A selection of our recent appearances in the UK media.
The Sunday Times
30 November 2025
Rachel Reeves is buying herself time, but she’s running out of moves
Next week, Reeves is likely to face an urgent question in parliament over claims that she misled the public — and markets — by overstating the scale of the fiscal challenge in order to justify tax rises. While No 10 last night dismissed the claim as disingenuous and peddled by those “who don’t understand maths”, the public are yet to be convinced that the tax-and-spend decisions that ensued — those “choices” of which Reeves spoke — were justified.
According to polling by More in Common, only 6 per cent of voters believe the cost of living will fall as a result of the budget:
Of the 1,500 voters polled in the 24 hours after her statement, those who struggled to make ends meet were the most pessimistic: 70 per cent said it would increase their day-to-day costs, compared with slightly less than half of the “very comfortable”.
The Sunday Times
30 November 2025
Keir Starmer will move to rescue budget after Rachel Reeves row
In other developments:
• The U-turn on income tax was a “political decision”, senior government figures acknowledge, as it emerged that No 10 conducted private polling showing it would have provoked a public outcry;
• A More in Common poll finds 51 per cent of Britons do not think their energy bills will be cut;
• The survey shows that 58 per cent of voters believe Reeves’s freeze on income tax thresholds breaks Labour’s manifesto promise, up from 47 per cent who thought this before the budget.
The Guardian
30 November 2025
Starmer leads fightback as budget row rumbles on for Reeves
Reeves argued on Sunday that she needed to put up taxes to increase her buffer against unexpected costs to protect her fiscal rules and keep government borrowing costs down. Her allies point out that without the productivity downgradeshe would have been in a far more comfortable position.
But Reeves and Starmer know that the more challenging long-term problem is that the public appears to have made its mind up on how the government is managing the economy. Polling for More in Common after the budget shows just 16% of voters think the chancellor is doing a good job – almost exactly the same as thought so beforehand.
The Guardian
27 November 2025
‘It was just … meh’: the voters who feel ‘tinkering’ budget let them down
Research group More in Common spoke to former ‘blue wall’ constituents unimpressed by ‘chaotic’ U-turns
“It’s all sort of stacked against you … The people that are working hard and earning a decent wage, trying to get childcare costs under control … you sort of question why you’re doing what you’re doing,” was how Hayley, an assistant headteacher in our focus group in Aldershot, described the economy, shortly after the budget was announced.
Hayley’s not alone: a record 57% of Britons now say they are unsure that the cost of living crisis will ever end. But what was so revealing about Wednesday’s focus group was that they were all in what we would normally see as relatively high-paid jobs, they owned their own homes – not the type of voter you’d normally think of as struggling. As Martin, a product manager in the automotive industry, put it: “On paper, we should be feeling really well off.”
The Telegraph
26 November 2025
Dear Rachel, do you have any clue how much hard-working people are struggling?
You could have reversed the idiotic increase in your last Budget in employers’ National Insurance contributions which has had such a devastating impact on hospitality, on hiring in general and has seen tens of thousands of devastated people lose their jobs.
The latest polling by More in Common shows that even your own Labour voters prefer spending cuts to tax rises. But you’re a coward, Chancellor, aren’t you? You know the innumerate, purple-haired progressives on the benches behind you will scream red murder at the first whiff of “austerity”. And party politics comes before country, no matter what Sir Keir Starmer promised voters on the steps of Downing Street.
Politico
25 November 2025
Donald Trump is a hurdle to peace in Ukraine, say Brits
Donald Trump once claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in a day. Brits think the U.S. president is a hurdle to lasting peace. More in Common polling shared with POLITICO’s London Playbook Tuesday found 47 percent of British voters think the U.S. president is a hindrance to efforts to stop the fighting, compared to 21 percent who say he provides a boost.
Just over a fifth (21 percent) said he is neither a help nor a hindrance, while 11 percent didn’t know. An overwhelming 75 percent of voters also think it is important for the U.K. to stand up for Kyiv’s sovereignty, compared to 8 percent who believe it isn’t.
The More in Common think tank polled 2,062 British adults between Nov. 22 and 24, as U.S. and Ukrainian officials worked on a peace agreement in Geneva almost four years after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The overall margin of sampling error for the poll is 2.2 percentage points.