Back in the day – in 1992 – the think tank I worked for commissioned a series of focus groups of swing voters in marginal seats. They had all voted Conservative in that year’s election, having toyed with and then deciding not to vote Labour.
I thought of those voters yesterday, when the Prime Minister decided to tell potential Reform voters that they’re a bunch of racists. (I know he didn’t put it like that, and that he says he doesn’t think that, but bear with me.)
One constant of those 1992 focus groups was the popularity of the Lib Dems’ manifesto idea of ‘a penny on income tax for education’. Almost everyone thought it a great idea. It was only when the pollsters really looked that it emerged just why it was so popular. Our focus members thought it was, quite literally, an extra penny on their income tax bill, rather than a 1 percentage point increase in the rate of tax.
I learnt a lesson that has stayed with me about politics. Geeks like me might obsess over the details and minutiae of politics and policy, but for most people, all they hear is the broad thrust.
Just as a penny on income tax was heard as meaning an extra penny to pay, so when the Prime Minister today lambasts Reform’s policies as racist, voters who are now telling pollsters that they would vote Reform hear those two words – Reform and racist – and see Sir Keir Starmer calling them racist.
It’s continually striking just how bad at politics Starmer is – and how he seems incapable of improving. Asked in his round of post-speech interviews whether he thinks Nigel Farage is a racist, he said: ‘No, nor do I think Reform voters are racist. They’re concerned about things like our borders, they’re frustrated about the pace of change. So I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist.’ All he was doing, he said, was ‘talking about a particular policy’ – axing indefinite leave to remain.
That’s fine and dandy, except that is not the message those voters will have taken from his speech – or more specifically reports of his speech, because only political obsessives watch actual speeches. They will think the PM thinks they are racist. Starmer can tell interviewers that he doesn’t mean that, but his clarifications are just noise.
It may be that I have maligned Starmer, and that he is in fact a genius tactician. Perhaps he has decided, as the Lib Dems have, that Labour has no interest in Reform voters. Ed Davey’s party has made attacking Reform – and thus Reform voters – their core message.
It may be that Starmer is in fact a genius tactician
But while it makes total sense for the Lib Dems to go after Reform voters – the crossover between potential Lib Dem voters and potential Reform voters is tiny – it makes no sense for Labour to be perceived as branding the very voters it is losing to Reform as racist, when it needs to keep hold of them.
It’s as if Starmer has looked at the 2016 US presidential election, seen Hillary Clinton labelling Trump voters as ‘deplorables’ (we often forget that she added for good measure that they were ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’), and decided that it was a good attack line for Labour.
When it comes to drawing the wrong political conclusion, I don’t think it’s possible to underestimate the PM’s stellar ability.
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