What does an AI generated picture of a hamster have to do with protecting children from illegal content online? Turns out, a lot. Ofcom’s first fine against a company flouting our online safety laws was against the online forum 4Chan, for not sharing how they assessed risky content online. The fine got bigger this year, reaching £520,000, when the company failed to stop children accessing pornography.

The company’s response? An AI generated picture of a hamster. And an unpaid fine.

Ham-strung and hamsters

Children seeing disturbing content online, people being scammed out of their life savings through fake ads, misinformation eroding trust in the government or skewing elections. What is sometimes termed blandly ‘online safety’ in political debate is in fact deeply consequential to ordinary people’s lives. The PM was right to announce a new Centre for Information Defence to tackle ‘information warfare’ ahead of the next election.

We have a law on the books - the Online Safety Act - which should tackle the worst of these harms. It puts new responsibilities on social media firms to prevent content our laws deem illegal remaining on their platforms. If these companies don’t play ball, we can fine them or even turn off their access to UK users.

But we haven’t been able to enforce our laws. Ofcom has levied 11 fines on companies failing to take measures to protect mainly children online, but only two have been paid. Speaking before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on October 20, Melanie Dawes admitted that we ‘might not be able to recover every single fine on online safety’. Thus far, Ofcom says children are still being exposed to harmful content - in part because of the challenge of regulating this illegal content.

This is because most social media companies aren’t based in the UK, and US-based companies have resisted complying. In fact, the US government has threatened consequences on countries who try to regulate content. For example, the European Union passed the Digital Services Act to tackle illegal and harmful content online, with hefty fines for non-complying companies. The US has threatened tariffs and export curbs, which could raise everyday costs for people, and EU officials have been barred from the country. The EU, however, has stood firm, and the threat has not yet been realised.

Testing the public’s limits

We know action to protect children online is popular. But when it comes to harms to adults, what do people care about? And when people know more about the trade-offs, do they still want the government to act?

To understand which online harms towards adults people were most concerned about, we gave people a list of potential issues with the ability to choose 3 options. People were particularly keen to see the Government tackling scams and fraud online, with tackling false information second. Hate speech, racism and misogynist abuse followed.

We then wanted to test how the public’s support for government action on the social media harm they considered the most concerning changed when presented with the possible threat of adverse consequences, like tariffs or removing access to social media companies. We tested these through a Randomised Control Trial, where segments of our sample were shown different adverse consequences, and a control group was not shown any adverse consequences.

We found that the group that was shown no adverse consequences was extremely supportive of action. For those shown information about adverse consequences, support dropped - but importantly, a majority still wanted the government to act. While support falls further if action pushes up the cost of living, people were still more likely than not to support action.

Interestingly, women were both more likely to want government action, and less likely to tolerate the consequences of tariffs.

Trade-offs in trade relationships

Obviously geopolitical strife is unpredictable and the public’s response equally hard to predict in the age of fragmented media. But it’s heartening to see that the public seem to maintain support for robust government action to protect them online.

ThinkLabour is doing more work on what this action could look like, from bold action to tackle scammers who use social media to lure people into giving up their money, to rules which put trustworthy news centre stage on your timeline.

But we should be in no doubt that the trade-offs (no pun intended) are real. Because these companies aren’t British, we have far less control over how they behave. That means we should support homegrown firms to grow.

It’s been 100 days since Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street. At ThinkLabour, we wanted to find out what voters Labour needs to win over think of him, his government and what may have changed in public opinion since he crossed through the lacquered black door.

So, we brought in a wide range of people, based on our “Who is Labour For?” voter segments and all of whom were Labour considerers, as we did at the start of his premiership.

What we found was a well-liked leader, someone who was universally described as normal and decent, inhabiting a world of politicians that has become distasteful to the public. Ipsos note that public trust in politicians is at its lowest level since they first recorded it in 1983. And yet, Burnham the man inspires quite different feelings altogether.

The ancient satirist Aristophanes said that “under every stone lurks a politician.” This sentiment finds a home in the modern body politic and was especially present in our focus group. One participant said: “[Politicians] talk a different language than normal people.” (Man, 63) Another said: “I don’t trust a politician as far as you can throw them, basically.” (Man, 50)

They think politicians are venal, divided and unstable. “They’re just trying to say what they think people want to hear… they’re just out for themselves, out for the success of their own party rather than actually the interests of the country,” said one respondent (Woman, 40). Another simply said: “For me, all politicians are crooks anyway.” (Man, 50)

Yet, for all the disdain people have over politicians, there is one particular politician this group was warm to: Andy Burnham.

There is one word that repeatedly came up again and again about the Prime Minister: normal. One respondent simply acknowledged: “He is an ordinary bloke…” (Woman, 37) Another remarked that his latest appearance on Gogglebox made him seem normal: “You know, I’ve seen a lot of adverts on the TV of him being on Gogglebox and, you know, arguments whether he should even be on Gogglebox, whether he should be doing his Prime Minister-ing or whatever. But, you know, we want to see a human, you know, and someone who has charisma.” (Woman, 36)

He is also seen as working class. One man said “He comes from an ordinary working class family, as far as I can tell. And he’s managed to get up into politics. And I think people like him because of that.” (Man, 75). Another respondent went on to contrast this with Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer: “It’s different from someone like Keir Starmer... he was a barrister, and I feel like he was just going through the motions, whereas with Andy Burnham, I think things are coming from the heart.” (Woman, 36)

Our own polling also reveals this. ThinkLabour’s polling in June found fewer than half (46%) of those familiar with Andy Burnham identify him as coming from a working-class background, so most still assume he was born into a middle- or upper-class family. But he is well ahead of his predecessor: only one in seven believe Starmer was born into a working-class family (even if his father was, famously, a tool-maker), with nearly half thinking he comes from a middle-class background and a further 35% upper class.

As well as normal, the group also sees Burnham as a political outsider. One woman said: “He’s been an everyday person, hasn’t he? Before he’s come into this, obviously, being the Prime Minister, he’s been an everyday person.” (Woman, 34) Part of this is motivated by Burnham’s association with his local area of the north west of England. That same respondent subsequently said: “You know, he was Mayor for Greater Manchester.” (Woman, 34) This may be why, for those who know a bit more about Burnham’s past, the first thing that often comes up unprompted is his response to the Hillsborough case. One respondent said: “He’s a man of his word. [If he] says he’s gonna do something, he does it... He said that he would help with the Hillsborough case in the courts, and he has done. He’s made some real changes in Manchester.” (Man, 50) This has recurred in focus groups ThinkLabour has run, including our first focus group of this series, where a man (38) raised Hillsborough unprompted, saying it took Burnham from vilified to almost a hero.

All of this strikes to the heart of what Labour is, and this is remarkably consistent between this group and the focus group we held within days of Burnham assuming office.

When asked who they thought Labour stands for, our groups of voters were clear on two particular groups.

The first was working people. Last time, one person noted that Labour “was supposed to be for working people, because that’s what Labour means.” (Woman, 69). This time was no different: “Traditionally, [Labour are] meant to be standing up for, you know, the working person.” (Woman, 37) This sentiment was echoed a few times around the group.

The second was people in need and pensioners. This time one respondent (Woman, 54) said: “[Labour] need to aim [support] not only at those of us on benefits, but at people working as well... there’s a lot of people that I know that are working, that have got families, single, et cetera, and they’re just struggling.” and in the previous group one respondent (Man, 31) talked about taking care of the working class through affordable rent and bills, and elderly people who can’t afford heating.

These twin principles are viewed cynically when respondents talk about the Labour party: “Like every other politician, they talk a great game, but it’s still the people at the bottom suffering.” (Man, 63) Yet the same man said of Burnham: “He tries to stand up for the elderly and people who, you know, are what we class as being at the bottom rung of the economy.” This wasn’t the first time this happened in the group. Asked whether Labour stands up for working people and pensioners, one woman (34) simply said “No.” And yet of Burnham, she said: “I think he’s for the lower [classes].” There is much more warm feeling for the man than his party.

So there is an inherent tension.

Andy Burnham currently has the highest approval of any political leader and his approval ratings have stayed positive right from the start of his premiership. You can see it here:

People are minded to think that politicians do not represent them or their interests. But they are also minded to think that Andy Burnham, at least for now bucks this trend. For them, this means, by association, he is not tainted with the lack of activity people feel (fairly or unfairly) has been demonstrated by their politicians.

Burnham has had a very good honeymoon, not least because of the public’s perception of him as being normal and a political outsider. Yet, with the budget to come and tough times ahead, some people are wary if he can maintain this positive start to his premiership.

“He tries to stand up for the elderly and people,” one voter told us, “but I think he’s just governed by what goes on in Parliament and in Westminster.” (Man, 63) Time will tell.

And with good reason. ThinkLabour’s polling found that while attacks on the Greens and Polanski were potentially damaging, and were credible to those already sceptical of the party, they were much less believable to voters wavering between Labour and the Greens. Many voters have positive views of both parties and see them as being on the same side. As Labour campaigners in Bristol memorably told us, attacking the Greens could be seen as akin to “kicking a puppy”, though whether the Greens appear to be so appealing following their conference vote that “Zionism is racism” remains to be seen.

Rather than relying on attacking the Greens, Labour needs to offer people positive reasons for voting for it, which is exactly what it did in Holborn. As ThinkLabour argued in our paper: Who Is Labour For, different groups of voters have different reasons for voting for Labour. One group of voters – left-liberal values voters of whom there are many in Holborn – need to be appealed to on the basis of their values. The previous administration had tended to treat them transactionally, expecting them to vote Labour simply to stop Reform. Clearly Andy Burnham has started to change perceptions – through actions such as imposing sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements, reopening the debate on the EU, and emphasising public control of the essentials. Polling by Persuasion found that Burnham was perceived as more left wing than Starmer on Israel and Gaza and the economy, and that the top reason given for not voting Green was “not to undermine the Labour government”.

But victory in Holborn does not mean the Green threat has disappeared. Holborn was not demographically ideal territory for the Greens, and that Labour’s victory was even in doubt in a seat where Labour won a majority of over 30,000 in 2017, was extraordinary. The decline in vote share in this seat reflects Labour’s wider performance in major cities. In 2017, Labour won an impressive 59% of the vote in these areas. In May, the Greens outpolled Labour in 36 constituencies across London and other major cities, some of which they could still win on current polling.

New polling of London, commissioned by the London School of Economics, shows that values were not the only thing driving younger voters in particular, away from Labour. One thing we know increasingly shapes how people vote is education. In the 1980s, fewer than one in ten 18-year-olds went to university, so graduates were not a major part of any party’s coalition. Today, around 60% of 25-to-34-year-olds hold a university degree. But, as ThinkLabour highlighted in our report Painting the City Red, many of these graduates feel that the social contract is not working for them.

Many of the jobs graduates train for are concentrated in Britain’s major cities, where housing is most expensive. As a result, a growing number of well-educated graduates, often in good jobs, cannot afford to buy a house and therefore lack the economic security they expected. In some parts of London, such as Battersea, around a quarter of adults are graduate renters. Data from the BES shows that, nationally, compared with graduates who own their homes, graduate renters are less satisfied with their lives, more worried about their economic security and more dissatisfied with democracy.

Labour was initially the main beneficiary of this phenomenon, with renters moving towards the party by more than their political views alone would suggest. Young people, including those on relatively high incomes who might once have voted Conservative, have been alienated both by the party’s shift towards socially conservative values and its relentless insistence on governing in the interests of older generations rather than the young. In a YouGov poll in October 2026, just 4% of 18–24-year-olds said they would vote Conservative.

But Labour is now losing them. In the LSE-commissioned polling, 27% of graduate private renters in London who named a party intended to vote Green, just six points behind Labour at 33%. Privately renting graduates make up a fifth (19%) of current Green support in the city. And in 2024, graduate private renters were nearly twice as likely to support the Greens, compared with graduate owners.

