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Much has been made of the news that Reform has overtaken Labour in voting intentions in a recent poll. The poll, produced by market research agency Find Out Now, put the Conservatives on 26%, Reform on 24% and Labour on 23%.
Most recent polls show that Labour is still ahead of Reform, but only by a small margin. So while it is too early to say that Reform is beating Labour, it is nonetheless snapping at the heels of both Labour and the Conservatives. If this pattern of support continues up to the local elections in May next year, Reform is very likely to win a lot more councillors.
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These results reflect the fact that Labour has experienced a very short honeymoon in government, largely related to the unpopular decisions it has made, such as the means testing of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, and Rachael Reeve’s budget that imposed higher taxes on businesses.
But how seriously should we take the findings of this single poll? Labour won by a landslide in the July election so to be overtaken already would be a significant development. It is worth examining how robust and therefore enduring these polling results are. One way of finding out is to look at votes rather than polls. We can investigate the extent to which the national parties were rivals as opposed to allies in the general election.
Vote Shares for Reform and Labour, 2024:
The chart shows the relationship between the vote shares for Reform and Labour in the 632 constituencies in Great Britain (Northern Ireland is excluded).
The summary line is flat, which means that the Labour vote was unaffected by the Reform vote across these constituencies. Labour did not lose seats to Reform in strong Labour areas which contain many working-class voters. If it had, then the summary line would slope upwards as the Labour vote share increased because Reform would be doing well at Labour’s expense. Reform undoubtedly won some votes from Labour, but not enough to make a difference to the party in its traditional strongholds.
This can be quantified by calculating the correlation between the vote shares for the two parties, which was negligible (-0.01). Correlations run from -1 to 1, with zero being no correlation at all and -1 being a perfect negative correlation – and 1 being a perfect positive correlation.
I’ve previously explained this relationship by looking at how Ukip, the ancestor of Reform, and the Conservatives were allies in the general election of 2017 rather than rivals. This is because the vote shares for both parties increased together, except in a few seats where support for them was very high. In this case, they were weak rivals.
This pattern was repeated in the 2024 general election as the chart below shows. The correlation between the Reform and Conservative vote shares was positive although rather weak (0.21). This means that Reform did better in traditionally safe Tory seats.
Vote Shares for Reform and the Conservatives, 2024:
This creates something of a puzzle. If Labour had no effect on the Reform vote and the Conservatives had a modest positive effect, where did much of the Reform vote come from? The answer is that it came from the two other national parties – the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
The correlation between the Reform vote and the Liberal Democrat vote share was negative (-0.25) and the same was true for the Greens (-0.27). When the Liberal Democrats and Greens did well, the Reform vote was reduced which means that both parties were rivals to Reform.
The Liberal Democrats have a history of picking up protest votes, that is, voters who are disillusioned with both major parties and so support the traditional third party in British politics. These voters are not loyally attached to the party and so are quite willing to switch to another one in a subsequent election.
These correlations suggest that much of the support for Reform, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens was made up of protest voters in the 2024 election. They all did well because the protest vote has been growing over time as attachments to the two major parties have weakened. This has produced a much more fragmented party system in Britain than used to be the case.
Will this change?
What is likely to change the current polling, which puts Labour, the Conservatives and Reform close together in voting intentions? Tony Blair famously said that the priorities of his government were “education, education, education”. To turn this around Labour needs to prioritise “delivery, delivery, delivery” – something which is going to take time.
There are reasons to be optimistic that this can be done, however, and they relate to the three major shocks that have hit the economy over the last decade: Brexit, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
These were all what the unorthodox economist Nassim Taleb describes as very rare, highly disruptive “black swan” events. Brexit never happened before, a pandemic on the scale of COVID hasn’t happened since 1918, and the last time a major European war occurred was close to 70 years ago.
The probability that more of these will occur in the next few years is, therefore, quite low, which should give economies across Europe time to recover. With the right policies, economic growth in Britain can resume. Delivering this is the key to ensuring Reform’s lead is consigned to one solitary poll.
Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC.
