When I first saw news about Kemi Badenoch’s so-called “purge” of MPs and candidates standing (or looking to stand) for the Conservatives who supported either the UK’s Net Zero targets or the country’ continued membership of the ECHR, I was suddenly launched back to 2019 when Boris Johnson’s administration was effectively doing the same thing over the issue of the UK’s continued membership of the European Union.

Back then, the party leadership were routinely throwing out anyone who didn’t back the party’s expressed position on how (and indeed if) the UK should leave the European Union. No fewer than 21 MPs lost the whip in early September 2019, including former Cabinet ministers Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, and Rory Stewart.

Johnson and the Conservatives went on to win that 2019 election decisively, campaigning with a clear message (albeit it actually quite vague in terms of process) of “Get Brexit done”.

So, success? Is this indeed a model for Badenoch and her team to follow now along new and evolving dividing lines within the conservative movement (if not the country at large… more on that later)?

Well, fast forward to 2024, and there are as many Liberal Democrat MPs sitting in the 21 constituencies represented by those 2019 Tory rebels as there are Conservative MPs - eight.

The context of a party revived, looking to build a new, winning coalition

Badenoch’s move is, I think, designed to project strength on behalf of a newly invigorated leadership, who have overseen a rise in Tory polling numbers from mid-teens nadir in 2025 to now somewhere just below their national share achieved in that historic 2024 election defeat.

The move is also seemingly designed to signal to the electorate (and of course the party itself) what kind of Conservative Party is going to be pitching itself to the British public at the next election.

It is also (I think) designed as a way for Badenoch to project authority and control within the party, pushing her beliefs and her ideas firmly down throughout its structure. “You’re either with me, or against me”. No one can be left in any doubt.

While Badenoch’s manoeuvres here all seem to make sense on these terms, and have brought quite some glee among some Conservative commentators and observers (though not others), there are some tricky angles to this in terms of public opinion which are worth highlighting.

The Conservative political movement Prosper UK, founded by Ruth Davidson and Andy Street, have argued that such a move risks restricting the Conservatives’ ability to build an electoral-winning coalition. By throwing out anyone who is pro-ECHR or pro-Net Zero, they argue, the party narrows its appeal to the electorate and risks alienating potential supporters who will be needed to build a winning voter coalition at the next time of asking.

But there is a more immediate issue beyond the building and maintenance of a future voter coalition capable of winning a British election – these moves will divide the current Tory base.

Abandoning Net Zero and the ECHR are not popular positions with the public, and divide the Tory base

Let’s begin by casting a wide net: the UK remaining committed to Net Zero and the ECHR enjoy public support, and particularly so in the case of Net Zero. According to the latest YouGov polling, the public believe the UK should maintain its climate commitments by a margin of 63% to 29%. The public also believes that we should remain in the ECHR by a margin of 46% to 29%.

Already, taking a stand against both Net Zero and the ECHR is in this sense looks to be a risky electoral move, leaving the Conservatives pitching to under one-in-three voters and potentially pushing away a constituency twice that size. Those one-in-three voters will also be direct targets for Reform UK, who still remain the strongest force on the UK political right despite their recent challenges.

But more specifically and fundamentally, both Net Zero and the ECHR divide the Conservatives’ own voter coalition. According to that same YouGov polling, almost half (48%) for 2024 Conservatives want to the UK to meet its Net Zero commitments. Meanwhile, over a quarter (27%) of 2024 Tory voters support the UK remaining in the ECHR. These voters are not likely to feel well represented by Badenoch’s latest moves.

Driving wedges through a party’s base is usually a tactic deployed by its opponents, rather than its own leadership. It is high risk move which as well as having the primary, immediate effect of carving up and pushing out MPs and would-be MPs, also carves up the party’s own already restricted (compared to years previous) existing voter coalition.

Lord Ashcroft wrote in his piece on this matter about the importance of (to paraphrase) even a broach church having walls. This is fair enough, but does it make sense for said walls to put half of the people who supported you last time out to pasture?

Badenoch’s tactic here has shades of the Labour party’s ill-fated approach toward its own left flank in between 2023 and 2026 – a rather uncompromising shove which drove huge numbers of supporters away from the party, and arguably ultimately cost Keir Starmer his position as prime minister. A cautionary tale, perhaps.

An anti-Net Zero and ECHR could distract the Conservatives from the focus which has driven their recent recovery

Badenoch and the Conservatives have enjoyed their polling recovery while largely avoiding talking about issues which both divide the public and their own voter coalition base. Tory polling recovery came while Badenoch, Stride, and the rest were hammering the Labour government accusing them of failing on the economy (which 70% of the public agree with), being incompetent (64% agree), and lacking direction (69% agree).

Pivoting away from this and (back) to more divisive - both internally for the party and generally among the public - issues which don’t mobilise anything like an obvious election-winning bloc certainly does project confidence and a sense of strength and clarity on identity, but comes with some rather large public opinion risks.

One potential argument against the case as presented here is that neither Net Zero nor the ECHR are ‘first order’ (or in other words, top priority) issues for Conservative voters.

The latest YouGov most important issues tracker suggests that just 4% of 2024 Tory voters have the environment as one of their top three issues today, for example. YouGov don’t track the ECHR as a priority issue, but you can imagine it would attract around the same level of concern.

But that counter argument can itself be flipped on its head - why spend time carving up a political party and taking uncompromising positions on something that just 4% of its own base care about?

It would also be fair for architects and supporters of these uncompromising positions to point out that the ECHR policy is designed as a tool to address an issue which does concern huge numbers of the public and Conservative voters - immigration. Similarly, it could be argued that the Net Zero positioning is less about an ideological stance against climate change action itself, but one rooted in economics.

Even if we accept that, the prospective danger there is that Badenoch and the Conservatives get bogged down constantly making these two, three-stage arguments and outlining these connections while other parties jump straight to the central issues themselves. Ronald Reagan once said “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Those are particularly harsh words, but ones which the Conservatives might want to think about if their electoral strategy is to address the two core issues facing voters today through indirect routes.

This year’s set of locals included many of the country’s biggest cities, including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds. It also included districts centred on many leave-voting towns and smaller cities up and down the north and midlands, and some county councils in the south and east.

Most of them were, until now, predominantly Labour held, and (mostly) last contested in 2022. That year’s elections were altogether pretty rosy for Labour - they did not feature surging Reform UK or Green parties, and were followed shortly by the resignation of the deeply unpopular Boris Johnson as prime minister. In that sense, Labour were defending a set of results from what was widely agreed to be a pretty high baseline.

In the context of what will turn out to be around 1500 Labour losses against that baseline - or put another way, a ‘loss rate’ of around 60% of seats defended - I am going to use this post to focus on one important angle: what the locals can tell us about the fragmentation of Labour’s 2024 voter coalition.

And, specifically, whether it is the Greens or Reform UK who are the bigger threat to the Labour vote.

Which, in turn, probably ought to contribute to discussions and debates around how Labour should think about responding to these election results, and plotting their future course.

(And gives us a good indicator as to which polling cross-break of Labour 2024 voters and their vote intention now is most likely to be correct - in which I have a vested interest, of course).

Pollsters disagree on where Labour’s 2024 vote is going, but more tend to suggest a higher defection rate to the Greens than Reform

Generally speaking, all polling companies and houses agree that Reform UK are clearly ahead in current national Westminster vote intention, and that some order and combination of Labour, the Conservatives, and the Greens follow behind (something which, by the way, the BBC’s Projected National Share confirmed yesterday).

However, pollster to pollster, there are differences in (a) how close the Greens are to the two ‘traditional’ parties (including even maybe being ahead), and (b) in what numbers are Labour defectors moving to different parties (principally, the Greens and Reform UK).

The table below shows how, broadly speaking, pollsters can be split into two camps on this niche. The first would generally suggest that Labour 2024 voters are breaking evenly between both the Greens and Reform. The second would suggest that significantly more Labour 2024 voters are moving to the Greens than to Reform (to varying degrees).

The 2026 Local election results can be used to help triangulate the polling evidence

Local election results cannot give us concrete conclusions about voter flows - do be deeply suspicious of anyone trying to sell you a story about individual voters using aggregate data:

• People vote different in local versus national elections (which means there is no direct read across to national Westminster opinion polls even from exercises to extrapolate local election voting behaviour to national vote data, such as BBC’s Projected National Share)

• Using swings from ward level data to directly extrapolate voter flows is an ecological fallacy (we don’t know who, if anyone, moved between parties when swings happen, just that the electorate in aggregate moved in that direction)

That said, we can use specific disaggregations of and trends in ward level results from 2026 to give us a clues as to which camp of pollsters is more likely to be correct about where the Labour 2024 vote is going.

In turn, this should have important consequences for our understanding of what Labour’s 2024 vote was, why they are behaving as they are, and how Labour should think about responding to that.

To that end, I think there are two particularly clear signals from the results data suggesting that Labour were struggling more versus the Greens than Reform. As I say, that alone does not give concrete conclusions about the flows of individual voters (which is what the polling is designed to do), but it gives some strong hints.

Labour suffered more where the Greens advanced strongest

During the overnight count in the small hours of Friday morning, John Curtice appeared on air to suggest that the ward level results suggested that Labour were losing out more to the Greens than they were to Reform. The evidence was quite clear on this when we looked at who was ‘suffering most’ when either the Greens or Reform were advancing strongest.

According to the data collected and analysed as part of the BBC’s Keyward exercise, Labour were dropping back on average by a whopping 37 percentage points in wards last contested in 2022 where the Greens were advancing most strongly in 2026 (up 30pts or more).

Conversely, Labour were down by much less than that, 20pts (which is still an awful lot, by the way), where Reform were up by 30pts or more versus 2022.

The relationship becomes even clearer when we look at the other side of the respective scales. Where the Greens were advancing least (by only up to 10-points or less), Labour were only down by an average of 12pts versus 2022. But they were still down by an average of 20pts where Reform were advancing by only up to 10% or under - making the relationship on that side of the coin completely flat.

Or, in other words, there is little to no statistical relationship between Reform performance and Labour performance, but a very strong (negative) relationship between Labour and Green performance.

Relatedly, the Conservatives were down by 26pts on their own high water mark in wards contested last in 2021 where Reform advanced by 30pts or more. Those ‘vaccine bounce’ elections were part of a very strong year of polling and electoral results for the Tories, against which they fell back heavily this time around. Labour for their part were down by just 13pts in such wards.

The more Labour vote there was to go around, the better the Greens did

We can also see similar relationships when looking at areas of particularly high Labour ‘prior strength’ in 2022.

Labour, like the Conservatives at the 2024 General Election, fell back more where they started stronger, as we can see from the table below. There is then a linear increase in the Green average performance as we move through the categories of Labour past vote, and an almost linear decrease in Reform performance. By the time we get to Labour’s strongest seats, the Greens have overtaken Reform in terms of mean growth in vote share.

In fact, the ‘flip’ between Greens advancing faster than Reform happens at a Labour 2022 baseline share of around 55%. This sounds high, but as a category actually includes around half the seats Labour were defending this cycle.

Furthermore (see also below), this category of seat is particularly useful for analysing what happens to the Labour vote, because there is, quite simply, more of it to analyse (and it will constitute a larger chunk of whatever is moving).

It is worth noting that even at their ‘lowest’ level of advance, in those strongest Labour seats, Reform were still putting on 16 points relative to 2022. And they were undoubtedly doing so while taking Labour votes. However, it does not appear that they were doing so to the same rate as the Greens.

The Conservatives were also down (from a low baseline) by around 7 points in such wards.

Conclusion: #LE2026 data suggests the Greens are a bigger threat to Labour’s vote than Reform

Overall, we can pretty reasonably conclude from the election results data and the polling evidence that the Greens are a bigger threat to the Labour vote than Reform are.

Now, this can only really said in aggregate and general terms - there will be sub-groups of voters, and specific places, where the opposite is undoubtedly true.

And I’m sure some of my polling colleagues will still disagree!

It is also true and worth considering that this cycle of English local authority elections included many places where the Green vote ought to be strongest, such as the aforementioned large cities (including London).

However, that actually makes these sets of local elections better rather than worse to do this sort of analysis on, because such areas include a far larger chunk of Labour’s 2024 voters for us to analyse than other cycles (such as last year, where contests were fought predominantly in areas which included far more Conservative and Reform voters).

(This set of locals also ironically did not include any areas where the Greens won MPs in 2024, but did include elections in all but one council area where Reform won a constituency in 2024).

I’m not going to take a position on whether the data and conclusions presented here should prompt Labour to “move to the left”, or the opposite, or chase one particular set or voters or another in response to what happened on Thursday - not least because I argued against seeing Labour’s dilemma in those terms in my previous Substack.

That’s for others to consider and work out.

But I do think it’s quite clear from the results data, the result in Wales with Plaid storming to victory and replacing Labour there, the bulk of the polling evidence, and indeed even from what happened in Gorton and Denton earlier this year, what is currently happening to Labour’s fragile 2024 voter coalition. And that feels as if it ought to be relevant to what Labour does next.

In both situations, a traditional powerhouse party of British politics faces a populist challenge from an insurgent party, creating a crushing pincer movement on their once trusty voter coalition. Both suffer big, hard-hitting defeats in parliamentary by-elections and take hammerings in local and devolved electoral contests. Public (and private) conversation focuses mainly on which political direction the party should turn toward in order to come out of the situation as best as possible.

In 2024, the question was whether Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives should move right to directly counter Reform, or shift to the centre and claim back voters drifting off to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The former were eating away a much more obvious chunk of their vote share, but the latter two were their principal opponents in the vast majority of seats being defended.

Fast forward to 2026, and Labour are facing an existential threat from an enthused and mobilised Green Party (as well as Plaid Cmyru and the SNP in Wales and Scotland respectively), who under new political leadership have just knocked the government out of the park in their backyard stronghold of Manchester, and (at least in the short term) surpassed them in the vote intention polls. But they too are facing significant threats from Reform, with Farage’s party the main challenger to Labour in the majority of their parliamentary seats.

The post-Gorton and Denton conversation is now mostly concerned with whether Labour should embrace its ‘soft left’ and try to win back the progressive voters who have left them, abandoning the political direction scoped out by Morgan McSweeney et al. in the lead up to GE2024.

Or, whether they should stay the course and continue to largely ignore (or at least remain far less concerned about) their left flank in favour of trying to win back voters who have jumped ship to Reform UK on their right.

In both cases, Labour 2026 and the Conservatives 2024, the argument essentially boils down to ‘faced with competing pressures, should X move left, or should they move right?’

Labour are losing far, far more voters to parties on their left (and in the centre) than they are the right, and that cannot be ignored. However, my personal view on that question is essentially the same as it was vis-à-vis the Conservatives back in 2024: if shifting left or right is the answer, then you’re asking the wrong question.

There are a number of reasons why I ultimately come to that conclusion, but I’ll discuss the two most important in this post.

Firstly, the political right and political left are useful categories for us as keen observers, students, and bubble-dwellers to understand political parties and systems, but they are rarely ever categories which voters themselves use to frame, understand and communicate their political views and demands.

The public is, quite frankly, far more ‘a la carte’ in their approach to politics. They care not whether a particular policy might be ideologically incompatible with another, nor whether values or principles preclude or facilitate the meshing of policies together.

A bigger, more interventionist state increasing government spending to help ease the cost of living crisis is, as far as the public are concerned, completely compatible in terms of a policy programme with a smaller state lifting tax burdens on lower and middle earners.

A state which ploughs funding into national welfare programmes such as the NHS is completely compatible with a state which slashes welfare programmes for those out of work.

A government which is willing to slap higher taxes on billionaires and big businesses and push for net zero is completely compatible with one which lays down tough immigration and asylum rules and introduces harsher sentences for serious criminal offences.

Really, rather than focusing on whether the party ought to follow a path laid down by a Shabana Mahmood or a Wes Streeting over one laid down by an Angela Rayner or an Andy Burnham, some combination of the above is probably the closest Labour can get to what the public want.

It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense therefore as a question of electoral strategy, political positioning, or acquiescence with the(ir) median voter for Labour to ask, “should we go more left wing or right wing from here?”

Yes, policy platforms should broadly make sense in the whole, and be able to tell a coherent story which can be communicated to voters (“What, and Who, are we for?”). But the glue which knits them together need not be, and is frankly probably best off not being, ideological.

The second reason I believe “left or right” is the wrong question to ask is that the public’s issues with the current Labour administration are much more rooted in issues surrounding credibility, reliability, and authenticity than they are the specific policy platform(s) being pursued by the government.

We can look at the November 2025 Budget for some great evidence of this. A large number of the things announced by Rachel Reeves that day were very popular with the public; including higher taxes on gambling profits, freezing rail fares, increasing minimum wage, reducing environmental levies, new taxes on millionaire properties, decreasing hospitality business rates, and extending the sugar tax.

But nonetheless, Brits were still more likely to view the Budget as unfair (48%) rather than fair (21%), and the event itself – despite the introduction of said popular policies – did nothing to improve any Reeves’, Starmer’s, or the Labour government’s position in the court of public opinion.

More recently, Starmer’s positioning on conflict with Iran has been closely aligned with where a war-wary, Trump-hostile, British public sit. Only 25% of the British public support the US in their military action, and fewer than one-in-ten (8%) believe the UK should be joining in the conflict.

Despite UK government policy aligning well with public opinion in this regard, by a margin of 47% to 37%, the British public are more likely to think that Keir Starmer has handled the UK’s response to the conflict badly rather than well.

That whole situation again reminds me of polling we saw in the lead up to the 2024 election – you could find a pretty decent number of individual Conservative party policies which commanded at least moderate-to-good ratings with the public (including even national service). But did they make anyone really more likely to vote for Sunak and his party? Absolutely not. They were, to coin a term, cooked.

Which brings me back around to the central point of this post – the “left or right?” debate misses the fundamental points which explain why this government is where it is with the public, and is ultimately likely to serve Starmer and his government in 2026 about as well as it did Sunak and his in 2024.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, the public opinion obstacles that he and his administration face are far more fundamental in nature. They are, mostly, about him and his government’s perceived ability, reliability, and credibility.

Starmer made competency – doing the job of government – a huge part of his (and Labour’s) 2024 pitch, but as early as just five months into his premiership, more than double the number of people thought Labour were incompetent than thought they were competent. That figure which has now grown to 4x.