A large part of the Left’s coalition has struggled with the housing crisis: just under half of both Labour and Green voters have had negative housing experiences in the last five years, from living in flat shares longer than they wanted, to sleeping on friends’ sofas. But Green voters seem to have lost hope that things will improve. Half (49%) think London has gotten worse and a third (32%) are considering leaving London in the next five years, compared with 22% of Labour voters.

For Labour, this is extremely risky. The party has become increasingly reliant on graduates just as graduates have become increasingly likely to remain renters. The values of this group pull them towards the Left but their material circumstances give them growing reasons to reject parties that fail to deliver. If the Government cannot show that it is making a difference then the Greens will continue to pose a threat potentially bringing many of Labour’s safest seats into play.

Jenevieve Treadwell is a Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she works on the Leading for London programme, researching the challenges and opportunities facing the capital, including housing, politics, health and local governance. Previously, she was a Senior Researcher at the Westminster think tank Onward, specialising in social policy and spatial analysis, and holds an MSc in International Relations from LSE.

Industrial strategy is hard. Changing the structure of the economy requires years of favouring some sectors over others with regulation, subsidies and procurement. It’s about building out sophisticated supply chains of services and manufacturing, often co-located in a specific region. It’s technical and complex. Policy needs to be driven by sophisticated economic analysis, not political bumper-stickers.

But voters do not swoon at “geographically-specific high value supply chains.”

So why does “re-industrialisation” work as a political shorthand?

Voters certainly love the term. “Reindustrialisation” has a net approval of 61 percentage points, rising to 67pp amongst Labour’s 2024 vote.

Sovereignty is at the heart of this. Asked for their top two reasons to support reindustrialisation, 43% said reducing our dependence on the US and China and 42% said creating British companies. That was more than creating new jobs (36%), reducing regional inequalities (26%) and even funding public services (16%).

There is scope for Labour to define reindustrialisation beyond just manufacturing. Earlier this year, we at ThinkLabour did work on how Labour can retain post-industrial towns like Burnley from Reform. We pitched several economic models to residents, including a “manufacturing renaissance” in which industry came back versus a “connected town” in which they were better connected to services-heavy cities like Manchester. People younger than 45 years old preferred the connected town model. Having never experienced the manufacturing heydays, they saw that as much more realistic.

A note of caution - voters are still on the fence about actually spending money on reindustrialisation. Ambitious industrial policy is not cheap. It requires subsidies, tax breaks and government purchases…the bill for which eventually falls on households.

When showed a mocked-up newspaper front page with the headline “Government raises taxes to keep loss-making steelworks open,” net approval was -11pp for all voters. Among Labour voters, though, it was zero.

In a separate experiment, we asked voters to choose between pairs of plans for government support for industry. We found that willingness to make sacrifices for industrial policy was even lower for “new” industries such as battery manufacturing and data centres. Support also fell sharply when the company included in the plan was foreign rather than British - with plans supporting foreign firms chosen just over a third of the time, compared with 60% for those supporting British firms.

So what does all this mean for how Labour talks about its industrial strategy? Rather than root it in growth, manufacturing or jobs, we would explain “re-industrialisation” as creating the great British companies of the future. That speaks to voters’ desire to rebuild our national strength. Focusing on the companies of the future also stops journalists using every closure of a manufacturing plant - part of the ebb and flow of a dynamic economy - as evidence that our industrial strategy has failed.

We can credibly claim to be building a new wave of British companies. The UK has one of the strongest start-up ecosystems in the world. We’re seeing companies emerge across lots of sectors including AI, space technology, semi-conductors, life sciences and financial services. While many start life in the South East, they will spread out as they build out manufacturing and office space.

But Labour needs to help voters connect the dots between what they want - more British companies - with the steps to get there: a corporate tax system that is competitive enough to keep companies and their founders here, regulation that reduces the cost for them to experiment and stronger public finances to get interest rates down and get them investing.

The Budget on October 28th will be tough. But, in “reindustrialisation”, the Prime Minister has found a term to help motivate some hard economic choices for voters.

If it helps unlock the politics of better economic policy, even the economists should learn to love “reindustrialisation.”

In May, ThinkLabour published research into Muslim voters, using both survey data and qualitative research. We found that only 56% of Muslims had voted for Labour in the 2024 General Election, and that this had fallen even further to 44% by early 2026. The report highlighted the serious threat the Greens now pose to Labour in constituencies with large Muslim populations, particularly because they have broader cross-community appeal than the Gaza Independents who took seats from Labour in 2024.

The Holborn and St Pancras by-election will be the first test of whether Labour under the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, can hold a seat with a significant Muslim population. Last week, we spoke to a focus group of Muslim voters from across the country who had previously backed Labour but had either most recently voted Green or currently intended to do so. We found cautious optimism about the new Prime Minister and an openness to being won back, but also a clear need to see evidence of delivery.

The focus group reflected our previous research with participants describing a long-standing connection between the Muslim community and Labour: “The Labour Party has always been the party that my own family or even my own community… we all felt, you know, that we were part of it.” More recently, however, they felt that Labour had moved away from its “core values” and would need to return to them to win back their support. These values were understood primarily as standing up for ordinary people: “if Labour can go back to that core Labour area of looking at the working people and helping the working people, that to me will change things”.

There was optimism among some in the group that Andy Burnham would bring this change. “One of the things for me is I really believe in Andy. I feel like a lot of his messages feel super centred around everybody that kind of feels like they’re left behind in the rat race.” Muslims are disproportionately likely to be economically insecure with 40% of Muslims living in deprived neighbourhoods. Public services therefore play a particularly important role in their lives, especially given the community’s younger age profile and the importance of education and employment opportunities. Given this, Burnham’s focus on public services and devolving greater power to local councils was viewed positively by some.

But others in the group were more pessimistic about the new Prime Minister. “I’ve heard a couple of people talk about Andy Burnham, but to be honest with you, I don’t think he’s going to be any different from the rest.” In common with other voters, Muslims can be cynical about politicians, and inclined to regard politics and politicians as inherently corrupt. After more than a decade of perceived failure by mainstream politicians, they want to see tangible change before they can begin to trust them again.

Understandably, the fate of Palestine and the Palestinian people was important to the group. They acknowledged that Labour had started to move in the right direction under the previous administration, noting the recognition of the state of Palestine in particular. But clearly, part of the attraction to the Greens was that they were seen to have been more vocal on this issue than Labour. And they still wanted Labour to do more, for example to call Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide. One participation felt that Burnham was “going in the right direction, but I feel like he’s still not there, not for me personally”.

Intriguingly, none of the group said they had seen Andy Burnham’s apology for Labour’s handling of the Gaza conflict. The reason that some of the group felt more positive towards him, instead reflected his focus on standing up for ordinary people who were struggling.

Again this echoes our earlier work, which found that the cost of living was regarded as by far the most important issue to Muslim voters. Only 21% thought Gaza was one of the key issues determining their vote, compared to 56% who thought the same about cost of living. “The rents are so high, cost of living is so high” lamented one of our participants. This does not mean that Gaza and Palestine are unimportant. Muslims who did prioritise Gaza were more likely to have moved away from Labour, and tended to be younger and more likely to use social media. Reaching this audience with a message about Labour’s decisive change of direction will be important.

On other issues with a particular resonance for Muslim voters, the balaclava-clad gangs blocking roads and threatening asylum seekers were mentioned more than once. Participants talked about being scared and wanted the government to do more to deal with racism and threats from the far-right. “Nobody feels safe, even if it’s in the park, if it’s in school, if it’s outside in the community. I think the government needs to take a stance now where they need to tackle this head on rather than just wait and see what’s going on and trying to minimise any sort of public order.”

These focus groups and our previous research both give Labour grounds for hope. Muslims remain significantly more likely to support the party than the wider electorate, and our qualitative research found few who were completely closed to voting Labour again. Some Muslim voters in our groups are impressed by the new Prime Minister and believe he offers a return to Labour’s core values. This may well be enough for Labour to hold Holborn and St Pancras.

But what is also clear is that other Muslim voters who have moved away from Labour are demanding proof points from the party before they return. This will be particularly true of economically insecure voters who want their material circumstances to improve. “They have to perform. They have to show something” is their message to the new administration.

A thank you to our Research Manager, Calum Weir, for his work on the focus groups and helping bring this research together.

I have moderated dozens of focus groups for ThinkLabour since the last election. They were mostly people who had voted Conservative in 2019 and Labour in 2024 – the switchers who had contributed so much to Keir Starmer’s landslide. For many it was the first time that they’d ever voted Labour.

I’d ask when and why they switched – when did the Tories lose them, when did Labour secure them and what, looking back on it, would fourteen years of Tory government be most remembered for?

The answers took me back to 1997, the previous time the Conservatives were expelled from government in a landslide. After that defeat, in his first speech to the party conference as leader, William Hague spoke truth to the Tory faithful. He told them why they had lost: Tory MPs had become “divided, arrogant, selfish and conceited and the party as a whole was out of touch and irrelevant”. These were exactly the kind of words that voters used in focus groups before that election. There was, no doubt, much about the substance of that period of government which many voters objected to. But when they came to explain their utter rejection of the Tories, the words they mostly used were not about their policies, but about their character. Hague’s diagnosis was correct, but the party didn’t want to accept it – and lost almost as heavily again in 2001.

So it was when the voters in ThinkLabour focus groups looked back on the party they had all voted for in 2019. Overwhelmingly what they spoke about was Covid; not the pandemic itself but what that period revealed about the Conservative Party’s character. Partying in Downing Street - in brazen contempt for the rules they had imposed - while countless families faithfully followed those rules at unforgettable emotional cost; fast-tracking of friends to lucrative PPE contracts; the elevation of their self-interest above the interest of the country; the pantomime chaos, cycling through leaders; the lies and the dogged defence of lies.

Even Liz Truss and her disastrous budget is barely mentioned at all. Most have forgotten that her Premiership even happened. It is not why the Tories suffered by far its heaviest ever defeat in 2024. That was because the party had come to be seen, once again, as divided, arrogant, selfish, conceited, out-of-touch and irrelevant – and also as dishonest, self-serving and entirely lacking in integrity.

The last year has seen a marked and unarguably impressive improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s personal poll numbers. This is reflected in focus group discussions. For the first several months of her leadership, few could even name her, and no-one could recall anything she’d said. That has changed over the last year. Spontaneous positive comments about Badenoch are now common in focus groups. Polling tells the same story.

Many people think she comes across as strong (a significant asset for any leader), intelligent and determined. Many relish the combative directness with which she takes on the government. But at that point there’s usually a pause in the focus group discussion and then someone will say “but the Tories are finished”. Only 20% of voters think the party is ready to return to government; three times as many think they are not.

It is important also to keep the improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s standing in proportion. Her approval rating has increased very significantly over the last year, but from a disastrously low base and barely one voter in four thinks that she looks like a Prime Minister in waiting.

Because the Conservatives haven’t properly understood the reasons why they were expunged with such relish and relief in 2024, the party’s brand has barely thawed, still defined by its misconduct in office.

Successfully rehabilitating the brand of a political party requires absolute clarity not only about why it was rejected, but also about what it stands for. Polls find that barely a quarter of voters say they are clear what the party stands for – and in focus groups it is often observed that the Tories don’t seem to know either.

In as much as any idea or belief or policy is strongly associated with the Conservatives it is Brexit. Getting Brexit done was their last successful electoral rallying cry; they own it. That places the Tories on the side of the ever-shrinking minority in Britain who think that leaving the EU was a good idea. Nearly two thirds of voters think Brexit has been a failure and nearly 90% of those voters think the Conservative Party is responsible for that failure. Kemi Badenoch’s strategy of turning right rather than leaning to the centre, makes it impossible for the Tories to evolve to a more mature, honest position on Brexit.

Total defence of Brexit also undermines Conservative efforts to be seen again as the party of business. But if they’re not the party of business, what are they? As focus groups correctly intuit, the Tories don’t agree about that. Some say they are the party of low taxation; others define themselves around an absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty. Neither offers a credible route to growth and prosperity.

