News

The Independent

17 July 2025

Labour voters back doctors over five-day strike and think Wes Streeting should meet pay demands

Labour voters support junior doctors’ plans to stage a five-day walkout next week, even as public support for the strike collapses, according to a new poll.

Overall people oppose the industrial action due to start next Friday by a margin of 44 per cent to 34 per cent, pollsters More in Common found.

However, Labour voters support the strikes, with 47 per cent in favour and 35 per cent against, in a major challenge to the stance taken by the health secretary Wes Streeting who has vociferously pressed doctors’ leaders to ditch their plans.

The Telegraph

17 July 2025

The seats that Labour’s teenage voters will steal from Reform

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new hard-Left political party could create an earthquake for younger voters.

One in three voters aged under-25 previously said that they would consider voting for this new party when it formally emerges.

Analysis from More in Common also highlights that seats with the highest number of 16 to 17-year-olds saw independents and Workers Party perform their best.

Young voters, it would seem, are the most drawn to Labour, but also the most likely to stray from the traditional Left altogether.

BBC News

17 July 2025

Which parties could benefit from lower voting age?

In the UK, 16 and 17-year-olds make up only around 2.8% of the population aged 16 or above, so researchers say the impact on party vote share is likely to be negligible.

Turnout for elections also tends to be lower for younger age groups and if this is also true for 16 and 17-year-olds they would be an even smaller proportion of the electorate.

Luke Tryl, UK director of political research group More in Common, says he would not expect this age group to have "an outsized impact".

However, he adds: "Then again we are in an era where small shares of the vote can deliver you lots of seats in multi-party politics."

The Spectator

17 July 2025

‘Let Keir be Keir’: inside the cabinet’s away day

Luke Tryl of pollsters More in Common told a Spectator event on Tuesday evening: ‘What Labour has struggled with is that people don’t know what it’s about.’ Asked what they want from Labour at its best, voters answer ‘tackle poverty, support the working class and improve public services’. Tryl said: ‘People elect Tory and Labour governments for very different things. That rose garden speech, where Starmer said it was going to be more of the “tough choices” which people have heard about since the financial crash, got people thinking: “This isn’t why we got these guys in.” Winter fuel and the welfare cuts really jarred. In politics, you want to be congruent with what people think you’re about.’

The New Statesman

15 July 2025

Britain’s shattered trust

Westminster loves a good piece of polling research, and the latest offering from More In Common – dramatically entitled Shattered Britain – has captured imaginations as Parliament limps towards the summer recess.

Key to the analysis is not what separates Brits, but what unites us. And somewhat terrifyingly, that unifying theme seems to be a sense of mistrust. A staggering 87 per cent of people trust politicians not very much or not at all, with net negative trust among all seven groups. This tallies with the latest annual British Social Attitudes survey, published last month, which found that “Just 12 per cent trust governments to put the interests of the nation above those of their own party just about always or most of the time, a record low”.

Metro

14 July 2025