Things can only get bitter
Michael Wagstaff • 5 March 2021
The public's focus on Covid-19 end game rather than blame game is bitter pill for Starmer to swallow
I can remember it as if it were yesterday. John Prescott and Peter Mandelson jigging awkwardly to D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better. It was the day after the 1997 General Election. A Labour government had been returned after 18 years in opposition. Optimism was in the air. Tony Blair's Labour Party seemed unassailable.
Fast forward 24 years and Sir Keir Starmer's Labour is in a very different place.
A recent YouGov poll gave the Conservative's a 13 point lead over Labour. The Tories lead despite accusations of dithering over lockdown, PPE shortages at the start of the pandemic, allegations of cronyism over government contracts, the government held by the courts to have broken the law, problems with Test and Trace and over 120,000 dead from Coronavirus.
Labour party supporters must be scratching their heads wondering what on earth is going on. How can a government that has performed so poorly during the pandemic be so far ahead in the polls?
I think there are two things going on. First, the British government is not alone in being criticised for its performance. YouGov tracking data shows that significantly less than half (43%) of Britons think their government has performed well during Coronavirus (as at 22nd February 2021). They are not alone. The French government is tracking below the UK in relation to approval by its citizens. It's a similar story in Spain. The USA has only moved slightly ahead of the UK on public approval since the election of President Biden. Approval for the German government is higher at 48% but has tumbled sharply in recent weeks as the vaccine roll out has stuttered.
People see that governments of some of our closest allies are struggling too and so give the Tories the benefit of the doubt. Further, data from Opinium suggests that voters are not convinced that Starmer would have handled the pandemic any better. Again, this explains why Tory support in the polls is so high.
The other issue is that with the success of the vaccine roll out people are now focused on the end game - getting back to normal - rather than the blame game. The vaccine has brought the end into clear view hence the bounce we see in the polls. Analysis shows that there is a relationship between when people think life will return to normal and Conservative support.
We've used YouGov's voting intention tracker and plotted it against ONS data on the percentage of people who think that restrictions will be over sooner rather than later (measured by the percentage saying normality will return in six months or less).
Figure 1 : Percentage intending to vote Conservative plotted with percentage who think we will be back to normal in 6 months or less
The graphic shows the effect of the link over two time periods. The period from April 2020 to October 2020 saw a downward trend in the percentage of people who said normality would return sooner rather than later. We can also see a downward trend in Conservative support. Conversely, from October 2020 to now we have seen an upward turn in the percentage who think normality will return within six months. We also see an upward turn in the Conservative's popularity.
In fact, voting intention and thinking that things will return to normal in less than 6 months are reasonably well correlated (correlation coefficient of 0.6, where 0 is no correlation and 1.0 is a perfect correlation) and helps to explain the polls.
It seems that none of the negatives over the government's performance in the last 12 months have seriously dented Tory support. Now that the vaccine is being rolled out and normality is tantalisingly close, the Conservatives are getting a bounce.
For Sir Keir Starmer, the public's focus on the end game rather than the blame game must be a bitter pill to swallow.
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