They sometimes talk the language of fiscal conservatism, but promises of more spending and lower taxes while ducking difficult trade-offs reveal that too as mere posturing. Lately Kemi Badenoch seems to have decided that the answer to ‘what do the Conservatives stand for now?’ is simply whatever she says – a hubristic, Trumpian approach to leadership and a recipe for a narrow, unrooted party.

Focus groups do, as her defenders assert, respond positively to Badenoch’s performances in Parliament – but only up to a point. When I showed groups clips from her budget response, most were impressed by the strength of her attack. But the longer she went on, the more uncomfortable they became. Calling Rachel Reeves “a woman wallowing in self-pity… whining” was too much, too personal for most; many winced, especially the women. This was not an isolated example; it is a character trait.

With a tarnished brand and no clear unifying purpose, the obvious risk to the Conservatives is that they come to be defined once again as “the nasty party” - which is how many voters summed up the Tory government’s character flaws that William Hague listed in 1997.

The danger signs are already there. YouGov recently asked voters to choose, unprompted, the words that sum up their view of Kemi Badenoch. Overall, far more picked negative words than positive ones. One of the most common themes was, as YouGov put it, “a perceived unpleasantness”; recurring words chosen by voters to describe the Tory leader are, “mean”, “rude” - and “nasty”.

Kemi Badenoch is right that much in the UK needs reform, but how many people will trust a nasty party to do it?


Lord Andrew Cooper is a leading political pollster and strategist, and a Partner in Research & Insights at FGS Global. He co-founded the polling and research consultancy Populus and previously served as Director of Strategy to Prime Minister David Cameron in Downing Street. He has advised political leaders, campaigns and major businesses for more than two decades and is now a politically unaffiliated member of the House of Lords.

We argued that Labour needed to win across a broad coalition consisting of three groups: left-liberal voters who are attracted to Labour because they identify with Labour’s values; economically insecure voters who look to Labour to improve their material circumstances; and transactional voters who support whichever party they believe will deliver on their priorities.

Under Keir Starmer, Labour struggled to hold these groups together. While his administration pursued progressive economic policies it failed to clearly explain the values behind them. It also often deployed rhetoric appealing to voters on the right that ended up alienating progressives, while coming across as inauthentic and unconvincing to its intended audience.

By the end of Starmer’s premiership, Labour was performing substantially worse than it had in the 2024 general election across all three voter segments. The heaviest losses were among the “economically insecure” and were large enough to reverse the traditional relationship between low income among working age people and support for Labour. The higher someone’s income, the more likely they were to vote Labour.

Since Andy Burnham has become Prime Minister, Labour’s fortunes have turned. ThinkLabour’s polling has the party’s vote share rising by seven percentage points between June and September with the Greens falling by three points, the Liberal Democrats falling by one point and a two point decline in those who say they don’t know who to vote for. Labour’s biggest gains have come from the “economically insecure” and left-liberal voters, with the party’s support among both groups 13 points higher than it was in June at headline level.

In Who Is Labour For?, we argued that Labour needed to make a stronger appeal to left-liberal voters’ values while doing more to highlight its offer to the economically insecure. The Burnham Government has taken this to heart, and the latest polling is clear evidence that this approach is working.

The cost of living measures implemented by Andy Burnham in his first week as Prime Minister included capping bus fares and cutting VAT on electricity bills. These were very specifically designed to give “breathing space” to the economically insecure, voters that have been disproportionately likely to switch to the Greens in the last two years. As a result, Green support has fallen most sharply among this group.

The Government has also been keen to pitch to wider progressive voters on values. Our recent report on Labour’s challenge from the Greens in cities, Painting the City Red, that for many left-liberal voters issues such as Gaza/Palestine act as an indicator of Labour’s wider values. The announcement of sanctions on illegal settlements in the West Bank, which the Prime Minister linked to Labour’s commitment to standing up for the underdog, will be exactly what many of these voters want to hear.

The recent increase in support for Labour is also reflected in the demographics. Since June, support has risen most sharply among the youngest voters, increasing by 14 points, compared with just five points among those aged 65 and over. Looking at housing tenure, the largest increase has been among private renters (who are most likely to be economically insecure), which was also up 14 points. On the other hand, support among outright homeowners has barely changed.

Labour has made substantial gains among those with the highest levels of education (up nine points), voters who are more likely to hold left-liberal views, but also among those with the lowest levels of education (up seven points) who are more likely to be economically insecure.

Our polling also puts to rest any worries that Andy Burnham’s appeal might be confined to his home turf in the north west of England. Labour support has risen by 11 points in London, slightly higher than the ten point increase in Burnham’s home region, with the concentration of young, left-liberal voters in London, helping to explain this rise in support. This bodes well for the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election in North London where Labour hopes to thwart Green leader Zack Polanski’s bid to enter Parliament.

There is also good news in Scotland where Labour support has increased by nine points. The picture is, however, weaker in the South East where the party has gained only five points, and is particularly concerning in Wales, where Labour has recorded no increase at all.

This look back at ThinkLabour’s segments is proof that Andy Burnham has made a strong start in rebuilding Labour’s relationship with values-driven voters, and that the early cost-of-living measures have sent an important signal to the economically insecure. But Labour’s overall vote share remains around eight points below its 2024 level, and its recovery among the third key group of “transactional voters” has been a little more limited, with support up eight points since June.

These voters are mainly worried about the cost of living, immigration and public services. Regular and irregular migration have both fallen sharply, and parts of the public are beginning to recognise this. But the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to put further pressure on energy bills and the cost of government borrowing.

In any case, real terms cuts to spending outside health and defence were already planned before the end of the Parliament. Transactional voters, who do not have much attachment to any party, will judge the government harshly if inflation rises or public services fail to improve. And economically insecure voters are likely to lose faith if their living standards do not materially get better.

If Burnham is to continue to stand for a coalition of all three segments, his government will need to make some painful choices, whether now or later. Those choices must be deliberate and supported by a clear plan to explain the rationale behind them to the public, something the previous administration often failed to do. Political strategy has taken Labour this far. Holding its coalition together in the future will depend on good policy and the confidence to defend it.

This is great news. But when put like that it seems like a no-brainer that the government would do away with “consultation culture”. Yet wry Whitehall watchers know this is hardly the first time a government has railed against it—to little effect. Starmer pledged to bin off such process steps, before consulting on everything from national security to whether a chicken can legally be caught by one leg or two (the answer: only two, never one). In August, Politico relished pointing out that this new government is already consulting on whether councils can issue cautions for flytippers..

So why is it so easy to go awry?

When governments dig into consultation culture, what they find is that most consultation requirements sound more reasonable than on the proper care of chickens or cats.

Take the 2022 requirement that mandates NHS decision-makers have due regard to reducing inequalities in accessing health-care when changing NHS services (often in practice requiring a consultation to demonstrate). What could be more reasonable; is a Labour government really in the business of unpicking rules that make NHS decision-makers care about reducing inequalities? Government gulps, decides to leave that one alone, and consultation culture lives another day.

But that is because they mis-diagnose the problem.

Compare legal requirements on NHS decision-making today for a major service change, like moving a hospital, today versus the year 2000:

Thank you for scrolling so far.

Today NHS decision-makers have a great deal more consultees (no longer just the local health council but now the public, the local authority and the secretary of state), and more things they are bound to consider (inequalities of access, outcomes, and inequality more broadly), methods by which it must consider them.

While each step sounded reasonable when taken on its own, the combination is absurd; especially when you consider that by almost every metric, the NHS did a better job in 2000. We spent less (both in per person terms and in terms of OECD ranking), voters liked it more, and we largely got better outcomes.

Therefore, the government needs to take on these requirements in one go. Removing any individually will enliven defenders, and it won’t make the system better. But taking them on together as part of wider, strategic thinking about how each system should best work allows the government to convincingly argue that its concern is streamlining the whole system rather than on the merits of any individual rule. That may mean one big bill. But for areas, like the NHS, where reorganisation is already happening, this is a good opportunity to use the existing reorganisation bills to re-shape that system into what will work best for what we all want: delivering high quality health care across the country. Local feedback could still happen as an important part of that process, but in the more effective ways devolution offers, such as via mayors or their representatives on integrated care boards.

In some ways it will make the politics easier, not harder. At the moment because the Health Secretary has the power to call in any local change, they receive tremendous pressure from local MPs to intervene if a change shuts a local clinic or moves it to a neighbouring constituency no matter whether that change makes the health system better overall.

Nevertheless, in general the politics of ripping up consultation culture is hard–that’s why these rules have accumulated. In the same week as the letter to Ministers, the Minister for Women and Equalities announced her intention to introduce a new ‘legal requirement for public bodies to consider how to improve the lives of lower-income families as part of decisions’. That again sounds appealing, but would mean a good deal more consultation, not less.

And in the round, as Lame Leviathan argues, these superfluous process steps sap public faith in politics rather than augment it. Democratically-elected governments have as strong incentives as we know how to give them to make good decisions which their voters will like. Additionally-required process, therefore, stinks of pointless bureaucracy.

By law since 2005, any body that wishes to close a train station must consult the public first. Again, it sounds reasonable; the Government ought to listen to locals before they make potentially very impactful service changes.

In practice since 2010 (the earliest year for good data), an English station has never been consulted on for closure which didn’t then go onto close. Nine stations were consulted on; all nine were closed.

This was not because respondents to the consultation wanted closure—the consultation on the closure of Woodlands Road station, for example, received 51 responses, 42 of which were opposed–but because the decision had already been made.

You can interpret this as the cynical way the state runs ramrod over public feeling. I think the more generous and more accurate interpretation is that most officials and politicians don’t want to be in the business of shutting things down, so if a closure is proposed there’s likely a very good reason it has to go ahead regardless of local feeling (a number of these stations were being closed as a new station was planned nearby).

Regardless, the current model is clearly not working. For one, now providers often ‘suspend services’ rather than close stations since that gets them out of having to do the paperwork of a consultation.

More importantly, voters see through these faux-consultations. It is alienating. Government is no longer a group of individuals they’ve elected to make decisions (rightly or wrongly) to the public, but an opaque bureaucracy. In the words of Susey, who responded to the Cottingley consultation, “What is the point its already been passed nothing we say will make any difference?”. An official assured her that the decision really was still under consideration. Cottingley station’s closure was ratified not long after.

Let’s all meet up in the year 2000?

Before 2005, the model was less duplicitous. The law required that the Government advertise any planned railway closure and allow users to object.

Important public feedback could still get through: a huge public backlash ensued to the proposed closure of the Settle-Carlisle line in 1986, which ended up saving the line. But it lacks the dishonesty and cost of the current system. The past is not always a model, but sometimes it might just be.

On Wednesday Amelia will be joined by Jack Straw, Jonathan Jones and Sam Freedman to discuss the report ‘The Lame Leviathan’, public law and how to make the state work better. There are still some places to join, so if you are interested click the link below and we will see you there!

Wednesday 23 September, 11am–1pm, Central Westminster. Sign up here.

The money to make those purchases came from provincial banks, life insurance companies and friendly societies. Back in those days, English local authorities raised 86 per cent of their financing from private investors. Central government lent the rest, mostly to the smallest authorities.

By 1899, English municipal debt was equal to half the size of the national debt. London’s Metropolitan Board of Works borrowed at only marginally more expensive rates than the Treasury.

This is the level of devolution that Labour can aspire to.

The UK’s “financial” state is extremely centralised

The situation today is very different. The Treasury issues 99% of UK government debt that is borrowed from the private sector. The comparable figure is roughly 78% in France and 55% in Germany. The centralisation of this debt issuance has two big consequences.

Chart 1. Government debt held by the private sector, broken down by the issuer

First, mayors can’t just get on and build

A mayor, let’s call her Tracy, wants to build a tram. Typically, she asks HM Treasury for most of the money. At face value, that suits her well. It’s either free money in the form of a grant, or a loan with a cheap interest rate.

Long-term, though, everyone loses.

