‘From Ashfield to Surrey, floating voters are open to Labour ideas’

A lot of people will tell you just now that there just isn’t much enthusiasm for Keir Starmer or Labour out there in the country. They say that the historically good polling for Labour is actually a bit squidgy and only reflects a desire to chuck out the Tories – and to change the government. Labour, will, they insinuate, only arrive in government almost by accident, and only because the Conservatives have been so extraordinarily bad at governing.

Certainly, there is a grain of truth in that characterisation. Voters are unthinkable cross with Rishi, Liz and Boris for a whole host of reasons. Boris because of party-gate, Liz for playing Russian roulette with people’s mortgages and grocery bills, and Rishi for being super-rich and out-of-touch. It’s a killer combo.

All-pervasive sense that the country is broken

All of this is layered in top of the cost of living crisis and the all-pervasive sense that the country is totally broken. 

Put like that, it’s hardly surprising that the Conservatives are being lined up for an electoral shellacking of historic proportions.

But dig beneath the surface and there’s also something else going on. Firstly, there is a willingness to give Labour time once they’re in government to fix the country. Unintentionally, voters seem to buy into Keir’s framing of his mission as “a decade of national renewal”. Of course most won’t have actually heard the phrase, but there is a strong willingness to give the new government a decent honeymoon period. The country, we’re told in focus groups, is so profoundly fractured, that it will only be put back together with a colossal effort.

Secondly, there is also an openness to new ideas, often soft left and progressive, that could help with the national rebuild they yearn for.

Everyone has stories of NHS at breaking point

In a focus group I ran last week in Ashfield, for example, we discussed the subject of the NHS. It never stops being shocking just how poor the consumer experience of state healthcare is in this country today. Every single participant had an appalling story of missed appointments, extraordinary waiting lists (often years) and prescriptions gone missing. 

Participants were open to all sorts of ideas for reform, but they wanted them to be long-term – interestingly they rejected Wes Streeting’s plan to use private healthcare provision to bring down waiting lists, not on the basis of principle, but because it would represent a “quick fix”.

The NHS, they thought, needed to be totally redesigned from the ground up.

 Similarly, participants, unprompted, suggested long-term and progressive ideas for fixing antisocial behaviour. ASB besets the lives of too many communities in this country, and the groups I have run recently are no different.

People care about tackling the causes of crime

When it comes to solutions they are totally on board with the spirit of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” Interestingly, while happy to discuss the need to return to community policing and increasing the presence of uniformed officers on patrol, they will often bring up other, perhaps more progressive approaches to getting to the causes of crime.

 I’ve never met a focus group that doesn’t, for example, want to talk about the importance of youth clubs, and often – often! – they will want to discuss the root cause of why young people are causing trouble on the street outside their house, They will often identify social problems and a lack of support for young families as the root cause. Fixing the problem will, therefore, take time…

The pattern is replicated when you discuss education. Classroom behaviour will often come up in conversation with voters, and will soon be followed by conversations about the need to ensure that schools are ordered, well-run places. Badly behaved children, focus groups will tell you, must be controlled.

Voters will give Labour time to get to work

But they will then, just as quickly, pivot to the reasons for this poor behaviour, and start exploring the need to introduce more vocational “hands on” content into the curriculum. They will also, discuss the need to ensure that those who are badly behaved because of their home lives need additional support from school, teachers and wider society to make sure they don’t fall out of the system altogether. 

What’s the upshot of all this? Well two things spring to mind. Firstly, a Labour government should, with the right focus on communicating that “it is going to take time to fix the country”, be able to rely on voters to give it at least a year or two to put new foundations in place. 

Secondly, those foundations might just have a few progressive ideas at their core.

Read more of our 2024 general election coverage:

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2024 manifesto versus 1997: ‘There are big similarities, but big differences’

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