By Stephen Fisher, 27 February 2026

Yesterday Labour lost the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election. This was a constituency were they took 50.8% of the vote at the 2024 general election and an estimated 67.2% in 2019. 

With just 25.4% of the vote yesterday, it was their thirteenth biggest ever drop in vote share at a by-election. Labour’s vote dropped to half of what it was in 2024, and to just under two-fifths (38%) of their 2019 vote. Moreover, Labour had not lost a parliamentary election in the area since the 1931 election: a time when Labour lost four out of every five seats it defended following the collapse of the Labour government during the Great Depression.  

There are already several good analyses of the by-election result including these from (in alpha order), Stephen Bush, John Curtice, Peter Kellner, John Rentoul, Michael Thrasher, and Henry Zeffman, as well as some great pre-election commentary by Rob Ford. There’s lots of good relevant background analysis, including this from Jane Green and Marta Miori. 

I thought this might be a reasonable moment to share the piece below that I wrote for the Oxford Forum on how and why Labour’s support has collapsed since the 2024 general election. 

Since mid-November, when I finished the piece below, Labour’s support in the polls broadly stabilised at around 19%. So, despite numerous developments — including the Budget, Andy Burham being blocked from standing in the by-election, publication of the Epstein files, the departure of Morgan McSweney from number 10, the Scottish Labour Leader calling for Starmer to step down, and various controversial policy announcements and U-turns — Labour’s support in the polls has essentially been steady at around 19% since October.

We shall see if that continues to be the case. 

Perhaps the most important consequence of the by-election result is that it will encourage the Greens to challenge Labour in more places in local elections and for liberal-left voters to be more willing to vote Green in seats Labour are defending. The more success the Greens have at local elections in Labour seats the more they are likely to carry on challenging in Labour seats at the next general election. 

It turned out in Gorton and Denton that the combined Green and Labour vote was more than twice the Reform vote, and so Reform could not have won on their share however the combined Labour-Green vote split between those two parties. But in a general election there are likely to be many more seats where Reform will win without tactical coordination between the relatively liberal-left parties. So, one of the few sources of hope for Labour that I identified in the piece below is now looking less likely. 

Consequently, Reform should be glad that their chances of winning a majority at the general election has gone up because co-ordination failure among their opponents is more likely. 

Otherwise, I think the rest of the analysis below — of Labour’s predicament as it was in November — still holds. 

On the Labours of Labour 

As submitted to the Oxford Forum, 17 November 2025. Pdf of the printed version here.

The 2024 general election was a spectacular turnaround for Labour. The 2019 election was the worst result for Labour since 1935, but Starmer’s majority of 174 last year was only a little short of Tony Blair’s 179 majority in 1997. A year and a quarter on and things don’t look so good for team Starmer. Where did it all go wrong? 

There is no clear event that precipitated the decline in Labour opinion poll ratings. They have dropped steadily month after month. From 35% of the GB vote at the July 2024 general election, the average of the polls was 33% in August 2024, 31% in September, 30% in October, 28% in November, 26% in December and January, 25% in February and March, 24% in April, and 23% in May and June.  

That 12-point drop is the largest for a first year of any government. The previous record was set by John Major who lost 11 points as a result of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis, and went on to lose the 1997 election heavily. Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee both lost 5 points in their first years as prime minister. Both went on to win the next election, but it took the Falklands war to rescue Thatcher’s popularity and Attlee only just squeaked home and was out within a year. 

Support for Labour continued to collapse after the government’s first birthday: to 22% in July; 21% in August and September; and 19% in October and the first half of November 2025. That is, well below the 31% for Reform UK at the same point. Also in mid-November, approval for the government stood at just 13% in YouGov polls, with 70% expressing disapproval. That is on par with attitudes to Rishi Sunak’s government just before it lost the 2024 election. By contrast, 39% of Americans told YouGov that they approve of “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as President”, while just 56% disapprove. 

Not only did 59% of people say the government did worse than they expected over its first year, but people have little faith that it will succeed in its aims in the future. According to an Ipsos in July, less than a quarter of people believe that the government will fulfil their five missions by the time of the next election.

Keir Starmer’s own personal ratings are also terrible. Ipsos have long asked voters if they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the way the prime minister is doing their job. At the end of October, 79% were dissatisfied, just 13% were satisfied. That net satisfaction rating of -66 is the worst Ipsos-MORI have ever recorded for any prime minister since they started asking the question in 1977. Hitherto John Major and Rishi Sunak were joint worst with -59 points each. 