Grant funding means that HMT will micro-manage the tram project to protect taxpayer money. That means lots of slow-moving bureaucracy and changes that push up costs. It can even mean cancellations at short notice when the political sands in Westminster shift. Every wonk knows the travails of the Leeds tram: since the plan for a “supertram” in 1993, most subsequent governments have promised, redesigned and then cancelled the project.

HMT does much less micro-managing when it makes a loan. The problem here is the opposite one - there is too little proper due diligence of local government plans. When Woking council borrowed £1.8bn to buy a shopping centre, at no point did it need to explain the business case to a hard-nosed private investor. HMT didn’t question the plans because it knows it has first dibs on the council’s tax revenues if the investment went sour. HMT now insists councils can only borrow to deliver local services and regeneration, rather than make commercial bets. But given these historic debts and the rising cost of delivering local finances, when someone like Tracy takes power she will need to work with local authorities weighed down by bad finances.

Second, everyone pays higher interest rates

Westminster itself suffers from this arrangement. Nearly every organ of the British state - be it local authorities or the National Wealth Fund - borrows from central government. To fund those loans, HMT needs to sell a lot of gilts. Given the size of the national debt and the fact we already borrow a lot from foreigners, we have become very dependent on flighty hedge funds to finance the government. Our borrowing costs are now the highest in the G7.

A municipal bond market would not change how much the state borrows. But, as in Joseph Chamberlain’s day, it would broaden the types of investors who buy our debt. When building her tram, Tracy can tap infrastructure, green and other investor types who would not typically buy gilts. At the very least, a diversified funding base makes for a more resilient one. If HMT issued the same share of overall UK government debt as the central government does in France (i.e. the blue bars in Chart 1), there would be £600b fewer gilts in the market. That would probably lower gilt yields.

It’s true that Tracy would borrow from the market at a somewhat higher rate than if she just borrowed from the government. Or she might not. When Transport for London returned to the bond market in 2025 it raised £350m at only 0.62 percentage points over gilts - cheaper than the rate the Treasury currently lends to councils. But for smaller and more occasional borrowers, there would be a bigger premium.

Getting back to Birmingham

For a big global investor to finance Tracy’s tram, three conditions need to be in place:

First, there are tax and spend powers to pay them back. The investor needs to know that, if the tram turns out to be a bad investment, Tracy has other ways to pay them back. Labour is giving mayors more control over income tax, business rates and other income streams. But the councils that sit under Tracy still have little control over their financial position. They must hold a referendum to raise council tax by more than 5%. They have no control over business rates. And up to 70% of their spending can be mandated for social care because of statutory duties. Unless we change those, there is little space to repay investors if things go wrong. That means investors will be reluctant to lend.

Second, combined authorities can jointly issue debt. Tracy and her local authorities are small. Too small for lots of big investors to take notice. That means their borrowing costs will be high. Other countries like Sweden or France solve this problem by getting sub-national government to borrow jointly or share credit risk. Kommuninvest in Sweden has 298 members, for example.

We set up a UK Municipal Bonds Agency in 2014 to copy this. In the next 6 years, it only issued two bonds, both times for Lancashire. It’s now closed. Councils refused to work together because they lack the tax/spend levers that make them creditworthy and indeed many are fiscal basket cases. So the stronger councils would much rather borrow straight from the Treasury: it’s cheaper and safer. To encourage this cooperation, it needs to be harder to borrow from HMT.

There is a bankruptcy process if things go wrong. Woking, Thurrock, Croydon and Birmingham each hit the wall, and each was handled by ad hoc “Exceptional Financial Support” rather than a defined process. Investors will price the uncertainty into higher borrowing costs.

There is a prize for Tracy at the end of this process: she can borrow without the constraints of the fiscal rules. With the conditions above in place, she is neither a liability to national taxpayers nor the gilt market so national government needn’t worry about her finances.

Re-designing the “financial state”

Labour’s political project requires a huge amount of public investment to rebuild our infrastructure and revive our deprived communities. But public debt is around 100% of GDP, gilt yields are at 30 year highs, while we rely heavily on flighty foreigners to trade them.

To manage this tension, we need to go further to strengthen our public finances and grow the economy.

But we also need a bigger project to re-engineer the financial side of the British state. Reviving the municipal bond market is one part of it. For the same reasons, other state institutions like the National Wealth Fund and Development Corporations should issue their own debt. And we can be more deliberate about increasing the structural demand for public debt. Countries like Japan and Italy have a bag of tricks to boost demand for their large public debts, ranging from the design of saving vehicles, inheritance tax and financial regulation. We should learn from them in order to finance much higher levels of public investment.

When I started at the Bar in 1972 there were around 2,500 practicing barristers in England and Wales. By 2024/25, according to the Bar Council, their number had reached 17,864. That’s a seven-fold increase. Solicitors have shown a similar-sized increase – up from around 20,000 in the early 1970s, to 176,440 in April 2026.

In contrast the overall population of England and Wales over the same period has been about 28%. GDP (for the UK) has risen by between 130% to 150% in real terms in these five-plus decades.

Whatever comparator is taken, the growth in the numbers of practicing lawyers over the past half century is extraordinary.

There will be many explanations for this. One will be the commendable growth of England and Wales (particularly of London) as an international legal centre, and the increasing use of English law as the law of choice for many international transactions.

Another will be the increasing procedural complexity of the criminal law, as successive reforms have sought to make the system fairer for both defendants and prosecution.

But without question, a third factor will be the astonishing explosion in the practice of public law, a subject which scarcely existed fifty years ago, but which now takes in myriad changes in regulation from employment and equalities law, asylum and immigration law, human rights, and all kinds of applications for judicial review in which the courts are invited to intervene to stop or delay a wide variety of decisions of public authorities, at national and local level, on grounds of alleged procedural irregularity or unfairness. There’s been a parallel growth in the retrospective examination of decisions (or their inadequacy) through the far greater use of public inquiries and of inquests.

As Amelia Wood brings out in the brilliant paper she has authored, each of the changes which has led to today’s situation has been justified in its own right, but which taken together has undermined effective and timely decision making in one area of public administration after another, from immigration and asylum decisions, through to major infrastructure projects.

The result faces us with a paradox. Measures passed individually by Parliament to give people more rights have coincided with a marked reduction in the confidence which the public has in our democratic institutions, and I suggest, may well have contributed to that reduction. The costs of HS2, for example, have risen not because our engineers are any less proficient than those of other advanced nations, but because before they can even put a spade in the ground, millions are spent on ensuring that there has been full procedural compliance; or well-meaning but profoundly disruptive special interest agencies like Natural England provide for regulations which end up with £100 million spent on a bat tunnel. The British public were never asked whether this was what they wanted. And a £100 million of their taxpayers’ money spent on a bat tunnel is £100 million which could not be used on far more important projects, from the NHS to our defence.

This over-obsession with procedure is now actively undermining our democracy. Little wonder that public frustration with our system of government is as high as it is.

This paper suggests a way through. Not by tearing up the necessary improvements in rights which have been made in the past half century, but by paring back on those which are not necessary, and by shifting political decision making away from the courts, to where it must and should belong, our democratic assemblies, local councils and Parliament.

This summer, Labour members did not get the opportunity to express their views in a leadership contest as Andy Burnham was the only candidate nominated. Some would argue that was no bad thing, given that party members have often been accused of pulling leadership candidates towards positions that later prove electorally difficult.

Yet our latest ThinkLabour polling shows that the current Labour membership is strikingly pragmatic on many of the most politically contentious issues the new government will face.

That should not perhaps come as a complete surprise. The membership itself has changed substantially over the past six years. In the 2020 leadership election, Keir Starmer secured 56% of members’ first preferences. Today, supporters of Starmer make up 70% of those members who voted in the 2020 election, while those who backed Rebecca Long-Bailey have fallen from 28% of members to just 12%. Many of the party’s most left-wing members have clearly left in the intervening years.

So when we asked party members about their attitude towards defence spending we found that a large majority supported increasing defence spending. At a time of heightened international instability, and against the immediate background of the crisis in Iran, more than two-thirds (68%) think Britain should spend more on defence, while only 11% think spending should be reduced. Among those who support higher defence spending, 54% think the money should come from higher taxes rather than additional borrowing or cutting spending on other things. And when we probed into what “other things” those members who said they preferred cuts were actually prepared to spend less on, 56% selected welfare and benefits, while 32% favoured further reductions to overseas aid. Just 8% wanted cuts to public services outside the NHS.

Perhaps the most surprising finding concerns welfare. Contrary to the public image, Labour members are actually more likely than the public as a whole to think welfare spending is too high. In our polling, 51% of members with an opinion, thought the government spends too much on welfare, while only 21% thought it spends too little. By comparison, polling of the wider public earlier this year found that 42% thought the government spends too much on welfare benefits (excluding “don’t knows”). Perhaps this unusually pragmatic membership recognises the political danger that unreformed welfare spending poses to the Labour government, and is therefore more willing to contemplate difficult choices.

However, when we asked those who supported cuts about which individual benefits they would spend less on, more members opposed than supported every proposal we tested. They were especially opposed to cuts to Child Benefit, with 60% opposed and only 25% in favour. But the narrowest gap between opposition and support was on the State Pension. While 43% opposed pension cuts, an unusually high 41% said they would support them.

This preference was confirmed when we asked which area of the welfare system should be protected most from cuts. Labour members tended to prioritise disability and ill-health benefits, with 26% choosing these benefits, compared with only 18% who selected the State Pension. It is striking that protecting the pension was a relatively low priority, given that polling consistently finds large majorities of the general public want the State Pension triple lock protected. It is also surprising given the age profile of the membership itself. In our sample, almost two-thirds (63%) were aged over 55. Our findings do, however, mean that to win the approval of members, any cuts to disability and ill-health benefits will have to be seen as fair.

Finally we asked the membership about social care, which Andy Burnham has made clear that he personally is committed to reforming. Two thirds (67%) believe the current funding system is unfair, while 73% think government should spend more on social care even if doing so costs more.

Asked how that additional spending should be funded, among those who said we should spend more on social care, opinion was divided. A plurality (43%) favoured higher taxes on higher earners alone, but almost as many (39%) were prepared to support increases in general taxation. Very few wanted social care funded through cuts elsewhere in government, higher council tax or increased taxes on business.

Andy Burnham will face a series of extraordinarily difficult and painful choices as Prime Minister. Defence, welfare and social care all involve significant fiscal trade-offs. The encouraging message from our polling is that Labour’s current membership appears much more pragmatic than it is often given credit for. With Reform UK likely to be Labour’s principal opponent at the next general election, members appear determined to prioritise the party’s electoral survival above all else.

This polling and some other information on what’s happening at ThinkLabour was covered in the Guardian last week, I would recommend giving it a read!

“Someone needs to sort out this test situation. I know it’s not national priority but it’s literally almost five years since Covid and there’s still this insane backlog. I was talking to someone the other day and they have to go on every Monday at 6am - it’s like Glastonbury tickets - to try and get a cancellation.”

–Josh Widdicombe on Parenting Hell, 28th July

The situation has become a running gag on Widdicombe’s podcast, which charts in the top ten in Britain. Rose, his partner, has been learning to drive for three years and counting, waiting for a test. She is far from alone.

Every Monday morning thousands join a digital queue for the chance of securing a test slot in six months’ time, in a test system that has been broken since the pandemic. Much like for Glastonbury tickets, a resale market sprung up, offering tests for up to £500. The backlog affects roughly a million people a year.

That it is so hard to get a driving license, is, unsurprisingly, bad not just for the families of successful comics. It’s especially hard on young people, for whom lack of a license hampers access to work and education (ever heard of the NEETs crisis?). Fully a third of learners say they are learning to drive for a current or future job, reports the DVSA, the arms length body responsible for driving tests.

Both how the backlog happened and how to fix it are questions of basic arithmetic. The Covid lockdowns led to a backlog of wannabe test-takers. To fix this build-up in demand for tests, you need to supply more tests, presumably by hiring more driving test examiners. About 400 or so are required, the DVSA reckons.