What the public mostly see from the government is a steady stream of u-turns, scandals, electoral defeats, negative press, and a seeming lack of ability to arrest either the constant, stinging sense of national decline or the ever-growing financial pressures facing voters in their day to day lives. Six, thirty-tonne anchors round the neck of an albatross, none of which have much to do with being “too left” or “too right”.

The answer to “what should Labour’s response be to Gorton and Denton, Caerphilly, and the rest?” obviously will have to include some repositioning on some policy areas to bring them more in line with the sorts of voters who are likely to back them again and – by extension – (re)construct a voter coalition which gives them a shot at winning the next election.

However, the more pressing and important challenges - the questions which Starmer and Labour should be trying to answer - are how to change the reputation, perceptions, and general atmosphere that surround this Labour party in government. How to change the story that is being written about them? That will require far more work than changing position(s) on policy issues.

I saw this sentiment expressed across multiple platforms and by multiple analysts and commentators, though a few of them have since added further clarification or rowed back slightly on it.

Nonetheless, it sparked a curiosity which I wanted to explore more deeply today than I had time to do on Twitter/X earlier in the week.

The argument leading folk to the above position goes as follows: Labour’s support among young voters is dropping through the floor, while the populist appeals of Farage and Reform are attracting ever increasing numbers of today’s teenagers and young adults – frustrated, angry, let down, and politically homeless – to their cause. Therefore, enfranchising a whole new band of young voters will benefit Farage to the greatest degree, and do little to help Labour.

But contrary to what might feel like a widespread belief about Reform, Labour, and the youth vote, the above is simply not what the opinion polling says.

For those of you wanting a quick read: my conclusion about lowering the voting age and what it might do for British political parties at the next general election is that there might be something in it for Reform, but there’s clearly a lot more in it for Labour.

What does the current polling about young voters say?

While it is easy enough to find young, suit-adorned men who are happy to go on television, podcasts, and radio to discuss their support for Farage and Reform’s positions and projects, the reality is that recent YouGov vote intention polling suggests only around 10% of young people (those aged 18-24) expected to vote if a general election were held tomorrow would opt for Reform UK.

That drops to only around 6%, or around 3-in-50 young people, if we look across all folk aged 18-24 (regardless of predicted turnout).

To put that into context, we would expect around 1/3 (~33%) of young voters to back Labour if an election were held tomorrow. Around a quarter (~25%), we think, would go Green. Around one-in-five (~20%) would likely vote for the Liberal Democrats.

And in fact, the number of voting 18–24-year-olds we would expect to back Reform is essentially equal to the number we would expect to vote Conservative (~8%).

But while Labour remain well ahead of Reform with younger voters, it is certainly true that their popularity among young people has been declining in recent years. We can assess this by looking at YouGov’s ‘How Britain Voted’ data from the past four elections, and comparing it to the current polling average.

Strikingly, we can see that Labour’s 1/3 figure now has essentially halved from the particularly high, Corbyn-driven figure of almost 2-in-3 in 2017. Their levels of support now are broadly similar to what they achieved among young voters under Ed Miliband in their 2015 defeat.

Meanwhile, Reform have essentially not budged among young voters since the 2024 election, but their 1-in-10 figure now is well above what the Brexit party achieved. It is also however no better than what UKIP achieved in 2015 – another data point against the suggestion that Reform UK are doing especially well with young folk at the moment.

What about those who can’t yet vote?

The above figures and the stories within them are of course all of current 18-24-year-old voters. People who could, if an election were held today, already vote (and those who were eligible to vote at the respective included elections in the table above).

But what can we say about how 16-to-17-year-olds might vote, and which party might benefit most from their inclusion if an election were held tomorrow?

Firstly, it is important to note that polling this group is extremely hard. Polling young adults (18-24) is hard enough, and polling teenagers is even harder. Not least because we don’t have politically representative targets for them – we obviously can’t use past voting behaviour for example to make sure we have the right balance of political preferences within this age group.

That caveat noted, we can appeal to some very timely polling of 16- to- 17-year-olds from Focaldata and Merlin Strategy which suggests that vote intention among that cohort looks broadly like those aged 18 to 24, though with higher Reform support.

In both polls, Labour clearly ahead with 16- to 17-year-olds. Starmer’s party register 35% of vote intention among this group with Focaldata, and 30% with Merlin.

Both then have Reform and the Greens tied for second place; Focaldata have Reform on 17% of vote intention and the Greens 19%, while Merlin Strategy have on 20% and 18% respectively.

So we have some evidence here that maybe Reform are stronger among those not yet in the electorate than those who are, but again the central message is that Labour, not Reform, are ahead with them.

And what about those who these proposed changes will actually bring into the electorate?

Of course, current 16- to 17-year-olds isn’t quite the right group to be thinking about here. Assuming the current government serve out their full term, then today’s 16- to 17-year-olds will be eligible to vote at the next election regardless of any proposed changes to the law.

The voters being enfranchised by government plans are in fact today’s 12- to 13-year-olds.

Now, while we know some things about the 16-17 age group, we know next to nothing about the current vote intention figures of today’s 12- to 13-year-olds.

Realistically, given the difficulty and severe limitations which would come any attempt to even begin to poll vote intentions among children, no actual, direct measurements of this group is likely to be forthcoming.

Doubtless only a fraction would even have thought for a split second about how they would vote in a hypothetical election for which they may or not be eligible.

But we can appeal to the established political science wisdom to guide as to what we can expect in four years’ time, given what we see in the data now.

Overall, the weight of evidence suggests that party vote choice in the UK tends to change most (at the aggregate level) as people age, rather than as generations or cohorts move in and out of the electorate. Up until the last election at least, people grow older, their probability of voting Conservative increases.

We can see this clearly from data collected and written up by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch in 2022 (as above), and from the YouGov/WPI pre-2024 election data below showing the fairly linear move into the ‘switch’ moment when someone became more likely to vote Conservative than Labour (it was 66, by the way). New voters pretty much always tend to start off on the left side of the political divide.

Interestingly, on a slight tangent, as we can see from John’s work that millennials were the first generation (since data has been available) in the UK and US to get more left-wing as they age (whereas other generations have become more right-wing).

Back to the main quest: Dr Laura Serra and Professor Maria Grasso outline to us in their forthcoming paper that each generation tends to be more socially liberal than the generation proceeding it (to some degree). Interestingly however, they note that levels of economic liberal/conservatism from generation to generation tends to be cyclical (rather than trending in specific directions).

Given this, and the fairly left-leaning location of the current cycle on economic attitudes (see above), we probably ought to expect voters coming into the electorate between now and the next election to be generally a least a little more left-leaning than the ones who came before them.

That said, previous evidence from YouGov suggests that a far higher degree of younger people today (Gen Z) are familiar with and actively agree with the views of the culturally extremely conservative Andrew Tate than any other generation.

Plus, if we think that 16- to 17-year-olds are more inclined to vote Reform UK than 18-24s, could we see a break in the academic consensus above? Will future voters be more right wing and lean more toward right-leaning parties than the voters who came of age before them?

It’s certainly possible, but even if might expect some reversal of this liberalising trend and increasing support for the political right as Gen Z come fully into the electorate, we should only expect the scale of any such changes (particularly when then mapped on to voting behaviour) to be minimal and gradual.

Writing last year for the Political Studies Association, Dr Serra showed how probability of voting Labour (over Conservative) among young people has followed what we would describe as an autocorrelated trend since 1964.

That is to say, aside from a structural break around the landslide 1997 general election (where probability of every voter backing Labour went up dramatically across the board) the probability of a voters under the age of 35 opting for Labour at election 0 (or, now) is very closely related to the probability of a voter under the age of 35 opting for Labour at election -1 (or, the one before).

Given that, we ought to expect current levels of support for right- and left-wing parties among today’s 18-24-year-olds and 16- to 17-year olds to be a pretty good proxy - or an anchor, or a watermark - of how that support will shape among young people in four years’ time.

How does this compare to the situation in other countries?

The sustained popularity of the political left over the right puts the UK in something of an odd position compared to many other Western democracies.

Polling and electoral evidence from places such as the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, among others suggests young people increasingly favouring right-wing (broadly defined) parties. In some instances, support for the right in these countries goes well and clearly beyond their backing for left-wing parties.

These comparative contexts, I think, drive a lot of the general (erroneous) conventional wisdom about Reform UK and young voters in Britain. We constantly see evidence of the political right doing increasingly well with young people in democracies across the globe – so, surely it must be the same here?

To that: yes, Reform UK are certainly far more popular among younger people than, for instance, the Brexit Party, before them, which gives the sense of growing momentum for the British political right among young voters. But, importantly, not momentum which has yet taken them past the benchmark set by UKIP in 2015.

And we are still talking about very few numbers of young people supporting right-wing parties in Britain right now. And, frankly, those numbers remain dwarfed by the support for left and centre-left parties among Britain’s youth.

So what’s the upsum?

Given the collective evidence above, I don’t expect a sudden huge change in the polling nor the long-term trends on young people, political ideology, and voting, within the next four years.

Or, at least, I don’t believe we should hold any expectation that it will change as our default position.

We should expect voters coming into the electorate as a result of Labour’s proposed changes to be more likely to vote Labour over Reform, and also for at least as many young voters at the next election to be backing the Greens as Nigel Farage’s party.

And, as such, votes at 16 will, the evidence above suggests, absolutely will benefit Labour (and the British political left in general) more so than Reform (and the British political right).

But all birds come home to roost eventually, and here I am once again to talk to you about the annual serving of political drama that every British politics geek can rely upon: English local elections.

This cycle is the smallest of the four rotating sets of contests which happen in England - and was made smaller still by the cancellation of no fewer than nine council elections earlier this year, owing to the extensive ongoing reorganisation of local governments up and down the country.

But elections are going ahead in many areas. Alongside 21 county councils, eight unitary authorities, and one metropolitan borough (Doncaster), four combined authority mayoral positions are up for grabs this coming Thursday.

It’s on those mayoral contests that I will mostly be working for the BBC’s coverage of the elections (starting late on Thursday night, all the way through into Friday evening), so it is they I will focus on for this post.

Greater Lincolnshire

I’ll start with the contest with which I am most personally familiar - Greater Lincolnshire. A younger Patrick spent eight years growing up in the county, and I still have family ties there (yes, it is pretty much exactly as flat as everyone says it is, apart from that one hill).

Late last year I wrote something about how I thought this could have the potential to turn into a three-way contest, should the Conservatives and Reform UK split the right-wing vote between them and should Labour’s campaign motivate and turn out their voters in the more urban areas of Lincolnshire in which they did well in last year (Lincoln, Scunthorpe, and Greater Grimsby).

According to YouGov’s polling of the race, that hasn’t happened.

Instead, Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns looks to have a mobilised a clear majority of Lincolnshire’s political right, and seems set to become the historic county’s first ever mayor.

Labour may well end up outperforming the 15% we had them at in this poll, but the message Lincolnshire voters told us over our fieldwork period last week was quite clear - this does not look like a three-horse race.

A note generally on polling for any sort of local elections (including mayoral): it is very, very difficult. Much more difficult than traditional, national vote intention polling (and that’s hard enough!).

The key reason being is that local election voters are a very specific subset of the overall electorate. Only about 30-35% of registered voters turn out for such contests (when there isn’t also a larger election, such as a general election) going on. That in turn is only about 20% of the adult population. Trying to speak to that 20% in online polls and estimate which of them will actually turn out and who they will vote for is a big challenge.

For the sake of serving our public data mission, and providing information to stakeholders and interested parties, it is a challenge we at YouGov are always happy to take on. But I would urge anyone reading this post to remember the scale of that challenge when we compare these polls to the results on Friday.

West of England

Onto a different contest which is very much a multiparty battle, former local councillor and business leader Helen Godwin is looking to defend the West of England mayoralty for Labour. The task will be a difficult one, according to YouGov polling, with Godwin in a close fight with Mary Page of the Greens.

Some may be surprised to see the Greens potentially in with a chance of winning their first ever combined authority mayor position, but West of England of course contains the city of Bristol, where the Greens added one of their three extra MPs they won in 2024 (Carla Denyer, Bristol Central) and came within a whisker of taking the city council in the May before.

And this is not just a two horse race: both Aaron Banks (yes, that Aaron Banks) of Reform UK and Steve Smith (no, not that Steve Smith) for the Conservatives were within ten points or less when we polled the West of England public last week.

Whoever wins the West of England race will be highly unlikely to do so with the kind of dominant vote share we are probably expecting from Reform UK in Lincolnshire.

Much more likely the eventual champion of what is a very politically diverse section of South West England will squeak past their nearest rival with something around 30% of the vote.

Looking across the rest of the polling (see above and below), the West of England could be Labour’s best chance of walking away from Thursday’s contests with a combined authority mayor win to their name.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough

Moving Eastward and to another contest we expect to be close, and the combined authority of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is set to elect its third mayor in as many contests, with 2021 Labour winner Nik Johnson not seeking re-election.

YouGov polling suggests that the Conservatives are in a good position to re-take the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty off Labour, in what could be a rare moment of good news for Kemi Badenoch’s party on a night in which they are expected to struggle to defend a high watermark 2021 baseline (remember Boris Johnson and the vaccine bounce?) against insurgent parties from all sides (though not including Labour).

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is another mayoralty which covers an interesting patchwork of different sorts of political contests, and we need only look at the 2024 general election results for confirmation of that.

Cambridge itself is of course currently a pretty safe Labour seat at the Westminster level, but is an island in a sea of what is now Liberal Democrat gold, but was previously Tory blue, surrounding it. Peterborough is an ultra-marginal between Labour and the Conservatives, but the latter still comfortably won the adjacent Cambridgeshire North East. Reform UK put on a healthy vote share across the board, without winning any seats themselves.

Though the Conservatives (we think) led the battle last week, this has the potential to be another closely-ran thing.

Hull and East Yorkshire

The final contest this post will take a look at is taking place just north from Greater Lincolnshire and across the Humber Bridge (which by the way is a marvellous feat of engineering - go see it, and cross it, if you haven’t already).

Here, our YouGov polling last week put the Reform UK candidate Luke Campbell - a former champion boxer - well ahead of his rivals. Speaking after carrying out focus groups in the region, More In Common Director Luke Tryl noted how voters there had warmed to Campbell and his “not a politician” attitude and approach to the campaign and the voters he is trying to win over.

Mike Ross of the Liberal Democrats was in a virtual tie with Margaret Pinder of Labour in a race which includes the oft-hung, always hotly contested (between the Lib Dems and Labour) Hull city council.

The rest of the combined authority brings in some large towns, small towns, and rural areas which we would typically identify as traditionally Conservative heartlands. But in the era of a surging Reform UK, that status (and indeed the status of Hull as a Labour-Liberal marginal) is very much under threat.

Reform winning in Hull and East Yorkshire would be quite the statement from the party. Nigel Farage’s outfit did well in the area - particularly in Hull itself - in the 2024 General Election but were well beaten by their rivals in every seat except Kingston upon Hull East (where they lost by 13 points to Labour). Taking the mayoralty would be a significant step up from that.

So, what’s the story?

It’s very, very possible that Labour go 0/4 this year, which would be quite the change of fortunes from their last second snatching of the West Midlands mayoralty from under Andy Street’s nose in 2024 in what was, let’s be honest, overall a pretty blockbuster year for Starmer and his party.

Not winning a single of these contests would be a significant battery of cannon fire across the bows of the good ship Number 10. This is of course Labour’s first ballot box examination since taking power for the first time in 14 years. If zero combined authority mayor wins is coupled with a loss in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election and a poor performance in the council wins/losses ticker, grumbles of discontent will surely become full blooded shouts.

For the Conservatives, they may make a pickup in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough but this could be one of their few moments of solace - as their win in Tees Valley was in 2024 - in what is otherwise shaping up to be a bruising night for the official opposition.

This is not a position that Badenoch would want her party to be facing as they try to rebuild and present a front to the British voting public which looks like it has momentum and is ready to lead again.

Reform, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats will all be looking to make gains on Thursday, and our polling expects that the former two (and Reform UK in particular) have a great shot at doing so in the mayoral contests as well as the local council ballots.

Unlike counts in some other countries we could mention, the whole thing will be wrapped up within a matter of hours, rather than days.

While the polling industry disagrees somewhat regarding specific shares for specific parties, and eventual makeup of the Bundestag in terms of parties getting representation, the agreed-upon expectation is that we are headed for a change in government after just three-and-a-half years of an Olaf Scholz premiership.

His is a premiership by the why which has cratered in terms of approval ratings; 77% of Germans told us they disapproved of their government’s record to date in our latest YouGov data, versus 15% who said they approved. Much as there was with the Conservatives and Rishi Sunak in the 2024 British general election, a strong feeling of “get them out” dominates.

The CDU/CSU Union, formerly led by Angela Merkel and now by former corporate lawyer and MEP Friedrich Merz, are expected comfortably be the largest party. The current SPD-led government looks set to be yet another casualty in the recent global trend against incumbents.

How did we get here, and what has the election been about?

I’ve been working extensively on YouGov’s polling for the election, mainly the MRP, for a few months now, having also done so for the last federal election in 2021 (we didn’t have an MRP then, though).

This year’s contest feels mightily different from the previous in a number of ways - not least because of the early, ‘snap’ nature of the vote which was thrust upon Germans after the collapse of the ‘traffic light’ coalition in November.

As it went, I happened to be in the Reichstag (the German parliamentary buildings) the day the government fell. I had nothing to do with it, promise!

That day (6th November), Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) met with Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) to attempt to salvage a programme for continued government from the bombsite of disagreements and in-fights over fiscal policy.

They failed. And here we are, facing only Germany’s fourth early election in its history.

The 2021 election was contested as Germany, and Europe, were in the twilight of the Covid-19 pandemic. The key issue was essentially that - how would Germany recover, financially and socially, from the biggest global shock since the financial crisis.

This time, while it is not the topic that the SPD (nor either of their coalition partners) would have chosen, it has very much been an immigration election - at least in terms of public priorities. That has, of course, played into the hands of Germany’s political right.

Our polling from earlier this month reported that no fewer than 35% of Germans saw immigration as the top issue facing the country today, while 56% placed it in their top three.

By contrast, those figures for ‘the economy’ were 16% and 35% respectively.