When asked how Keir Starmer has changed the country, 49% told Ipsos in July that he had made things worse, a further 29% said he made no difference, and just 19% thought he had changed the country for the better. 

It is not just opinion polls that show things going badly for Labour. At the local elections in May, Labour lost control of the one council they were defending and 66% of their seats. They only won 98, little more than the 79 secured by the Greens. The BBC Projected National Share of the local election vote put Labour on just 20%, down from 34% in 2024. That was the lowest level for Labour since the 2009 local elections which were held in the aftermath of both the financial crisis and MPs’ expenses crisis and heralded Labour’s loss at the 2010 general election.

Also in May, Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election to Reform, a seat that Labour had won with a majority of 34.8 points over Reform at the general election less than a year before. In October, Labour were pushed into third place (with just 11% of the vote) by Plaid Cymru and Reform at the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly, a place Labour had won for over 100 years.

In local by-elections between May and mid-November, Labour lost three quarters of the seats they were defending (39 out of 52). 

Traditional uniform change projections from mid-November opinion polls suggest that — if nothing much changes — Labour could lose over two thirds of their seats in a general election. Reform would win 349 seats — a majority of 48 — while Labour suffer their greatest ever loss of seats ever (-296). The party would be reduced to just 116 seats, well behind the 202 seats Jeremy Corbyn won in 2019 and the lowest level since the 1931 election that followed the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. 

Such a projection is not unrealistic. The most recent Multilevel-Regression and Poststratification (MRP) seat projection from YouGov projected Labour would win 144 seats to 311 for Reform. A similar analysis from More in Common put Labour on just 90 seats with 373 for Reform. 

Labour may be in even more trouble if the concentration of the Reform vote among those who voted to leave the EU produces a more efficient distribution of the Reform vote across constituencies, as the Conservatives benefitted from in 2017 and especially 2019.  Remain voters, and those who were too young to vote at the 2016 referendum, are relatively concentrated in cities. Leave voters are more evenly distributed across England & Wales. Some 394 (61%) of constituencies are estimated to have had a majority that voted to Leave. The first-past-the-post electoral system coupled with that political geography gives an advantage to any party that consolidates support among former Leave voters, as Reform are now doing, and disadvantages those that rely on Remainers, as Labour currently do.

Why is the Labour government so unpopular?

The history of British elections shows that governments lose after economic crises, especially recessions. There has not officially been two successive quarters of negative economic growth since the last election but estimates of quarterly growth since the 2024 general election have been close to zero (0.3% or less with one exception of 0.7% in the first quarter of 2025). But with population growth of 370 thousand or 0.5% from mid 2024 to mid 2025, GDP per capita growth — although consistently positive — has averaged just 0.2% a quarter. Annual real regular pay growth was similarly positive but modest for those in work. However, since Labour came to power, unemployment has increased from 4.2% to 5.0%, the highest since the Covid pandemic. 

While inflation was close to the 2% target when Labour took office last year, it has been close to 4% throughout 2025, driven by price increases for energy (8%) and food (4.5%). In June, YouGov found that 24% of Labour defectors pointed to insufficient improvement on the cost of living as one of the three main reasons for abandoning Labour.

Although these economic indicators have been poor, they have not been as bad as in recent crises that brought down governments and prime ministers. More broadly, The Economist magazine’s Government-Performance Tracker shows a mix of positive and negative developments with no systematic improvement or deterioration overall.

However good or bad things have actually been, people overwhelmingly feel they are going to get worse. Public pessimism about the economy reached record levels in April when Ipsos found 75% expected the economy to get worse in the year ahead, compared with just 7% who thought it would improve. That -68-point difference (the Economic Optimism Index) is lower than the -64 that was recorded during both the 1980 recession and the 2008 financial crisis, and also when inflation hit 9.4% in 2022.

Although the index rose somewhat, to -56 in July, that remains near historic lows. That pessimism about the economy is not unrelated to faith in the government. Along with vote intention for Labour, the index has trended downwards over the past year from -10 after Labour took office. Also, those who support the government are more optimistic than those who do not. Only 43% of Labour supporters think the economy will get worse over the next year, compared with 68% across Britain, and 89% of Reform supporters. Whether voters have stopped supporting Labour because they have lost faith in the government’s ability to revive the economy is unclear. It may be that those who have drifted away from Labour have subsequently become more pessimistic about the economy.