Hiring 400 people to sit in the passenger seat as a trembling 17-year old attempts to parallel park shouldn’t, on the scale of the challenges the government faces, be so hard. Yet, six years on from the pandemic, it has so far eluded us. Over 19 recruitment campaigns since the pandemic, the DVSA managed to hire just 83 more driving examiners by December 2025, once you account for those who left the profession, according to the National Audit Office.

Why?

It comes down, bizarrely, to the politics of the cost of living.

You see, the price of a driving test hasn’t risen since 2009. Set in law at £62 by statutory instrument, it is a political choice to raise it. The Conservatives never did. Keeping the price fixed, presumably, was a tactic to make the DVSA more efficient and to avoid unpopular headlines (because no one likes higher prices).

That didn’t matter so much before the pandemic. Inflation was quite low during the 2010s so the DVSA could just about manage. But when the pandemic brought about both a backlog and an inflation spike, the DVSA didn’t have the resources to cope. From its driving test operations earning taxpayers millions annually, the DVSA now loses £44m on them: £24 per test. It couldn’t (and cannot) afford to pay examiners an attractive enough wage to hire more.

The most obvious way to fix the system would be to whack the price of a driving test up by 30 quid and hire some more examiners. But in a cost of living crisis, the political calculation of four successive post-pandemic governments is that such a price rise is impossible. The decree comes down from No10: We are a cost of living government now, you must not raise any prices your department is responsible for.

But keeping prices artificially low at the expense of a working test system costs learners far more – it keeps them out of work, it forces them to pay a scalper or for another six months of driving lessons. Nor is it based on evidence it’s what voters actually want.

Here at ThinkLabour, we trust the public, so we decided to put it to a poll. We asked people whether they would be willing to pay more money (£85 or £95) to wait 7 weeks to take a driving test or to pay the current test cost to wait 22 weeks. The results were clear: most people said they would rather pay more than wait.

We may still worry that it’s politically difficult to raise prices while the system is still broken: even if you upped prices tomorrow, bringing waiting times down wouldn’t happen overnight (though it could happen quite quickly).

But our polling also suggests there are also ways to get creative.

28% of people said they would be prepared to pay £200 if it meant they only had to wait three weeks for a driving test. That’s not a majority by any means, so you’d struggle to raise the general price of a test that much, but it does suggest there’s a market for an express test option, by which people have the option of paying more than the standard price for a faster service.

Such a system already thrives elsewhere in government. The Passport Office runs one, whereby people can choose to pay more to get their passport sooner. If the DVSA did, the additional revenues could fund the additional examiners needed to get the system back on its feet–for more detail I’ve written a report separately for the campaign group End The Backlog setting out how here.

And it matches learners’ revealed preferences. Test resellers emerged precisely because a big portion of learners were prepared to pay £200, £300 or even £500 to get a test faster. The National Audit Office reported in December that a third of test-takers paid a test reseller rather than go through the official booking system (a result which nicely matches our polling!).

There’s nothing wrong with the government being concerned about the cost of living. But it should ask itself what it is really concerned with–headlines or results? Saving people money sometimes means raising prices, if only on the Rose Hansons of the world.

Gordon Brown, foreword to the National Care Service White Paper, 2010

Few policy areas are burdened more by the ghosts of previous failures than social care reform. No-one knows that better than PM Andy Burnham, whose previous attempts at building a National Care Service were stymied by an election and the Coalition government. He spoke in today’s speech about the ‘scars’ of that time. Since then, there have been more failed attempts, including one which cost Theresa May her parliamentary majority in 2017.

As a result, social care reform has dithered and the system is even less generous now than it was in 2010. Today, thousands face staggering care costs, waiting lists for care assessments have reached 400,000, and ensuing pressure on the NHS eats up precious bed capacity. Local councils bear the brunt of ever-growing need and cut bin collections to pay for care. An ageing society will only make these problems worse.

It’s refreshing to see Burnham talking about ambitious social care reform, particularly for older people currently locked out of any financial support. He has pledged to expend ‘whatever political capital I have’ to get it done, and spoken of ‘problem-solving, not point-scoring’, which he thinks has ‘set back social care’.

To fix it, he’ll have to do what no other politician has been able to do - find a way to build public support for care funding reform. This won’t be easy, first because Labour has committed to not raising taxes on working people and wealth taxes on inheritance are unpopular. To add to the challenge, as older people become more financially secure, and younger people less so, it’s no longer clear to whom the public owes a ‘debt of dignity’. ThinkLabour is going to spend the next few months trying to navigate this difficult but important topic.

The ghosts of social care reform past

Had the last Labour government managed to create the National Care Service they wanted, care reform would be in the party’s legacy just as the NHS is. What can we learn from that attempt?

The ambition for the National Care Service in 2010 was significant - universal care, free at the point of use. In the foreword for the National Care Service White Paper PM Gordon Brown wrote of undertaking care reform as repaying a ‘debt’ we owe to older people who lived through the Second World War. He drew a comparison between care reform after the 2008 global financial crisis and the establishment of the NHS out of the ashes of wartime Britain. ‘Just as the National Health Service was born at a time when finance was tight, so too is now the right time to fundamentally change our system of care and support.’

But like others after him, Brown’s government shunted the problem of how to pay for a more generous system to the next government - ‘we’, he said, ‘will establish a Commission to help to reach consensus on the right way of funding the system.’ Sadly, there was no we. Labour’s election loss killed the National Care Service for more than a decade. The Coalition government scrapped the plans, instead focusing on the more narrow question of how to prevent catastrophic costs. The rest is history - first, Andrew Dilnot’s Commission and proposed reforms which included a cap on lifetime costs, and the ensuing decade of almost-but-not-quite attempts to find ways to pay for them.

The Labour government has a generational opportunity. We did start a Commission to find consensus on a funding model, and appointed a singularly effective leader, Dame Louise Casey, to find a solution. Today we have announced that we’re starting a proper conversation with the public to decide what care means to people, who should get more financial support, and how to pay for it. We’ve sped up the timeline to find the answer sooner. And we’ve also started fixing other deep-rooted problems in the care system, like creating a Fair Pay Agreement for care workers so their work is valued.

Who should pay for the National Care Service?

We know the Prime Minister wants a more generous system, and he is right to demand it. The public wants it too. But Dame Casey’s Commission is being tasked with answering a hard question: who should pay for a more generous system?

The government funds about half of care delivered, and individuals pay for the rest out of pocket. You could make the system more generous in a number of ways, such as:

• caps on the lifetime cost of care like the Dilnot cap

• free elements, like free end of life care

• co-payment systems like Japan and France, where you pay a percentage of the care fee

• protecting more of your means before you start to pay for care, like uprating or raising

• the current capital thresholds

• free care at the point of use (with or without room and board).

The biggest winners from cheaper care would be wealthier older people, who are currently locked out of the most generous support. That doesn’t mean the system we have is fair, however. Our system metes out injustice almost at random. Currently, care in the home is government-funded for people with some savings who own their own home. But if the person moves to a residential care home and the home is left empty, people are liable to pay for care and board and costs can quickly skyrocket. The average stay in a care home costs £1,000 a week. In a particularly cruel twist of fate, this leaves widows with advanced dementia at particular risk of having staggering care costs. Other groups, like couple families who mostly get care at home and have few savings but own an expensive home, can keep their wealth intact.

So, who owes who? Do we take Gordon Brown’s view that we owe older people a ‘debt of dignity’? If so, this might lead you to paying for reform through income taxes, like the Health and Social Care levy, which taxes the young to pay for older people’s care.

The challenge with this view is that since 2010, many older people have experienced a surplus, not a debt. Incomes have been protected and boosted by generous Defined Benefit pension schemes and the triple lock, which is now significantly more expensive than predicted. Assets like property have grown exponentially in value and low interest rates until very recently protected the pockets of many older mortgage-holders.

All this has meant pensioners are generally doing better financially than other groups. The reduction in pensioner poverty is a policy success, should be celebrated, and shows we can reward contribution if we want to. But if we think the debt is now borne by the young, we might look to luckier older people to contribute more to fund care reform through wealth taxes like an expanded inheritance tax or property taxes.

There could be another way. The Conservatives’ Kemi Badenoch has demanded Andy Burnham undertake social care reform through cuts, not taxes. She may not like one idea to pay for care reform which takes aim at intergenerational unfairness - reforming the triple lock to prevent the double counting effect inflation exerts on wages, ratcheting up the level of the State Pension.

Navigating the politics of care reform

There is wide support for a National Care Service, including amongst Labour members. But, generally, care isn’t one of the top three, or five, or 10 things the public is worried about. ThinkLabour’s previous work has found that people also don’t realise that local councils fund care, squeezing budgets intended to fund other other services. To top it off, reform of inheritance and property taxes is a particularly unpopular way to raise money.

But Burnham is right to keep going. One idea is to spread the cost of care amongst both the old and young, to make it fair to all generations. This is the principle of national insurance - you pay in more through your working life to get support when you can’t work. For example, Re:State’s proposal to create a hypothecated social insurance system - like pensions auto-enrolment - which age cohorts pay into which funds their care, would reflect this logic. For the current generation of older people who can’t contribute sufficiently, we could then look to more modest, temporary, wealth taxation to fund their care. It may be easier to ask us all to contribute more, rather than take aim at just one group.

In 2010, high care costs were a scourge warranting an ambitious response. In 2026, they are a damning symptom of Westminster’s inability to deliver change. Burnham is right that he’ll have to expend political capital to solve the problem. If he can, Labour will be able to claim the National Care Service in our DNA as we can claim the National Health Service: a symbol of British values, of Labour values, and of the impact politics can have on people’s everyday lives.

Get in touch if you have any thoughts at info@thinklabour.co.uk

If you’re looking for more reading on this subject my colleague, Dan Mead, wrote back in March about one way we could nationalise the funding of adult social care.

“I’d wish him luck, because he needs it. And I would say, be bold. Don’t be timid. Go follow your instincts, go for it.” (Man, 74)

As part of our regular series of focus groups at ThinkLabour, we asked a group of six Labour considerers about their hopes and fears about Andy Burnham becoming Britain’s latest Prime Minister. Although all of them would think about voting Labour, they held very different underlying attitudes, ranging from committed left liberals to more right-leaning transactional voters. What united them was a cautious optimism.

This is reflected in surveys. YouGov’s June favourability tracker had Burnham at net -4: not exactly fawning, but the best score of any politician tested. Opinium found the same shape as he entered Downing Street: overall approval just tilting towards the negative, yet leading the field on being likeable, competent and looking like a Prime Minister.

But for some participants, particularly those based in the south, there was some confusion about what a Burnham premiership would look like, with one participant saying that apart from opposition to the cancellation of HS2 they “don’t know any of his other policies.” (Woman, 69) Another said “I hadn’t heard about him very much before everything happened recently. Maybe because I live in the South.” (Woman, 37)

Those from the North had firmer views.”He’s definitely well thought of in general up north... he’s slightly worried people down south that he’s got too much of an allegiance to the North, and I don’t think that that’s fully true.” (Man, 38) For him, the northern allegiance is tangible: “We can’t get a train back from London unless it leaves about 10 o’clock, because there’s no electrification between Hull and Doncaster. The north in some areas is just left behind.” (Man, 38) This doesn’t necessarily mean that voters from the South see themselves in for a Harrying from the North, however: “I’m a Londoner, and I don’t have any objection to the view that it’s too London-based... it’s been too London-centric for far too long... I don’t want the balance to be tipped too far the other way.” (Woman, 69) She would even entertain the most visible version of rebalancing: “I don’t think we have to be as extreme as having Number 10 Downing Street in Manchester, but so be it, if that’s what happens.” (Woman, 69)

Several participants drew a contrast with Keir Starmer. One put it in the brutal style only the British public can: “He comes across probably as slightly more genuine, but I think that’s mainly because he’s probably got a personality, but I don’t think it would be difficult to have much more of a personality than Keir Starmer, who just looks like a photocopier that’s running out of ink, doesn’t he? God love him.” (Man, 46)

When Britain woke up to see Keir Starmer at the lectern of Downing Street, many of them had voted for one simple concept the day before: Change. Just after the election, 34% of Labour voters said their biggest reason was getting rid of the Conservatives, far ahead of any other.

