The Month in Polling: Starmer in serious trouble
Since the last review of polling, we’ve had actual elections take place, and the reverberations from those can still be felt. And that’s left us with a ten-point Conservative lead in the polls. That’s actually a tiny swing to Labour, but even that small morsel of comfort for Starmer and the Shadow Cabinet masks some pretty awful dynamics.
The first is our old friend, the regional variation coupled with the continued failure of the Northern Strategy: while there’s a swing to Labour overall, that swing is concentrated in the Midlands and the South outside London. In the North (and also in London), there’s a swing to the Tories.
After Hartlepool: Reform UK is no longer a serious player
The picture for Labour is made worse by what the Hartlepool By-Election appeared to tell us: a Farage-less Reform UK is no credible successor to the Brexit Party, and those voters who in recent years have left Labour for independent candidates, UKIP and then the Brexit Party have now completed the journey and gone Full Conservative. What Hartlepool demonstrated is that the Brexit vote has now gone almost entirely to the Tories, and in the handful of Northern seats where Farage’s outfit did particularly well, Labour would be in danger of incurring heavy losses even if they weren’t losing votes to the Tories north of the Humber and the Mersey. I’m now factoring that in to my projections, so this month’s release isn’t comparable to last month’s.
That’s why, despite the modest national swing to Labour, I’m projecting that if there had been a General Election on Thursday, the Conservative majority would increase. The Tories would make a net gain of 32 seats, comprised of 40 gains and 8 losses. Of those gains, 39 are from Labour and 31 of those are in Northern England, as is the one gain from the Liberal Democrats — Tim Farron’s seat in Westmorland & Lonsdale. Other high profile casualties could include Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy (yes, you read that right, as things stand an election now would see the whole of Wigan Borough represented by Tories in Parliament), former Leader Ed Miliband and even current Deputy Leader Angela Rayner. And it’s the assimilation of Brexit voters into the Tories that’s doing the damage: even if Labour and LibDem support remained at 2019 levels, only four of those Conservative gains would be prevented.
And, for the record, one of those four preventable Conservative gains is Batley & Spen, which right now is looking like another Labour loss before any attempt to work out what the consequences of George Galloway standing are. Right now it’s looking perfectly possible he could find himself on the wrong end of another humiliating result but end up making the difference between Labour winning and losing.
The dilemma: the Northern Strategy isn’t working, but Starmer needs to act in the North
This is the problem for Labour: the strategy aiming at Northern voters clearly isn’t bearing fruit. Far from pulling disaffected voters back into their camp, the party appears helpless to dissuade them from voting Tory. But if Labour is serious about forming a government at some point in the 2020s, it has a problem: it’s now hard enough for Labour to win a majority at Westminster without the Scottish constituencies which have moved wholesale to the SNP, denying the party around forty seats they could have counted on winning until 2015. Take another thirty seats out of play, and worse still, hand them to the Tories, and the job looks impossible.
Despite talk of Labour having a shot at the “Blue Wall” in places like Oxfordshire, the demolition of the “Red Wall” is still in progress, and is far more advanced. And people forget that Labour’s stonking majorities in the seats they lost in 2019 weren’t just erased overnight, but worn down slowly, election after election. That process is only just beginning in the South, and of the eight projected Labour gains in this month’s Nowcast, there’s only really Hastings & Rye that would have seemed unthinkable in 2010. In fact, one or two of them might have seemed unthinkable only because no one would have believed Labour could lose them in the first place (Gedling and Wolverhampton South West, for example).
So with no immediate prospects of Labour being able to replace its Northern losses in the Home Counties, Starmer’s top priority has to be stopping the rot in the North somehow. It remains to be seen if he’s capable of that.
