There He Is Again
Britain changes governments, parties, slogans and political tribes. Then the electorate moves again — and somebody asks Sir John Curtice to explain what just happened.
There he is again.
Sir John Curtice.
And if he’s not on your television today, don’t worry.
He’ll be back.
The next election. The next by-election. The next referendum. The next opinion poll that apparently changes everything.
Come hell, rain or shine, somebody in a television studio will eventually turn to Sir John and ask the question Britain has apparently been unable to answer for itself for decades:
So, what does the British public think?
And out come the numbers.
I’ve watched this ritual for years.
I don’t even mean that disrespectfully.
Curtice clearly knows his subject. He’s been contributing to British Social Attitudes since 1986. He’s been analysing elections and public opinion for longer than some of the politicians he’s now analysing have been alive.
In fact, increasingly, I quite look forward to hearing what he’s got to say.
But watching him discussing Reform recently, I found myself thinking something I’ve increasingly thought about British political commentary generally.
Are we making the British voter much more complicated than they really are?
Here We Go Again
The latest British Social Attitudes research tells us Reform isn’t simply a protest vote.
There is evidence for that.
Reform supporters are particularly distinctive on cultural questions. Three quarters in the survey said migrants undermine Britain’s culture, compared with 35% of the public overall.
They’re more dissatisfied too.
Sixty per cent were very dissatisfied with the NHS, against 51% overall. More reported struggling on their household income.
So the analysis begins.
Before long, we’ve constructed an extraordinarily complicated creature called The Reform Voter.
And I’m sitting there thinking:
Haven’t we met this person before?
The Voter Who Voted for Everybody
Imagine someone who has spent the last sixteen years voting.
Maybe they voted Labour.
Then Liberal Democrat.
Then UKIP.
Then Brexit.
Then Conservative.
Maybe Labour again.
Now Reform.
Perhaps they’ll vote for somebody completely different next time.
What exactly are they?
Have they undergone six ideological transformations?
Did they wake up one morning socially liberal, become economically conservative by lunchtime, turn populist on Wednesday and discover authoritarianism over the weekend?
Or is there a considerably simpler possibility?
They’re not satisfied.
And they keep looking.
That’s what fascinates me.
Britain keeps analysing where the voter has gone.
I want to know why they keep leaving.
We’ve Been Here Before
Think about the political language of the last fifteen years.
Every few years Britain acquires another political slogan and another supposedly newly discovered group of voters.
The red wall. The blue wall. The Brexit voter. The Workington Man. The left-behind voter. Now the Reform voter.
And each time we behave as though we’ve discovered something completely new.
But look underneath it.
An awful lot of the same problems.
Maybe Britain Is the Thing We Should Be Studying
This is where I think the endless analysis can become almost absurd.
Not because the polling is worthless.
It isn’t.
Not because Curtice doesn’t understand his numbers.
He plainly does.
But numbers tell you what people said.
They don’t automatically tell you how Britain produced the person answering the question.
People don’t grow up inside polling tables.
They live through governments. They read newspapers. They watch television. They scroll through Facebook. They hear political slogans repeated for months.
They lose jobs. They get pay rises. They watch rents increase. They wait for hospital appointments. They watch their towns change. They hear politicians tell them who is responsible.
Then eventually somebody puts a ballot paper in front of them.
And afterwards we analyse the result as though the voter arrived fully formed from nowhere.
The Distraction Machine
And then there is the media.
Because none of this happens in isolation.
For fifteen years we’ve bounced from crisis to crisis and argument to argument.
Europe.
Immigration.
Boats.
Culture wars.
Boris.
Corbyn.
Truss.
Starmer.
Farage.
Some of those questions matter enormously.
But the volume of the political argument can obscure a much simpler test:
Is the country actually getting better?
Are people better housed? Are wages stronger? Are public services better? Is infrastructure improving? Are towns becoming more prosperous? Do people feel more secure?
Do younger people believe they’ll have opportunities their parents had?
Those aren’t particularly sophisticated questions.
Perhaps that’s why they don’t occupy entire election-night graphics packages.
And Then There’s the Burnham Bounce
Which brings us neatly back to the present.