When More in Common asked people in June what the government’s biggest achievement was, they overwhelming said “nothing.” They were similarly agreed that Labour’s biggest failure was means testing of the Winter Fuel Payment. Similarly, back in October 2024, YouGov found that was the policy change which voters were both most aware of and most negative about. 

The shock announcement on Winter Fuel came within a month of election. While the immediate effect on Labour support in the polls could not have been any more than a couple of percentage points, perhaps the full effects took some time to be reflected in vote intention (as apparently happened after the ERM crisis). The legislative process and legal challenges to means testing continued into November 2024, prolonging the controversy. Even though Winter Fuel Payment means testing is clearly the most talked of source of discontent with the government, in May YouGov found more people in support (47%) than opposed (39%) to restricting the payments to those on pension credit or other means-tested benefits. After the government partly reversedtheir decision in June 2025 to extend the payment to pensioners with incomes of £35,000 or less, Ipsos found71% support and just 9% opposition. Popular though that U-turn may have been, it did not lead to any rise in support for Labour. 

It is not clear what Labour can do to regain support. They should try to govern as best they can. But even if they achieve as much as could reasonably be expected of any competent government under current circumstances, it is not clear the voters would reward them.

Unless much changes, the most likely scenario is that Reform consolidate their position as the principal alternative government and go on to win the next election. The causes and indications of government election losses are often in place years in advance. In mid 2022 the Conservatives were already heading for defeat in 2024. John Major’s defeat in 1997 was due to the ERM crisis in 1992. Labour’s loss in 1979 can be traced back to losing their poll lead in the 1975 recession. 

That is not to say governments never recover from mid-term blues. Changing leaders is a tactic that helpedConservative governments win re-election they might otherwise have lost (as in 1922, 1935, 1959 and 1992). 

Labour have never secured re-election by changing prime minister. Even when disaster looms, orchestrating a change of prime minister is hard to do. An attempt to oust Gordon Brown in 2010 failed. In 1995, John Major invited Conservative MPs to “put up or shut up” but they failed to agree on an alternative. 

Is there a potential Labour leader that Labour MPs and the public can agree would be better? In July, YouGov found that all the senior Labour politicians they asked about had net negative favourability, except Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham. His +7 net favourability narrowed to +2 in October after a backlash from Labour MPs over his behaviour during the party conference. 

Replacing Rachel Reeves as chancellor has been suggested as a possible move to increase support for the government, but no prime minister has sacked a chancellor and gone on to win a general election. Some who have done so — including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — did not even survive to contest the next election. 

Even without change at the top, Labour might reasonably hope that — faced with the prospect of a Reform government — voters might come back to them. The main source of Labour decline in the polls has been the high levels of “Don’t Know”, “Would not vote” and refusals from those who were willing to tell pollsters they voted Labour last year. In the mid-November YouGov vote intention poll, some 22% of 2024 Labour voters gave one of those responses, with 16% saying “Don’t Know”. If those 22% plus the switchers to the Liberal Democrats (9%) and Greens (16%) all stayed loyal to Labour at a general election then Labour would do an awful lot better than current polls suggest they would do. Collectively that 47% dwarfs the 8% of former Labour voters that switched to Reform. Although Labour cannot bank on it (and some other pollsters show relatively more Labour to Reform switching) it is not unrealistic for Labour to hope that most of their former voters might return to them. In the months leading up to the 2019 general election the Labour vote rose from the mid 20s to 33% as the Liberal Democrat and Green vote was squeezed.

Such squeezing will be most helpful to Labour if it is focused in the seats they will be defending. It may take the form of tactical appeals. Many of Labour’s current seats were won thanks to tactical support from those who preferred the Liberal Democrats or Greens. Labour need to retain (or regain) those tactical votes. Although YouGov’s MRP projected 231 Labour losses to Reform, all but 19 would be saved for Labour if those projected to vote LD or Green voted tactically for Labour instead. That kind of complete tactical voting has never happened before, but since Green and Liberal Democrat supporters really don’t like Nigel Farage, the prospect of unprecedented levels of tactical voting is plausible.

Dire as the opinion polls are for Labour, if they hold their nerve they may recover. But it would be no great surprise if the public — having apparently lost faith with both the Conservatives and Labour — plump for Reform at the next general election.