Reform voters are the big outliers on immigration

Welcome to the 128th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which has now been joined on Substack by another of my newsletters. While TWIP is weekly and about political polling, the other, Liberal Democrat Newswire, is monthly and about the Lib Dems. You can find it here.

But back to polling, and this time I take a look at new polling about immigration to see if the picture painted in earlier editions has changed.

Then it’s a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

But first, this week’s head scratching comes courtesy of YouGov, who published a poll with fieldwork all carried out in September 2024 that included this question, “How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Keir Starmer will ever become Prime Minister?” Make what you will of (only) 73% picking “very likely”. Though another 13% pick “don’t know” and may indeed not know who the current PM is (or be baffled by the question), the head scratching starts with the 9% who think it only “fairly likely” and intensifies as we get to the 2% who think it “fairly unlikely” and the 3% who rate it “very unlikely”. In a neat sign of how people tend to pick the answer that leans towards their own side in such questions regardless of the specific wording, 4% of Conservative 2024 voters pick “very unlikely” but 0% of Labour 2024 voters do.

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Reform voters are the big outliers on immigration

Regular readers will recognise three long-running conclusions from polling and focus group data in my coverage of views on immigration:

1. That immigration doesn’t top the list of the public’s concerns overall, with the NHS and economy or cost of living being the dominant two. It does come out with well above average importance for a group of voters on the right, but conversely that means it scores below average for voters elsewhere, making it a poor choice of top topic for a party looking to be more than a niche on the right.

2. That there are long-term trends in favour of a more liberal approach to immigration.

3. That while the public overall says it favours lower net immigration, when you break this down into the individual components of net immigration, support flips. Ask group by group and you get a set of answers that don’t add up to wanting lower immigration. (That’s partly due to many people thinking illegal immigration is a much larger part of the total than it really is, and so favouring, say, generous approaches to immigration for the public sector while wanting an end to illegal immigration wouldn’t end up with the story of net immigration figures that most people expect it would.)

The cases for both #1 and #2 have weakened in more recent times, with some polling on some ‘most important issues’ questions putting immigration higher than third, for example. Those may be short term weakenings, or part of a more significant undermining of that picture.

So let’s look at a big new report by British Future, using data from Ipsos and see how this picture is evolving, crumbling or perpetuating. As the report says, the research was, “conducted shortly after the [general] election in unusual circumstances during a summer of violent disorder and riots”.

First, we get a repeat of the picture that there is a group of voters on the right who are very concerned about immigration, but also that these views are significantly different from where the rest - and majority - of public opinion sits.

As one of the pieces spun off from the report puts it:

The new research finds that, across a range of tracker questions, Reform voters are outliers – with starkly different views to the average voter and to supporters of other parties. They are the only group to oppose resettlement schemes like Homes for Ukraine and the prospect of using them again in response to future crises; the only group where a majority feel immigration is not talked about enough and should be the number one priority for the government; and the only group where a majority feel no sympathy at all for people crossing the Channel.

Or in graph form:

Gideon Skinner, Senior Director of UK Politics at Ipsos, concludes:

Immigration is a key issue for Reform voters – and for those Conservative voters from 2019 who switched to the party at the last election. They were very unhappy with the way the last Conservative Government handled the issue, and remain very dissatisfied with the way the new Labour government is dealing with it too. However they are the most negative – and most focused – group on the topic among a polarised public where there a range of other views that place more emphasis on control and the need for immigration in certain sectors as much as deterrence to get numbers down.

What about other people’s views then? The report says:

Many people remain ‘Balancers’ on immigration – feeling both pressures from population change and pragmatic support for migrants who make an economic and social contribution. They want a system that offers control and compassion, with an orderly, workable and humane approach to asylum and refugees.

Moreover, that basic tension - people saying yes to cutting immigration but then also saying no to the measures required to bring that about - remains:

Most of the public want to see immigration fall from its record levels: 55% now support reductions in overall numbers. But those who would like net migration numbers reduced still struggle with the dilemmas of control – and what migration they would actually cut.

There is no flow of immigration for work and study tested that a majority of the public – nor even a majority of Conservatives – would reduce.

Large reductions of immigration are not possible without securing public understanding that this must entail significantly cutting the flows of migration that retain broad popularity across the political spectrum.

No surprise therefore that the basic misunderstanding of the numbers continues:

The public estimate – on average – that asylum seekers made up more than a third of immigration to Britain, though in reality it is just 7%. Some 39% of Reform voters believe that more than half of migrants are asylum seekers. But the scale of overestimation captures how much the visible lack of control over arrivals in small boats drives public anxiety.

(The British media’s style very much is one of ‘dog doesn’t eat dog’, so it is unlikely we’ll be getting journalists quizzing the editors from outlets which heavily cover immigration about whether they think they share any responsibility for this. Such interviews would though, I suspect, be fascinating.)

However, what that does mean is that the government’s future standing on immigration is likely to be disproportionately influenced by what happens to asylum seeker numbers, and in particular if small boats in the Channel continue to be a newsworthy item.¹

As for long-term trends, that long-running trend towards being more positive about immigration has stalled and even reversed somewhat:

Plus there is this, though note the very compressed y-axis scale, meaning that the changes between the start and end of the graph are still in single digits:

Overall then, that trio of points I started off with do now need modifying to reflect current public opinion. There has been at least a short term change in the long term trends and a rise, again possibly short term, in the importance that people give to immigration as an issue. With need more time to see if those are blips, pauses or reversals of the previous patterns.

It does however remain the case that trying to build political appeal by focusing strongly on an anti-immigration message looks to be a route to be a niche party rather than a broadly popular one. Perhaps to survive as the largest party on the right that would therefore still be a wise course for the Conservative Party. But to try to become a majority government again via this route still looks much less likely to be successful.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates:

Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:

For more details, and updates as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

Values, voters and a puzzle about the Conservatives.

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The Conservative conference isn’t being driven by the polls, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.