As one participant reflected: “people didn’t really know what they wanted to vote for, or who they wanted to vote for, they just knew they didn’t want more of the same. They were fatigued by it.” (Man, 46) Expressing itself as the agent of change was a strategic success for Labour. The issue is that voting based on fatigue for one party leaves a blank canvas for the other: “That’s the whole problem Keir Starmer had, was I’m not even sure he knew what he meant by change.” (Man, 74)

The one change that Labour could feasibly deliver on that came up time and time again in the focus groups was one of integrity. The public can understand that changing behaviour is the one thing you can deliver instantly, even if changing material circumstances takes a while. This is why there was such a strong reaction to immediate stories of expenses and freebies. It was expressed well by one participant: “I thought there was gonna be no more getting caught out... I felt there needed to be almost whiter than white. And I think within a week, there’d been news stories coming out: Starmer being given Arsenal tickets, this person’s been given Taylor Swift tickets, and these little things. But it’s like, ah, they’re the same as the other guys.” (Man, 38) He went on to say: “It was actually, what’s the difference? These are the same type of politicians that we’ve had for the last 10 years.” (Man, 38)

The challenge for Burnham will be to succeed where Keir Starmer did not: convincing voters that he represents genuine change. The public sees other places where politicians on the left and centre are putting across positive visions by doing bold things. One participant said: “If Burnham could do anything like what Mamdani has, it’s nothing but just positive stuff for the UK” (Man, 31). It is not any single policy he admires: “That’s what Mamdani is, he’s just a person for the people, and he’s trying to make everyone’s life a lot easier.” (Man, 31) That’s not just an ideological tilt to the left: another cited Mark Carney, for similar reasons.

Like those other figures, Andy Burnham may also be able to turn scepticism. One participant said: “I think he would be more Labour values.” (Woman, 69) They even cited long-past achievements: “He went to the Hillsborough event first time, and he was like, yeah, I’ll be different, we’ll come and get some of it sorted. And completely changed people’s opinions on him. He was vilified, and actually almost turned into a hero. Someone was finally listening to him... I think if you can get them onside, then you can scale that up.” (Man, 38)

When we asked the group what they thought Labour values were, one participant said “It was supposed to be for working people, because that’s what Labour means.” (Woman, 69) Another put it more concretely: “Just taking care of the working class: affordable rent, affordable bills, utilities... during the winter some of the elderly population have to go to a shopping centre to stay warm because they can’t afford heat.” (Man, 31) The public’s definition is simple: Labour exists for people who contribute, and for those who cannot protect themselves. They did not see the previous iteration of this government doing that.

Some are willing to give Burnham time to demonstrate change: “I’m an Arsenal fan... we gave Arteta a lot of time, and after five, six years, we got the Premiership. You just gotta give him time... if you’re able to slowly work on something, eventually it will pay off.” (Man, 31) Patience is what voters offer a leader, but it is not itself a plan. Burnham’s task is to take what has been quietly built and do something a fair bit braver with it, without letting go of the Labour values the public can still recite. Voters expect it, and in particular, expect it from him.

The key to being an effective politician lies in quickly working out how little power you have, and finding ways to get stuff done anyway.

One of the exchanges most redolent of Keir Starmer’s time in office came in December last year, when he appeared before parliament’s Liaison Committee, the gathering of the Commons’ Select Committee chairs.

Asked what he had found most difficult in the first eighteen months, his plaintive response was that he “kept pulling levers” only to find that very little happened. Too much regulation and obstruction was getting in the way, he suggested.

The reaction of many seasoned parliament-watchers at the time was, “But Keir, it’s literally your job to make sure the levers do something …”. Which is a fair point. But it misses something more fundamental about the way that politics works.

If you’re only concerned with process, you’re likely to achieve very little. Getting anything done in government is as much about being able to navigate people, politics and behaviour, as it is about the system. And that single insight goes to the very heart of being an effective politician.

Starmer would have done well to absorb the lessons from his own national security adviser’s book on the Blair years. Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli: how to wield power in the modern world, recounts his time as chief of staff between 1997 and 2007, and in the first chapter notes that the dominant sensation for a PM first entering Number 10 will be how difficult it is to make anything happen.

Foreshadowing his future boss he states specifically, “A new prime minister pulls on the levers of power, and nothing happens.” The principal problem about the centre of government, he says, is not that it has too much power, but rather too little.

This is not a revelation. Most holders of the office have said similar things. But as Powell goes on to elaborate in the book, ensuring that the levers of government do something depends on persuasion, and carrying people with you. All political power is highly contingent, based on the ability to cajole, influence and build broad-based coalitions of support, and then hold them together. As he points out, this means that if you want to deliver on your promises to the electorate, you need to be a leader of remarkable skill.

It also reflects a deeper truism about politics, and what it takes to be an effective politician.

Having spent the last twenty years working with hundreds of politicians in more than sixty countries, newly-elected MPs and ministers everywhere seem constantly surprised by how little formal power they hold once they reach office. In contrast to the poetic flourishes of their campaign, the prosaic nature of legislative politics hits them hard.

The smart ones work this out quickly and set about finding ways to get around this by tapping into other sources of influence and leverage. Although they might lack formal power they have significant informal power, especially in their ability to convene. MPs sit at the centre of numerous and disparate networks at both national and local level. Rather than bleating about what they lack, they find ways around the formal process by connecting the concerns of different stakeholders, aligning the incentives at work, and constantly brokering, negotiating and compromising between those interests to hold their base together.

These ‘remarkable skills’ require tenacity, inventiveness, and entrepreneurialism, as well as a feel for politics and people. And they are as important for a prime minister as they are for a backbencher.

This is the essence of politics, or what political scientist James C Scott called ‘mētis’. Such skills are difficult to teach, and learnt by engaging with people and problems. They are honed through practice, experience, and by constantly having to adjust to uncertainty and opposition. As Scott puts it, they come from adapting quickly to unpredictable events and making the best of limited resources.

These are not, however, traits that have characterised Keir Starmer’s leadership. One of the most common complaints from ministers and MPs over the last two years is that Starmer does not do politics. He has instead tended to delegate the dealmaking to others, preferring to focus on what he seems to regard as the real business of being Prime Minister.

To be fair, he had limited time to learn these skills – suffering from the fact that he had only been an MP for five years before becoming leader, and only nine years before he became PM. Most of his predecessors had far longer apprenticeships before reaching high office. But also, for reasons I’ll explain in my next Substack, the years since 2015 were by far the worst time for any MP to learn the craft of being a politician.

The bigger problem is that he has not shown any interest in developing such skills and appears to regard the realities of politics as all a little distasteful. Yet, as Jonathan Powell explains, it is the very limits of formal power that require the Prime Minister to become an exceptional politician if they are to get anything done.

At a political level, government needs to be organised around the implicit recognition that power is limited and contingent. It feeds into everything including managing the parliamentary Labour Party and anticipating internal opposition, being clear about the implications of policies before they are announced, and ensuring that ministers and advisers know exactly what the government line is before they speak to any journalists.

But they are also basic management skills. Management in every profession is less about issuing instructions than leading a team and shaping its culture – it is the art of getting people to do what you want them to, but without having to ask. That depends on setting out a vision and values, as well as an array of interpersonal skills, understanding what motivates others and appealing to the personal, professional and political interests at work. Managerialism without managerial skills is unlikely to achieve much.

In this context, the appeal of Andy Burnham is obvious to most Labour backbenchers. He is evidently a more instinctive politician, comfortable with both people and politics. His note last week to members of the PLP was clearly designed to mark the difference between his style of leadership and that of Keir Starmer, emphasising his desire to change the culture, modernise parliament, listen to MPs’ views, and draw on their talents.

But, unlike Starmer, he also spent a long time honing the craft of politics. At several points in his book, Head North, written with Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram, he is at pains to point out how little power he had as MP, minister and Mayor. Yet the book is characterised by stories describing how the pair of them got around this, building the skills that enabled them to compensate for that lack of executive control.

Viewed in that light, two of the major criticisms that he faces – ‘away from Westminster for too long’ and ‘being a Mayor is not the same as being PM’ – start to look like advantages.

In the first place, British parliamentary politics has possibly never been as dysfunctional as it has since 2016. The rapidity of elections, Prime Ministers and turnover of MPs, alongside significant societal and technological shifts, has made the culture of the place far more fractured, fractious and polarised than it was when he was in government. Any attempt to change Westminster’s culture so that it is more constructive is probably more likely to be led by someone who can bring an outside perspective, and see more clearly the insidious creep of new norms over the last decade than those who have slowly absorbed them on the inside.

And second, the criticism that being a Mayor is not the same as being Prime Minister is self-evident. The obvious rejoinder is that no job prepares you adequately for being PM, as all of his recent predecessors have proved.

However, Burnham’s biggest achievement in Manchester is arguably in making the mayoralty matter. This was by no means guaranteed when he started. He came into a role characterised by few formal responsibilities and facing opposition from his own Labour council leaders who believed his only job was to reregulate the buses. As he put it, he wanted to put the Manchester role on a par with the more established Mayor in London.

Although there are genuine arguments about what he alone can claim to have achieved since he was elected as Mayor, the fact that he was able to turn it into a role so significant that he was able to use it as a springboard to Number 10 should not be underestimated.

He will need to bring all of those abilities to the job of Prime Minister. The economist J.K. Galbraith when working as an adviser to President Kennedy noted that “politics is not the art of the possible, it consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” The most successful Prime Ministers achieved things not because of the power conferred by the office, but rather because of the skills that that they deployed in getting around the job’s inherent limitations and challenges. Ultimately, the most skilful politicians are those who show the ability to make the most of what they have at their disposal.

The one thing that Andy Burnham is plainly not short of is advice. But after a career spent supporting the development of leaders of a range of public services, I am struck by the prevailing view that the personal attributes and frailties of political leaders are somehow immutable. Commentators promote certainties on what Andy Burnham offers (or might fail to offer) that often go back two decades. As if he must obviously be the same leader now as he was then. That the 10 years as Mayor will not materially have changed him. A perspective that finds its corollary in the ‘Mary Poppins School of Political Leadership’ which seems to insist that the heroic leader swooping down to save the day must show up practically perfect in every way.

It’s baffling because in no other organisational context is this the prevailing wisdom. In the world beyond Westminster we know that leadership is a craft that can be honed, with leaders enabled to expand their skills and develop the reflective, self-aware psychological armature that is critical to effective leadership.

In other settings the journey to senior leadership is strewn with development programmes, coaches and a panoply of psychometric instruments aimed at revealing, and more importantly, broadening leadership skills and styles. And yet a systematic approach to leadership development still appears to be anathema in our political culture and so, in its absence, I offer five thoughts on capable leadership – my advice to add to the growing pile.

Recognise that leadership is situational. Sounds obvious right? Except that this looks like an unexplored lesson from the Starmer project. This was a political project forged in years of brutal hand-to-hand combat as it fought to rescue the Labour Party from oblivion. Is it any wonder that it arrived in government tactical, pugilistic and frankly a little paranoid? Is it any wonder that it would read ‘contest of ideas’ as ‘threat to authority’? Is it a surprise that it would see the imposition of unquestioning loyalty and discipline as a survival strategy?

All this apparently unexamined baggage came into government with them. Bringing it to awareness, recognising its impact on behaviour, exploring its usefulness in this new situation was characterised as navel-gazing. Whereas it is, in reality, an essential discipline for leaders if they are not to be driven by embedded habits and practices that no longer serve them or their purpose . Andy Burnham will bring different baggage but no less need to reflect on whether this will or will not be functional for him and the team he builds around him.

