Dear friend,

Hope you’ve had a great week. We’ve had a busy week at More in Common, and have plenty of fascinating research to share with you:

Caerphilly: Our analysis of the dramatic Welsh by-election, with insights from our conversations with voters in Caerphilly.

Is Labour becoming the party of the status quo? Labour and the Conservatives lead among the financially comfortable, while Reform and the Greens are surging among those who are struggling. What does that mean for the future of our politics?

Britons on multiculturalism: Our new polling looks at where the public is on multiculturalism, and their expectations for integration.

In other news: in a 2020 throwback, we asked the public how they remember the pandemic, lockdown and leadership during those unprecedented times. And which voters think they are most likely to go to heaven?

What happened in Caerphilly?

Last night, in the early hours we saw the seismic results of the Caerphilly by-election.

The most obvious and striking result is the collapse of Labour’s vote share in a seat that they had held for as long as the Senedd has existed - at the heart of the Welsh Valleys which has been a Labour stronghold for over a century.

With Labour’s vote share falling by 33 points since 2021 (and the vote share of the ‘big two’ falling from 63 per cent to just 13 per cent), it’s an early sign of the fragmentation and realignment we’re likely to see in next year’s Senedd election.

This result of course was driven in no small part by significant defections to both Plaid Cymru and Reform from disillusioned former Labour voters. This was the overwhelming sense we got from our focus group in Caerphilly, with voters defecting to left and right describing a weariness with a double-incumbency of Labour in Wales and Westminster. More broadly, there was a sense that Labour is losing its connection to the Welsh Valleys.

“I’ve been a lifelong labour fan. But I never thought I'd see a labour government take money away from pensioners (...) I've never seen politics so adrift. I think they've totally lost touch with the people and I think politics is broken, which is leading to Britain and Wales being broken.”

Martin, call centre manager, Labour to Plaid Cymru switcher

“I think you saw how bad things were getting after 14 years of the Tories and voted Labour and thought, oh here we go, finally things are going to turn around and I think they've just accelerated what the Tories were doing and things are getting even worse at a quicker pace. There's been too many scandals in a year or just over a year”

Derek, transport engineer, Labour - Reform switcher

“You do see reform absolutely everywhere, but it's kind of like we have been as Wales or South Wales have been quite strong at voting labour for many, many years And it's kind of like that's all we know (...) So I think people have got kind of a bit fed up of what we know and want to change, but really don't really know what the change is.”

Fiona, maternity leave, Labour - Reform switcher

With the highest turnout the Senedd constituency has ever had - and higher than the national turnout at any Senedd Election, the by-election shows that Reform is mobilising voters en masse - both those who are turning up to vote for Reform, and those who are turning up to oppose it.

Tactical voting was essential to the size of Plaid’s victory, once it became apparent they were the stop Reform party they gained as a result and that undoubtedly magnified their majority. This reflected what we heard in our conversations with voters in Caerphilly. While Reform is rapidly gaining popularity across Wales, we hear from some Welsh voters who remain averse to the party, sometimes put off by their lack of a Welsh leader, or a broader sense that Reform is a primarily English party that does not care about Wales. Meanwhile, Plaid has broadened their appeal, and proven that they can win over working class voters in communities that had previously been loyal to Labour.

This result shows that Reform has further work to do to de-risk the party in Wales. While the proportional voting system means that tactical voting will likely be less significant in next year’s Senedd election, if Reform hopes to top the poll in Wales in the next Westminster election (as our September MRP suggests is possible), they’ll need to insulate themselves from the risk that progressive voters tactically unite to keep them out by building out beyond their core base of support.

Similarly, with the upcoming budget and throughout the next few years in government, Labour may need to make a deeper offer to their progressive voters - in order to show they do represent real change, and prevent their left flank drifting to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and enabling themselves becoming the beneficiaries of tactical voting.

“If Reform get in, it would be a catastrophic moment for me. I've always thought about Plaid. If I didn't vote Labour then I'd vote Plaid. In a way a national Assembly, having a bit of a national party sort of like Scotland, it sort of makes sense to me because feeling like they're going to look after you a bit more as a bit of a connection I suppose.”

Gareth, civil servant, Labour - Plaid Cymru switcher

Is labour becoming the party of the status quo?

In our Westminster voting intention this week, we noticed two interesting things.

The first was that the Green Party has hit double digits, reaching 10 percent for the first time since April. Many pollsters have recorded a similar bounce for the Greens, suggesting that Zack Polanski's energetic campaigning may be beginning to cut through.

