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Dear friend,

Happy Friday!

As we reach the end of Andy Burnham’s first week in office, we’ve got lots of new research we’re excited to share with you. In this week’s newsletter.

• The Burnham bounce: The new Prime Minister’s net approval rating has surged, but will that translate into support for Labour?

• What do Brits make of Burnham’s start to government? Our new polling explores Britons’ expectations of Burnham, whether they agree with his diagnosis, and what they think of his first policies in office.

• What would Britain look like with proportional representation? Our new modelling for the Guardian finds that no matter the electoral system, Britain's voters are fragmented.

• Repeating Gallup’s 1952 survey, to see how British attitudes have changed in the past 74 years.

• The rise and fall of Thomas Tuchel: How the England manager’s approval rating has changed over the past month.

As ever, remember you can hear us talk about these topics in this week’s episode of the Opinion Brief podcast:

The Burnham bounce

It’s too early to tell whether this government will win the public over, but the early signs are positive for Andy Burnham.

In our first poll of Burnham’s premiership, we saw his net approval rating jump from +3 to +13. Not only is this a ten-point jump in a single week, but it also puts him higher than Keir Starmer’s all-time high of +11, recorded immediately after the 2024 General Election.

It's also the first time since our tracker began that both main party leaders have held a net positive approval rating at the same time: Kemi Badenoch remains on +3.

Perhaps most positively for Andy Burnham, he’s particularly popular among Labour’s 2024 coalition: 57 per cent of those who backed Labour in the election think Burnham is doing a good job, compared to just 8 per cent who think he's doing badly. Yet the wider public are still making up their minds: 54 per cent say either “don't know” or “neither good nor bad” when asked to rate him - a higher undecided share than for Kemi Badenoch.

So Burnham still has work to do to define himself to much of the British public, but so far voters seem cautiously optimistic: asked in a word how they feel about the new Prime Minister, the top options are hopeful, good, optimistic and “not sure”.

How do Britons rate Burnham's first week?

While many have yet to make their mind up about the new Prime Minister, the good news for Andy Burnham is that most voters believe he deserves a fresh start: 7 in 10 Britons (71 per cent) - and majorities of every voter group - say Burnham deserves to be judged only on what he does in office, compared to just 15 per cent who will judge him on Keir Starmer's record too.

In this week’s Opinion Brief podcast, we talk about the paradox that, while Britons’ demands of Burnham are high, their expectations have been tempered. Only 26 per cent think it's likely Burnham's government will deliver “the most significant change in our politics for 40 years”, as he has promised, compared to 60 per cent who think it's unlikely. Even Labour's own 2024 voters are split down the middle, 45 per cent to 45 per cent.

But what about Burnham’s diagnosis? Much of his storytelling in recent weeks has focused on the need to tackle the North-South divide, and to undo the legacy of neoliberalism in Britain. Our polling finds that Britons are behind him on the North-South divide, but nobody really knows what neoliberalism means.

Three in five Britons (58 per cent) think the North gets less than its fair share of attention from politicians, rising to 4 in 5 (81 per cent) among people who live there. But it’s not just Northerners who hold this view: 45 per cent of people from the South of England say the North is neglected in our politics, whereas they tend to think the South gets its fair share.

But if the North-South divide is a framing that resonates, neoliberalism is not. Asked whether Burnham is right to blame neoliberalism for Britain’s problems, 20 per cent agree, while 12 per cent say it is not to blame. But the biggest group - 68 per cent - say they don’t know if neoliberalism is to blame (the highest “don’t know” figure we’ve seen for quite a while). And only 21 per cent of Britons feel they could define what the term neoliberalism actually means.

On substance, Burnham's early policy moves are landing well. In much of our work in the run-up to his entering Downing Street, we said that action on the cost of living is the public’s most urgent priority: 71 per cent name it as one of the most important issues facing the country today, and 59 per cent want it to be the government's top priority.