Because while we’re busy trying to establish the permanent psychological profile of the Reform voter, another question has appeared around Labour:
What happens when Andy Burnham is put into the equation?
Polling that has tested Labour under Burnham has suggested that he can recover support that Labour has struggled to hold.
His personal ratings have also, at points, compared favourably with those of other leading political figures.
And that interests me much more than pretending today’s voting intention is fixed until polling day.
Because if voters who were drifting away from Labour can suddenly look at Labour differently when the personality at the top changes, what exactly happened to all those permanent political identities we had just finished constructing?
Did the electorate undergo another ideological transformation?
Or did some people simply look at a different politician and think:
I’ll have another look.
That’s politics.
And now we get the interesting part.
Because popularity eventually meets events.
Budgets happen.
Economic conditions change.
Governments make decisions.
Voters feel those decisions in their wages, bills, taxes, services and communities.
Then we ask them what they think again.
So I’m interested in what happens to Labour’s numbers through the next political and fiscal tests.
Does a Burnham bounce become something durable?
Does it fade?
Do voters move somewhere else again?
I don’t know.
That’s precisely the point.
And We’re Already Talking About the Next Election
This is what really gets me.
We’re already discussing what all of this means for the next general election.
Years away.
Think about that.
We’re trying to predict what somebody will do at a ballot box years from now based upon how they answer questions today.
I don’t know what Britain will look like then.
Nobody does.
What happens if living standards improve?
What happens if they deteriorate?
What happens if unemployment rises?
What happens if the NHS improves?
What happens if immigration falls?
What happens if another crisis arrives that we’re not even discussing today?
What happens if Reform disappoints its own supporters?
What happens if Burnham does?
The voter we’re painstakingly categorising today may have moved again before the election arrives.
And then we’ll need another explanation.
There Will Be Another John Curtice
One day, presumably, Sir John will decide he’s counted enough British voters.
Although I wouldn’t bet on it happening tomorrow.
Britain likes continuity.
We like institutions.
We particularly like familiar people who can explain complicated things in reassuring tones.
Curtice himself has already handed over one institutional role. After sixteen years as president of the British Polling Council, Professor Jane Green succeeded him in 2024.
And she’s hardly an unknown quantity.
Oxford professor. British Election Study co-director. ITV election analyst.
There is an entire generation of serious researchers already doing this work.
Others will follow them.
So eventually television will find its next great interpreter of the British voter.
Perhaps that’s inevitable.
The British Election Study itself has been examining elections since 1964.
We have decades of data.
Decades of elections.
Decades of increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding what British voters think.
And yet there’s something wonderfully British about the fact that, after all that research, every few years we still appear completely astonished by what British voters do.
Perhaps the Voter Isn’t the Mystery
That’s where I’ve landed.
Maybe Reform really has created a durable ideological constituency.
Maybe it hasn’t.
Maybe today’s Reform voter remains a Reform voter for twenty years.
Maybe they’re somewhere else in five.
Maybe Burnham has genuinely changed Labour’s trajectory.
Maybe this is another political bounce that disappears when governing gets difficult.
We’ll find out.
That’s for the evidence to establish.
But there’s another question that interests me far more.
If somebody has spent fifteen or sixteen years moving from Labour to UKIP to Conservative to Reform — and perhaps is now looking at Labour again — perhaps the remarkable thing isn’t their latest destination.
It’s that nobody persuaded them to stay.
That’s the bit I think Britain keeps talking around.
We endlessly study the voter.
We classify them.
Segment them.
Poll them.
Give them names.
Put them into electoral tribes.
Then, when they move again, we commission another analysis explaining why.
Meanwhile the country continues underneath them.
And maybe that’s why this article will probably still work at the next election.
Maybe Reform will be stronger.
Maybe it won’t.
Maybe Labour’s Burnham bounce becomes something permanent.
Maybe it disappears as quickly as it arrived.
I don’t know.
But there’s a Budget coming.
There will be speeches, arguments, newspaper front pages, political winners, political losers and, inevitably, another set of polls.
Then somebody will have to explain what the British public makes of it all.
And actually, I’m rather interested to hear what Sir John thinks.
I suspect they’ll give him a call.