Understand ‘authenticity’. We want leaders, and especially political leaders, to be anchored in a set of values - an answer to the deceptively simple question ‘What really matters most to me?’ We want to see those values reflected in both policy and behaviour. But commentators should not mistake Andy Burnham’s relaxed sociability for authenticity, especially contrasted with Keir Starmer’s restrained, occasionally awkward personal style. Neither have anything to do with authenticity. Voters came to see Keir Starmer as inauthentic because of the gap that opened up between the values that he espoused and the choices that he either made or allowed. And if Andy Burnham makes the same mistake, no amount of surface charm will save him.

In my work supporting leaders I often hear ‘but this is just the real me – my authentic style’. My question in response is ‘And is the purpose of leadership to express the real you or is it to discern what is needed from you in service of the organisation’s mission?’ When ‘this is just who I am’ gets in the way of challenging reflection on what is needed from you - and doing the work of growing your capability as a leader – that’s not authenticity, it’s defensiveness.

Perspicacious readers will be detecting a theme. Effective leadership calls, almost more than anything else, for a constant replenishing of deep reserves of self-awareness. I hope that Andy Burnham will find regular, safe moments for personal reflection , to seek out and embrace constructive challenge, and to keep calibrating judgements about what is needed from him.

Know that organisational culture does not land mysteriously from Mars. Behaviour over time hardens into culture. And behaviour in its widest definition. The personal conduct that leaders model; the conduct they permit and reward; the conduct that they turn a blind eye to; the priorities that they set; the decisions that they make and the way that they make them; the things they talk about and the people they invite (or fail to invite) into those conversations.

Persistent press briefing would have us believe that No 10 has a ‘culture’ problem. The good news is that culture can be reshaped though consistent, rigorous, disciplined, intentional leadership. If leaders believe that a different culture will better serve their purpose they have to work with colleagues to describe a different aspiration and then prioritise consistency, rigour and discipline in the delivery of that intention.

Crisis (and failure) comes with the territory. Screeds have been written about when, why and how the Starmer government failed. My observation is that this was a leader and a project that seemed psychologically unprepared to manage ‘crisis’.

The risk of failure/crisis produces anxiety. Anxiety drives restless activity. It tells leaders that they have to keep moving, keep doing. Once anxiety takes hold, entertaining a slower, more reflective process becomes fraught with risk, opening leaders up to intrusive thoughts that threaten to overwhelm. Psychoanalysis refers to this as a ‘manic defence’. A psychological mechanism that allows individuals to defend against feelings of loss, shame and helplessness that threaten their sense of competence and authority. A defence mechanism that manifests as a flurry of activity.

These are leaders who have mostly only known success, mastery and agency. The combination of holding apex power whilst simultaneously experiencing themselves as powerless, at the mercy of events and forces beyond their control, is profoundly unmooring. The internal coordinates by which leaders orient themselves – control and competence – suddenly feel like they no longer hold. In the face of incipient failure, it really matters that leaders explore the question ‘How do I feel?’ because bringing feelings into awareness allows leaders to respond rather than react. In psychological terms, the task is to process those feelings rather than convert them into impulsive action.

Leaders (and teams) psychologically resilient to failure or crisis have agreed protocols for how to respond. Organisationally, this usually means maintaining rather than jettisoning organisational habits and routines. Resisting the ‘sugar rush’ surge of frenetic ad hoc emergency meetings and calls in favour of personal and organisational rhythms that recognise that humans are overall better wired for predictability. Stress is a physiological response expressly designed to de-activate functions not critical for survival. Persistently elevated (chronic) stress is profoundly unhealthy but it also impacts on effectiveness. Particularly tasks that require divided attention, juggling and complex decision making.

Reflection and self-awareness to allow leaders and their teams to move from a leadership of brittle certainties to one of supple, adaptable, compelling confidence. Leading through crisis is not perhaps fundamentally about speed or certainty. It is about the capacity to remain psychologically alert and open when the ground feels unstable. Leaders who can tolerate shame without displacement, anxiety without frantic activity and uncertainty without retreating into brittle omnipotence create the conditions for finding a path forward. Crisis does not so much test technical competence as it exposes emotional architecture. The strength of the foundations of that architecture determine whether leaders, and their team, emerge diminished or enlarged by the experience

What it takes to have an argument. Politicians and political pundits alike are coalescing around the view that a key failure of the Starmer project was its unwillingness to make and have an argument. Sounds plausible but arguably one dimension of this is that this crop of leaders don’t actually know what it takes to enable the kind of generative conversations critical to the shaping of an argument. Because thinking together really does not come naturally for most teams. Even less so for politicians marinated in a culture that encourages superficial bombast, brittle certainties in a team climate riven with personal ambition and rivalry.

In most organisations, team processes are usually best described as theatre. Well-worn conversations typified by people saying the things that they have said before, downloading stories, ideas, and opinions. To begin to think together, this pattern must break down. Team members need to be challenged to reflect on deeply held thoughts and positions. There are known individual disciplines and practices that can help with this.

• Actively listen – seek to understand before being understood. Are you waiting for your chance to say what you planned to say?

• Notice and reflect on your assumptions – Pay attention to your internal reactions to others’ contributions.

• Suspend the rush to judgement – are you forming responses in your head while the other person is speaking?

• Balance opinion and enquiry – get comfortable with not being right or having the solution

• Embrace the unknown - welcome uncertainty – choose to learn more deeply by releasing what you think you know (or think you are expected to know)

These sorts of processes in turn depend on the overall approach taken to shaping the nurturing, curious, imaginative, collaborative team culture that is a pre-requisite for creativity and innovation. What it takes to build this kind of team is perhaps unsolicited advice for another day.

Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was remarkable.

Only a few months ago, Reform UK won 50% of the vote in the local council elections across the wards that make up the constituency. Labour won just 25%. In the by-election, Burnham reversed that position dramatically: Labour surged to 55%, while Reform fell back to 35%.

For Labour, defeating Reform so emphatically is clearly good news and one that will give hope to many across the party that Labour is capable of defeating Reform at a General Election. That hope is well-founded but for it to be realised we must avoid drawing the wrong lessons from what occurred yesterday.

The immediate temptation may be to see Makerfield as evidence that Labour can win back voters from Reform by signalling a move rightwards. But the evidence suggests that Burnham’s victory appears to have been won less through large-scale switching from Reform to Labour, and more through uniting the progressive vote and remobilising Labour’s own voters.

Without full voter-flow data, it is impossible to know exactly what happened. But polling data from Convergent (whose constituency poll came closest to the actual result), gives us a strong indication. That poll suggested that only 5% of Reform’s 2024 general election voters switched to Labour, alongside 8% of the 2024 Conservative vote — amounting to just under 1,000 voters overall. At the same time, it estimated that Labour lost 11% of its 2024 voters to Reform, around 2,000 voters.

If those estimates are correct, it would suggest that the net movement between the left and right blocs since the general election actually ran from left to right, not the other way around. Burnham may well have suffered a net loss among direct Labour-Reform switchers.

Since the General Election, Reform has increased its national vote share by around 12 points enabling the big Reform win in the local elections in May. It is theoretically possible that Burnham got his 20-point lead principally by winning back people who had voted Labour in 2024 and had switched to Reform in those council elections only a few weeks ago. But this is not what the evidence suggests.

Labour increased its vote by around 10,000 between the local elections and the by-election. Maybe half of this came from progressive parties. The Greens and Liberal Democrats together won fewer than 500 votes in the by-election - around 5,000 fewer than they had won in May. It is reasonable to assume that most of those voters moved to Labour.

Meanwhile, the right-wing bloc - Reform, the Conservatives and Restore — lost around 3,000 votes between the local elections and the by-election. That means, at most, 3,000 of Labour’s gains could have come from direct switching from the right. This suggests that a substantial part of Labour’s increase came from Labour-leaning voters who had not turned out in the council elections.

The turnout figures support this interpretation. Turnout in Makerfield rose by around 7,000 between the local elections and the by-election. Extraordinarily for a by-election, turnout was actually higher than at the General Election. This strongly suggests Burnham succeeded in mobilising significant numbers of people who had stayed home in May, and even some who had not voted in 2024.

This fits closely with ThinkLabour’s own polling nationally, which found that in constituencies like Makerfield the largest single destination for Labour’s 2024 voters is currently “Don’t Know” — 15% of them.

It is reasonable to assume many of these voters sat out the local elections but felt motivated to turn out for Burnham. That would imply that a large majority of Labour’s vote increase came from progressive switchers or from people who had not voted in the local elections at all.

ThinkLabour’s report Who Is Labour For? argued that Labour’s route to a second term lies less in chasing voters lost to the right on questions of values, and more in rebuilding a broad progressive coalition while winning back more transactional right-leaning voters through delivery and credibility.

That is almost exactly in line with how Burnham appears to have won so handsomely.

First, he is clearly seen as a politician of the left. His support for public ownership of essential services gives progressive voters confidence that he reflects their values.

Second, he has built a strong reputation for standing up for Greater Manchester against central government, particularly during the Covid pandemic. This has created a powerful sense that he is on the side of the people he represents.

Third, he is widely seen as a successful mayor. Under Burnham, Manchester has seen sustained economic growth and highly visible improvements in public transport. For more transactional voters, this matters.

This combination - values, representation and delivery - appears to have allowed Burnham to unite progressives, remobilise disengaged Labour voters, and pull back at least some voters from Reform.

Reform has always been beatable. They now stand at 27% in the national polls down from a peak of 32% last year. The reason successive constituency-level MRP studies (polling techniques used to predict public opinion at a highly localised level) continue to show Reform emerging as the largest party is not because Reform is overwhelmingly popular but because the progressive bloc remains fragmented.

In many seats, the combined Labour, Green, Liberal Democrat, SNP and Plaid Cymru vote would be enough to defeat Reform. But where those votes are either unable to determine who the strongest challenger is, or are unwilling to vote for them, Reform can come through the middle.

But In three successive by-elections now, the anti-Reform vote has successfully coalesced behind a progressive candidate: Plaid Cymru in Caerphilly, the Greens in Gorton and Denton, and now Labour in Makerfield. Makerfield matters because it is the first time Labour has been the vehicle through which that anti-Reform coalition has been assembled.

Burnham managed this not by shifting right but by being seen to be clear about his principles and therefore persuading progressive voters that Labour was the natural home for anti-Reform voters.

For Labour, the strategic implication is clear. The path to beating Reform is not primarily through chasing right-wing votes. Such strategies usually feel inauthentic to Reform-curious voters and simultaneously make Labour’s progressive base question what Labour stands for. It is through rebuilding a larger progressive coalition, while persuading more transactional voters that Labour can stand up for them and deliver in office.

This is the route to beating Reform and winning a second term for Labour. Whoever leads Labour in a few months’ time would do well to recognise that.

“My Dad felt the disrespect of vocational skills all his life.” In his 2023 Labour conference speech, Keir Starmer used his father’s experience as a toolmaker to make a powerful argument about a lack of respect for working people and to reinforce his claim to understand the lives of ordinary families. But ThinkLabour’s research finds that only one in seven people believe that Sir Keir Starmer was actually born into a working class family. For Westminster insiders, Starmer’s references to being the “son of a toolmaker” are well-known enough to become meme-worthy. Yet outside the political bubble, the message has barely landed. Nearly half of the public believe Starmer comes from a middle class background, while a further 35% think he was born upper class. Among the youngest voters, fully half believe he comes from an upper class family.

Britain’s enduring obsession with class is really a way of seeking to quickly understand something about a person they do not know. Too often this leads to crude and inaccurate assumptions. But it is understandable when voters are being asked to make choices about leaders they will never meet and know only through fragments of information. They are trying to predict how political leaders will act in situations they cannot yet foresee. Voters considering the social class of politicians among other factors, is not irrational.

In itself, being posh is not a problem. The British public elected Eton and Oxford educated David Cameron in 2010 and 2015, and Eton and Oxford educated Boris Johnson in 2019. Very few people believe Nigel Farage comes from a working class background. Nearly 80% of current Reform UK supporters, who are themselves disproportionately working class, assume Farage comes from a middle or upper class family, rather than from a more humble background.

