Undecided voters muddy Labour prospects as it surveys UK’s bleak economic terrain

Good morning. If you can just hold on a few more days till Monday, Stephen will be back. But today I’m standing in, looking at some FT analysis and new polling on Labour’s election prospects — as well as the party’s expectations management regarding a possible victory and what it might be able to do with it. Tomorrow my colleague Jude Webber, Ireland correspondent, will be here.

Let it grow (more than the rest of the G7)

The FT’s series on Labour, The Starmer Project, led by Jim Pickard, has been compelling even to those who are familiar with the terrain. Looming over a lot of it is Rachel Reeves, the would-be chancellor, and her battle for shadow cabinet supremacy. She wants to rule out any policies that give the impression that Labour, once in power, might play fast and loose with fiscal discipline. For those who enjoy the soap opera aspects of Westminster, the latest instalment of the policy story, about building a green economy, also features Reeves squaring up to Ed Miliband and his energy and climate change brief. His influence in the Starmer circle is often mentioned along with a note on his record as party leader (Elections fought: 1. Election victories: 0).

Today’s piece from Chris Giles, our economics editor, deals with the “bleak” economic landscape that Labour might inherit — the prettily-presented data will not look good to Reeves and team. Chris explores the political problems the outlook implies for Labour — including, how on earth to manage public expectations of turning around the public services without a spending spree.

Here’s another, though, and one that sparked an interesting intervention this week. Starmer has promised to give the UK the best “sustained growth” in the G7. He can’t control what happens in the other, comparator countries, which already makes it a tricky pledge to keep. But even the Labour leader’s allies lack confidence in achieving the promise while holding the current line on Brexit — which is to make it work and not row back on it.

A couple of nights ago Neil Kinnock, former Labour leader, admitted: “I worry — with great loyalty — about how it will be possible to achieve the ambition, or progress towards fulfilling the ambition, of a sustained, high economic growth rate in the absence of our engagement in the Single Market.” He was talking to the UK in a changing Europe think-tank, and in full, bearded elder statesman mode.

He also warned against taking the popular SW1 parlour game “Will this be 1992 or 1997?” too seriously — pointing out that every general election is different. There are indeed reasons to think more outcomes are possible than one that mimics 1992 (narrow win for John Major over Kinnock’s party) and 1997 (voters stampeding away from the Conservatives and delivering Tony Blair a thumping 179-seat majority).

Hung up

Kinnock’s views on comparing the putative #GE2024 analysis with previous elections is of interest because his 1992 losing campaign was plagued with endless speculation on whether there would be a hung parliament. It got completely out of hand, and was partly blamed (along with a ruthless Tory campaign on Labour’s tax plans) for the against-expectations result. Even in the Liberal Democrat camp, where you might expect glee at talk of outsize influence for the minor party after an inconclusive result, strategists still see 1992’s public preoccupations with post-election deals as a cautionary tale on how not to run a campaign — they netted only 20 seats.

Neither Labour nor the Lib Dems want to repeat the 1992 mistakes. As I wrote a few days ago, Ed Davey’s leadership of the third party is a steady-as-she-goes, gradualist affair. He does not want to trumpet either opposition to Brexit or power-sharing with Labour in case he frightens the disillusioned-Tory horses in the limited number of mainly Tory-held seats around the south-east of England that he thinks can fall to his party this time. But not admitting any possibility at all of influence on Labour risks looking irrelevant.

For the main opposition, of course, it’s a different matter entirely — why admit the possibility of relying on other parties at all when you want to secure a majority government after what will be 14 years out of power? Expect a new poll for the pro-EU group Best for Britain, published yesterday, to dominate a lot of debate for the rest of the week. It suggests a healthy Labour win and a majority of 140 seats based on the redrawn constituency boundaries (and a transformed picture in Scotland since the SNP implosion).

It’s not unalloyed good news for Team Starmer, though, as the FT political team explains: there’s an opportunity for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to head off defeat — so that yes, you’ve guessed it, we might end up with a hung parliament. And this is down to the high level of undecided voters.

Both the stories I’ve focused on today, the economic plan and the prospects of a healthy victory, actually circle back to a central problem for Starmer. There’s a tendency to assume that there will be a change of government because many voters believe the situation is dire. As a survey last month for The New Britain Project, a campaign group, showed, 58 per cent say that “nothing works anymore”. But in the same piece of research, 47 per cent of undecided voters were hesitant about Labour because “I’m worried they won’t be able to do a better job than the Tories at sorting out the cost of living crisis”. Nearly 75 per cent of all those surveyed said they lacked confidence in the ability of politicians to solve the country’s biggest issues.

Labour may need a bit more of that “hopey-changey stuff” to pull off a win.

You’re as cold as ice

The pre-election phoney war has well and truly started, so just think: so many months to come in which senior politicians find peculiar, contorted ways to reject criticism of their preferred candidate for prime minister. Here’s Kinnock, who was damned as a hothead during his own spell in charge of Labour, defending Starmer’s alleged dullness at the Tuesday UKICE event: “His passion is cold — as cold as ice — but by God it’s effective.” Yikes.

Now try this

The rest of us can’t really compete with Stephen’s extracurricular cultural activities. But here’s a nice politico-cultural non-fiction crossover: The Invention of Essex, a new book by Tim Burrows, which I’ve reviewed for this weekend’s paper and can be read online here. Come for the swing seats and target voters (hullo “Essex Man”), stay for the hair-raising exploits of boy-racers on the Southend seafront, gangsters, reality TV stars and my only famous forebear, the wizard Cunning Murrell. It’s a very good read and the miasma of the marshlands will hover about you long after you’ve closed it.

Top stories today