Now that we’re tracking the issues facing the country through Public Pulse, it’s only a short step to tracking voting intention.
Public Pulse monitors UK opinion about politics, the economy and the major issues facing the country. We’ll be making the data available to end clients and brands every month.
Voting intentions
Our Public Pulse polling, based on those who plan to vote and have voted (or were too young to vote) in the last election, over the last four months has Reform rising from 18% in November to 25% in February, a rise that mirrors Labour’s fall from 30% to 25% over the same time. The other parties have changed little over the past four months, which says a lot about the impact that Kemi Badenoch has had on Tory fortunes since she became leader in November.
There are two axes of analysis that are interesting to look at here. The first is voting intent by gender: among men Reform is in the top spot, having edged ahead of Labour back in January (26% vs 23% in Feb 2024). Among women, the story is very different indeed, Labour, while down from 34% to 28% over the last four months, is still the top choice for women voters and its only in Feb that Reform has begun to be in a position to threaten that.
Of course, Labour can still firmly rely on the university-educated – fully a third of them (34%) are still committed Labour voters. This is in comparison to just 19% of the non-university educated, who are as firmly Reform (32%) as the university-educated are Labour.
A key focus here, as we do a lot of work in the banking, finance and luxury goods sectors is looking at the population split by above/below average (median) personal income (c. £37,000). Support for Labour is falling among those who are above average income, from 39% in Dec to 25% now. And over the last month support for Reform has jumped from 14% to 23%. Those below average income favour Reform (26%) over Labour (21%). The Tories are stuck at the 1/5 mark for both groups, just as they are overall.
Attitudes towards the government
These falls in support for Labour will be no surprise to anyone who pays attention to the news or has opened a newspaper in the last six months, but the scale of the unpopularity is quite interesting. We asked the general public to tell us, in two or three words, how they would describe the government and nearly half of the respondents gave us fairly general and non-specific comments (e.g., “I just don’t like them” type answers), 32% said the government was incompetent and/or inefficient and 21% said they were corrupt and/or dishonest. Only 14% (rising to 40% of Labour voters) gave positive feedback on the government, with 9% saying that the government displayed good leadership and trustworthiness. While it is usual for people to grumble about the government, the scale of antipathy, given they had won a landslide election less than a year ago, says a lot about British attitudes towards the government and politics these days.
We asked a similar question about the Labour Party and Sir Keir Starmer – among the public overall the five top response themes for “words to describe the Labour Party” were negative – a litany of concepts like “bad reputation”, “dishonest”, “incompetent” etc.
The Prime Minister himself fared a bit better – while the top three response themes are negative (incompetent, dishonest and bad character traits – in descending order) around one in ten still thought him to be competent and of good character (12% and 8%). Both of those scores more than doubled among Labour voters (25% and 22% respectively) which indicates that he retains his core support.
As ever, it will be interesting to see how these polls play out over the coming months, and we plan to do deep dives into attitudes towards Kemi Badenoch, Sir Ed Davey and Nigel Farage (and their respective parties) over the coming months.
Get the full Public Pulse report each month
These findings offer a small preview of the Public Pulse report, available monthly from late April. It will also include insights such as top issues facing the UK, confidence in the Government’s ability to deal with them and a comparison between business leaders and the general public.