But the misconception about Starmer’s background means there is a tension between his attempt to present himself as someone who deeply understands ordinary working people and the public belief that he comes from a much more privileged background. For politicians who use class as proof of their connection to voters, a failure to persuade the public that they come from humble origins risks creating an impression of inauthenticity.

Meanwhile, misconceptions about politicians’ social backgrounds are not confined to Keir Starmer. Across the board, our research found that people tend to assume politicians come from more privileged backgrounds than they actually do. The tendency is particularly pronounced among younger people and among those who pay little attention to politics. For many of these voters, the default assumption is that politicians are middle or upper class unless given a reason to think otherwise.

So while it is well-known in Westminster that Angela Rayner was a working class single Mum, the public are not so aware of this. Of those who had heard of her, around half correctly identified her as coming from a working class background. But Green voters are the most likely to assume otherwise: 63% of those who have heard of Rayner believe she comes from a middle or upper class family. Green voters tend to be more distrustful of mainstream politicians than average, and therefore may be more likely to assume that they are privileged and out of touch. It is notable that the Greens’ newest MP, Hannah Spencer of Gorton and Denton, has made her own working class roots a central part of her political identity, contrasting her background with those of other Westminster MPs, writing “This place is a bubble. And they’re just aren’t enough of us here who get it; who come from working class backgrounds.”

Our findings have implications for other Labour politicians. Around 46% of those familiar with Andy Burnham correctly identify him as coming from a working class background; his parents were a telephone engineer and a receptionist. But this still means that a majority still believe he was born into a middle or upper class family. Only 18% of those who know who Wes Streeting is, believe he comes from a working class background, despite being raised by a single mother in a council flat in East London.

Unlike Starmer, however, Burnham and Streeting are not yet as firmly defined in the public imagination. There is still an opportunity for them to introduce themselves to voters and shape perceptions of their backgrounds.

The lesson from Starmer’s experience is that doing so requires extraordinary persistence. Against a widespread assumption that politicians come from privileged backgrounds, it takes industrial levels of repetition to convince people otherwise. Sadiq Khan understood this during his 2016 London mayoral campaign when he referred so often to his father being a bus driver, that it became something of a joke. Yet even by the end of the campaign, canvassers were still encountering voters who had never heard the story.

For Starmer, the challenge to convince the public about his origins is even harder. The Prime Minister comes from a generation in which people from working class backgrounds who did well for themselves were often encouraged to leave that identity behind rather than celebrate it. Traits - like accents - which are associated with being working class were more likely to be seen as barriers to advancement rather than badges of pride. In the absence of these clues, people can be forgiven for assuming that a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and former barrister had been brought up in a privileged family.

Politicians who genuinely come from working class backgrounds and seek to use that as evidence of their connection to ordinary people must first persuade voters that this story is authentic. Repeating biographical details alone are rarely enough. If Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting want to draw on their origins as part of their appeal, the persona they present to the public must be at all times be consistent with that story, and they need to appear comfortable embodying that identity. What voters find hardest to forgive is the sense that a politician is trying to be something they are not.

We are moving away from our newsletters for our blog posts and instead we are now using this substack! This will be the new home for our blog posts, offering subscribers insights and analysis from both our staff team and external contributors. We’ll be covering the key issues shaping the day, while also exploring important topics that often receive less attention elsewhere in the news. Subscribe to stay informed and be part of the conversation.

Our first piece is by our Director of Devolution Policy, JP Spencer. JP is an economist with over a decade of experience working across economic policy and strategy in both the public and private sectors. This includes roles at HM Treasury, HM Revenue & Customs, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Metro Dynamics. Outside of Think Labour he is also a Policy Fellow at The Productivity Institute and writes on Substack about the North of England at Future North.

The importance of rationalising the geographic boundaries of our public services

Now, I know where Darlington is. I used to work there. But if I asked you ‘where is Darlington?’ in the sense of which local authority, administrative geography or region then you might struggle.

This is because central government has an addiction to creating new overlapping regional and local government boundaries which leave places in the dark about where they actually are and who is responsible for them. This may sound boring but getting this right will improve how our government functions so that it can deliver properly for everywhere and everyone.

When Jack Newman and Michael Kenny looked at this in 2023 for the Institute for Government and Bennett Institute, they found at least ten different boundaries in use - on top of strategic and local authority boundaries. These range from NHS regions and integrated care boards (ICBs), through police forces and fire and rescue services, to arts council regions and schools commissioner regions. The authors created a gif to show the absurdity of the situation at the time which is available here.

Every other advanced economy manages its subnational services around local democratic boundaries - ranging from US states, Canadian provinces, German lander, French regions and Japanese prefectures to municipalities and villages across every country.

In this context, the 2024 Devolution White Paper made a bold statement, saying that there would be:

“Action to deliver greater public service boundary alignment in the long term, making more Mayors responsible for fire, police, and engaged in Integrated Care Partnerships, and supporting the mayoral convening role in public services, so Mayors and Strategic Authorities can support partners in driving public service reform. This includes clearer expectations for Mayors’ roles in local health systems and in improving population health.”

This is a very sensible policy. Boundary misalignment and consequent complexity is a hidden part of our state failure.

Take our Darlington example. It is a separate unitary authority with historic links to neighbouring County Durham (which is its own separate unitary). The two unitaries are covered by the Durham Constabulary. But Darlington is part of the Tees Valley Strategic Authority, whereas County Durham comes under the purview of the North East Strategic Authority. The health service covers the whole of the North East region (which also includes Tees Valley), but also brings in North Cumbria for health purposes too. The map below shows part of this issue with the differing strategic authority, police and health boundaries of which Darlington is a part. Click here to see more of the boundary complexity in the area.

By creating a complex system that people do not understand, central government undermines accountability and democracy. Sorting it out has two important benefits:

Public Understanding and Accountability - the public are clear on where they live and who is responsible for services. This is difficult when your mayor, police, health and other services all cover different areas. Local accountability for services should be provided by democratic institutions elected by the people in that area. This reinforces the direct link between voting and change which is the essence of democracy - and has broken down given centralisation and outsourcing to unelected agencies. Public and media understanding of how the system works is essential for this to be able to happen. For example, in Darlington, if there is an issue with the police then it might be reasonable to assume that the mayor of the area - Ben Houchen - is responsible like David Skaith, the mayor in neighbouring York and North Yorkshire is. But owing to the boundary differences this actually remains a Durham Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) issue.

Efficiency - too much emphasis is put on ‘efficiency’ within policy areas without thinking across them. There are three elements of efficiency that can come from simpler boundaries. Firstly, it may allow for a rationalisation of backoffice functions and other shared services. For example, we are seeing this where PCC powers have been given to mayors. Secondly, there are benefits in terms of time - with fewer meetings and stakeholder relationships needed for organisations in different areas. This will help join up services, as we are seeing with increased links between transport and policing in areas where they are aligned, and deal with cross-cutting issues and crises. Thirdly, it will save government time - especially in not needing to spend any more time creating more boundaries.

Despite the clear benefits and commitment from government, we have not seen this policy followed through on by the DHSC with regards to Integrated Care Boards (for example, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is now part of a larger area). And now the Home Office seems reticent on police forces, with the independent review being clear that other options are on the table. Why is this the case?

It seems that health and police rationalisation are being developed in departmental silos - with teams trying to devise the ‘right’ boundaries for delivery of their service - but without prioritising the impact on other services or on local democracy and understanding.

For example, almost every other G7 or similarly populous developed nation has some form of regional policing based on democratic boundaries, usually with a municipal police below them, supported by specialised national police forces. If the government does not use the police reforms to create such a similar model we will end up moving toward it at some point in the future - at huge extra transitional cost.

So, what does this mean for public services in England?

Public service boundaries should be based on strategic authority areas. The planned creation of strategic authority areas across England in the coming years unlocks the benefits above. This does not mean everything should be devolved. National services will be needed in some areas - like the proposed National Police Service.

And moving to this model will still create some simplification and rationalisation. For example in the police, aligning with likely mayoral strategic authority boundaries would mean a net reduction of about 5 or 6 police forces.

If we do not adopt this model of place-based service boundaries then there will be a constant tendency for the centre to tinker with new boundaries as is the case now. This will leave the issue of policing - and other public service boundaries - unresolved in perpetuity, constantly at the mercy of change. Only having local boundaries that people understand and which align with local democratic institutions will stop this.

The process of getting there will require some work by central government and also by mayors and councils. For some policy areas this might need further legislation, though the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act enables changes to police boundaries and the recent health boundary changes have not required any primary legislation.

The only long term rational solution is to align public service boundaries with local democratic boundaries - at strategic or local authority level - for the sake of accountability, public understanding and efficiency.

Last week ThinkLabour published Rowenna Davis’ lessons from her recent election campaign in Croydon, one of these was ‘attract rather than attack the Greens’. Oscar Harman, Chair of Streatham & Croydon North Labour Party and former special adviser to Steve Reed, sets out the alternative.

Croydon is an interesting case study in how Labour lost the council elections where we could have won. The Conservative government underfunded Croydon for years – refusing to link funding with deprivation as they increased poverty in the borough with a housing benefits cap that forced thousands of lower-income families out of inner London into boroughs like Croydon.

But with this Labour Government came fair funding – and Croydon is getting a 28% funding increase in line with deprivation levels across the borough. That’s a good news story. It’s fundamentally about social justice and it should have helped Labour win if we’d told the story well enough. But earlier this month the Conservatives narrowly won the election for Croydon’s directly elected mayor.

Our candidate, Rowenna Davis, fought an energetic and upbeat campaign. Writing for ThinkLabour she explains she did not offer voters any reasons for not voting Green and would do so again. That, she explains, is because those voters were not ideologically wedded to the Green Party. Instead, “they wanted a bigger politics that was courageous about taking action on social injustice... I could not attack them for that.”

This is a fundamentally flawed argument, but one I’ve seen in other elections where we face a Green threat. Attacking the Green Party on the facts of what they stand for is not an attack on potential Green voters – it’s providing them with information they need to take their decision in the ballot box. Elections are about choices, and if we don’t make the choice clear to voters, no one else will.

Voters who care about social justice deserve to know that the Greens routinely oppose council housing that could help end the housing crisis, oppose investment for jobs that puts money in local people’s pockets, and even oppose the infrastructure that is necessary to get clean climate-friendly energy from where it’s generated to where it will be used.

And voters deserve to know that the Greens have been infiltrated by racist antisemites, including many who were kicked out of the Labour Party but found an open door and a path to power via the negligence (at best) or collusion (at worst) of their new party.

One Green candidate in Croydon was suspended by the national Green Party for alleged antisemitism but backed by local Greens. Shamefully, Labour’s campaign in Croydon remained silent on the matter, so most voters never found out. He was elected in the ward I grew up in.

Rowenna’s not the only Labour candidate who’s shy about attacking the Green Party’s record – but it’s not a restriction applied to other parties. Rowenna was vocal in her attacks on Reform, joining a demonstration and giving interviews outside the hall when Nigel Farage came to speak. She lambasted the Conservatives for putting council tax up 33% in four years, and hung the Lib Dems’ record in coalition with the Tories round their necks.

Labour campaigns have to make our positive case to the voters but we also have to highlight the failures in other parties’ records whoever our main opponents are. The Greens pulled no punches with frankly dishonest attacks on our record. The idea that we should exempt them, uniquely, from legitimate scrutiny is misguided.

Labour lost Croydon’s mayoral election to the Tories by just 1000 votes, while the Green candidate won almost 20,000. Just 500 of those voters staying with Labour would have swung the borough our way. But our campaign deliberately placed no barriers in their way.

Croydon now faces four years of a Tory mayor who will get to spend the increased funding his own party denied the borough and will undoubtedly refuse to spend it on those parts of the borough where poverty is highest.

That’s what happens when we don’t do everything we can to win elections. And there’s a very obvious lesson to learn from it.