Confidence in UK hits new low while Starmer goes in wrong direction

The Herald Scotland

09-05-2025

In the aftermath, arguments have raged both within and outwith Labour over the Government's current course. MPs in formerly Conservative-held seats and across the Red Wall have been arguing for a doubling down on anti-immigration policies and rhetoric. Others have blamed Rachel Reeves' decisions to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance and Personal Independence Payments, arguing for the Government to shift to the left.
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The backdrop for this debate is the success of Reform UK last week. Nigel Farage's party won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, two mayoralties, 677 councillors, and took control of ten councils. The BBC's projected vote share, which extrapolates from local election results to the full country, suggests Reform would win 30% of the vote in a general election, to Labour's 20%. Labour MPs in more conservative and pro-Brexit constituencies have been spooked by Reform's success, and are focused on how they triangulate against Farage's party.
Downing Street appears to agree with those MPs who want Labour to focus on Reform. In the immediate aftermath of the results the Government announced new anti-immigration measures and have stuck by their welfare cuts, signalling no intention to change course and doubling down on their existing bets.
There's a problem with this focus on Reform, though. The geography of the local elections last week has heavily influenced the narrative about the results. They took place in some of the most conservative and pro-Brexit parts of England, so a right-wing party coming first isn't a massive surprise. If elections had been held in part of England where the Liberal Democrats did well last year, or in Scotland and Wales, we would be having a very different conversation.
In national opinion polls, Labour have lost to the Greens and Liberal Democrats more than double the number of voters they've lost to Reform, whose rise is fuelled more by former Conservative voters than anyone else. In Scotland, they've lost more voters to the SNP, Greens, and Liberal Democrats than to Reform, and in Wales they've lost just 5% of their voters to Reform, but a quarter to Plaid Cymru and and eighth to the Liberal Democrats and Greens.
Nigel Farage of Reform UK (Image: free) Labour's problem isn't that they are not enough like Reform. They are bleeding votes to parties all over the political spectrum, more so to the left than to the right. Doubling down on their current direction won't win those voters back and risks alienating even more of them. More than half of Labour's 2024 voters have a favourable view of the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and in Scotland and Wales a significant minority of Labour voters have positive views of the nationalist parties. Not only have they already lost more voters on their left than their right, there's also far more scope for them to lose even more voters on their left flank.
Labour's problem isn't that they aren't tough enough on immigration. They won't hold on to power by aping Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Their problem is that, despite only having been in office for ten months, they nevertheless govern a country that most people think is going in the wrong direction.
In March, Ipsos found the lowest level of economic confidence in the UK that they have ever recorded, having started tracking in the 1970s. Britons are more negative about the state of the economy than they were in the 1980 recession, in the wake of Black Wednesday in 1992, during the Great Recession in 2008, and even at the height of the pandemic. 59% of us think Britain is going in the wrong direction; just 19% of us are happy with the way things are going.
As YouGov's Dylan Difford has put it, the mission of the Labour government should be 'deshittification', both because it's the right one from a policy perspective and because it's the agenda most likely to glue Labour's voter coalition back together. By the time of the next general election, and from the point of view of Scottish and Welsh Labour preferably by the devolved elections next year, Labour need to be able to point to ways in which life has gotten better.
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Immigration crackdowns and salami-slicing the welfare state are not the path to making life better for ordinary Britons, never mind keeping Labour in power or the Union intact. Voters look at Labour's headline policy decisions since the election and see a government taking money out of ordinary people's pockets rather than those of the wealthiest. Despite the UK being a spectacularly wealthy country, most of that wealth sits in very few hands, and we simply do not tax it properly.
The British tax system is a dysfunctional mess that is incapable of mobilising the nation's resources to address the problems we face and needs thoroughly overhauled. But Labour's promises not to increase taxes, which they will ultimately be forced to do and which we knew needed to happen before last year's election, ties their hands behind their backs in this regard.
It also leaves a chasm on Labour's left that smaller parties are happily exploiting. Doubling down on their current strategy won't win their voters back because those voters are going left, not right. Only a change of course can win back the people who put Labour in power last July.
Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social