I hope you’re well. It’s back to school season across Britain - and in Parliament - and we’ve been hard at work as Party Conference season begins. And we are reporting back in a special Saturday newsletter from the first of those conferences.
How has Reform’s coalition changed? We’re in Birmingham at Reform Party Conference, presenting our deep-dive report on Reform’s voters and what they want
Holborn and St Pancras: Taking a look at the race to replace Keir Starmer, the demographics of the seat, and what this tells us about the left of politics.
Britons’ love of Dolly Parton: In honour of the singer, we have been looking at how voting intention breaks down by Dolly Parton’s favourite songs.
More in Common has kicked things off at the Reform conference with our panels on nature, Reform’s coalition, trust in science and disagreeing well. We were delighted to see packed crowds at our events and look forward to seeing many more people at the Liberal Democrat, Labour, Green, Conservative, Plaid Cymru and SNP conferences in the next few weeks. We’ll be hosting more than 40 events. So stay tuned for updates on our programme!
You can also catch up on this week’s podcast episode here:
The More in Common team has spent the end of this week in Birmingham hosting events with our partners at the Reform Party conference. At each of the Party conferences, we will be presenting new data on what their voters look like, what they want and how the party’s fortunes have changed.
There’s no doubt that the party begins the Autumn in a less dominant position than last year. When we arrived in Birmingham a year ago, it sometimes felt like Reform’s momentum was unstoppable. Today, with their vote share down by 10 points, Nigel Farage would have been hoping to use their party conference to regain that momentum they held for much of the past two years.
Reform’s stall in the polls has been driven by two dynamics at once: an erosion of support among their wavering new voters, and a sapping of enthusiasm among some of their core voters.
This has taken place at a time where Andy Burnham is showing early signs of consolidating Labour’s dominance on the left. For most of the last year, the right bloc has been united around Reform as the left fragmented; now, that seems to be reversing. At its peak last year, 63 per cent of right-leaning voters backed Reform; now that’s dropped to just 50 per cent. And likewise on the left, at Labour’s nadir they only commanded 44 per cent of the left-wing vote; that has now risen to 57 per cent.
And as a new controversy emerges this week in Reform’s finance row, we found last week that perceptions of sleaze now rank as the main barrier stopping people from supporting Reform.
Nevertheless, Farage and his party still have many loyal voters whose confidence in the party remains unshaken: one in ten Britons say they would definitely vote Reform in an election tomorrow - more than any other party. But equally there’s a growing number of Britons on the left who are uniting against the party, and willing to vote for any candidate to keep Reform out of power. We’ve seen this threat play out in several consecutive by-elections now. As well as reassuring their own supporters, Reform will need to address the depth of fear many other voters feel that is driving them to vote against them. Burnham on the other hand seems to have succeeded in making Labour not just more popular, but also less disliked - the proportion saying they would vote “against” Labour has dropped to 20%, down 15 points from the spring.
As Reform’s vote share has slipped, their support base has contracted. At last year’s conference, we described Reform’s voter base as a “disillusioned broad church” - branching beyond their base of Dissenting Disruptors, and winning over a broader pool of right-leaning and centre-right voters.
Since then, the concentration of Dissenting Disruptors has grown, as both Labour and the Conservatives have made gains with other segments at the expense of Reform among their other target segments - Rooted Patriots and Traditional Conservatives.
But the coalition is also changing in other interesting ways. As Reform’s policy agenda has pivoted toward the right on some economic issues - with Robert Jenrick’s welfare reforms at the forefront of Reform’s platform in recent weeks - so too has the party’s voter base. Burnham has managed to win back some Labour-Reform switchers, and the party’s remaining voters are those on the economic right.
Nearly three quarters say the government too readily provides benefits, 65 per cent want the government to let people keep more of what they own, and 47 per cent want the government to try and keep people as wealthy as possible, even if that leads to gaps between rich and poor. On each of these measures, Reform’s voter base is now significantly more right-leaning.
Reform has faced hurdles in recent months, but the demand for a populist party on the right of British politics is still there.
Since Reform UK hit its peak in the polls last summer, the proportion of Britons who believe that immigration is too high has not dropped; nor has the salience of channel crossings. And while the public mood has lifted slightly, most Britons (56 per cent) still believe that things are getting worse in the UK. Seven in ten Britons still believe the system is rigged.
So long as these drivers remain, there will still be a demand for insurgent parties challenging the status quo.
All it ever feels like is Labour and the Tories, and everyone else jumps on them about how shit they are. (...) We need something completely different with a new way of thinking - that might still be shit, but we need to shake it up because it ain't working.
Paula, radiographer, Bury
I'm a man of giving people a chance. And for now, I like the little things that Burnham's done in a short space of time. We're yet to see whether he can back it up financially and how he's going to do that. Only time will tell. Burnham's got, what, 18 months to try and figure it out and convince people it's right - because if not, there's only one man coming in and that's going to be Farage.
Jake, teacher, Manchester
If you’re interested in more details, you can read our full deck here:
Just when we thought that we had worn out the phrase “consequential election” for the year, the third party leader in a row will contest a by-election in 2026. After former Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned as an MP, Zack Polanski is standing as a candidate to replace him.