That same polling found that 80% of Germans believe immigration has been too high in the last decade, and that half believe immigration has been generally bad for the country.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that the biggest political moment of the campaign came when Merz and the Union controversially cooperated with the AfD to secure the votes to pass a (non-binding) immigration-cutting motion in the Bundestag. A momentary unification of the parliamentary right wing to place a marker in the sand on the topic most pressing to the German public.

What are YouGov’s projections?

The German 2025 federal election is yet another contest in which, if the polling is right, incumbent parties will get a hiding. Particularly so the SPD as the leading governing party and Olaf Scholz as Chancellor, but also the FDP - who we project will drop out of the parliament altogether. The Greens, the third coalition partner, will likely emerge relatively unscathed, though.

Germany’s electoral system gives every voter two votes – one for a ‘direct mandates’ representing their local constituency, and a second ‘regional list’ vote from which overall parliamentary seat allocations are calculated.

German electoral law stipulates that to qualify for representation in the Bundestag, parties must either win 5% of the national vote (all regional list votes, tallied) or win three ‘direct mandates’ in the form of constituencies. Hence, for instance, BSW and the FDP can win 4.6% and 4.5% of the vote respectively but be allocated no seats (as above).

As well as the anticipated change in government, the other major story of the election is, as with so many countries across Europe, the rise of the far-right.

The AfD look set to effectively double their vote share from the 10% they managed in 2021, and become the second largest party in the Bundestag.

To fuel their polling rise, the AfD have been winning support from the those who previously voted SPD, the FDP, smaller (non-Bundestag) parties, and even the Union, who themselves have almost exclusively been winning their extra votes from former SPD and FDP backers.

Looking at map of projected constituency wins, Germany’s old wounds are figuratively lit up in bright lights. The contrast between the old German East (the five Bundeslands of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saschen, Sachen-Anhalt, Thüringen, and the east of Berlin) and West (the remainder of Germany, including West Berlin) is stark.

The AfD are projected to win all but five constituencies in the former East Germany, and precisely zero in former West Germany.

The old Iron Curtain is now a barrier against a blue tide.

What possible governments are we looking at, and will the far-right be involved?

Despite their rise in popularity and prospective occupation of something in the order of 20%-25% of parliamentary seats available, all other German political parties have promised to maintain ‘the lockout’ of the far-right from government.

In this sense, Germany stands apart from other European nations, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, who have brought far-right parties into governing coalitions.

Depending on the eventual outcome of the vote and the exact composition of the parliament, government formation could be tricky - especially if the AfD are indeed occupying so many seats yet no party wanting to work with them.

The reason being is that there are three parties close to that 5% threshold (Die Linke, BSW, and FDP). If they were to each make it into the Bundestag, this will significantly reduce the number of seats which the other four (larger) parties will win.

As I explored and outlined for my piece on the YouGov website yesterday, in a five-party Bundestag - the central projection of our MRP model - Merz and the Union could partner directly with the SPD and together enjoy a seat total well above the 316 required for a parliamentary majority.

This would be a relatively simple task, one which the two parties have often done before, and would create a stable governing majority.

A ‘Black-Green’ coalition between the Union and Greens could even be possible, if both parties perform well in the final vote share.

A seven-party parliament (or rather eight, if we include the protected minority South Schleswig Voters' Association party) makes coalition-building maths very difficult versus a five or even six-party parliament.

A fractured Bundestag in which Merz would be forced to work with not just one but two other parties to form a government would come with two sizeable risks:

1. The new coalition could fall to the same fate as the outgoing current government - collapse, forcing new snap elections. Negotiating between and managing the interests of three parties with three distinct voter bases is no mean feat, as Olaf Scholz and the SPD found out. We don’t know how kindly, if at all, German voters would react to being sent to the polls early again.

2. If the Union partner with both the SPD and the Greens to form the government, that leaves the AfD as essentially in a very clear position as the key opposition voice. Though of course the other, smaller opposition parties will be competing for airtime in such a parliament, if the far-right alone become the lightning rod for all anti-government sentiment that is a potentially highly dangerous situation for German politics and democracy (and for the electoral prospects of mainstream parties themselves).

What about Germany’s political left?

Another noteworthy story of this election has been the contrasting fortunes for Die Linke and BSW over what was otherwise a fairly stable and uneventful (in terms of the polls and public opinion, at least) election campaign.

These two main parties of the German left flank have essentially swapped places in the polls - and also their respective chances of making it to the Bundestag

The central projection in our first MRP on 17 January was that Die Linke would drop of the Bundestag altogether, failing to reach either the 5% national vote threshold or get the three constituency wins required to qualify for parliamentary representation

Now, Die Linke have gone from an estimated 2.9% of the national vote in mid-January to no less than 7.5% in our final projection. Their campaign has really sprung to life after a slow start, with younger voters in particularly quickly connecting with parliamentary leader Heidi Reichinnek. She has taken a much more central role in Die Linke’s campaign efforts (particularly on social media) in recent weeks.

We’ve seen the opposite trend however for Germany’s newest political party, the ‘Alliance for Sahra Wagenknecht’ (BSW) – a former Die Linke politician who split out from the party in 2023 to form her own parliamentary grouping.

The BSW campaign has been a highly personalised one, with Sahra Wagenknecht’s face featuring heavily on party literature and posters occupying the social media feeds, lampposts, and roundabouts (yes, really!) of Germany.

In so doing, Wagenknecht hoped to lean into her relative popularity and high name recognition among many, mostly left-leaning, voter groups.

But our MRP projections suggest she and her party may not have been successful in this aim and could be facing exclusion from the country’s parliament altogether.

In our first MRP, we projected BSW to be on 6% of the vote, qualifying them for around 45 seats in the Bundestag. Our mid-campaign update MRP on 6 February had them on 5.4%, and approximately 40 seats. In our final MRP, their projected vote share has dropped to 4.6%, meaning they drop out of the parliament altogether.

It remains to be seen what the BSW will do from here, if they fail to make the parliament. The case for a bespoke political party in their niche position in the German political system might be difficult to justify, particularly if Die Linke perform as well as expected The projected 8 or even 9% of the vote for Die Linke would be double what they achieved in 2021.

A final thought

Perhaps this is just a reflection of the relatively short time in which I have been working in political research and elections, but it feels that snap election contests are a tool exercised by incumbents much more frequently now than in decades gone by.

Governments in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Germany, as just some examples, have all called snap contests within the past 18 months. Each time, the motivation of the incumbents in these races has been, at least to some extent, to try and catch their opposition off guard and unprepared, to focus dissenting internal-party voices and swing momentum around, and to force their opponents into errors or missteps under the sudden pressure of a campaign.

Only one incumbent has really managed to successfully achieve this - Spain’s Pedro Sanchez.

Looking at the projections for the German election tomorrow, I feel we can safely conclude one thing - Olaf Scholz is not Pedro Sanchez.

Only Pedro Sanchez is Pedro Sanchez.

MPs are expected to vote on the second reading of the assisted dying bill at around about 2:30pm today. Ahead of that, I explored where public opinion sits - and where it has sat for quite some time - on assisted dying for Con Home. The first half of this blog is a copy of that.

The second half is an exploration of what I think the impact of former Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns’ decision to stand in the Greater Lincolnshire Mayoral election next year as the Reform UK candidate.

Finishing today’s post off, I’m also going to give out a very strong recommendation for all my readers to get subscribing to a brand new Substack.

On assisted dying

It is still unclear at this time whether the proposed legislation on assisted dying will pass or fail at today’s hurdle. Even if were to get the nod this week and pass its second reading, it would create another flashpoint – one it may be even less likely to break through – after committee stage (and all the amendments and interventions which will likely follow).

The legislation as worded, if passed, would allow for those facing terminal illness to choose to end their own lives under certain specific criteria (relating to their condition and that of their life expectancy) and after having completed a due process involving the sign off from two doctors and a hearing from a high court judge.

Either way it goes, the result of the vote on Friday is expected to be very close. Assisted dying is no doubt a tricky issue, with strong feels and strong arguments on both sides. As such, and for other reasons, MPs are allowed a ‘free vote’ on the issue – not bound by party whips.

Nonetheless, Labour leader Keir Starmer has previously signalled his support for changes to the law in line with the proposals (though has not publicly given a position on this particular vote itself) in statements given as recently as just under a year ago.

Furthermore, as well as implied (if not expressed) leadership approval, changes to the law to allow for assisted dying enjoy strong support from the public. So strong in fact, that it crosses all manner of socio-political divides and stretches back to comparative political ancient history.

Since 2019, YouGov tracking data has shown consistent, 2/3 support for assisted dying in case of terminal illness. At the last measurement on 7^th October this year, 67% of the public indicated that they thought the law “should be changed to allow someone to assist in the suicide of someone suffering from a terminal illness”. That number, as with the 13% who were opposed, has barely moved in what is now five years, according to our data.

But far more impressively, public support for changes in the law to allow for assisted dying in certain circumstances can be traced back almost 75 years. As highlighted by Ed Hodgson of More in Common, Gallup recorded support for voluntary death’ in the case of incurable illness was supported by the public by 55% to 24% in 1950.

Racing back to present times, we at YouGov tested a wide range of wordings and conditions and circumstances under which the public may support or oppose assisted dying. The current policy as it is proposed in the Bill enjoys support of 73% of Brits, with 13% opposed.

And this support cuts across whichever line you care to try and place upon it. By party, support for the legislation as worded ranges from 80% of 2024 Liberal Democrat voters (with 10% of them opposed) to 68% of Reform UK voters (19% opposed). Men (74%) and women (73%) are equally likely to support the changes (with 13% and 14% opposed, respectively). Older people (aged 65+: 72% support, 16% oppose) are more likely than younger people (aged 18-24: 72% support, 16% oppose) to support changing the law, but even then, younger people are very clearly in favour. The list goes on.

Which is not at all to say that the British public support changes to allow for assisted dying in any given circumstance. There are a number of hypothetical instances where the public are clearly against assisted dying being allowed, and MPs talking or thinking about ‘slippery slope’ styled arguments may well have this in mind.

When we asked if this should be allowed “for any reason a patient wants”, support dropped all the way down to 10% while opposition rose to 71%.

Equally, the public were not in favour of the suggestion that children should be allowed access to assisted dying (19% support, 51% opposed) nor when the patient wanted it for mental health reasons (16% support, 58% opposed). There are clear limits to public backing for patients choosing to end their lives.

Even so, by a margin of 55% to 20%, the public are in favour of someone choosing assisted dying when their condition was incurable and painful/debilitating, but not terminal.

All of which, those specific and perhaps extreme conditions aside, puts the current declared positions, and the expected outcome of the vote on Friday, quite far apart from public opinion. While Brits are very clearly in favour of these changes, MPs are heavily split.

We do not often see misalignment of this scale – and across all social and political groups, and over such a long period of time – between elected British political elites and the public they serve. Which begs an interesting question – why?

On Greater Lincolnshire

I actually lived in rural Lincolnshire aged 10-18, so it’s a place I can speak to with a lot of anecdotal and contextual knowledge as well as from a wider perspective of psephology and public opinion data.

The story here is that former Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns has now joined Reform UK and is standing as their candidate for the newly created Greater Lincolnshire mayor. The election will be held in May next year.

I’d advise a bit of caution against some very hot takes I’ve seen about what this means for how the Greater Lincolnshire Mayoralty race will play out. Namely: that this nails on a Reform UK win of the mayoralty.

Not least because while, yes, this will be a boost for Reform and a clear indication that they are going to commit high levels of resources to this race, th3 mayoral election will be held under First Past the Post (at least until any forthcoming legislation tells us specifically otherwise). And that changes things in a big way.

First off, for Reform this makes total sense. Lincolnshire is amongst their most fertile possible territories. It’s traditionally very Tory, voted Leave in 2016, and there’s a lot of deprivation among its large rural and semi-urban communities - and a lot of anger/disillusionment about that.

They also of course have an MP in the region: Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness).

But personally, I think Jenkyns’ intervention makes this more of a three way race than a slam dunk for anyone. Jenkyns and Reform are much more likely to win over Lincolnshire voters who would have otherwise opted for the Conservatives, not Labour.

This is, by the way, true of Reform voter coalitions everywhere - they are overwhelmingly made up of previous Conservative voters. YouGov research after the 2024 general election highlighted that no less than 1/4 of Conservative 2019 voters opted for Reform in July this year. Just 3% of 2019 Labour voters made the same journey.

The Tories were probably best placed to win the Mayoralty pre-Jenkyns’ intervention, but Labour are by no means no hopers.

For sure, Lincolnshire has vast swathes of farmland, small villages, and general ‘not friendly Labour territory, but they have been doing very well lately in local elections in the county’s only city, Lincoln.

By “very well”, I mean successively holding on to control of council for over a decade, only ever losing a couple of seats at a time per election, despite some very tricky national circumstances and political headwinds. They currently control 23 seats out of 33 in Lincolnshire’s most populous area by some distance.

Labour also won back both the Scunthorpe and Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes seats at the 2024 general election - two typical ‘red wall’ areas.

They also did well in the North East Lincolnshire authority, at the expense of the Conservatives, in May.

With what will now be a split vote on the right, and under FPTP, Labour have a shot at coming through the middle. Now, I use the word shot deliberately. It will still be an uphill battle, but one which Reform and Jenkyns have, I think, made easier for them.

Much will depend on the strength of the Conservative campaign, who their candidate is (Labour have picked a very good candidate in former Grimsby Town FC Chairman Jason Stockwood), and how well their vote (and turnout) holds up against Reform pressure. If Nigel Farage’s party pick up serious momentum and flip higher and higher numbers of Conservative voters in Lincolnshire to their cause, then Labour may well beat the Tories but not come close to beating Reform.

We have real three-way contest potential, here, if all three parties decide they want to go for it and test each other out in these electoral battleground conditions.

Whatever happens, it will be fascinating to watch!

And a recommendation

Finally, I’d like to bring to everyone’s attention the fact that James Kanagasooriam, Chief Research Officer at FocalData, is now on Substack. James’ first post highlights an intriguing way of looking at cycles in the British political system using a 2x2 framework. I would highly recommend giving it a read, and giving James a follow.

And so we move into members voting stage of the 2024 Conservative leadership contest. Yesterday’s rather shock result saw the frontrunner from the previous (third) round of MPs’ voting, James Cleverly, eliminated at the final parliamentary hurdle. The figures for that final ballot are below, showing Cleverly not only dropping out yesterday, but doing so having lost votes overnight between the 8th and 9th October.

For the front runner to fall backwards and drop into third place in the space of 24 hours, you suspect perhaps more than one parliamentary game has been afoot in the recent rounds of voting.

If you’ll allow me for a moment to indulge in the exchange of gossip and speculation (not my normal Plain Speaking English service, I’ll admit), the three theories I have heard most in various exchanges (both public and private) have been that either one or some combination of the following happened:

• The Cleverly campaign did not canvass strongly enough overnight on October 8th, complacency having set in, and ‘soft Cleverly’ votes (including those coming over from previously backing Tugendhat) were peeled off by the Jenrick and Badenoch campaigns who were hitting the phones hard to try win new supporters.

• Cleverly-aligned votes were lent to other candidates (one, in particular, with reference to the head-to-head matchup data in recent Conservative party membership polling) on October 9th to try and maximise his chances of winning the membership ballot. This may have happened without any central Cleverly campaign sanction or even knowledge.

• Cleverly was himself ‘lent’ votes in the October 8th ballot by other candidates who wanted he and not Tom Tugendhat move into the final round of MPs voting.

Personally, I find the former two more plausible than the third - I’m not sure what the rest of the field gained by Cleverly, rather than Tugendhat, making it through to the final three. But, as I say, this is all gossip and speculation.

At any rate, with Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick now moving into the final two, the Conservative party membership will be listening to a rather narrower ideological debate than they have been used to since being gifted the final say on their leader as part of William Hague’s reforms.

In terms of how that vote might go, the latest YouGov Conservative party membership polling suggests a dead heat between the two now finalists. Our figures on the eve of the party’s Birmingham conference had Badenoch on 52% and Jenrick on 48% (with uncertain and non-voters removed). It’s anyone’s game.

Both candidates were identifiably on the right of the original of field of six candidates from the get-go. Kemi Badenoch has is a well known and long (in the context of the speed at which British politics now moves) champion of the Conservatives’ right flank, and is more recently joined in that regard by the previously Remainer, described-moderate, Robert Jenrick who these days talks very tough on issues such as immigration, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and ‘prudent’ public spending.

Not many expected that an opening slate of candidates featuring broadly equal parts right and centre of the Conservative party would produce probably the two furthest right as the final options for members to pick between.

Typically, the more centrist ‘one nation’ group (and their offshoots and allies) are able to organise behind and put through a candidate from their part of the party into the final two.

This time, that did not happen.

And that will have consequences for the type of debate that we are likely to see from this, the final round - and the direction it will likely go in.

It is well known that Conservative party members sit further to the political right than even the party’s own MPs, and further still to the right of the average British voter (h/t, Professor Tim Bale).

The two candidates put forward to the membership align fairly well in that regard with the party faithful, but could perhaps struggle to differentiate themselves in the debates and pitches to come and could find the position they eventually win from to be well away from the median voter.

The natural instinct for the candidates may well be to push further to the right to try and establish points of difference from their rival, maximising membership appeal while simultaneously creating separation from their opponent.

While this could be a good strategy in the immediate battle to come, it could create a tricky situation for the winner when they then have to pivot back toward the general public.

A leader for instance who won the membership vote while committing to leave the ECHR will find themselves immediately at odds with the average voter, who believes that the UK country should stay in.

Equally, an emerging winner standing on a platform of cutting taxes over increasing funding for public services would also be on the wrong side of public opinion as it stands.

As well, while immigration is by far the number one concern among Conservative party members, it is tied in second place with health and behind the economy in the eyes of the British public.

The last election was not an immigration election, and while that might be the question that the Conservatives would like 2029 to be about, there’s little now five years out that should lead us to conclude it will be.

And any revival of the Rwanda plan, or something similar, is likely to be received lukewarmly, at best, by Brits.

While all this won’t be of much concern to Jenrick and Badenoch in the nearest future as they seek to win an election among one of the most right-leaning electorates in British politics, putting together a winning voter coalition for the next general election by talking about and campaigning on the sorts of issues and positions, and in the sorts of ways, which curry favour with Conservative party members will be difficult, to say the least.

