A selection of our recent appearances in the UK media.
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.
27 February 2026
Shabana Mahmood to sacrifice ‘bourgeois support’ over migrants
However, sources close to Mahmood have hit back at suggestions that Labour is losing votes to the Greens on immigration and pointed to polling that found Green voters supported her reforms.
Polling carried out by the More in Common think tank found that Green voters were among the biggest cohort that supported Mahmood’s asylum reform to replace permanent refugee protection with temporary status.
26 February 2026
Sarwar gambles on break with Starmer as Labour support slumps
“People look at Holyrood and think: ‘Lets give them all a bloody nose’,” says Alex, a betting shop manager. Speaking in a focus group of people who voted Labour at the 2024 general election, Alex captured the downbeat mood of a cohort bitterly disappointed with the Labour government’s early performance, frustrated by the record of the Scottish National party and wearied by what they described as “scandal after scandal” polluting public life.
Organised by the public opinion researchers More in Common, the discussion took place last week in Glasgow’s southside, where the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, grew up and still lives with his family.
26 February 2026
Starmer braced for high-stakes battle for Manchester seat
Luke Tryl, of think-tank More in Common, said: “The worst outcome for Labour is either a Green win or a Reform win with the Greens in second.”
Tryl said it would not only reinforce the trend towards a split in the left vote — a mirror of the Conservatives’ loss of support on the right to Reform — but it would also undermine Starmer’s main electoral message.
“It makes it much harder for Labour to run a ‘Macron strategy’, that is ‘however much progressives might be frustrated with us, it is us or Reform and so you have to hold your nose and back us’.”
25 February 2026
Luke Tryl: What it’s like living in the Gorton and Denton ‘political storm’
Over the past few weeks, More in Common, the research company and consultancy, has been speaking to voters about what it is like living at the centre of a national political storm.
Gorton and Denton is literally a divided constituency. The M60 flows through the middle: Gorton, on the Manchester side, feels closer to the city centre. It is more diverse and more metropolitan; about two in five residents are Muslim, and two in five are either students or graduates. On the other side of the M60, Denton is more white and working class.
23 February 2026
‘It’ll be a photo finish’: inside the Gorton and Denton by-election
Both Labour and the Greens want to frame this as a binary contest: vote for us to stop Reform. Yet this slugfest risks becoming a stalemate. ‘A lot of voters on the left seem stuck in tactical paralysis: they’re desperate to keep Reform out but don’t know which party is the safer bet,’ says pollster Louis O’Geran of More in Common. ‘Even this early on, voters are already seeing competing claims from Labour and the Greens on Facebook, each presenting themselves as the tactical choice to stop Reform.’