Is Labour's Unpopularity a Problem?

Robin Campbell 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.

Figure 1. The Labour Party’s logo.

The Labour Party is very unpopular right now. Is this a problem for Labour's chances in the next election? My short answer is no, not yet, at least. Things are not so bad, and it is too early to judge the future.  

Labour's sour start has been a constant fixture in the news cycle. It is the front-page headline of The Times as I write this article. One poll on December 4th found that Reform was beating Labour in voting intention (24% to 23% respectively). More respectable polls consistently have Labour losing to the Tories, though not by a lot, and Labour is haemorrhaging by-elections, losing 27 councillors since the election. 

It is undoubtedly true that Labour is unusually unpopular for a government that has just been elected into office, but the picture for Labour is not so bad. Firstly, it is not as bad as people say it is. As I write this, in the last few weeks, most polls have Labour as the lead on voting intention. Further, many headline-grabbing polls that spell bad news for Labour tend to be just one-offs.

We must understand that while Labour are unpopular, so are the Conservatives. Labour are hovering at about 25-29% support, but so are the Conservatives - far lower than the 35-40%, which is generally what you would expect from an election-winning party. While Reform UK are eating into Labour's support, most analysts consider them damaging the Tories more. It is also true that political parties do not need significant support to win elections. Labour won a landslide in the 2024 election with a lacklustre vote share of only 33.7%. They did this by utilising a micro-targeting strategy, appealing to specific seats rather than the general public.

When there is no election in sight, the polls that we see now show voter intention for the whole country because such polls are easier and cheaper. But this is unhelpful for telling us the election result because Labour never had widespread support across the country- and this was always part of their strategy. However, an obvious drawback of Labour's targeted strategy is that they can quickly lose many seats because they won with few votes. They are almost certainly confined to losing many seats in the next election. 

But even if the polls are not suitable for Labour, this is not necessarily a cause for worry. When there is no election in sight, polls are not great predictors of the next election because things can quickly turn around in politics. Labour narrowed a 20 percentage point lead by the Conservatives to only two percentage points in the three months before the 2017 general election. Opinion polls between Labour and the Tories were neck and neck in late July 2019 before Labour got gazumped in the December election.

Labour was persistently ten percentage points higher than the Tories between 2010-2015 but lost the 2015 election. In 2021, Starmer threatened to resign from his inner circle due to poor results, and as late as 2022, the Conservatives were still winning in the polls before losing their worst election defeat since 1761. Five years is a long time in politics. The Trump presidency will start and end with the next UK general election. It, therefore, is not essential to consider what the polls say right now unless there is a massive disparity in the polls followed by a sense of being fed up with the government like there was between 1992-1997 and 2022-2024. There is currently no such poll lead. 

It is incredibly unhelpful to study current polling given that Labour's strategy is long-term. Labour has frontloaded their unpopular policies initially, such as their budget keeping the two-child benefit cap and removing the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners. Labour's strategy is to set clearly defined and ambitious targets they aim to achieve by the next parliament, and these targets will be used as measurements of their success. In the short term, they have nothing to show, but if they succeed, they will have something to trumpet. Given this long-term strategy (which involves short-term unpopularity), we need to wait a few years to properly assess their electoral position in the next election. 

The future is brighter than it is now. The economy will improve. Some commentators are pinning the abysmal growth in the year's second half on Labour.

Many business leaders blame the rise in the tax on Labour's national insurance contributions to their budget. But this is all nonsense. The budget had a minimal but very real negative effect on consumer and commercial confidence, but this is small potatoes.

Growth was already projected to shrivel due to external reasons, namely, lessening global economic trade and niggling inflation. The second-quarter projected growth was downgraded from 0.5% to 0.4%, and the third-quarter growth was from 0.1% to 0%- this is hardly a significant change. There were upsides, too. Projected consumer spending rose 0.5%, and business investment was revised from 1.2% to 1.9%.

As with real household incomes, growth will increase over the coming years. Much of the current pessimism around the economy will likely subside as interest rates decrease multiple times. Labour hopes that changes to planning reform and increased investment in public services will increase growth beyond that projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility's modelling. Some economic analysts (e.g. those at Capital Economics) predict that growth will exceed such models.

Some argue that Labour has shown incompetence so far (e.g., managing the media with the Freebies scandal) and that this is a measure of what's coming. But now that Labour has got some unpopular policies out the way and shuffled their inner circle around, we are better positioned to see how Labour will govern as they pick up some much-lacking experience and settle into things.   

The emphasis of this article certainly overstates the positives for Labour in trying to correct the overly negative perception. But things are not as bad for Labour as has been presented. Significantly, we cannot predict the future well- it will be subject to external shocks and unforeseeable scandals/problems. Labour may do poorly or fine (they will do well only to lose a chunk of seats given their lofty 2024 win), but what we have now is not a reliable indicator of any particular outcome.