Crises suit him – whether in Southport, Ukraine or the White House. Facing the headwinds of the Donald Trump storm, Keir Starmer’s “we have your back” pledge yesterday at a car factory in Solihull heralded a welter of “further and faster” and “fight for the future” to match his apocalyptic “the world as we knew it has gone”. The psephology supremo Prof John Curtice says of the prime minister: “He’s brilliant at bad news.” Coping with catastrophe is his forte.
Yet the planet-wide tremor didn’t feature on the doorsteps of voters last weekend, as I listened to their conversations with Labour canvassers for the Runcorn and Helsby byelection next month. Fear of economic cataclysm as a result of Trump and his tariffs hadn’t arrived yet. But it is coming.
A cheerful Labour voter who works at the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) factory in Halewood shrugged off the risk with a smile. He reckoned the 25% tariff on exporting British cars to the US wouldn’t affect JLR: “These American millionaires buying our high-end cars won’t be bothered paying a bit more.” But just an hour later, news thundered in that JLR was pausing all shipments to the US, sending shudders through the British car industry, which employs 200,000 people.
The bright sun and blue sky were not dispelling a pervasive sense of pessimism. Labour won with a mega-safe 52.9% of the vote here last year, before the MP, Mike Amesbury, punched a man to the ground. Now Reform UK is snapping at Labour’s heels in this seat by the Mersey, in which 54% of the electorate voted leave, 96% are white, incomes and employment are average, and home and car ownership are higher than average.
Constituency polls are few and famously unreliable, but Curtice reckons Electoral Calculus may have it right calling 36.6% for Labour and 28% for Reform. Labour is far from confident. With news arriving at the speed of lightning, 1 May may be too far away to guess what might swing people’s votes by then.
These brief encounters on voters’ doorsteps say nothing of the result, but they can shed some light on what is on people’s minds and what is not. For now, I heard disappointment from Labour voters, such as the woman who hugged a bug-eyed dog. “Not sure,” she said, when asked about her vote, though she was previously “Labour for ever” and works for a credit union. “I thought there’d be change,” she said. Immigration is high in her thoughts, so would she vote for Nigel Farage’s party? “Oh no, definitely no. We tear up their leaflets.”
Down the road, another always-Labour voter, a retired woman in a glittery T-shirt, just might turn to Reform. Near her, she said, a hostel was filled with “illegals, all young men, who look at women, you know, scary”. She said she had nothing against non-white people, but these men were “threatening”. “And the prices, up, up, up, for council tax, the electric, water. I don’t know what Labour are doing.”
But another lifelong Labour voter, hosing down his garden wall, definitely did know why he was not defecting. “Labour’s right on benefits. There are too many knowing how to work the system. Other parties? All fat cats. Give Labour a chance to get the country on track.”
A woman who answered the door with a towel wrapped around her head asked where all the change promised during the election campaign was. “I don’t see it,” she said. Matthew Patrick, the Labour MP for Wirral West, stepped in offering good news: NHS waiting lists are at last falling, the minimum wage and pensions jumped up this month, breakfast clubs have just begun in local primaries, a new nursery is opening, there are new workers’ rights, a housebuilding boom is on the way. Lest she forget, she was handed a “What has Labour ever done for us?” leaflet. “I might be persuaded,” she said.
Pollsters report nationally what it’s easy to hear: pessimism and disappointment. “They [Labour] are not getting the change they expected. The spring statement registered only negatively,” says Gideon Skinner of Ipsos. “Reform takes on that mantle of change now.” In byelections and local ballots in fraught times, voters like to throw a Mike Amesbury-style punch back at the government. A Farage success would be a huge credibility boost for Reform. “But,” says Skinner, “it would be hard to tell if that was a harbinger of a new trend. Many think Farage divisive, not a good change.”
His supporters are “distinct”, adds Skinner. Half of Reform voters have little or no confidence in the Covid vaccine, against 14% to 18% of those backing other parties. There is, says Skinner, a definite ceiling of never-Farage voters. And as markets plunge, that Farage/Trump brotherhood is ageing badly: Trump is reviled by four times as many Britons as those who like him. Trump the world-wrecker may deter local voting for wild mavericks of the right.
The top pitch in Reform’s leaflet is, of course, “freeze immigration and stop the boats”, and maybe that’s enough when 52% of Britons want immigration cut. Yet if Farage hopes to copy the right’s success elsewhere, the UK is notably different, with some of the least anti-immigration views in Europe: last year 66% of those surveyed said immigration had a positive impact on the economy, and the UK scored highest when asked if “immigrants make the country a better place to live”, with 60% saying yes compared with France’s 30%. Nor can the far right thrive on social conservatism: Britain ranks among the most socially liberal of all nations.
As for the rest, Reform’s finger misses the pulse. The other three policies on its Runcorn leaflet include “reverse Labour’s winter fuel cuts”, yet public support for means testing is evenly split. It also pledges to “scrap net zero to cut your energy bills”, but people support the net zero target, with 61% in favour and 22% against. Even Reform’s pledge to “cut your taxes” is backed by only a third: 52% would keep them as they are or raise them. And Labour hammers at Farage’s praise for an insurance-based NHS, surely poison.
Reform success on 1 May would be a rough reminder, as if Labour needed one, of people’s general disenchantment. On Starmer’s fifth anniversary as Labour leader, only half who voted for his party last year now say they know what he stands for, though they do note defence and security as his strength. “To be in the centre is no longer comfortable in Britain,” Curtice says, pointing out that Labour and the Tories are equally squeezed from right and left.
If Starmer means yesterday’s urgent words, then not just “the world we knew” but the overcautious Starmerism we knew may be gone, too. When he says “old assumptions can no longer be taken for granted”, does that mean his own, and his hypercautious No 10 team’s too? In an uncharacteristic burst of hyperbole, he promises that Labour is “creating wealth in every corner and delivering security for everyone, everywhere”, and “we simply cannot cling on to old sentiments when the world is turning this fast”. That has to mean escaping from fiscal and psychological handcuffs and unleashing his cabinet’s enthusiasms. Change is what people voted for.
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