The other thing we noticed was an interesting pattern in the financial wellbeing of different voter groups.

Labour leads Reform by 11 points among those who say they are “very comfortable financially”. But they trail Reform by 16 points among those who say they often struggle to make ends meet. In fact, with 16 per cent of the vote, the Green Party are very close to overtaking Lab for 2nd place with those who struggle to make ends meet.

The two main parties’ vote shares peak among Britons who are comfortable, and drop sharply with age. Whereas insurgent anti-establishment parties perform much better with Britons who feel financially insecure.

A similar trend emerges across a range of measures: Labour leads among private school alumni, high earners and those who think the country is on the right track.

Earlier this year, we asked the public to rate their life satisfaction from a scale of one to ten. Labour and the Conservatives led among those who rate their life satisfaction 10/10, whereas Reform UK won with a landslide among anyone who answered 3 or lower.

Similarly, while Labour has lost voters on both sides - haemorrhaging Rooted Patriots to Reform and increasingly losing Progressive Activists to the Greens and Liberal Democrats - it is Established Liberals (our ‘Blue Wall’ segment) whose support for Labour has remained stable.

Established Liberals stand out in their optimism and their support for incremental rather than radical change - they are the most likely to say that things are getting better, that our institutions should be maintained and preserved rather than “burned down”, and to believe that economic growth benefits them: 53 per cent of Established Liberals believe that a higher-than-expected increase in GDP would be good for them, compared to just 30 per cent of the overall public.

Reform and Green voters, on the other hand, are united in their growth-scepticism, with both voter groups - by a margin of 40 per cent to 29 per cent - saying that an increase in GDP would not benefit people like them.

Labour’s higher performance among affluent voters would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago, and it shows how dramatically our politics is realigning, and that the left-right axis is no longer enough to understand it. It seems increasingly certain that the next elections will be fought along a pro-system/anti-system axis, with Reform and the Greens challenging the established parties from either side.

Britons on multiculturalism

In the midst of recent debates about multiculturalism, identity and integration, we asked Britons where they stood on these issues. At a top level, the public are more likely to think the UK is made stronger than weaker by multiculturalism.

There’s a striking age gap here: nearly two-thirds of those under the age of 25 say that multiculturalism makes the UK stronger, yet those over the age of 55 are more likely to say it weakens, rather than strengthens, the UK.

But how do Britons understand multiculturalism? Of a list of possible definitions, by far the one that the public most agree with is a society where different cultures co-exist.

Few (5 per cent) believe that multiculturalism refers to a system where people of different backgrounds live different lives. And our polling shows that Britons don’t want a country like this: three quarters of the public - and majorities of every voter group - believe it is better for communities to contain a range of ethnic groups.

More broadly, Britons have high expectations when it comes to integration: two-thirds believe that we need to do more to encourage interaction between different groups, and 93 per cent believe that newcomers have a responsibility to learn English and integrate into their communities.

In this context, we found that the public is broadly aligned with Robert Jenrick’s comments on multiculturalism. When we showed Britons his comments about wanting “people to be living alongside each other, not living parallel lives”, we found that just over half of the public agreed with him, while 22 per cent disagreed.

Strikingly, while Britons in general say that people from different backgrounds interact in their community, Reform voters stand out in their view that their own neighbourhoods are less integrated. More than half (54 per cent) of Reform voters say different ethnic groups interact “not much” or “not at all” in their neighbourhoods, compared to only 38 per cent who say they interact “sometimes” or “frequently”; a fifth of Reform voters say ethnic groups in their community do not interact at all. In contrast, half of the general public - and majorities of every other voter group - say that different ethnic groups do interact in their communities.

In other news:

Reflecting on Covid: As Boris Johnson appeared in front of the Covid inquiry this week, we asked Britons about their thoughts on the pandemic in hindsight. We found that nearly three in five Britons (58 per cent) said that school closures during the pandemic did more harm than good; but interestingly younger Britons themselves were far more positive about the measures. We also asked about how different key politicians handled the crisis, and how Keir Starmer compares to Boris Johnson as PM. You can read my thread here.

Which voters are most likely to go to heaven? We asked the public where they thought they might go after they die, assuming heaven and hell both exist. While Reform leads among both groups, their lead grows from 6 points to 20 points among those who say they are likely to go to hell. Yet it is Green voters who are most likely overall to say they expect to go to hell, and Conservatives who are most likely to think they’re going to heaven!

As always, thank you for reading.

We really enjoy hearing your feedback, so do let us know your thoughts.

All the best,
Luke Tryl

Executive Director