Worse still, if coverage of the final stage of race becomes dominated by policy issues and leads to the winning candidate being framed (or understood) in terms of ideas, approaches, and positions which sound alien to the preferences and priorities of the average voter, this could be a very difficult opening position in the court of public opinion for the new leader of the opposition to recover from.

All of which could also distract the new leader of the Conservative party from actually dealing with the fundamental, underlying issues as to why the party lost so heavily on July 4th. Issues which, by the way, I did not detect a lot of serious engagement with during their conference in Birmingham this month; trust, competence, sound economic management, engagement with and consideration for the life and experience of the average Brit, and working in the best interests of the country rather than endlessly talking to themselves.

There is though a common loop through which this tricky thread may pass. We at YouGov used our AI Topic Quantifier - an AI-powered open-text response coder - to summarise what, in their own words, Conservative party members told us they were most looking for in their new leader.

While 15% said something about the new leader needing to have ‘conservative values’ almost a quarter (22%) said mentioned that they were looking for a leader with ‘integrity and honesty’. Two themes which strike chords with many of the reasons why the British voting public abandoned the Conservatives to such an extent between 2019 and 2024.

Perhaps there is a walkable, winning path for either Jernick or Badenoch which does not engage so much with rightward policy drifts, and instead addresses these crucial characteristics required for the Conservatives to win bak the trust of the British public.

There has been some chat around of a polling miss; a charge that the British polling industry, as a collective, failed to give an accurate account of the 2024 UK general election.

This is not, as it goes, the view of the British Polling Council.

Nor is it my view. Here are all the things which happened on July 4^th which the majority of pollsters and election modellers correctly anticipated to an accurate degree:

• The Conservatives suffered their worst ever defeat at a British general election.

• A large number of sitting Cabinet ministers (and would-be future leadership contenders) lost their seats.

• Labour won a landslide majority without putting on a Blair-level vote share.

• The Liberal Democrats added dozens upon dozens of seats to their parliamentary total, without significantly growing their vote share.

• Support for the Scottish National Party nosedived, with Labour replacing them as the largest party in Scotland.

• Reform UK arrived as a serious electoral force, and outperformed UKIP in 2015 both in terms of votes share and seats won.

• The Greens recorded their best ever result, and significantly expanded their vote share and parliamentary representation.

And what of the MRPs?

This election saw a record number of pollsters putting MRP models out – nine, by my count. Now, while

1. most models were pretty off the mark in terms of the scale of the Labour victory (in fact, all of them overestimated the number of Labour seat wins),

2. few of them properly captured the extent of the Liberal Democrat advance, and

3. some had the Conservatives dropping well below 100 seats,

a handful of MRPs were pretty darn close to getting the details of the election correct: including YouGov, More in Common, and Focaldata.

I am actually very proud of what we managed to achieve this election with our YouGov MRP. Every party’s seat and vote share numbers were within our stated intervals, and we called 92% of constituencies correct. A large number of those which we got wrong we listed as tossups.

To put that into context, 92% is only one percentage point less than was managed by YouGov’s 2017 General Election model which swept MRP into the British election mainstream by correctly anticipating – much against the conventional wisdom at the time – that Theresa May would lose her majority.

Overall though, I wouldn’t say this election was a great success for MRP models in general - even ours had some notable issues. Which is actually a helpful demonstration of the fact that they are no silver bullets, blessed with automatic capability to turn polling data into accurate election projections. They, just like any other model of voting and elections, require a huge amount of work and expertise, and are subject to error and mishaps.

How did pollsters do on the headline vote figures?

Onto the vote shares, and what the polling industry had to say about those versus how it actually all panned out.

Some national share projections significantly underestimated the Conservative party vote, with five pollsters having Sunak’s party at 20% or lower in their final call.

But 15 by my count did not produce such wide errors, and 10 had the eventual figure of 24% within a 2-point error margin. That, I would say, does not constitute an industry miss.

The polling was also largely pretty accurate on the Liberal Democrat and Green Party national shares, and nigh on every pollster estimated the Reform UK vote share within 3 percentage points (the majority were within two). Again, no polling miss here, I would argue.

But what should be of concern for us as pollsters is that, with notable exceptions being Verian, Norstat, and Ipsos, we did not paint an accurate picture of the level of support for Labour.

Thus, by extension, we overestimated the size of the Labour lead over the Conservatives and thus the size of their victory in terms of the popular vote.

On the former (overstating the Labour share), the polling average heading into voting day had Labour at around 39-40%. The eventual final Labour vote share on July 4^th was 35%. This is, by any reasonable measurement, a bit of a miss.

Not a large one, and not an election defining one – nor indeed one which changed the narrative of the result we eventually saw – but a miss nonetheless which we as an industry have to now work hard to diagnose, understand, and correct (more on that below).

On the latter (overstating the Labour lead), while it is undeniably true, gauging polling accuracy purely by looking at implied leads is not, in my opinion, good or fair form. Polling leads are product of, not the intended measurement of, vote share point estimates - the thing we actually measure.

Our job as pollsters is to try, to the best of our ability, accurately capture support for parties within an acceptable, pre-stated margin of statistical uncertainty or error. We are not trying to estimate polling leads – those are a by-product of the task we set ourselves.

The reason why I don’t think it is fair to judge polling accuracy based on lead size is that even a one-point error in party shares (which would be a very impressive result for a pollster) inevitably counts double in terms of estimating a lead.

Let’s suppose a Pollster X is covering a given election, and have Party A measured at 45% of the vote in their final call. But, it turned out they actually won 43%. Equally, Pollster X had Party A’s main rival, Party B, measured at 35%, but they actually got 37%.

In this scenario, Pollster X got the election correct – Party A won, and won comfortably. As well, neither party have been estimated incorrectly by the pollster, as both came in within two percentage points of where Pollster X said they were.

However, the lead would have been ‘mismeasured’ by a factor of four points; Party A had a projected winning margin of 10 points over Party B in the poll, when in actual fact it was a six-point victory.

But would it be fair to criticise Pollster X for that, given they accurately measured support for both Party A and Party B within any reasonable bounds of statistical uncertainty? I would argue that it would not be fair, and this is why pollsters ought not to be judged on measuring leads.

Back to GE2024, I am therefore resistant to arguments that pollsters mismeasured Labour’s lead over the Conservatives for the above reason. That’s not a fair stick to beat us with. But that doesn’t escape the fact that nigh on all of us did not accurately measure and report the Labour vote.

So, what might have caused the Labour miss?

Before progressing here, I should express plainly that the following are all my thoughts and my thoughts alone, and do not represent any official post-election post-morteom on the part of YouGov. The same can be said of anything I write on my Substack rather than on my YouGov page, really. That’s why the two things co-exist!

Anyway, one thing which is worth noting is that the polling industry did pick up on some pretty hefty fragmentation of the Labour vote in the days leading up to the election itself. Vote shares of 40%+, even pushing 45%, were pretty common in the week of the 17^th of June. But by the time of their final calls in the week of the 1^st July, many pollsters had Labour sub-40%.

This fragmentation looked like it continued right up until the day of the vote itself, which is definitely an important part of the story of the overestimation of Labour’s stated vote share - things were happening past the point at which we were collecting and reporting data.

But that isn’t the only source of error, I don’t think. Another more concerning factor that we failed to properly register the extent of the fragmentation within certain elements of Labour’s voter coalition – most consequentially, the Muslim vote.

Taking the YouGov MRP as an example, while the anticipated that Jeremy Corbyn had a very good chance at winning his Islington North constituency and (notionally) taking it off Labour, we did not anticipate any of the Labour defeats in Birmingham Perry Bar, Blackburn, Dewsbury and Batley, Leicester East, or Leicester South.

What all the above seats have in common is a particularly large Muslim population. Each, bar Leicester East, were won by independent candidates standing on strong pro-Palestine platforms.

A number of further Labour MPs, including the new Health Secretary West Streeting and Victims and Safeguarding minister Jess Philips, came within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats to similar candidates.

Recent analysis from the Economist suggested that for every 1 percentage point increase in Muslim population in a given constituency, Labour’s vote went down by an average of 0.7 points. This is, by the way, a continuation of a pattern spotted in the 2024 local election results by Matt Singh (among others). Labour’s current struggle with Muslim voters is very much real.

As well, evidence from Leicester, Brent, and Harrow also suggest ongoing problems with Labour regarding capturing the Hindu vote – a community we have known to be much less predisposed to Labour than other ethnic minority groups for some time, now.

Should we now be saying the same of the Muslim vote? Has it reached a point where we should simply no longer assume by default that Labour can bank support from Britain’s Muslim communities? If so, how can pollsters improve their methods to properly capture that? These are questions we must ask of ourselves and answer by the time the next general election rolls around.  

Anything else?

We also may, and probably did, miss things regarding turnout and younger voters. Along with ethnic minority voting behaviour, these are two further areas where we know polls tend to struggle.

The stars, I think, aligned against the industry in this regard on July 4^th – significant and important movements and moments in all the areas that we struggle most in.

Keep an eye out for full and proper diagnoses of polling performances by pollsters as the weeks and months progress. I’ve offered some thoughts and hunches here, but I do so from my post-election escape to Borneo without having seen or worked with any underlying data (yes, I left my laptop at home!). I could therefore be quite wrong about all the above, or only telling part of the story. More to come!

The headline results from the local authority, mayoral, and police and crime commissioner across England and (in the case of the latter) Wales are quite unambiguous: the Conservatives have taken a beating.

While the Rishi Sunak’s party won’t quite lose over 500 councillors, as some were briefing before the count began, they have nonetheless lost around half of the total number of seats they were defending.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have also lost around 40% of the police and crime commissioner positions they held going into the election. That figure would have no doubt been higher if the electoral system had remained in two rounds; the Conservatives won many ‘first past the post’ contests over Labour or the Liberal Democrats by a slim margin, with the other of the latter two in third with a significant share.

In terms of the mayoral races, while there was a statement win (against a big swing) for Conservative-incumbent Ben Houchen in Tees Valley, rumours that Susan Hall would outperform expectations and deny Sadiq Khan a third term as London Mayor were wildly out. In reality, Khan won by a comfortable 11 point margin.

And in one of the real headline moments of the count, Labour’s Richard Parker managed to squeeze out the Conservative in Andy Street in the West Midlands Mayoral race by a mere 1,508 votes.

There is no correct read from these results other than that they spell deep, deep trouble for the Conservatives. They lost seats in all races across all areas to all parties on all fronts: Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens.

While Reform didn’t make many waves in terms of winning seats (just the two), they did contribute to Conservative struggles, particularly in the North, by eating heavily into their vote share in the minimal number of places they actually stood. They also had a strong showing in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election (won, in thumping fashion, by Labour), almost pipping the Conservatives to second place.

The Liberal Democrats managed to symbolic accolade of beating the Conservatives in terms of councillors won on the night, finishing second on that metric behind Labour.

Meanwhile, the Greens had a fantastic night, winning over 180 council seats with a net gain of over 70. Their performances may become one of the stories of coming local election cycles if Labour do win a parliamentary majority and the Greens successfully crystallise their position (among many others, such is the diversity of their voter coalition since 2019) as a home for protest voters on the left of the political spectrum.

Many headline analyses and commentary of the results have already been conducted, including this writeup by Sir John Curtice, Stephen Fisher, Rob Ford, and myself (which includes an explanation of the ‘projected national share’). What I would like to focus on in this post is a specific but very strong correlation in the results which speaks to a wider development in vote intention and vote behaviour in British politics since the last election.

Namely, the relationship between Conservative Party vote performance and the percentage of households with mortgages at the ward level. I should say that this story is just one among many different dynamics which were at play on Thursday’s votes, but is one which particularly interested me.

Each year, the BBC Election Results team (on which I work as a psephologist) collects and looks at ward-level results and background data from a number of key councils as part of its ‘key ward’ exercise.

The data from this year’s 811 key wards suggested that in wards with less than 22% of households owned by a mortgage, the Conservative vote share change on 2021 was -8 points. In wards with over 36% of households owned with a mortgage, the vote Conservative share dropped by 13.5%.

Conversely, Labour’s vote was up by 6.5 points in wards with the highest proportion of mortgage holders, and actually down by 4.1 points in those with the fewest.

This is no statistical anomaly nor coincidence. In fact, we can draw a clear line between the key ward results and evidence from YouGov survey data, written up by my colleague Chiara Ricchi, regarding vote Westminster vote intentions among people with different housing situations.

Chiara found that while outright homeowners are currently breaking for the Conservatives over Labour by a margin of 26% to 22%, Brits with a mortgage are going strongly toward Labour, by 35% to 15%.

Why would Westminster vote intention be so divisible by home ownership status? Why do we see such clear patterns in the ward level results?

The simple explanation: this is a tangible public opinion reaction to the stark rise in mortgage interest rates in 2023 associated with the economic fallout from the mini-budget introduced by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwaerteng during their brief stint in power in October 2022.

Despite being 18 months ago, mortgage rates have remained high (compared to the pre-Truss baseline) ever since the Autumn 2022 mini-budget caused shockwaves throughout British financial markets. So, not only did that fiscal event affect people looking for their first (or new) mortgages during 2023, it has continued to affect those looking for their first mortgage now, and has impacted everyone remortgaging or renegotiating their mortgage over the same period.

Figures estimate that around 285,000 mortgages were up for renewal this quarter alone. This means that across Britain, every month, tens of thousands of voters are very quickly reminded of those moments in Autumn 2022 when the then Conservative government oversaw a self-inflicted economic shock, and the party were forced to remove their newly-anointed leader within just six weeks of her being selected by the membership.

And so rather than those moments of madness fading into memory, even in the context of now falling inflation and wages growing, somewhere around 1 million households a year find themselves suddenly paying thousands of pounds extra for it.

An under-developed piece of thinking in terms of plans for a general election date is that while ‘going long’ and waiting until the autumn or winter may well maximise the chances of any economic recovery being felt in the payslips and back pockets of British voters, it also drags more and more of them into the pool of homeowners paying a direct price for the economic policy choices of a Conservative government.

First time writing in a little while…

I wanted to spend a few moments today sharing some thoughts on this year’s local and mayoral elections. Compared to last year, there are a much smaller set of councils. Both the Conservatives and Labour are defending around about 1000 councillors each, with a total of around 2700 seats up for grabs.

Tonight, and tomorrow, and Saturday…, I’ll be working with the BBC psephology team under Professor Sir John Curtice, producing TV’s most up-to-date and thorough analysis of the results data as it comes in.

The polls are still open as I write, so I won’t say anything about the results at this time (beyond already-published, pre-election day expectations). There have also already been some fantastic preview pieces (including this one by Rob Ford) and some modelling done (including this here by Stephen Fisher), so I won’t venture into that much either.

But I thought I might spend some time pulling together some of the above resources into a bit of a ‘cheat sheet’ for everyone watching the results of today’s contests with keen eyes.

I will also share a tale of an incumbent government polling poorly and under pressure heading into local elections, catching everyone off guard by calling a general election immediately after the local results came in.

What days and times are the results due?

Counts will begin as soon as polls close at 10pm tonight, and continue right through until Saturday evening. Streams of results will come in three main batches:

• Some local authorities will declare between the hours of around 11pm tonight and 5am tomorrow morning. Ones to look out for in this time block are two top Conservative-held Labour targets in Rushmoor and Redditch (where Labour could gain a council from the Conservatives) and North East Lincolnshire (where Labour are looking to make serious moves against the Conservatives in a council which has remained stubbornly blue in recent cycles). We will also get the results of the Blackpool South by-election.

• Friday will see more local authority results, including Labour targets in Walsall, Milton Keynes, Cannock Chase, and Hyndburn, as well as key Liberal Democrat targets in Wokingham and Elmbridge. We will also discover the fate of Ben Houchen in Tees Valley by early afternoon, as well as the result in the newly created East Midlands mayoralty (Labour are expected to do well here). There will also be great interest in the Bristol results, expected by early-evening, where the Greens are seeking to take control of their third-ever council (after Brighton and Mid Suffolk). Results are expected to flow on Friday beginning from around midday through until about 10pm.

• On Saturday we will get the final rounds of results beginning at around midday and concluding in the early afternoon. Most notable results on Saturday are the Norwich council election (where Labour are seeking to re-establish control) and the big ticket London and West Midlands mayoralties.

What are the expectations?

The Conservatives are defending a really strong set of results this year as the last time the majority of these seats were contested was back in the vaccine-bounced induced heyday of Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2021.

Though it is important to note, as Ben Walker explains below, that there are good number of seats up from different baselines - including as far back as 2019. That includes no less than 15% which were contested in 2023.

While we expect a pretty substantial degree of Con to Lab swing versus the 2021 baseline, any seats last fought in 2023 will not see anywhere near as much of a dramatic shift - Labour were, as we all recall, well ahead in the polls a year ago (as they are now) and the Conservatives lost over 1000 seats at that local authority contest.

As such, some swings and some councils may look to be behaving very differently to others as the count comes in, but, as ever, much of that will most likely be explained by the relative baselines.

Overall, the expectation across pollsters, media, and the commentariat are:

• Significant Conservative local authority seat losses to be reported over the course of the next two days - anything up to and around 50% of what the Tories are defending may fall.

• Not many actual councils changing control, owing to the particular authorities up in this cycle - there aren’t a huge number of councils which mathematically can (or are likely to) switch between parties (or to or from ‘no overall control’).

• Some very tight mayoral races, including some likely Conservative holds in the West Midlands and Tees Valley. Labour expected to hold London.

Our 2024 local elections YouGov MRP model anticipates that both Hyndburn and Milton Keynes are set to fall into Labour hands, with each of Walsall, Tamworth, and Thurrock also possibly following suit.

Below is a table of figures I have managed to gather for overall expected Conservative losses. As far as I know, there are only two which have been made public.

EDIT: Britain Elects (Ben Walker) published their forecast at 10pm on Thursday, which estimated 478 Conservative loses.

Will Sunak ‘pull a Sanchez’?

In my Con Home article last month, I explored the possibility that Rishi Sunak may be tempted to try and replicate the success of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in the days following May 2nd.

