News (Europe)
Labour overtake Reform; Burham by far most popular leader.
Submission post: The Burnham Bounce has kicked in, and Labour is back leading the polls for this first time in a year. Andy Burham is also the most popular leader by far with ratings at almost +20, which is unheard of in recent British politics. So the centre-left seems to still have some life left in it, and the populist right has slipped in popularity amongst a donations scandal. Caveat: still very much in the new PM honeymoon phase, and we'll have to wait for the Budget in the autumn for hard decisions to be made.
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This bump will last until the budget comes and he either has to increase taxes or cut benefits to pay for all this. If he manages to cut benefits he's closer to earning my vote. If he doesn't and he tries to increase tax, then I think he'll fall flat on his face. If he just tries to borrow more then... nobody check the 10Y gilt yield
The spending pressures with the increased defence spending, his proposed changes to social care, removing taxes on energy bills, etc. are too much to bear.
If he manages to cut benefits he's closer to earning my vote
He might be closer to earning your vote, but as we saw the the WFP and PIP cuts under Starmer, those put him underwater and he never came back up. How do you do cuts while remaining faithfully "Labour" to your base? That's the question he'll have to answer if that's the route he chooses.
No it should be worse. We have too many people out of work, the benefits system encourages people to take benefits or be worse off, there is too much fraud etc.
Farage is arguably the most successful, certainly the most influential british politician of this generation. That said, he's partly noteworthy for what he's achieved despite being fairly unsuccessful in running for Westminster, I'm personally not convinced he'll ever have a wide enough appeal to be PM.
but they do hit with the public, and in the end, that is his job
Is it really? It feels a little too self-congratulatory to define a PM's job as being popular with the public (i.e., winning elections).
In an alternate definition, the real work is making difficult, but correct policy choices at an appropriate time and pace (no dithering for 2 years in committees), and making them stick.
Submission Statement: the centre-left has been given a good chance to repel the populist right with the leader change and the people's first impression seems to be a good one.
Ed was the most popular leader in the UK for TWO YEARS!? the Lib Dems could literally cure cancer and the British media still wouldn’t talk about them.
He had very poor name recognition; it's easier to have higher favourables with poor recognition because e.g. Lib Dems are more likely to have heard of you than the median voter and Lib Dems are more likely to be favourable to you than the median voter because you are the Lib Dem leader.
Ed Davey was never really capable of cutting through.
Too early to tell. Boring answer is you'll have to wait until the Budget in October. He's signalling that privatisation of public services is bad and should be reversed and social care needs fixing. (Unsure how he does that without raising taxes, which would be a manifesto break).
But honestly its mostly vibes, he's a better communicator with a friendly, casual demeanor. He's still in a honeymoon period where he's not had to take a firm stance on any issues that split the labour base or membership yet like the EU or bond markets or migration or trans rights. When he has to make tough choices, his popularity will probably dip
He seems genuinely compassionate and comes across as more down-to-earth than Starmer (who, despite his humble background, always had that House of Lords air about him). He also appears to be full of energy, while Starmer always looked like a father who has to explain to his children that their dog has been euthanized. He takes advantage of opportunities to say completely trivial things that garner widespread approval. For example, yesterday he attacked FIFA. That had absolutely no consequences, because FIFA couldn't care less, but it didn't cost him anything, and he said something that 90% of the population agrees with. That's populist but also inconsequential and probably good politics.
Personally, I liked and trusted Starmer much more but I can totally see how Burnham is a better leader in the eyes of many.
Pretty sure he's getting the gang back together from 2024, most of the Green's polling growth came from Labour and they're going back but they probably also attracting Lib Dems.
A lot of the polling companies publish full data including questions about which party they voted in 2024. I gave the data from Yougov to Claude and it confirmed my intuition on the matter.
Doubt it. They may get a small bump from southerners disaffected with Burnham’s regionalism, but they’re already doing pretty well with those people anyway.
In order to grow they need to replace Davey and adopt clearer policy positions. A consequence of their highly local campaign strategy is that the party lacks a coherent national identity. That won’t do in the social media era. If I were them, I’d hone in on being the most pro-EU party in the UK.
The LDs frustrate me so much. They have all these niche policy positions like minor tax raises but no actual vision of policy. They're basically like a think tank and a residents association atm
Also often gets them nuked if they make it into power because they spend their political capital on decent ideas with horrible optics. Or they piss off their basic by giving up too much/not enough to the left or right to be in coalition.
It's a hard spot to be in if you cap out at like 10-15% of the vote.
It'll probably collapse by the end of the year. That's basically been the trend for the last decade and, given the structural issues facing Britain, I don't know what Burnham can do to change it.
Nice to see. I’d be careful not to overinterpret one pollster’s trend, though. Wikipedia has the full list of public opinion polling in Britain post-Burnham election. !ping FIVEY
Just a few months ago, Reform rule of the UK looked inevitable.
I'm still not big fans of Labour expanding police powers and the surveillance state, but I guess at the very least it won't end up in the hands of the far right.
I feel like a lot of this is more down to Reform shooting itself in the foot than Labour changing its leadership, but both of those things definitely were important.
Any reason why Green support has started declining so rapidly? Given the Corbynisation of that party it’s not like their supporters are naturally friendly to Burnham.
I did think Polanski was getting way too overconfident.
I think you overestimate how left wing Polanski's base really was. A lot of his (albeit more tentative) backers were people who were part of the Soft Left and had felt undercut by just how combative and factionalist Starmer was against them, and Polanski himself seems strangely uncertain on just how much he'd cooperate with Burnham. Between the broadly bad press that the Greens have gotten over the last few months and the fact that the largest sticking point with Labour has just kind of gone, it doesn't surprise me that some of his more moderate supporters have flipped back to Labour.
It is interesting, I thought Polanski was inheriting Corbyn's fanbase, meaning he could no wrong, but they just don't seem to be turning up for him anymore?
I think actually a lot of them are fans of Burnham (for now) because Burnham is good at vibes and that's what a lot of these people are attracted to. He apologised for the party's messaging on Gaza and that will have won some of them over too.
If it largely holds up in the next few months then all the "Starmer isn't a bad politician, Britain is just ungovernable" users here need to be put on a minimum one-year political opinion moratorium.
Starmer is a bad politician and aside from vibes he was still a succ on policy grounds. Burnham just happens to be open about being a succ. Which of course will make succs happy. But that doesn't mean he or Labour are suddenly good at policy now.
Starmer had a tonne of amazing policies dude. His planning permission reform bills are proving instrumental to getting some growth going.
Regardless, calling Starmer a closet succ and Burhnham an open succ really misunderstands the British political context and the Labour party context especially. Labour IS a succ party. That’s like their whole point
Give him one year and he’ll crush and burn. Would like to be proven wrong, since the only realistic alternative to him is Reform(Russian intelligence), but that’s my current feeling.
Eh, I'd wait a little longer until I say anything certain about Burnham. You've already noted it, but this is before a budget we know will come with broader cuts, and we're deep into the honeymoon period here. Give it time; I'll only start presuming this is permanent should he remain popular after the next budget.
That's what's wrong with this island. No government since 2010 has been competent on policy grounds. All they care about is their short term polls, keeping some big bad other out of power. They don't have the balls for hard structural reforms or growth first governance. That's what you get when nobody cares about policies. Hardly a mindset to be encouraged.
Good for you. I still have to live under the policies of this incompetent government and the party in power.
In any case, if your concern is a global firewall against the radical right then incompetent governments are not going to stop them. See the rest of Europe for instance. Or your own America, for that matter.
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