Has Labour gained support since Andy Burnham’s emotional speech?
Labour has enjoyed a significant bounce in the opinion polls since Andy Burnham became prime minister in July. As our tracker shows, a seven-point “Burnham bounce” lifted the party from an average of 19 per cent to an average of 26 per cent.
Nigel Farage’s 16 months in the lead in the opinion polls was brought to an end and Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool was bathed in the glow of success – although enjoying the support of barely a quarter of those who tell pollsters how they intend to vote is hardly an enthusiastic sign of approval.
This week YouGov reported that Labour had stretched its lead over Reform to five points – 27 per cent to 22 per cent – and Labour sources expressed satisfaction that Burnham’s speech had consolidated the party’s support and pushed Reform firmly into second place.
It is unwise to look at a single poll in isolation, which is why I measure the Burnham bounce since July by looking at the average of the opinion polls. But YouGov is not the only poll carried out since Burnham’s well-received conference speech last Tuesday. Two other polls have been conducted wholly after Tuesday, and they both also show a small increase in Labour support.
Opinium for The Observer put Labour on 30 per cent, up two points compared with a week earlier, and Reform on 25 per cent, up one. Find Out Now put Labour on 27 per cent, three points up on the previous week, and Reform on 23 per cent, unchanged.
After a few weeks in which Labour support seemed to have levelled off after the initial effect of the switch from Keir Starmer to Burnham, these three polls suggest a modest further increase in Labour support coinciding with the leader’s speech in which he announced an “adjustment” to the triple lock for uprating the state pension and set out ambitious plans for a new national social care service.
The Burnham bounce has coincided with the “Polanski slump”, so the polls provide a lot of circumstantial evidence for Burnham’s success in winning back disaffected Labour voters from the Green Party. To a smaller extent, the Liberal Democrats have also lost support since Burnham took over – but so too has Reform. Given that Reform has lost more than the Conservatives have gained, it seems likely that some Reform voters have switched to Labour.
We do not have much evidence of the actual movements between parties, which is complicated by people switching in and out of saying “don’t know” or “won’t vote”. But Peter Kellner, the opinion-poll guru and former president of YouGov, reported some interesting findings from a Norstat survey of people immediately after the 2024 election, which reinterviewed 5,500 of the same people between 4 and 16 September – that is, after most of the Burnham bounce had happened.
Apart from showing a remarkable further shift in Labour’s support to middle-class graduates since the last election, which I wrote about here, it also showed that Labour had lost more support to Reform and the Tories (1.5 million voters) than to the Greens and Lib Dems (1.3 million).
Perhaps the “left defectors” figure was lower than the “right defectors” because Burnham has been more successful at winning back Greens and Lib Dems than defectors to the right.
But it does suggest that the potential gains from the right are now greater than from the left – not least because in most seats Labour faces a battle against either Reform or the Tories. In those seats, a defector from Labour to Reform or the Tories counts double: one vote added to the Labour score and one vote off the opposition’s.