After his incumbent-governing PSOE party suffered a huge defeat in the Spanish local elections, Sanchez’ response was to catch everyone - even some in his own party - off guard by immediately calling a snap general election contest.

His move was designed to totally wrong foot his opposition, and force them into making rushed and early calls regarding potential alliances, candidate lists, and policy positions.

The plan worked perfectly, with Sanchez’ opponents on the political right eventually denied a parliamentary majority, allowing him to continue governing in a new (and expanded) coalition.

Could Sunak be tempted to try and do the same to Labour?

The latest YouGov Westminster vote intention poll released today probably pours cold water over that idea. We have the Conservatives down on 18% of expressed headline vote intention, just three points ahead of Reform UK. Surely there can’t be much of a temptation for Sunak to ‘go early’ based on those numbers.

But there is another way the locals could spring a surprise summer date on us: if the results are suitably bad then Sunak may well be forced to call an early election to avoid being victim of Tory-MP regicide.

Rebels are already promising a flurry of ‘no confidence’ letters going in to 1922 Chair Sir Graham Brady in the coming days. A poor showing in the vote today, they argue, ought to be the ‘final straw’ in determining whether the Conservative Party should stick or twist with their current leader.

Could a real ‘worst expectations’ result over the coming days push more MPs to put letters in and force Sunak’s hand in a last ditched effort to retain control of the party?

All the briefings we have had from the party, and those close to various operations within it, would suggest Sunak has absolutely no such plans, and that the rebels do not have sufficient numbers to force his hand.

But this is British politics. You never quite know what is around the corner.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest Plain Speaking English. Just a week after the last one - as promised! A miracle!

In this issue, I’m going to look over what happened this week in Kingswood and Wellingborough but with particular reference to the current polling. Namely, do the results look in-line with what we might expect given the current opinion polling? I’ll also pass judgement a little on some of the commentary around the results, and say a quick thing or two about the Cunningham and Warren face-to-face Wellingborough poll.

First: Do the results show that there is no enthusiasm for Labour?
Aside from the obvious (and correct) takes suggesting “this is very good for Labour, and very bad for the Conservatives”, another view gained some degree of traction on social media as Friday trundled on. Here’s a variation of it from former Labour MP for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad:

The argument, as it goes, is that because Labour only put on an extra 107 votes vs its 2019 performance in Wellingborough, and “lost” 5,316 votes vs 2019 in Kingswood, that the results were actually bad for Starmer and for Labour.

Voters, as it goes, clearly were more enthusiastic for Corbyn’s Labour in 2019 than they are for that of Starmer in 2024.

But of course, by-elections don’t work like that. Raw vote numbers can’t tell us about enthusiasm levels for particular parties or leaders, or how that changes between elections, because turnout is *always* down in by-elections versus the most recent general election. Enthusiasm for by-elections themselves is lower than for general elections. There are less voters to ‘go around’ in general, in by-election contests. Comparing raw vote numbers in that context therefore simply does not work.

Why is turnout always down? Mainly because the question of “who governs” is not on the ballot paper in by-elections (unless by some wild circumstance, the result of the by-election could remove or deliver a government majority… as in 1996/7).

There are other factors, too, but the principal reasons is that by-election voters are not being asked to decide who runs the country, but rather who should be their local in MP in a parliament which has already provided the country’s government.

Second: Was it all about the Tory vote staying at home?

The suggestion that Labour’s double by-election victory was entirely down to Conservative 2019 voters staying at home, or voting Reform UK, is an equally dubious take on what happened this week.

Here’s Aubrey Allegretti from the Times reporting on this line from the ‘New Conservatives’:

In fairness, we do know from the current polling that 2019 Conservative voters are more likely to be uncertain or tell us that they simply wont vote at the next general election than voters supporting other parties. So, it is indeed likely that disproportionately more Conservative 2019 voters stayed away from the polls on Thursday than supporters of others parties.

But we also know that voters are switching between the Conservatives and Labour - 8% of them, in fact, according to the latest YouGov poll.

In fact, we can wipe away the Kruger et al. account with some quick maths, using the raw vote numbers from both contests.

In Wellingborough, around 22,000 voters stayed away from the polls who voted in 20191. The total Conservative vote dropped by almost 25,000. It is, therefore, mathematically impossible for the drop in turnout in Wellingborough to be explained by Tory 2019 voter absence.

Even adding on the Reform UK votes does not improve the plausibility much. If we assume that all Tory voters in Wellingborough did one of (a) voted Conservative again (7,408 votes), (b) voted for Reform UK (3,919 votes), or (c) stayed at home (must equal ~21,000), that suggests that over 95% of the total drop in turnout in Wellingborough was down to Tory voters staying put. Completely unrealistic.

Similarly, the total drop in turnout in Kingswood was around 24,000, and the Conservative vote total dropped by 19,000. Nearly 80% of the turnout drop coming from 2019 Tory voters is again extremely unrealistic, as it in turn implies implausibly high levels of by-election turnout from voters of all other parties.

Adding on the Reform UK numbers (2,578) to the Tory total (8,675) to make a new ‘Tory 19 stay at home’ number of about 16,500 makes the situation somewhat more believable in Kingswood, but still requires us to believe that almost 70% of the the drop in turnout from 2019 General Election to the 2024 by-election can be explained by Conservative voter absence alone. Again, not a sensible account.

Looking across the numbers, a far more realistic model would imply, exactly as the polls would suggest we should expect in a by-election”: that somewhere around 15% of Conservative 2019 voters came out and actually voted Labour between the two contests.

Third: What can the by-election results tell us about the current national polling?

Polling always gives us a much better, more consistent, reliable, regular read on public opinion and the parties than by-elections do. If we want to answer the question “What is happening in British politics right now, and who looks likely to win the next election?”, then the answer is “go and look at the opinion polls”.

That said, by-elections (as well as the annual local authority contests) can provide us with a useful check-in on how the polls are looking vis-a-vis these results of actual voting contests. In other words, we can use these elections to ‘check back’ to the polls and see if these are the kind of results we would expect if the polls were about right.

Or, alternatively, if there is a spread of leads and party shares in the polls, we can see toward which end of these spreads that the by-election results point toward.

(Edit: in a well-timed concurrent release, Dr Mark Pack reminds us that by-elections do have some fairly good predictive power in terms the general result of forthcoming general contests.)

So, are the 16pt and 29pt Con-Lab swings in Kingswood and Wellingborough broadly in line with an opposition party 10, 15, or 20 points ahead in the opinion polls?

The graph below shows the distribution of Labour leads in this year’s vote intention polling. As we can see, they range from around 25+ points (mainly from YouGov and WeThink) down toward 15 or even 10 points (mainly from More in Common, Savanta, and Opinium).

An ideal way to answer this question would be to consult with the YouGov MRP released by the Telegraph in January and compare how the seat levels results there, with a 14pt Labour national lead, compare to what we saw last night.

However, keen observers of changing British constituency boundaries will know that Kingswood is being abolished for the next general election, making it impossible to carry out such an exercise there..

Wellingborough on the other hand will be around 90% the same between now and the next general election when it becomes Wellingborough and Rushden. According to the Rallings and Thrasher notional 2019 results for new boundaries, released by the BBC this year, the changes taking place in the constituency do not alter the Con-Lab vote share baselines there all that much. Comparison between the MRP and the by-election result is therefore not completely streamline, but pretty fair.

The January YouGov MRP had Labour just winning this new seat by 37% - 34%, on a reported 14pt national Labour lead2. This week, Labour won Wellingborough by 46% - 27%.

With all pinches of salt taken, and even after adding on the anti-government by-election premium, a 19 point Labour win rather than a 3 point one suggests a current national Labour lead among those with a vote intention more toward the top end of the distribution in the graph above than the bottom.

Fourth: What about Reform UK?

Reform UK have been providing pollsters with a bit of a puzzle lately; how could they be polling nationally in double digits, but failing to register any shares or wins of significant note in by-elections or local authority contests.

In both Kingswood and Wellingborough, the Reform UK share reached north of 10 percent, perhaps seemingly solving the pollster puzzle. “The Reform surge is real”, wrote Ben Riley-Smith of the Telegraph.

But is that definitely the case? Was the Reform UK performance on Thursday around about what we would expect given their current polling?

The graph below shows that current polling in the form of another density plot. The range is pretty wide, from down to around 4-6 points (mostly from Savanta, Survation, and Deltapoll) up to 12 points and beyond (mostly from YouGov an Redfield and Wilton). The centre of the left-skewed distribution is somewhere around 10%.

Appealing again to the YouGov January MRP, we can make an educated guess at what we might expect the Reform UK share to have been in Wellingborough - a constituency with a high 2016 Leave vote.

That January model, with Reform UK on 9% nationally, had the party winning 12% of the vote in Wellingborough. On Thursday, they won 13% of that vote.

What we might suggest then (on this admittedly limited evidence) is that a reported Reform UK vote of around 10% nationally probably feels about right. Ish.

Fifth and final: A note on the Wellingborough constituency poll

In the lead up to Thursday, Kevin Cunningham and Ian Warren produced a poll of the Wellingborough by-election using the now-lesser-spotted polling methodology of face-to-face interviewing.

The poll suggested a narrow Conservative hold could be on the cards, but the intervals very much contained a Labour victory as a possibility. Essentially, the central estimate of the poll suggested the reverse of what the YouGov January MRP estimated.

As it went, the scale of Labour’s win went well beyond what was contained in the Cunningham and Warren intervals, as they stormed to a 20 point win.

But this is no ‘dunking’ post. Far from it. I’d like to say kudos to Ian and Kevin for doing it. Trying stuff is to be encouraged. Methodological diversity is great, and we should celebrate it. Even when it goes wrong.

If I were to put the miss down to one thing, I think the face-to-face poll was likely off because of false recall. YouGov powerhouse Anthony Wells wrote about false recall in reference to the 2019 general election, explaining that in the lead up to that contest, with Johnson’s Conservatives leading an increasingly unpopular Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn…

seven percentage points fewer people now recall having voted Labour at the last election, with a slight increase in the percentage of people claiming they voted for the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, UKIP or other parties.

Fast forward to now, and the direction of travel of both (a) the general polling, and also (b) the specific contest and controversies in Wellingborough, what that means is that I would expect Conservative voters were in general harder to find than they ought to have been in Wellingborough, with many of them now falsely recalling. Further, those that were found would probably be more likely to be staying Conservative than those who are falsely recalling and saying they voted Labour in 2019.

If my assumptions are correct, that would have significantly throw off the poll as the reported figures would have had a much stickier Conservative 2019 vote than in reality. Kevin and Ian may have other (and better) explanations in the days to come, though, so watch out for them.

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first Substack newsletter in a… little while.

Fair to say it’s been a busy first few weeks of the year over at YouGov towers. I won’t say much more on those MRPs released by the Telegraph this January, other than that it’s worth keeping in mind the difference between what YouGov choose to field and choose to release (and how we release it), and what clients choose to do with the work YouGov does for them (and how others report it).

And no, I don’t know who the donors are!

In this issue, I’m going to pick over the data on those people currently telling us they “don’t know” who they would vote for if a UK general election were being held tomorrow, and place it in a longer-term perspective. This is an extension of the 1000-worder I wrote for Con Home in January, for whom I’ll be doing a monthly piece this year up until whenever Rishi Sunak decides he’s had enough of keeping us all in suspense and sends us to the polling stations.

For this article, I’ve made use of having no word limits to expand on the Con Home article points, plus add in figures from 2010 and 2015 for extra comparisons and context.

So, let’s get into it.

Right now, according to the latest YouGov poll, Labour are on 44% of current vote intention, while the Conservatives are down on 23%. This 21-point gap is down from the eye-watering 27 points we saw earlier in January, but would nonetheless spell nothing short of Conservative Party wipe out up and down the country if it fell out this way the next general election.

While the ‘wipe out’ possibility is front and centre of many minds within the Conservative party, the media, and the commentariat, some of those closer to Sunak’s inner-circle are less down and out. They point to one eye-catching set of people within current vote intention data which gives them what they say is cause for extreme hope – those currently telling pollsters they “don’t know” how they would vote if a general election were happening tomorrow.

In recent months, anywhere between around 15-20% of people polled in YouGov vote intention surveys are telling us that they simply do not know who they would vote for if there were marking a ballot paper in a polling booth tomorrow.

Is that a lot? Well put it this way: it suggests that the jury is out on all parties – including the Conservatives and Labour, and Sunak and Starmer – for somewhere between 1-in-6 and 1-in-5 of the electorate. That’s around between eight and ten million voters.

But is it a lot in historical perspective? In short, not really, no.

The table below shows the average (across three polls) percentage of people telling YouGov they don’t know who they would vote for if a general election were being held tomorrow, at this same stage at each of the last five election cycles1. Ahead of 2024 election, that figure currently stands at 17%.

Looking at the table, 2024 levels of uncertainty do not look at all particularly large in recent context, being the same as average levels of voter uncertainty recorded in 2017 and in fact lower than uncertainty ten months out from 2019.

Uncertainty now does however look a little larger than 2015, and notably larger than in 2010. What is significant about 2010 of course is that it was the last time an opposition party successfully supplanted a government and took the keys to Number 10.

Voters were, it seems, more sure about what was in front of them before they last replaced a government than they are now.

Even still, 17% is not worlds away from 12%, and it is not even the highest amount of voter uncertainty we have had in recent electoral history.

But there is something quite particular and unusual about this current crop of uncertain voters - if not their relative composition within the electorate: their previous voting behaviour.

A number of pieces have been written lately about how undecided voters look more likely to break for the Conservatives than any other party. One of the key reasons why is that just under half of all those who currently don’t know who they would vote for if a general election were being held tomorrow voted Conservative in 2019.

Yes, you read that right - of all people who are uncertain about how to vote at the next election, almost half are 2019 Tory voters.

While over one-fifth (22%) of 2019 Conservative voters are uncertain about what to do at the next general election, that figure is only 9% for 2019 Labour voters.

In the graph below is the percentage of each party’s voters from the previous election who were (or, in the case of 2024, are) telling YouGov that they did (or do) not know who they would vote for in an imminent hypothetical general election at (presumably) a similar distance out from the actual vote itself.

And as we can see, that 22%-9% Con-Lab gap is completely unprecedented in recent electoral cycles.

This is uncharted (aside from the one below… I’ll get me coat) territory.

The next highest figure of uncertainty in recent elections comes from 2017 Labour voters ahead of the 2019 contest (23%). That election of course turned out to be Labour’s worst performance at a general election since 1935.

With that in mind, we might actually take the high uncertainty figure among 2019 Tory voters as (yet another) sign of impending doom for the Conservatives, rather than a potential saving grace.

But there are good reasons to think that if indeed many of these uncertain voters did come out to vote at the next election (which there is no guarantee that they will)2, they would be more likely to vote for the party they backed previously than to switch to another.

What consequence might this have for the election to come? If that assumption bears out, then the Conservatives may well have a much larger pool of the electorate currently likely to actually vote for them when the chips are down, and the “who governs?” question is asked, than most headline vote intention figures actually suggest.

But how realistic is that? And how much could it eat into Labour’s lead?

Some pollsters already attempt to answer this question in their headline vote intention figures. Take Opinium for example, who after collecting their vote intention samples subsequently remove all who say “don’t know” from this sample and re-weight the figures back to what they estimate to be the ‘likely voter’ population. This, in theory, gives a handle on what, according to Opinium’s model, is likely to happen with the “don’t knows”.

But we can appeal to a much fuller, probabilistic model of this, which also gives us a much stronger sense of how “don’t know” behaviour will actually effect things seat-by-seat.

Isaac Levido was of course addressing Tory MPs, telling them not to ‘divide and fall’, shortly after a brand new YouGov MRP model was dropped into the mixing bowl by the Telegraph. That, based on over 14,000 interviews, showed that, if an election were being held now (or rather with current patterns of vote intention), the Labour party would win a majority of 120 seats.

In short, Starmer would take his party from that historic 1935 electoral defeat to not only overturning the hefty Conservative majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019, but building a majority of his own the size of which not seen from any party since Blair’s years in government.

What is particularly important about the MRP poll in reference to this discussion is that it accounts for what might happen with the “don’t knows”, baking it into estimates you see published at the constituency level.

This is in fact why, unlike other projections using headline vote intentions, our MRP model did not show Labour north of 400 seats, or the Conservatives below 100.

For reference. it is also a significant part of the reason why the implied national vote shares from the MRP are so different to headline YouGov vote intention polls.

The MRP technique works out what it believes, given all the data is has, to be is the most likely pattern of voting for each type of voter in country by building models of relationships between voters who have given a vote intention in the sample data, and using them to project how all different types and tribes of voters across the country would vote in an election being held at that time.

This can be seen as much more statistically advanced and sophisticated variation (and, one which has been around much longer) of the sort of “don’t know reallocation/re-weighting” efforts noted above by pollsters such as Opinium. It takes out “don’t knows” and uses information from expressed vote intention to account for the likely behaviour of everyone in the electorate.

Altogether, that means that our YouGov MRP projection is already taking into account all of the above reasons and rationale for the Conservatives to maybe have a bit more optimism looking at the current polling than they otherwise might.

This is, in effect, what things would look like in a best-case scenario regarding the “don’t knows” right now. What YouGov are saying is that, even “accounting for the don’t knows”, as the polling currently stands, the Conservatives are on to a hounding.

If the Tories are to stop Labour sweeping to victory, they not only need to bring back in even more “don’t knows” than models suggest they currently will, but also win back a large number of voters who have abandoned the party for their rivals to the right and left.

In other words, “don’t knows” are just one (significant, and large) piece of the puzzle the Conservatives must solve if they are going to deny Labour victory this year.

This morning, two wins and some massive swings later, you could very well argue that Labour emphatically answered that call.

Tamworth and its predecessors have been bellwether seats since October 1974, and Labour haven’t really been competitive at all there since 2010. Until last night, when they took it on a 24pt swing.

In Mid Bedfordshire, Labour overcame a tricky three-party contest dynamic in which the Liberal Democrats went hard early at the seat. Starmer’s party took former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’ seat on a 21pt swing, and while their 3pt margin of victory was smaller than the 5pts they managed in Tamworth, given the circumstances it was an equally impressive result.

In their ‘just for fun’ graphics this morning, Election Maps UK reminded us that if a Tamworth-style swing was repeated at the next general election, the Conservatives would be reduced to around 30 seats.

