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Francis Bell
A communications and public affairs professional focused on delivering policy recommendations, briefings and key findings to a political and industry-level audience. Formerly a Parliamentary Researcher for two Labour Members of Parliament with experience on the Defence Select Committee and International Development Committee.
An enormous amount of political capital and policy generation is currently preoccupied with the question of exactly which ‘voters’ to target for a selection of centrist and centre-left parties in the UK. Some are contemplating electoral oblivion, some seeking to become kingmakers and others to flood the policy vacuum - I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is which.
The presupposition that a ‘voter’ is already in a clear camp at least three years out from a General Election is a dangerous one, but what is almost certain is that the ruling Labour Party will perform some sort of reset after a likely hammering at the local elections on the 7th May. Many commentators are in agreement that the Party is targeting current Reform voters, the fabled ‘Workington Man’ and ‘Stevenage Woman’ of the red wall, by shifting their stance to a more hardline one on immigration, crime and welfare.
Signposts and Weathervanes
As Tony Benn once said, politicians can be categorised as either ‘signposts’ or ‘weathervanes’ - indicating a clear and principled position on an issue they then take to the public; or responding wildly to changes in the prevailing wind blown by polling and headlines.
Sensitivity to the pervading mood of the country they are governing is hardly a criticism of a government, but evidence points to a slightly different picture as to whom they are losing to Reform, and why. And with this crossroads coming in the next two weeks, the Labour Party are not alone in likely doing some naval-gazing on the morning after the night before.
A recent poll by the British Election Study commissioned by The Economist suggested that, of the 2024 Reform voters, only around 10% had voted for Labour in the previous general election. The nadir for Corbyn-era Labour came in 2019, but with Boris Johnson promising a policy platform far to the right of the one-nation Conservative base, previous Conservative voters still made up 50% of the exodus to the Brexit Party against Labour’s less-than-10%.
In 2017, Labour won 11.3m votes and, although the Brexit Party were nowhere near the electoral force they were to become, a policy platform far to the left of the other parties led to a bleed of only around 15% to Farage’s team.
Fast forward to the 9.7m vote-getting landslide of the centre-left/centrist Starmer-led Labour Party, and appealing to a Reform voter-base that hasn’t ‘abandoned’ the party to any significant degree since 2005 is likely to drag the party away from its roots, and damagingly - its core voter base.
Being pulled to the right of both the Party’s soft-left, and arguably the Lib Dems, has led to the rapid rise of the Green Party, who are now the most popular among all age categories under 50. Of 18-24 year olds, who traditionally backed Labour and left-leaning parties, 49% will now vote for the Greens according to YouGov tracker in April 2026.
Several polls commissioned by Survation and YouGov assessing voting intention have put between 13-31% of previous Labour voters going to the Greens at the next General Election. More than any loss of voters to Reform or the Brexit Party.
Crucially, and this is where things get really interesting, around 10% of former Labour voters have suggested that they will vote Lib Dem in the next election according to Survation. Which puts the Lib Dems in an interesting position policy-wise.
Traditionally in the centre, the Lib Dems find themselves in the position of being outflanked by both Labour and the Greens to the right and left respectively - no longer a protest vote and not the sole, pro-market, pro-social safety-net party of the ‘sensible’ centre. But what is in their favour, as it was in Starmer’s for the 2024 Election, is the geographical distribution of voters in the UK.
In 2024, the Lib Dems managed to win 72 seats with 3.5m votes. Of the Party’s 64 gains, 60 were from the Conservatives. They achieved this by targeting the Blue Wall of affluent commuter-belt and countryside-based constituencies in the South and South West of England where a moderate Conservative vote shifted revolting against the Borissian/Trussian era of scandal and mismanagement.
Last year, in council by-elections where a Reform candidate finished in the top two, a Lib-Dem candidate defeated them 78% of the time. That, compared to 17% by Labour and 0% by the Conservatives, paints a picture, when viewed through a purely policy-related lens, of a party adopting a politically left-of-centre policy platform (as I would argue the Lib Dems currently do) and beating Reform. Whereas a Labour Party shunting to the right is clearly being outdone by a Reform Party that has redefined it. The Tories have no credit left in the bank and Labour will simply never outplay Reform at their own game.
There may be a ‘never vote Labour’ traditionalism at play in the leafy counties here, but the cold hard facts are suggesting that a shift to the right in an attempt to win back voters that were never theirs in the first place is doing the Labour Party more damage than good.
The Geography Problem
The reason Starmer was able to romp home with a gigantic majority with a smaller number of overall votes was because of the way these votes were spread across the country. The party received a lower vote share than any party forming a post-war majority government, but managed to capitalise on each vote because of its spread away from party heartlands.
Geography now gives Labour a headache. Starmer mastered the distribution of voters in 2024 but will never have that opportunity again. This is a reality that Labour must face. The evidence tells us that the voters who went for Boris Johnson and have now moved from the Tories to Reform were not moving from Labour in any large numbers anyway, and certainly will never return.
Labour must face the fact that they are going to lose the countryside anyway - with the loose coalition of disaffected Tories and voters willing to give the red team a go because they couldn’t do any worse - now dissolving back into a blue/teal split.
This is where the Lib Dems may capitalise in their offering of a progressive alternative. With an incumbent Labour vote decimated in the countryside, those voters in the leafy seats uncomfortable with Reform and a right-leaning Tory Party may find a haven in the Lib Dems, whilst blue-on-teal violence may split the right-wing vote.
The bottom line is that Labour can only mitigate the damage they will suffer at the 2029 General Election. Barring some kind of growth-miracle the party was always going to take a hit after a landslide that could be attributed to the perfect storm of a toxic Conservative Party and a First-Past-the-Post electoral system dishing out its most generous votes-to-seats ratio yet. 2024 was a high-water mark, but there are ways of maintaining a majority.
A return to Labour’s roots in an attempt to see off the threat from the Greens would likely reaffirm its dominance in the 160-or-so seats currently classified as urban - a considerable rearguard action when compared to the 86 seats it was projected to win in April by Electoral Calculus. It then must consider the potential for the Greens to hit their ceiling, as we have assumed Reform have, at around 25%, before facing greater scrutiny on defence and foreign policy as we approach a GE - traditionally a point where centrist voters are turned-off.
If a genuine alternative to Reform is to be found in traditional Tory heartlands that are comprised of voters who will back Reform at all costs and centrists who are looking at any alternative to a populist right-wing candidate, Labour must carefully consider how to distribute its electoral resources - but if the evidence presented above is to be believed, at no point will being to the right of the Lib Dems render them the natural alternative.
The only thing that should be preoccupying Labour now is winning back the centre and centre-left that are abandoning the party for better options in urban areas, performing a rearguard action that will hold off the Greens in cities, and nicking a few anti-Reform voters elsewhere. That, I’m convinced, will be the lesson of the 7th May, and possibly the Party’s only route to the 200-seat mark.
You can form your own conclusions from May’s results - register now for Radix Big Tent’s ‘Meet the Leaders’ webinar, at 5.00pm on Thursday 14th May with leading psephologist, Professor Tony Travers.