A selection of our recent appearances in the UK media.
The Times
14 March 2026
Trump’s Iran war is a bigger headache for the British right than left
Davey believes that, by being hawkish over Iran, the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has made a similar mistake to her predecessor Sir Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, when the former Tory leader criticised Tony Blair for “treading water” over America’s war in Iraq. The Lib Dems hope this can help them persuade some wavering Tories. “Making gains with soft Conservatives is the biggest opportunity for us, and the war is incredibly unpopular with those voters,” says a Lib Dem source.
The numbers back this up. According to pollsters More in Common, some 55 per cent of Britons now think the prime minister should “stand up” to Trump, with 27 per cent thinking he shouldn’t. Support for the war is also dropping fast among voters of every party.
The Times
10 March 2026
Keir Starmer will pay the price if the bill for Iran war spirals
What voters care about is the outcome. If energy prices go up, they will be angry with the government. Voters might expect, for instance, that he use public money to keep their energy bills low. But public debt as a share of GDP is already set to rise to more than 95 per cent by the end of the parliament. As Helen Miller, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has put it, we may have become accustomed to governments protecting household incomes from external shocks but “that can’t go on for ever”.
The political potency of this is clear. After the recent by-election in Gorton & Denton, the public opinion research company More in Common conducted focus groups to help it understand why people had voted as they did. Overwhelmingly, voters who deserted Labour, and even those who did not, talked of the cost of living.
The Economist
5 March 2026
Britain’s class politics is back—with a Green twist
Historically, Britain’s working class tended to vote Labour, while middle- and upper-class voters supported the Tories. This dynamic broke down in the 2010s, particularly after the Brexit referendum in 2016 as cultural issues rose in salience. Age and education replaced class as the key demographic dividers. Since then the class dynamics of British politics have been scrambled. To get to the bottom of this The Economist analysed a survey of 8,921 Britons, conducted by pollsters at More in Common in December 2025.
The data suggest that Britain’s politics are now divided along two dimensions. The young, the higher-educated, women and ethnic minorities are more likely to vote for parties on the left—Labour, Greens, Liberal Democrats or Scottish or Welsh nationalists. Voters on the right are older, less-educated, whiter and more male.
The Guardian
4 March 2026
Andy Burnham criticises ‘bankruptcy’ of Labour approach to campaigning
Burnham was speaking a week on from Labour’s loss of its once safe seat in the Manchester constituency, after Starmer and his allies blocked him from standing to be the party’s candidate.
Labour’s deputy leader and Burnham ally, Lucy Powell, has said he would have won the contest, in which the Green party’s candidate, Hannah Spencer, was victorious. Labour came third, with Reform UK in second.
Burnham described polling by More in Common that found a majority of people did not think the cost of living crisis would ever end as “code red for Westminster politics”.
“This is getting extremely dangerous, and change in our political system and culture is desperately needed,” he added.
The Guardian
27 February 2026
Labour’s worst fears realised by Greens’ victory in Gorton and Denton byelection
The Greens’ convincing win in the Manchester seat gives the leftwing party its best byelection result and its first northern seat. More importantly, however, it gives progressive voters a clear signal that they do not have to vote Labour to beat Reform – a signal that could prove catastrophic for the government in some of its strongest heartlands over the next few years.
“What makes this loss so consequential to Labour is not just the scale of the defeat but the message it sends to voters about future contests,” said the pollster Luke Tryl. “One of Labour’s ace cards had been the hope that, however frustrated or disillusioned progressive voters might be with the Starmer government, the threat of Reform would be enough to bring them back into the fold and reunite the left – a similar approach to President Macron’s re-election against Marine Le Pen [in France].
The Guardian
27 February 2026
Shabana Mahmood vows to stick with hardline migration policies after byelection defeat
She will also set out her vision for an asylum system to “restore order at the border and bear down on illegal migration”. Mahmood is expected to say that she supports neither the Green party’s “open borders” policy or the “nightmare” offered by Nigel Farage.
Labour sources have pointed to polling from More In Common showing that a majority of Labour and Green voters supported many of Mahmood’s proposals.