A Coalition for the Future of Britain

In July’s general election, Labour secured a parliamentary majority of 174. This is a remarkable achievement in any election but particularly so considering where the party had come from. Less than five years ago, Labour suffered its worst election result since 1935. At that point, its plight appeared existential, its reputation one of disregard for voters’ concerns and its policy platform offering zero credibility.

To have reversed all this is a testament to Keir Starmer and the team around him. By removing any fear that the electorate may have had about Labour taking power, the party was able to build a coalition of voters united against decline. The key political question now is how to keep this coalition together so that the government can enact long-term policy to deliver the change Britain desperately needs.

To learn more about this coalition – its shape, its scale and, critically, how it can be maintained – the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has worked with the research and strategy consultancy Yonder. This research draws on survey interviews with 4,000 voters in England and Wales, which are mapped onto the “clockface” – Yonder’s geodemographic model, built on census microdata. This model organises every seat in England and Wales across two axes: security (including factors such as health, levels of deprivation, income and educational attainment) and diversity (the make-up of its local demographic). We can use these axes to visualise the population on the face of a clock. This provides a clear, intuitive and original way to map how electoral coalitions are changing, and why.

A Broad Coalition

Data from the 2024 election show that Labour moved from an electoral coalition dominated by high-diversity, low-security seats in 2019 to winning… well, everywhere.

One proof point of Labour’s achievement is how it turned the demographic clock back. Since 2010 – even before Brexit roiled British politics – the Labour Party’s base had been shifting, seemingly inexorably, towards one type of seat: more diverse areas with higher-than-average levels of economic and social security. Labour has halted and partially reversed this trend.

Placing each constituency in England and Wales on the clockface model shows the implication of this. Because Labour largely already held the bottom left and a lot of the top left – the places with higher levels of diversity – the gains in 2024 were predominantly in the less densely populated places defined by lower levels of diversity, and most particularly in those places that also have lower levels of economic security.

The net effect is that Labour-held seats split almost equally between the left and the right of the clockface.

According to Yonder’s insights, this broad coalition maps neatly against a belief across England and Wales that Britain is in economic decline and the state is no longer working.

Labour united voters against this decline. The government can now unite them around what Britain could and should be – giving people something to vote for come the next election, rather than against. In an age of increasing voter volatility, this may seem like a daunting task. It is made harder by another belief uniting this coalition: that politics isn’t working, and will not deliver real and tangible change that improves voters’ lives.

Despite these challenges, there is also a huge opportunity – one that an ailing country desperately needs its leaders to take. By embracing technology, the government can go beyond fixing Britain to positively transforming the country – uniting it on its journey to prosperity. The prime minister has already taken the first step: recognising that things will get worse before they get better, while offering the hope that once the foundations have been fixed, “we have a country that we have built together.”

This is the right political message to strengthen a coalition and, most importantly, it’s the right course of action for a country desperately in need of transformation.

A Volatile Electorate

A significant feature of the election was the performance of the smaller parties. Just 57.4 per cent of voters opted for Labour or Conservative – the lowest combined total since Labour became a major political force after the first world war. This isn’t a failure of electoral strategy. Instead, it’s a consequence of the effective distribution of the Labour vote – losing in cities, gaining in the rest of the country – and it means that the average constituency in the UK is much more likely to be a marginal seat. The average Conservative seat now has a majority of slightly more than 3,500, down from 14,500. The average Labour MP has a majority of 7,000, down from 12,000. A swing of just 4 per cent against Labour in the next election will mean the party loses its majority.

Analysis on a seat-by-seat basis reveals just how complex the coalition against decline is. Reform UK won a substantial share of the overall vote by exploiting the grievances of working-class communities, and while its share of seats badly under-performed compared to that vote, the new party is now in second place to Labour in 89 constituencies (and second in only nine Tory-held seats). The Green Party, outflanking Labour on the left, is second in 39 constituencies. The Liberal Democrats are the main challenger to Labour in just six seats, while the Conservatives are the main challenger in just over half of the seats Labour now holds.

Labour’s new electoral map creates a situation that no governing party has faced before: a threat from the right through Reform UK and from the left via the Green Party. On top of this, there is a remarkably high level of voter volatility. The huge numbers who gave Boris Johnson a landslide four-and-a-half years ago have since turned against the Conservatives. This shift highlights a new era, post Brexit, in which voters are shedding any emotional ties to political parties, instead assessing the election in front of them. Almost half the country’s seats – 303 –are held by a different party now than they were in December 2019. This is an unprecedented level of change compared to previous elections.

Delivery, Not Decline

The policy challenge is even greater. Public services are broken – the NHS has the longest waiting lists in its history and an ever-growing budget that takes up more than 11 per cent of Britain’s GDP. More than 2.8 million people need treatment for their physical and mental health, rendering them unable to live healthy, happy, productive lives. Record numbers are persistently absent from schools, an issue exacerbated in high-deprivation communities, which will only add to the long-term economic challenges facing Britain. The country has been stuck in a doom loop of low investment, low growth and high taxation.

Politics seeps into the hole created by years of poor or no policy; the summer riots, galvanised by disinformation and social media, showed this. While many people condemned the violence, they also harbour legitimate concerns about immigration and integration. Meanwhile, though Just Stop Oil has been criticised for the tactics deployed at its climate protests, the group channels the anxieties of many voters – a large number of them young people, who turned to the Green Party at the ballot box. If the political landscape across Europe is anything to go by, this will feed the right who pounce on legitimate concerns about the pace and impact of climate action on working people’s lives.

With voters once again flexing their democratic muscles to show they’re not tied to any one party, maintaining discipline among a Parliamentary Labour Party that is facing constituency-specific challenges based on slim, diverse majorities will be a significant political-management challenge. How does a Labour government speak to voters’ anxieties, and retain control of a Parliamentary Labour Party fighting battles to its left and right, while delivering on the monumental, decade-long challenge of reversing Britain’s decline?

The answer is to pursue a policy agenda that goes beyond just firefighting. The government should set out a plan to transform the country, enabled by technology. This can be a shared mission, one that every Briton can get behind. It should galvanise business, charities and community groups. As the prime minister has already set out, change is going to be difficult and at times painful for the country – but the future can be one in which the NHS is genuinely a world leader in preventing diseases, rather than spending 40 per cent of its budget treating preventable diseases. Where every child, regardless of location, has access to a world-class AI tutor that enables their teachers to tailor their learning experiences. Britain can have smart borders, knowing who’s entering the country and shaping migration policy to the needs of the country. And we can become an international leader again, including in life sciences and climate, innovating to save lives and reduce emissions well beyond our borders.

Transformation cannot be piecemeal. It must be politically confident and brave. It needs to be wrapped up in a vision of what Britain could be – a sense of the possible that voters can unite behind and translate into an aspiration for their own lives. Being something for everyone will inevitably mean being nothing to anyone: the priorities of a Green voter in Bristol versus those of a Reform-tempted voter in the North West may not immediately align, but their fear of decline and desire for change may well. Rebuilding a coalition around Britain’s future is a huge political opportunity that Labour has earned the right to pursue. It will be worth it. Imagine an election in 2029 where voters are united in backing Britain’s ongoing transformation, rather than once again voting against its ongoing decline.

Explore Yonder's polling here.