Now of course, this graphic is indeed ‘just for fun’. Everyone is aware that this is a by-election, and there is no direct read across from by-election voting behaviour and results to upcoming general elections.

But what do those swings really tell us?

One thing I want to immediately throw caution on is the way that ‘swing’ is being interpreted in these by-election contests.

Swing in the context of sharp turnout decline (as we see in by-elections, where typically only 2/3 of those who vote in a general election will turn out) needs to be understood very differently to how it is assessed in general elections.

Typically, we think of two-party swing in a national vote contest as symbolic of the general percentage of the electorate who moved from one party to another (sometimes directly, sometimes not, depending on how strong competition is from third, forth, fifth, parties).

In by-elections, we have to factor in that turnout itself swings, and that the vote swing we see between two parties (in this case, 21 points in Mid Beds and 24 points in Tamworth) does not at all necessarily mean direct switching from one part to the other.

And that is very important; as well as putting on big swings in Middle England heartlands, the other thing I wanted to see from Labour vis-à-vis assessing their chances of going from their worst ever election result since the 1930s to building a House of Commons majority in 2024 (No, don’t even think about reminding me of the latest possible election date. Don’t do it, stop it) was evidence that they were successfully winning over 2019 Conservative voters to their cause.

The latest YouGov polling suggests that around one-in-ten (12%) of those who voted for the Conservatives in 2019 are currently planning to vote Labour at the next election.

That may sound like a small number, but it most certainly isn’t in the context of winning elections - carving off 12% of your opponent’s vote from one election to the next is not a feat we often see. It eclipses the rate of direct switchers that Johnson achieved in 2019 (around 7-8%).

But it is overshadowed by the ~16% of the Conservative 1992 vote that Blair peeled off in 1997 (according to figures from the British Election study).

Remember - Starmer’s Labour have to outperform Blair’s 1997 win in terms of vote swing achieved and number of constituencies flipped in order to get over the majority line.

Winning ~12% of Conservative 2019 voters is good for Labour, but unless that switching is coupled with an extremely efficient geographical concentration (as Johnson’s ~7-8% was in 2019), it is tricky to see how it gives Starmer a parliamentary majority.

Further, that direct switching figure is dwarfed by the number of 2019 Conservative voters currently telling us they either would not vote if an election were being held tomorrow (6%) or that they don’t know what they would do (21%).

This group, currently without a party vote intention, is a far bigger contributor of Labour’s headline vote intention lead than any combination of switchers.

And this big heap of former Conservative voters is the focus of a huge amount of energy and focus for both parties. For the Tories, it’s about winning them back. For Labour, it’s about convincing them to trust Starmer and trust that the party offer a viable, credible alternative.

They are also a big part of the story last night…

What do the by-election numbers tell us?

Mid-term, the best possible source of information we have for how the various parties are doing with the electorate are of course vote intention polls. But by-elections (and local authority elections) provide us with a great opportunity to check that the story we are telling in the polling is consistent with observable voter behaviour on the ground.

So, do the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire results reflect what we are seeing in the polls? Can we see evidence of a mass ‘Conservative 2019 stay at home’ effect? And what would this mean for Labour and their 2024 (stop it) prospects?

In the case of by-elections, with turnout down 30 points in Mid Beds and 28 points in Tamworth, the raw vote tallies give us a better clue as to what might have gone on regarding party 2019 bases and any switching between them. The table below outlines how the total number of votes and those for each of Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats changed between 2019 and yesterday in both Tamworth and Mid Beds.

An immediate and crude assessment is this: the drop in the Conservative vote share in both constituencies can, purely mathematically speaking, be almost entirely explained by the drop in turnout.

The drop in terms of total votes for the Conservatives in both seats is almost exactly equal to the overall drop in the number of voters who turned out to the polling booths.

Labour, in both seats, while hugely up in terms of vote share swing, saw their total number of votes barely change between 2019 and last night.

In fact, there is much more evidence of direct Conservative-Liberal Democrat switching in Mid Bedfordshire than anything else.

In other words, it is mathematically completely plausible that almost no direct switching from the Conservatives to Labour happened last night.

Now, realistically, that isn’t a sensible conclusion to draw for two main reasons:

1. Without individual level voter data, we should never made firm conclusions about switching from one party to the other.

2. We have polling, anecdotal, and briefing evidence to suggest that direct switching is happening in the public at large, and did happen in both seats last night.

It is much more likely that there was indeed direct switching from Labour to the Conservatives - and indeed across the party space - to some degree. But that degree is much more in line with the ~10% figure we are seeing in the polls than reflective of the 20+ point swings on the night.

The story from the raw numbers, and that from the Conservatives’ internal briefing leaked to Sky’s Sam Coates this week, suggests that the outcomes last night were much more about Conservative 2019 voter abstention than they were a mass endorsement of Starmer’s Labour.

The Conservatives, it looks like, simply could not get their 2019 voter coalition to turn out for them.

Again I must express - this would be entirely in line with the polling, which suggests that Labour’s 20+ point lead is driven by a much greater degree by Conservative 2019 uncertainty than it is Labour winning votes.

Is that good news for the Conservatives?

Bad results driven more by voter abstention than voter switching might seem like something for the Conservatives to be happy about, particularly in the context of losing two safe seats on mega swings.

Surely then, you might argue, the Conservatives have a fairly straightforward task in terms of turning things around, avoiding future Tamworths and Mid Bedfordshires, and winning (or least denying Labour a majority at) the next general election: motivate and mobilise the base.

Get the 2019 voter coalition back out.

But a simple question quickly throws the coldest of water onto those electoral embers: what evidence is there to suggest that this great raft of ‘Conservative 19 - Unsure/abstaining now’ voters will come back?

No change of leader, no policy announcement, no U-turn or row back, no ‘policy week’, no conference speech, and no pledge has pulled any significant numbers of drifters back into the Conservative column so far.

So where is this recovery of the “don’t knows” coming from?

Looking across all the polling data I have the privilege of working with at YouGov, I can tell you that there is little indication across any metric that these voters look like they can be convinced to trust the Conservatives again.

So, while Labour’s vote intention lead - and, I would argue based on the collection of evidence I can see, their by-election successes last night - is mainly rooted in unstable soil, the Conservatives have, by comparison, already been sucked well into the quagmire.

And, the point?

To cut a long story short, my advice in interpreting these results would be to exercise even more caution about what they can tell us regarding the next election than would be normally suggested for by-elections.

Why? Because of this Conservative 2019 abstention and uncertainty effect. It’s in our polls, it’s in the canvassing data, and it certainly looks like it was in strong effect in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire last night.

Labour certainly answered the question of whether they can win in Middle-England last night, but don’t let the swings fool you - the jury is still out with a tremendous number of voters.

I’m going to make up for it with a bumper three topic post today!

Anyone who has been following my Twitter/X account over recent weeks will have noticed that I’ve been around and about a bit at various conferences here and there, which I will use as my excuse for not writing since… never mind.

But of course, my visits to Liverpool and Manchester this month provide the perfect topic for my return to wordsmithing.

In this post, I’ll give my brief thoughts on the atmosphere at both conferences, whether or not they shifted any dials in terms of public opinion, and then look ahead to tonight’s by elections.

Party conference vibe check

This was my second year attending party conferences, last year being my first. Given that the 2022 Labour conference coincided with YouGov releasing our big ’30-point Labour lead’ splash, and the ‘mini-budget’ chaos dominated the Conservative conference I attended a week later, I’m not sure comparisons between my two years on the scene are all that useful.

That said, there was a big change in the way I observed both parties (and their members, supporters, and allies) thinking about the next general election between 2022 and now.

For Labour, their mood last year while the Liz Truss induced Conservative implosion was happening all around them was one of shock and disbelief that they could really be getting ‘that far ahead’ in the court of public opinion.

This time, they held much more belief in what they were seeing in the polls, not least because it broadly tallies with results from local authority contests and parliamentary by-elections in the past 12 months – including the handsome and well-timed win in Rutherglen and Hamilton the Thursday before.

Much of the focus in Labour conference fringe events was on “how do we turn this polling lead into a win, and then what can we do with it”. There was a good mood and good energy surrounding the speeches made by both Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, and relief in many quarters that the tragic ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict did not dominate and overshadow proceedings in the way it maybe might have under previous party leadership.

For the Conservatives, there was little sense of outright panic this year (which there most certainly was last time). I would broadly split the party, its members, and supporters who attended conference into one of two camps.

The first group seemed united behind Rishi Sunak and his ‘five pledges’ strategy, believing he was the right leader at the right time to eat into Labour’s polling lead and recover the situation for the Conservatives.

The second group were making leadership pitches.

There was no shortage of not-so-subtle interventions at various fringes (and even buried within main hall speeches) from various current and former Cabinet ministers and their allies aimed directly at Conservative party members thinking about ‘what comes next’. I won’t name names, but I am sure you can work out to whom I am referring.

But did party conferences significantly shift the dials of public opinion?

In my latest piece for YouGov today, I argue that they largely did not.

This shouldn’t be of much surprise, as we already know that the public don’t pay close attention at all to the ins and outs of party conferences; in 2018, when YouGov asked the public how much attention they pay to what is said at party political conferences, just 3% told us they pay “a lot of attention”, while ten times as many (30%) said they pay “no at attention at all” (19% said they pay “a fair amount of attention”, while 42% said they pay “not much attention”).

If just under three-quarters of the public tell pollsters they pay not much or no attention at all to something, we should not expect it to drive any seismic changes in public opinion.

And so it has turned out: Before the Conservatives headed to Manchester, the YouGov headline vote intention figures on 27^th September were 24% for the Conservatives and 45% for Labour. Last week, after the close of play at Labour’s event, our figures read 24% for the Conservatives and 47% for Labour.

But party conferences can influence public opinion in more subtle ways. They do tend to set mood music and agendas for media and ‘very online’ discussion and reporting around parties and their leaders. This in turn can feed into public perceptions around party unity, issue competency, potential government and prime ministerial credentials, and so on.

If a party has a particularly bad conference, the media coverage and subsequent reporting and framing of stories coming out of conference will reflect a party in trouble, volatile, and unable to maintain message and messenger discipline. Similarly, if a party has a particularly good conference, this will tend to create perceptions in reporting of a unit which is in control of itself, voter-focused, and all pulling in the same direction.

In some ways, this is fairly reflective of how this year’s party conferences were perceived for the Conservatives and Labour respectively (though I wouldn’t characterise the Tory conference of this year as especially bad). And in this sense, there were some notable shifts in some public opinion metrics surrounding competency and clarity.

For one, YouGov polling for The Times immediately after Labour conference closed suggested a notable increase in the number of Brits who believe that Keir Starmer has clear vision for what he wants to do in office. When asked if they thought that the Labour leader “does or does not have a clear plan for the country”, 28% said that he does, while 57% said that he did not. That represented a change of +6 and -3 respectively on the last time we checked in on this metric (11^th – 12^th October).

Similarly, there was a notable change in our ‘best prime minister’ tracker. On this measurement, while Starmer remained static on his pre-conference season figure of 32% (26^th – 27^th September) Sunak dropped significantly to record his lowest ever score of 20% (down five points on the week before, and two on the week pre-conferences).

There were also some small but nonetheless tangible movements in public opinion around some issue competency ratings.

Looking elsewhere, each month, YouGov check in with the public regarding their opinion on which prospective government would ‘best handle’ a wide range of policy areas: a Labour government led by Keir Starmer, or a Conservative government led by Rishi Sunak.

As of now, 28% of the public believe “a Labour government led by Keir Starmer” would be better at handling the economy (+3pts versus September), while 24% believe “a Conservative government led by Rishi Sunak” would do better (-1pt versus September).

As well, there was a similarly sized movement in terms of public perceptions on who would do a better job at “helping people get onto the housing ladder” – a key part of Starmer’s conference speech. Here, the Labour figure rose by three points to 34%, while the Conservatives dropped back a point to 12%.

These are however only small changes to the net leads, driven by movements which could theoretically be explained by just as well by statistical error as they can a specific response to conference season.

And to reiterate the ‘little change’ point; compared to September’s data (collected between the 17^th and 18^th of that month), our October measurements saw no significant change in public perceptions as to who would best handle what are likely to be key issues at the next general election such as “improving living standards for people like you” (17pt Labour lead, down 1pt versus September), and “keeping prices down” (11pt Labour lead, down 1pt versus September).

But we must remember that given the current state of the polls, “no change” is good news for Labour. To leave conference season in pretty much the same position that they entered it in was probably pretty high on Labour’s wish list.

What should we be looking out for in the by-elections being held today?

Voters go to the polls today in two Westminster by-elections: Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth.

While Mid Bedfordshire is seemingly providing the drama and attracting much more attention from the media and commentators alike, Tamworth is, in my view, far more important as it provides a far greater insight into what might happen at the next general election.

Yes, the adage remains – by-elections are by-elections, and there is no direct read across from parliamentary by-elections results to future general elections. Even in terms of who will win the seat itself in the next nationwide vote.

But there are always signals, signs, and suggestions.

The reason why Mid Bedfordshire is capturing so much of the coverage leading into today is the intriguing nature of a three-party contest. We don’t tend to get many of those in British politics.

The Liberal Democrats got in and got to work early in the constituency as soon as Nadine Dorries signalled her intention to resign, but Labour have also poured resource into a seat they finished a not-so-distant second in at the 2019 general election and feel they have a better chance of winning than Ed Davey’s outfit.

The result of both parties going hard at victory in Mid Bedfordshire is a wide sense of intruige and anticipation as to the outcome here, which is anticipated to be close, and what this might say about tactical voting (or lack thereof) at the next election.

But there are going to be hardly any genuine three-way contests at the next general election. The outcome of the next general election contest is highly unlikely to be decided by these handful of constituencies – nor what happens in Mid Bedfordshire (low down on the list of Labour targets) on the night.

But there are a whole heap of old English bellwether seats in the Midlands which Labour must win in order to put together a House of Commons majority. Seats like Tamworth.

Tamworth, and its former equivalent in South Staffordshire, has gone with the overall result across the country consistently since 1987. Blair’s Labour took the seat in 1997, before Cameron’s Conservatives then flipped it in 2010.

Since then, Tamworth has trended heavily away from Labour since they last won the seat in 2005. Given the size of the current Conservative majority, winning Tamworth is not required for Labour to put Keir Starmer into Number 10 on Labour seats alone. But Tamworth remains symbolic of exactly the type of constituency that Starmer needs in the ‘second push’ to put him into number ten (assuming he makes the ‘first push’ of winning back the seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019).

Looking down the Conservative majority line and the seats Labour need to pass the 325 mark, there would appear to be little prospect of an outright Labour victory without wins in places like Corby, Macclesfield, Erewash, and Nuneaton.

All two-party Conservative-Labour seats in the midlands in which the Conservatives have managed to build substantial majorities in what are usually highly competitive, swing seats in close elections.

All look far, far more like Tamworth than Mid Bedfordshire.

So, for tonight, I’m going to be paying my closest attention to what happens North of Birmingham, rather than North of London.

Labour don’t necessarily need to be taking this seat off the Conservatives tonight to signal that they are ‘back’ with midlands swing voters, but anything other than a big, big swing in their favour – including some evidence of direct switching from the Conservatives to them – should ring alarm bells in Labour Party headquarters.

If the prime minister does call the electoral machines to battle sooner rather than later, the theory goes, the Conservatives might avoid fighting Labour on even more unfavourable financial ground as mortgage rates climb to their (predicted) peak next year.

But why do increasing rates matter? And why should mortgage holders be of such concern to Sunak and the Conservatives – or, equally, to Starmer and Labour?

Others have written extensively on this ‘aspiring’ group of most-often middle class, younger-to-middle aged, financially stable, career and family driven voters constituting this segment of the population in 21^st century Britain.

These are exactly the sort of floating voters who twist and turn and tend to decide British elections.

The geography of a crisis

But there is another string to mortgage-holder bows, making them an extra important slice of our current political pie: namely, electoral geography.

The map below shows the percentage of households with a mortgage in English and Welsh lower tier local authorities, according to the 2021 English and Welsh census.

Immediately, we are drawn to the sea of yellow surrounding London and stretching up into the West Midlands. These are the authorities with the highest proportions of mortgage holders – some reaching as high as 40% of households in the council area.

What is so special about this region of constituencies, from an electoral geography perspective? You know it, of course – it’s almost completely covering the Blue Wall.

The Blue Wall is collection of around 50 Westminster parliamentary constituencies currently held by the Conservatives, but which voted to Remain in the 2016 EU referendum, have higher than average degree holders, and have also recently been the scene of utter decimation for the Tories at local authority elections.

Houses are more expensive here, but the pleasant suburban, family-friendly lifestyles mixed with easy commutes to London attract many of exactly the sort of people we would expect be at the ‘has a mortgage’ stage of life.

In fact, the highest proportion of mortgage owners in any local authority in England and Wales is Wokingham, at 40% (the England and Wales median is 28.1%). The parliamentary constituency covering that area is one of the Liberal Democrat’s top, top Conservative-held targets for the next General Election.

Notice how dark the areas on the map are where the safest, most rural Conservative constituencies sit? Namely, the East of England and the South West.

But why does it matter if the Blue Wall – or any other area of electoral competition – is stacked with mortgage holders?

Well, if a huge proportion of voters in a given constituency are applying for or renegotiating mortgages around about the time of a general election and are faced with sky-high rates at levels not seen since the 1980s, they aren’t likely to reward the governing Conservatives for the financial pain that will cause them.

Just as Sunak and the Conservatives have maybe started believing that the prime minister’s ‘steadying the ship’ economic messaging and policy platform might be yielding some results, they may well be struck with a ghastly blow from the ghost of prime ministers past (namely, Liz Truss).

Hence, the early election theory.

Will the Red Wall see red?

Looking elsewhere, the stretch of yellow and light green up toward the West Midlands, and the band of the same colours reaching across from Merseyside to East Yorkshire, blankets a large range of marginals and historical bellwethers which will be crucial to the outcome of the next general election.

The local authorities of South Derbyshire (38.3% mortgage holders), South Ribble (36.1%), Tamworth (33.7%), Rossendale (33.3%) Bury (32.5%), and Bolsover (30.8%) all contain vital parliamentary battlegrounds, and have significantly higher rates of mortgage holders than the national average.