Until recently, this looked like fertile ground for another Green win of the kind we saw in Gorton and Denton, where the Greens managed a 26 per cent swing against Labour. Labour’s struggles on their left flank in London actually pre-date coming into office: even in their 2024 landslide, Labour's vote share dropped by 5 points, and by 2026, the party held just a four percent lead over the Greens (26 per cent to 22 per cent). These declines were particularly concentrated around North London, driven by progressive disaffection from Starmer's perceived lack of radicalism on the economy, social issues and foreign policy. The Greens were the primary beneficiary of that decline, building up strong second-place finishes.
But two things have changed since then. First, Labour has made some progress winning back the disillusioned left: rising faith in Labour among left-leaning voters has cut the Greens' lead with Progressive Activists down from 20 points to 2, and the portion of 2024's Labour voters going to the Greens has fallen from 12 per cent to five per cent, as the Greens' own poll ratings have declined from 14 per cent to 9 per cent in our tracker. Second, Zack Polanski has become significantly more polarising; his approval rating fell dramatically in the aftermath of Golders Green, and his approval now stands at -28, making him the least popular major party leader.
On paper, that makes Holborn and St Pancras look like a very safe Labour seat. And Labour certainly has history on its side: the seat has been Labour since its creation in 1983, sometimes with over 70 per cent of the vote. Labour won 49 per cent in 2024 to just 10 per cent for the Greens, and Labour have won local council elections in the wards making up the seat continuously since 2002.
But at the local elections, the Greens enjoyed a substantial surge in the seat, rising 22 per cent from their 2022 results and displacing the Liberal Democrats as the primary opposition in the seat. Labour proved relatively resilient here, holding all but 5 seats, but with clear signs of weakness. There were differences between wards: Labour won 9 out of the 11 wards in the constituency by popular vote, albeit with very slim margins, with its strongest areas in Kentish Town and King’s Cross. The Greens won the popular vote in Holborn and Covent Garden, and Regent's Park, and picked up a seat in Bloomsbury, while the Conservatives showed strength in Primrose Hill.
There are, in fact, several reasons for Polanski and the Greens to be bullish. Chief among them is Andrew Feinstein's announcement that he will not be standing. Feinstein chalked up an impressive 19 per cent of the vote in 2024 and retained a strong electoral presence in 2026 in a cooperation agreement with the Greens (who stood down in two wards in the constituency for his Camden People’s Alliance). If Feinstein's voters go to the Greens, the swing needed for the Greens to win falls to 10 per cent - making this the fifth most winnable seat in the country.
Second, by-elections are often used as a vehicle for punishing the incumbent government - even under relatively popular Prime Ministers. Just three by-elections in the past decade have seen swings towards the incumbent government (Copeland, Hartlepool and Makerfield). A 10 per cent swing would also be very modest by historical standards, as the Gorton and Denton result showed.
The seat's demographics could help the Greens too. Holborn's demographics are remain-leaning, affluent and left-wing: an estimated 73 per cent of the seat voted for Remain in 2016. It is diverse, with substantial minority populations from different backgrounds, and has a large student population. The constituency is also one of the seats in the country where immigration is least salient - according to our MRP estimates, only 29 per cent of local residents consider immigration to be a top issue facing the country, the 8th lowest in the country. It does, however, contain notable pockets of deprivation: Holborn ranks in the top quarter of seats by multiple indices of deprivation, and has a 22 per cent child poverty rate, despite the seat overall being generally affluent, with house prices in excess of £600,000 on average.
Finally, Polanski's own candidacy could be a game changer. Despite recent missteps undermining some Britons’ confidence in the Green leader, Polanski's personal pull remains strong. He has a strong social media presence, with 700,000 Instagram followers, and a strong popularity rating with younger voters: voters 18-24 are nine times more likely to view Polanski favourably than those over 75, for example. Given Holborn has a much higher portion of young people than the national average (39 per cent are under 25, compared to 32 per cent of London and 30 per cent for the UK as a whole), this age differential could play to Polanski's advantage. If the Greens are able to tap into differential turnout with an enthused turnout of Green supporters, it would significantly boost their prospects in the seat.
Taken together, this has the makings of a seat that will be hard fought, and it’s difficult at this stage to make a call. But the political consequences could be pivotal in the battle for the left. For Labour, this is one of the first real tests of whether Burnham has really managed to unite the left behind Labour again. For the Greens, it's a test of whether Polanski can regain his mojo after a difficult few months.
In Memory of Dolly Parton: What do Britons make of the singer?
Many of us were saddened last week by the news of the loss of Dolly Parton. It inspired us to look at whether there were any political differences in how Dolly was perceived. 80 per cent of Britons held a positive view of Dolly Parton - something our politicians can only ever dream of.
The question of the favourite Dolly song was more divisive. ‘Jolene’ beats ‘9 to 5’, 23 per cent to 18 per cent, with ‘I Will Always Love You’ and ‘Islands in the Stream’ also registering high scores.
There were interesting partisan splits in favourite Dolly songs across the electorate. Labour voters dominate among ‘Coat of Many Colours’ and ‘Here You Come Again’ fans and hold narrow leads on ‘Jolene’ and ‘9 to 5’. Tories lead on ‘I Will Always Love You’ by one point, and Reform lead with ‘Islands in the Stream’.
Wishing you a great weekend!
All the best,
Luke
More in Common, 320 City Road, Angel, London EC1V 2NZ, United Kingdom
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