Cutting VAT on electricity bills is supported by 63 per cent of Britons (9 per cent opposed) and reintroducing the £2 bus fare cap by 67 per cent (7 per cent opposed), and both are popular across the political spectrum, including majorities of Reform and Conservative voters. While it’s perhaps unsurprising that Britons support these spending commitments, it also shows that his universal approach on the cost of living aligns with what the public want to see: 57 per cent think the government should prioritise cutting energy bills for all households, compared to 35 per cent who'd prefer they focused on support targeted at those struggling most.

Scrapping plans for digital ID has proven similarly popular: 61 per cent support the move, and only 14 per cent oppose it. As we discuss in this week’s podcast, it’s not yet clear how much of this support is driven by principled objections to digital ID, and how much is driven by a desire to undo a distinctive Starmer-era policy.

We’ll be tracking public reactions to Burnham’s first moves every week, so stay tuned.

What would Britain look like with proportional representation?

First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), the system we use to vote in general elections, is meant to have a major selling point: clear majorities and stable governments. Yet our latest MRP suggests that an election held tomorrow would result in a hung parliament, with Reform UK 30 seats short of a majority. And with a former advocate of proportional representation in Downing Street, the debate around our voting system has opened up again.

Our new modelling for the Guardian uses our MRP to project what British politics would look like with different voting systems.

To model these different voting systems, we put a set of questions to voters alongside our usual voting-intention question, asking how they would vote under each hypothetical system. What we cannot predict is how parties would campaign, or which parties might fragment, merge or emerge under a more proportional system.

The current FPTP system would give Reform 46 per cent of the seats off just 28 per cent of the vote, in touching distance of a sizeable coalition if the Conservatives lent their support. The proportional systems would not give Reform such a boost: regional party list is estimated to give them 28% of seats off 28% of the vote; additional member system (AMS) would give them 33% of the seats off 28% of the vote; and single transferable vote (STV) would give them 27% of the seats off 26% of the vote.

Under each of these systems, either a progressive coalition of parties - consisting of a combination of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP or Plaid Cymru - or a Reform-Conservative coalition would be the only paths to forming a government.

In a purely proportional list system, tactical considerations should largely disappear: there is no need to back the candidate seen to be 'winning here'. Without the advantage of being the largest party, Reform UK would lose almost 40 per cent of their seats. Without the advantages of a concentrated vote, the Scottish National Party would lose more than half of theirs, while the Greens - currently punished by a wide geographic distribution - would see their number of seats increase by 770 per cent.

What’s really striking about the results is that the two traditional parties’ fortunes only slightly change - showing that they are no longer the main beneficiaries of First Past the Post.

Read the excellent Guardian piece below:

We found a poll from 1952 and repeated it

Sometimes the best polling questions are also the oldest ones. This week, we found a set of gems that Gallup first put to the British public back in 1952, and we decided to ask Britain again.

The most dramatic change is how people feel about political parties - whether they are all “much of a muchness”, or if there’s a real difference between them. In 1952, 59 per cent of Britons said there was a difference between the political parties, compared to 32 per cent who thought they were all the same. In 2026, that has flipped: only 39 per cent now see a meaningful difference between the parties, while 52 per cent say they're about the same.

In the general election the previous year (1951), Labour and the Conservatives had won 97 per cent of the vote between them.

We also asked what social class people belonged to. In 1952, nearly half of Britons (46 per cent) identified as working class; today, that figure has fallen to 35 per cent. More Britons now identify as middle or lower-middle class, and very few Britons, in either era, identify as upper class.

The rise and fall of Thomas Tuchel

After England’s heartbreaking loss last week, we’re drawing our Tuchel Tracker to a close. It’s worth saying that throughout the tournament - and still today - the public have said Tuchel was doing a good job. But you can still see his approval rise and fall dramatically, and it more or less mirrors the public’s wider hopes during the tournament. After each of England's World Cup victories, his approval rating climbed higher, and England v Norway took Tuchel to a net approval rating of +36 last week - so high that he could barely fit on our graphs.

It didn't last. Tuchel's rating has come back down to +12 in our first post-tournament poll. That's still enough to make him the second most popular figure we track - only Andy Burnham now (marginally) rates higher on +13.

Thanks so much for reading, and as always, let us know what you think!

All the best,
Luke