Many areas shaded in those lighter colours also cover an infamous set of constituencies which are also currently proving extremely difficult territory for Sunak and the Conservatives – the Red Wall.

Coined by James Kanagasooriam ahead of the 2019 parliamentary election, the definition of this collection of seats has expanded somewhat since then to generally capture the Leave-voting areas of the North and Midlands represented by Labour MPs ahead of that election.

Many of them now of course feature Conservative incumbents following Boris Johnson’s thumping 2019 victory, and will be a crucial part of any attempt by Sunak and his party to try defend their parliamentary majority.

There is also a great degree of variance to the connection between mortgage holding and electoral competitiveness within local authorities, too. Including within local authorities we would consider part of the Red Wall.

Zooming in on the North East of England, we see comparatively low rates of mortgage holding in the densest urban areas (including heavily Labour voting Newcastle, for example) and the more rural areas such as Berwick-upon-Tweed and Hexham in the north and and the western reaches of Northumberland further south (where support for the Conservatives is stronger).

Of course, it must be said that higher mortgage rates do not only effect those holding (or apply for) mortgages; anyone renting a property for which their landlord holds a mortgage will be at risk of also feeling the impact in terms of rent rises. They will most likely be found in those more urban, Labour-supporting areas.

But buffering these dark blue areas of urban sprawl and rural ridings are the greens and yellows suburban and semi-rural swathes, where we find many more mortgage holders.

Some of these areas have rates so high in fact that four wards in the region have more than half of all households owning their property with a mortgage.

The highest rate can be found in the Ingleby Barwick West ward (59.6%) in the Stockton-on-Tees council area, followed by Wheatlands in Redcar and Cleveland (54%), and then Northern Parishes (51.9%), again in Stockton-on-Tees, and Stainton and Thornton in Middlesborough (51.9%).

The lowest rates of mortgage holders are Arthur’s Hill within Newcastle upon Tyne (6.3%), Elvet and Gilesgate in County Durham (9%), Monument (9.1%) and Elswick (9.7%) in central Newcastle, and Newport in central Middlesbrough (10.6%). All very urban.

Is anywhere as safe as houses for the Conservatives, now?

Whichever way you cut this particular cake, he evidence is clear – in terms of the geography of the coming mortgage storm, suburbia, the Blue Wall, and township England will be hardest hit. And that is bad news for Sunak.

The Conservatives cannot afford to lose heaps of voters in suburban England at the next general election, with so many Conservative seats to defend in exactly those of areas if they are to deny Labour a majority.

Many towns - particularly in the Red Wall - are increasingly turning their backs on the Conservatives. There is immense frustration in these areas around what are perceived to be unfulfilled promises on local improvements, economic mismanagement and the rising cost of living, and breaking down of trust over ‘partygate’ rule breaking.

And we know very well that Blue Wall voters are already abandoning the Conservatives in their droves in local authority elections. We can’t be certain if these patterns will replicate at a general election contest, but higher mortgage rates will certainly not help in bringing them back into Conservative the fold.

On the other side, Keir Starmer and Labour are making clear pitches to voters both in the Red Wall and also in suburban areas and towns right across the country. A full blown mortgage crisis will give the voters there even more reason to shift in Labour’s direction and solidify their polling lead.

If one thing was clear from the results as they starting coming in on Thursday night through until late on Friday, it was this confirmation of what the national opinion polling has been reporting now for some time: a deep sense of frustration and apathy toward the Conservative Party among the English electorate. Sunak’s party, and his government, are undoubtedly in trouble with the country’s voters.

The early results

One of the most important early stories to emerge from the overnight count came in Plymouth, where it was clear from the first few declarations that Labour was on track to take majority control of a council which has a habit of swinging back and forth between Labour and Conservatives as the national mood changes.

In the end, Plymouth was taken by Labour with a majority of 2 in a result which would turn out to be a bellwether of things to come.

Following key contests also went the way of Labour as counting for the night drew to a close - the party romped home Medway in the South of England, and swept back into power in Brexit-backing Stoke-on-Trent.

They perhaps did not take as many seats in places such as Dudley and North East Lincolnshire as they would have liked, and some strong Green and Liberal Democrat performances kept them away from the majority line in Worcester. Nonetheless, as Conservative seats fell away from successive councils into the small hours, there was no doubting that the overnight results belonged to Keir Starmer and his party.

Lib Dems winning here

It was also evident from those overnight results that the Liberal Democrats were set to have a very good election. Despite defending a very high-watermark in terms of their 2019 performance, Ed Davey’s party signalled their intent early by taking three seats off the Conservatives in Brentwood to move level with the Tories on 17 seats and place the council into No Overall Control.

They went on to put in good performances in the likes of Hull and Cotswold, but struggled somewhat in North Norfolk.

But the real Liberal Democrat headlines were always going to come during Friday’s daytime count. Specifically, from the Blue Wall - that Remain-voting, graduate-heavy, ring of traditional Tory towns and shires surrounding London and extending out into the South West and East of England.

And indeed, Windsor and Maidenhead proving to be the tip of the spear in what would be a series of very difficult counts for the Conservatives across the South and East of England.

The Liberal Democrats flipped no fewer than 13 wards in a council home to former prime minister Theresa May, and the reigning monarch King Charles III, to take majority control.

Each of Stratford-on-Avon, Dacorum, and South Hams would also then fall directly from the Conservatives and into Liberal Democrat hands by the time the counting was through, in a bruising encounter for the governing party in their traditional heartlands and Celtic fringes.

Many of us have long spoken about the demographic and political time bomb sitting underneath incumbent Conservative MPs in the London commuter belt and its eastern and western reaches. A Conservative Party increasingly reaching rightward in an effort to maintain its Brexit coalition is straining its relationship with an ever younger, higher educated, liberal electorate in its old southern stomping grounds.

The evidence from last night, and indeed for the last few local election cycles, suggest that the effects of this are already making their mark heavily on English local authority elections.

Correlation and causation

As part of our results coverage, the BBC psephology team (led by Professor Sir John Curtice) produces analysis and summaries of how the parties performed in different areas and with different types of wards and councils.

While we cannot say anything directly about voter behaviour by studying aggregate results (that would be an ecological fallacy), robust correlations across our 794 ‘key wards’ can give indications of the patterns and particularities that underpin the overall results.

One of the most striking relationships in the data was how the Labour to Conservative ‘Butler swing’ correlated with the prevalence of pensioners within ward populations.

Namely, the higher the percentage of those aged 65 and over at the ward level, the more the swing increased toward Labour (indicated by negative figures on the graph below, as Butler swing is calculated as Con change - Lab change, divided by two) on Thursday.

Areas with high numbers of pensioners swinging away from the Conservatives and toward Labour is a stark reversal of trends we have been observing at both local authority and Westminster elections for a number of cycles, and is very likely connected to a wider untangling of the ‘Brexit realignment’ (which seems now to have peaked in 2021).

Another important correlation we picked out on the night was the relationship between Labour improvements on 2019 and the share of people in working class occupations at the ward level.

In yet another apparent reversal of trends we had being seeing for many years, whereby Labour were gaining more (or sometimes, dropping less) with those in professional occupations and from middle class areas, Labour this time were racking up more votes in areas with more people from working class backgrounds.

In BBC ‘key wards’ with more than 13% of the population working in routine occupations (according to the 2021 Census), Labour’s vote went up by an average of 6.7 points on 2019. In areas where this share was less than 7%, the change was only 4.8%.

The relationship is even more stark when we compare to the 2021 baseline - the last local election in which the Conservatives came out ‘on top’. Labour vote share change (versus 2021) in areas with the highest proportion of routine occupation workers was 6.1%, compared to 1.8% in those with the fewest.

On the other hand, versus their 2021 baseline the Conservatives were down no less than 8.3 points in areas with the highest prevalence of routine occupation workers, but down just 5.3 points in wards with the fewest.

This evidence suggests that the Conservative vote is falling away fastest in England’s most working class communities.

There was more bad news for Sunak’s party in terms of its mission to hold on to Leave voters who the party had so successfully won over in the years since the Brexit referendum. Throughout these results, Conservative decline correlated pretty strongly with estimated Brexit vote share at the ward level.

Below, we can clearly see that the Conservative change since their high watermark of 2021 and the 2023 results correlated negatively with estimated Leave share.

Labour on the other hand did significantly better in areas with higher Leave voting. On 2021, they were no less than 7.4 points up where the estimated 2016 leave vote was higher than 63%. Their vote went up by just 1.3 points on 2021 where the leave share was below 40%.

To illustrate the contrasting fortunes of the parties in this regard, the Conservative vote was down a whopping 13.6 points in the highest leave voting areas but only 6.8 points in the most Remain areas.

The overall Labour performance

As we moved further into Friday afternoon, Labour continued to quietly rack up significant swings and seat wins in councils covering key Westminster marginal constituencies; Milton Keynes, High Peak, Worthing, Darlington, the list went on.

There were also impressive results in Derbyshire and of course the symbolic capture of Swindon council directly from Conservative control - previously seen by some as perhaps a little out of reach for Labour this time around.

There were some disappointments, no doubt. Losing Slough council to the Conservatives would have been something of shock, bucking the national trend. They also made little to no progress in areas such as Hyndburn, Hull, and Sheffield.

But the overall picture was nonetheless very good for Starmer and his party, who will no doubt take delight that the Conservative performance dropped below their own ‘expectations management’ figure of 1000 net losses that was fed out ahead of Thursday.

Projected National Spoils

By the time the BBC’s Projected National Share (PNS) was released on Friday afternoon, the Conservatives were losing councils like Bracknell Forest to Labour and Dacorum to the Liberal Democrats, and steamrollering toward that 1000 net losses marker (which they would eventually hit on Friday evening).

The PNS models party support in the areas which did vote in a given local authority election and then projects it across the country to create a national figure.

It does so by assuming that everyone in areas not holding elections would have behaved the same way as those that did, and using regression models to figure out what kind of result we would have expected if all the various different types of councils were voting. This year’s figures were:

Labour 35%

Conservatives 26%

Lib Dems 20%

Others 19%

On this metric, Labour were well up on 2019 (+8pts) and 2021 (+7pts), but completely static on 2022.

The Conservatives were down on each of 2019 (-2pts), 2021 (-10pts), and 2022 (-4pts).

What does this imply for the state of the parties as we gear up toward a probable autumn 2024 General Election contest?

Labour’s 9 point lead was their best performance in a national equivalent vote at a local election since they lost power in 2010.

The 20% figure for the Liberal Democrats represented another notch in their recovery post, though still left them some way off the heydays of former leaders Kennedy and Ashdown.

For the Conservatives, this year’s PNS signals two successive years of significant drops in their vote share. Not the sort of momentum Sunak would be hoping for as he tries to plot a path toward defending the Conservative parliamentary majority in 2024.

Of course, the specific voting patterns would not replicate at a General Election, and so we must not read the PNS as some kind of benchmark or expectation for a Westminster contest.

The correct way to understand and apply the PNS is to compare it to the same metric for other years (see above), and - for opposition parties - benchmark their progress at the same point in the midterm election cycle against opposition parties who would go on to oust the incumbents.

With that in mind, the PNS above suggests Labour are currently on course, but by absolutely no means guaranteed, to win the next General Election - in some form.

Though a good marker in the sand, a nine point lead is not the sort of thumping victories that Tony Blair or David Cameron were recording as leaders of their respective parties before going on to win office, which is something Labour will have to consider.

But they have nonetheless managed first to grow and then to maintain their popular support with the local authority electorate over the last two years, while their Conservative rivals have dropped away considerably (a sum of -14pts).

On the other side of the divide, the Prime Minister will need to arrest and reverse this trajectory very quickly if he is to have any hope of staying in Number 10 after the next election.

Green gains

A special mention must go to the Green Party, who despite defending their record 2019 result still managed to win an extra 250 council seats up and down the country - including taking majority control of a council for the first time in rural Mid-Suffolk.

They also became the largest party in East Suffolk, Warwick, and Folkestone and Hythe, but did suffer disappointment in Brighton where they lost a raft of seats to an ultimately victorious Labour Party.

The Greens continue to diversify their electoral coalition and local authority representation in England. Gone are the days of a party largely only challenging Labour for urban seats and progressive, younger voters. Now, the Green Party threatens - and wins - all sorts of voters in all sorts of places.

I’ll be working with the BBC psephology team, which forms part of wider election coverage squadron (and I mean, squadron – it’s an absolutely huge, brilliant exercise that goes into every single election results programme), who will be reporting on, analysing, and guiding the narrative of the results as they come in over the course of the 24 hours which follow polls closing.

The vast majority of the seats being contested on Thursday were last up in 2019, which is a very important baseline to keep in mind throughout not just this piece, but all the results as they come in overnight on Thursday through to Saturday.

If we cast our minds back to Thursday 2^nd May 2019, we will recall a tumultuous time in British politics (even by our standards); Theresa May’s minority Conservative administration was stumbling toward its inevitable end, Britain was about to hold European Parliament elections despite having voted to leave the bloc almost three years before, and Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity was weighing as heavy as an anvil round a beleaguered Labour party’s neck.

The result of which was an absolute hammering for the Conservatives, and a thoroughly disappointing mid-term result for Labour in the local authority elections held that day (and a further kicking for both main parties in the EU elections contested at the same time, but not counted until some days later).

Both Labour and the Conservatives ended up on 28% of the ‘projected national share’ in the 2019 locals, representing respective drops of seven and one point(s) on the 2015 results for those same wards. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens were the big winners on the night (in 2019), racking up over 900 gains between them (704 for the former, 198 for the latter).

Which makes this a very tricky set of the results for both of England’s third and forth party to defend. For the Greens, it was a record performance. For the Liberal Democrats, it was a huge marker on their long and very much ongoing road to recovery from their 2015 national wipe-out.

Which, conversely, leaves both Labour and the Conservatives defending fairly weak baselines this time around. And weaker baselines are harder to fall from.

The Conservatives for instance lost around one-in-four of the seats they were defending in 2019, leaving them with just below 3,500 to defend this time around. It’s for that reason that talks of ~1000 losses for the Tories are being met with a bit of scepticism – that would be around one-in-three of every seat they were defending, from a bad set of results. To lose another 1,000 on top of the poor 2019 showing would be quite something.

That said, this fact is perhaps negated somewhat by the fact that Labour themselves of course did not have a great set of election results four years ago. Their equivalent national vote share did not dip so much as that of the Conservatives between 2015 and 2019, but they nonetheless lost just shy of 100 net councillors across England while being in opposition (which does not usually happen).

Any sort of significant swing to Labour versus that baseline would see them start to take seats numbering hundreds directly off the Conservatives.

Or, in other words, Labour could make some pretty good numbers of council gains without the Conservatives themselves necessarily having to fall too much further from their 2019 low (Labour just have to be going up).

Which brings me to the crucial point – our interpretation of the results tomorrow night (and Friday morning) should be guided by looking at the Con to Lab swing. Particularly – the Con-Lab swing in the projected national share (which we at the BBC psephology team will launch at some point during our coverage of the results on Friday). If Labour are on course for a General Election win within the next year or so, the proof will be in that projected pudding.

That said, swings within councils – especially councils covering key Westminster battleground areas – will also be good guides while we await the projected national figures.

The precise number of seat gains and losses, given the tricky 2019 baseline we are working with (for all four main parties), may not be an especially great indicator of either the overarching narrative of the local elections themselves nor the implications of this vote for a 2024 General.

So, while we await the BBC’s projected national share, which councils (and what sort of swings) should we be keeping an eye on to give us the best summaries of the locals themselves, and clearest indication of what might be coming down the track in the next House of Commons election?

It probably won’t surprise you too much that I will recommend many councils included in the YouGov 2023 battlegrounds projection, which the aforementioned Sam presented live on Sky News last week, as key councils to watch throughout Friday. They were, after all, chosen for a reason – there’s a good story in each of them!

Starters for 10

We’ll begin with Plymouth and Lincoln – expected to start declaring around half past midnight. Both are part of our BBC ‘key wards’ exercise, meaning we will be reporting on and analysing them in depth throughout our coverage.

In Plymouth, four Labour gains would give them majority control of this key battleground council which also covers the marginal constituency of Plymouth Moor View (currently held by Veterans Minister, Johnny Mercer).

Plymouth, electing in thirds, swings along with the national mood like a pendulum between Labour and the Conservatives at each election cycle, and will give us a good early read of how Labour might do across the whole contest. Something like an 8-point swing would be enough to hand Starmer’s party control, and in turn signal a good set of results to come for His Majesty’s Official Opposition.

Lincoln on the other hand is not one to watch in terms of changing control, but offers up an intriguing prospect as being one of the first councils to start declaring which maps onto a pretty reliable bellwether parliamentary constituency (of the same name).

The council itself is held quite comfortably by Labour, but the Westminster seat is held by the Conservatives. A significant vote share swing to Labour and seats falling in the affluent southern wards of this midlands marginal city would send alarm bells ringing in Tory HQ.

Moving to the midlands

We can then look forward to Worcester and Dudley (again, both covered by the BBC key ward exercise), which are expected to start declaring sometime at around 1:30am. Dudley will give us a tantalising taste of how the two main parties are faring right now in the midlands ranks of the Red Wall.

The Conservatives hold the council, and are in very little danger of losing it, and quite famously took the Dudley North constituency on a big swing in 2019. They have held Dudley South since 2010.

Significant Labour gains in Dudley would add to the growing sense of there being proper Labour recovery in the Red Wall. A 10-point swing on 2019 would push Labour up by around five seats, continuing their work from last year in terms of chipping away the Conservative majority. Such momentum at the local level would put the party in a great position to recapture Dudley North at the next Westminster election, and bring Dudley South back into play.

Worcester presents and altogether different, but just as important, yardstick for the next General Election. The council is one of the most razor thin Conservative-Labour marginals going, while the parliamentary constituency currently has a 13.3% Conservative majority and has been blue since 2010.

Any Labour parliamentary majority at the next will not be determined by their ability to win back the Red Wall – that only gets them effectively back to the situation in 2017 – but their success in flipping marginal constituencies mainly across the midlands which, unlike the aforementioned Lincoln, have been stubbornly Conservative for the last few election cycles.

In other words, Starmer’s path to Number 10 may begin with places like Workington, but the latter stages are paved the likes of Worcester.

