago, three in five (61%) said that the decision to break the manifesto commitment would have been the wrong one; only 19% thought it would have been the right decision.

By comparison, there is far greater acceptance of the potential decision to raise council tax in the way that Rachel Reeves might choose to this week: 38% think it would be the right decision, 36% the wrong decision. So the Chancellor has succeeded in finding a measure with greater potential acceptance amongst the public.

However, the problem is that it’s yet another one of those measures with the potential to drive broader discontent. While Rachel Reeves can argue the point in interviews and in the chamber of the House of Commons, it simply has to be said that council tax is an incredibly unpopular tax.

Almost two thirds (64%) think that council tax is currently too high, which is significantly worse than for any other tax. In short, if you wanted to find one tax that people think would be a bad one to raise, council tax is it. It is also a tax that has become increasingly unpopular; in five years the proportion who believe council tax rates are too high has risen by almost twenty points, from 45% in 2020 to 64% last week.

So while there are strong arguments that she isn’t raising it for everyone, and she has chosen a far less politically toxic path than breaking a manifesto pledge, ultimately the headline of a council tax hike is unhelpful. This is one of many examples of unpalatable measures to which Rachel Reeves has had to resort, and it’s one of the reasons that now 52% of the public think that the Budget will be unfair, including a plurality of 2024 Labour voters (37% of whom agree it will be unfair, only 30% think it will be fair).

These will continue to pose big problems for Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer and the entire government. It seems like that perceptions will persist that their priorities are not in the right place and that their fiscal measures fail to communicate a useful narrative for the government.

Subscribe now

As seen in Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.

See the latest data tables on Opinium’s website here.