The Conservatives currently hold 15 out of the 35 Worcester City council seats, running a minority administration. The council tipped into No Overall Control last year after the Tories lost three seats at that election. Labour are right behind them on 13, and need something in the order of a 10-point swing to be comfortably the largest party. A 15-point swing would give them overall control. If they pull that off, the Conservatives really are in trouble in marginal middle England.

Northern necessities

Next up on the ‘much watch’ list is Darlington, which last year started declaring at around about 4am. This unitary authority holds ‘all out’ elections every four years, so every single council seat is up for grabs. Which means, unlike councils electing in thirds, change in control between elections suddenly becomes much more likely (though in turn that means elections themselves are much less frequent, occurring once every four years).

In 2019, Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck in Darlington, winning 22 and 20 seats respectively. Only a slight swing is required to make Labour the largest party, but a pretty good swing (something in the order of 8 points) is needed for them to win a majority.

As such, Darlington provides us with a great yardstick as to how well Labour’s recovery is really going in the Northern sections of that now famous Red Wall. Taking control of Darlington on Thursday would send a clear message that Starmer and his party are on the march in terms of taking their former heartlands in the North.

Blue Walls for baggy eyes

On Friday morning, results from the ‘Blue Wall’ start coming in with force. One of the key councils to look out for in these Remain voting, graduate-heavy, traditionally Tory shires will be Wokingham (another BBC key ward council), which is expected to declare at around about 12-midday on Friday.

Here, the Liberal Democrats need to be performing right at the top end of their expectations to take majority control of a battleground council with an already very nervy local MP looking over his shoulder at his Lib Dem challengers – former Conservative leadership candidate, Sir John Redwood.

Making four gains out of the nine opposition seats would give them exactly half the seats on the council, which would require something approaching a 10-point Con to Lib Dem swing. Taking majority control of Wokingham would be significantly harder, but not impossible.

Either result – effective or actual control – would suggest that the raft of recent parliamentary by-election wins and 2019 General Election second places across the South and East remain a rather ominous sign of things to come for the Conservatives across these regions at the next Westminster contest.

Another Con-Lib Dem contest to look out for will be East Cambridgeshire, which should have declared before Wokingham comes in. I hear from sources that the Liberal Democrats are very confident of winning here, and indeed taking majority control would require Ed Davey’s party to win just two more seats than their 2019 showing.

With this council ‘all up’, this is something the Liberal Democrats definitely should be doing if they are going to have a good night across the board. If they do not take East Cambridgeshire overnight on Friday, that will be an important early(ish) sign to us that the Lib Dems may be struggling to build on their 2019 (and indeed more recent) gains.

Keep a close eye out for Swindon on Friday morning, too. Labour need to take just four seats off the Conservatives to knock the council into No Overall Control. A 12-point swing ought to do just that trick. With the marginal Swindon South and bellwether Swindon North constituencies covering the council, strong Labour performances at the local level would again be an encouraging indicator for Starmer’s ability to build a majority at the next General Election.

Greening Suffolk?

Elsewhere, the (not-so) lesser-spotted ‘Green gain from Con’ phenomenon which has started becoming common feature in local politics in the East of England may reach fever-pitch at around about the same time as Wokingham comes in, with Mid Suffolk also expected to declare around then.

Here, the Green Party are hoping to take control of this very rural, Brexit-leaning local authority from its current ‘No Overall Control’ status, which was created after the Greens took no fewer than seven seats off the Conservatives in 2019. Again, this council is ‘all up’, making changes in power much more likely.

And finally…

Those catching the afternoon results flow will want to keep an eye out for Walsall, which I expect to declare at around 4pm. If Labour are having a particularly good set of elections, they may well take the 11 seats necessary on the 15+ point swing required to take control of the council. That would spell big, big trouble for the Conservatives in middle England.

We will already have a very good sense of how likely that is by the time Walsall even begins declaring, but it could well be the end of a very sweet cake for Labour come the end of the count.

At the start of 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson and his government were very much in touch with Labour in the polls; while public frustration with inflation was already beginning filter through, and stories of lockdown-breaching parties in Number 10 were just emerging, vote intention leads for Keir Starmer’s party were in the order of just around 4 or 5 points.

Fast forward to March 2023, and after a series of damaging stories and events, ranging from the full ‘partygate’ fallout to the election of Liz Truss to leader and the mini economic crisis created by her fiscal policy announcements, that Labour lead has extended to around 20 points.

Currently, less than half of those who voted Conservative in 2019 tell us at YouGov they still plan to vote for Sunak’s party if an election were held tomorrow. A full 10% of them tell us they now plan to vote Labour.

Of course, the lead is not all down to self-inflicted Conservative wounds. The elephant squatting in the court of public opinion is the cost of living crisis.

With inflation soaring, energy bills rocketing, and wages struggling to keep pace, public anger with the way the government has handled the economy in reference to their household finances - not just the nation’s - has only anchored the Conservatives down in their polling mire.

But not everyone shares the same point of view, or the same experience, of the cost of living crisis. In turn, this correlates with very different values and opinions on the government’s handling of the crisis. As such, economic worry has become a very powerful predictor of voting behaviour.

Thinking ahead to 2024, the different geographical distributions of financial insecurity across the British electorate creates very different challenges for the Conservative party looking to hold on to as many seats from its 365 wins in 2019 as possible.

Cost of living and voting

Earlier this year, we released our YouGov Cost of Living Segmentation model, which placed every adult in the country in Britain into one five distinct groups. The segments range from the asset rich, low worry ‘Calm and Comfortable’, through the ‘Unsettled Withstanders’, ‘Squeezed but Coping’, ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’, to the financially troubled and highly concerned ‘Worried and Suffering’.

Last month, analysis of how these five distinct groups would vote in an election held the next day showed strong support for the Conservatives among the ‘Calm and Comfortable’ group, but also among the far-less financially secure ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’. Labour however were well ahead among the ‘Worried and Suffering’, ‘Squeezed but Coping’, and ‘Unsettled Withstanders’.

As well as divisions on asset richness, economic worry, and financial insecurity, the five groups are also dispersed in unique patterns across the country. No one constituency is quite like another in terms of its distribution of the five segments. Which, when combined with their varying vote intentions, makes for an extremely important fragment of Britain’s contemporary political landscape - the electoral geography of the cost of living.

This piece focuses on how Britain’s cost of living groups are distributed two distinct types of constituencies which the Conservatives must look to hold in 2024 if they are to have any chance of defending the majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019: the ‘Red Wall’ constituencies won from Labour in the midlands, north, and Wales, and the band Remain-voting, graduate-heavy, ‘Blue Wall’ constituencies in the South of England.

What do the segments want from the government?

One of the key findings of our initial cost of living research suggested that the ‘Calm and Comfortable’ were overall quite likely to think the government were already “doing everything they reasonably can to help people through the cost of living situation”.

But, on the other hand, the ‘Worried and Suffering’ told us quite clearly that they believed the government should be doing more - by a margin of 88%-4%. There was clear, overwhelming majority support for “doing more” among the ‘Squeezed but Coping’, and sizeable support for this suggestion among both the ‘Unsettled Withstanders’ and ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’.

Similarly, the ‘Calm and Comfortable’ were the most likely group to think that Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget was “fair”, and were far more supportive than other segments on government measures such as abolishing the lifetime allowance, creating new investment zones, and allowing companies to claim investment spending against their tax bills.

The ‘Worried and Suffering’ were the least likely to support all of those measures - followed by the ‘Squeezed but Coping’.

All of this research points in the same direction - very different priorities and principles for government action on the economy across the Cost of Living Segmentation groups.

How does the cost of living go down in the Red Wall?

Across the Red Wall, an estimated 22% fit into both the ‘Worried and Struggling’ and ‘Calm and Comfortable’ segments. Meanwhile, around 18% are ‘Unsettled Withstanders’, 23% are ‘Squeezed but Coping’, and 16% are ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’.

The ‘Worried and Suffering’ are significantly over-represented here versus the country as a whole. In fact, according to MRP analysis, out of these 50 seats, the ‘Worried and Suffering’ are the largest segment in 18. The ‘Squeezed but Coping’ are largest in 30, while in two it is the ‘Calm and Comfortable’.

So much of the framing of the 2024 election focused on how various policies and narratives will ‘go down in the Red Wall’. In that regard, the cost of living map is quite clear: this collection of Conservative-held seats contain some of the most financially vulnerable and economically insecure communities in the country, and (as we know from the research above) they are demanding that the government do more to help them.

With strong Labour vote intention leads among both the ‘Worried and Suffering’ and ‘Squeezed but Coping’ segments, it is perhaps no wonder that every constituency-level analysis of the Red Wall has forecasted total Conservative wipe-out there.

Any signs of Blue Wall financial woes?

Distributions of the YouGov Cost of Living Segments are markedly different in the Blue Wall than to its red equivalent. For one, only 13% of the public here are categorised as ‘Worried and Suffering’, while 21% are ‘Unsettled Withstanders’ and 24% are ‘Calm and Comfortable’. Over a quarter (26%) are ‘Squeezed but Coping’ and 16% are ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’.

Visualising the largest segments shows just how different these Conservative-held constituencies are those the aforementioned northern-bloc. In not one segment are the ‘Worried and Suffering’ largest. The ‘Calm and Comfortable’ outnumber everyone else in 9. In 43, the ‘Squeezed but Coping’ are most numerous, while in one constituency it’s the ‘Cautiously Hopeful Strugglers’.

The ‘Calm and Comfortable’ constituencies are mostly concentrated in a cluster in and around London, and a few constituencies dotted around the Wall’s southern and western sides. This is the segment with whom the Conservatives are currently doing best in terms of voting intention, and who are likely to think that the government are doing all they can vis-à-vis the crisis itself.

Everywhere else in the Blue Wall is a sea of purple - those for whom the cost of living crisis has meant cut backs and spending changes, but who are nonetheless on top of their bills and payments.

Overall, with financial security much higher in the Blue Wall, economic priorities in here will be markedly different than in the Red Wall.

What does this mean for 2024?

Thinking ahead to the next General Election - assumed to be some time in 2024 - the political geography of the cost of living crisis presents a striking problem for the Conservatives.

I might go so far as to argue that there is perhaps no greater articulation of the breadth of the voter coalition that the Conservatives put together in 2019 than this: in the Red Wall, over one-third of constituencies are topped by the ‘Worried and Suffering’, while in the Blue Wall, the ‘Calm and Comfortable’ are the most populous group in almost 20%.

Relatedly, we know there are strong differences on attitudes toward Brexit and the European Union between the two areas - another key dividing line in the Conservative voter coalition, which has often been correlated with class and relative levels of economic security.

So, as Sunak and his strategists look for ways to defend their majority against a rejuvenated Labour and a determined Keir Starmer, they face a situation where two vital parts of their base are pulling in two very different directions regarding the cost of living, its impact on their daily lives, and what (if anything) they think the government should be doing to help people more.

How does the party create an electoral and policy programme which will provide the financial support and economic intervention needed in the Red Wall, but speak to voter priorities and maintain support in the more affluent and economically secure Blue Wall?

The next big exciting drop of English and Welsh 2021 Census data is due to happen in just a few days, with council ward-level data coming out on January 31st. This fresh juice will give us deeper insights into some of the patterns and trends picked out from the council and regional level data released so far.

This time last month, I released analysis of my own on the changing age profiles of local authorities up and down England and Wales. It is no secret that the UK has an ageing population - we’ve known this for some time.

However, what Census 2021 was able to tell us is that despite many of our urban areas experiencing a ‘Great Ageing’, other areas are getting younger on average in the face of the national ageing tide. I called these the ‘Benjamin Button’ local authorities, and they are almost exclusively suburban or semi-rural, leafy-green, and in the commuter orbit of large cities.

The ‘Great Ageing’

As we already know, the United Kingdom is getting older - and has been for some time. According to the latest census data released last year, the average drop in 18-30 year olds in local authorities across the country is -1.2%.

The data also revealed that this ageing process is happening much faster in the largest cities. Take London for example. There’s no other way of putting it - the capital is ageing, and fast.

Aside from the Borough of Westminster (+0.2 point change in % of the population aged 18-30 vs 2011), every single Borough is seeing a decrease in the relative size of its young population. Including big drops in Newham (-6.0) and Hounslow (-5.5).

A story emerged in The Times this week suggesting that many workers were being increasingly ‘priced out’ of London and forced to move further away from their places of employment. The article cites a survey by Pocket Living from October 2022, “which suggested that 27 per cent of renters in London are looking to leave the capital because the cost of living has become too expensive”.

London is not alone, but part of a wider pattern - the ‘Great Ageing’ of English and Welsh metropoli. Many of our largest cities are ageing faster than the national average:

• Manchester (-4.3 point change in % of the population aged 18-30 vs 2011)

• Bradford (-2.0)

• Leeds (-1.8)

• Cardiff (-1.7)

• Birmingham (-1.6)

• Sheffield (-1.4)

The ‘Benjamin Buttons’

Despite this declining presence of young people in many of the country’s urban centres, a small crop of local authorities a little further away from our most densely populated cities are actually seeing (relative) growth in their younger populations.

Against the national ageing tide, this ‘Benjamin Button’ group of local authorities consists of places like:

• West Lancashire (+1.8 point change in % of the population aged 18-30 vs 2011)

• Bath and NE Somerset (+1.3%)

• North West Leicestershire (+1.1%)

• Harborough (+1.1%)

• East Suffolk (+1.0%)

• Maldon (+1.0%)

• Guildford (+0.7%)

• Winchester (+0.7%)

What connects so many of these authorities is the ‘Blue Wall’: Conservative-held constituencies, leafy-green suburbs, and well-educated populations which tended toward voting Remain at the 2016 EU Referendum.

In fact, if we zoom in to just the South East and East of England, we can see just how prevalent young population growth actually is in Conservative heartlands. Authorities shaded in dark blue have all seen growth in their 18-30 year old populations, while those in light blue have seen declines.

What do all the dark blue shaded authorities have in common? That's right - of the 42 MPs who represent constituencies within those council boundaries, exactly 42 of them are Conservatives.

Notable MPs representing areas shaded in dark blue on that map include Priti Patel (former Home Secretary), Michael Gove (current Secretary of State for Levelling Up), Kit Malthouse (once of Brexit compromise fame), and Caroline Nokes (Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee).

But isn’t this all just a Coronavirus effect?

Now, many folk on Twitter wanted to know the extent to which the ‘Great Ageing’ and ‘Benjamin Buttons’ were a product of Coronavirus and its impact on population movement at the time the census was taken.

The theory, or the hypothesis proposed, is that urban areas looked artificially older and the rest of the country artificially younger in 2021 because a whole host of young people - including students and young professionals working remotely - had fled the density and cramped conditions of cities to return to their spacious, green, family homes in the Shires.

It is not a bad theory at all. Indeed, some research organisations have produced reports and publications arguing specifically this case. However, it is not - in my view - a theory which stands up to the evidence particularly well.

Firstly, the ‘Great Ageing’ effect actually pre-dates Covid-19 by quite some years. For example, while young populations were growing in places like Manchester for the first few years after the 2011 Census, this already started falling back between 2015-17.

The ‘Great Ageing’ is almost ten years old.

Secondly, there’s no evidence of a great flight of young people into the ‘Benjamin Buttons’ pre- and post-pandemic. Again, as with the ‘Great Ageing’, this demographic trend predates the Covid-19 outbreak by some time.

In fact, rather than seeing a big leap in their young populations between 2019 and 2021, many of our ‘Benjamin Buttons’ actually - as with the major cities - also saw relative declines.

Again, little here to suggest that Covid-19 is responsible for the ‘Benjamin Button’ effect.

Finally, we can also consider the survey and market data analysed in this week’s Times article as evidence that the ‘Great Ageing’ goes well beyond Coronavirus-related displacement.

While there was undoubtedly a Covid-effect in the 2021 Census data (namely, the time of its collection and its stipulation that respondents answer their current living situation as it was at the time), it is only a part of the story the data is telling.

The larger, more important part, is about substantial changes in where England and Wales’ young people are choosing to live - a longer term change driven by altogether different factors.

Political ramifications

So, while our most urban (Labour voting) areas are ageing, we're seeing real-term growth in young populations across many (Conservative voting) small cities, suburbs, and semi-rural areas. Wholescale demographic changes in our two major parties' safest seats.

The former may well be a long term problem for Labour - and you don’t have to ask deep within the ranks of London’s campaigners and organisers to find some rather dim projections about some areas of the capital in the next few election cycles (and the 2021 Mayoral and 2022 Borough elections testify to this) - but the latter is increasingly a problem for the Conservatives here and now. These are their key Southern battleground areas against both Labour and (more so) the Liberal Democrats ahead of 2024.

Younger folk are likelier to be more socially liberal, pro-immigration, have been hit harder by recent economic and cost of living crises, and to be in the most precarious employment and housing situations. Therefore, in the current political climate - and with the Conservatives pushing hard on ‘small boat’ and ‘culture war’ issues - much more likely to vote Labour (or for a second-placed Lib Dem).

If there are now increasingly (relatively) more of those voters in key Conservative Blue Wall seats, Tory electoral trouble is abound.

As I wrote for Conservative Home last year, the sorts of (+2% here, -2% there) might not seem like much, but they translate to thousands of people. Take Winchester, for example. The latest Census population figure for the local authority is 127,500, having been reported at 116,595 in 2011.

The population aged 18-30 has increased in Winchester from 15.2% in 2011 to 16.0% in 2021. That’s almost 2700 extra young voters now in and around Steve Brine’s constituency, with the Lib Dems just 985 votes behind in second place. Just seven years ago, that gap was 16,914 votes.

Next week: a further chance to investigate

Which brings me back to next week’s release. When doing media interviews and engaging in further discussions about the ‘Benjamin Buttons’ in particular, I was often asked about where in particular within the local authorities that young people might be increasing their presence.

Was it in the larger towns and small cities, or in the more rural communities?

In other words, are younger people moving from larger cities to smaller ones, or is it a flight to the countryside effect?

Of course, without lower-level data available at the time, I was only able to answer “we will have to see”. Well, now that ‘time to see’ is just around the corner, and I will be updating my analysis of the ‘Benjamin Buttons’ with the ward level data next week. Stay tuned!