Should Labour move to the right on immigration?

Welcome to the 138th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which takes a look at a polling-adjacent issue. I’ve covered polling on immigration before, but what does international data tell us about the success of different political responses to such data?

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.

This week, that includes some eye-catching voting intention data from Wales.

But first, a slight digression to mention Rob Hutton’s excellent book, The Illusionist: the true story of the man who fooled Hitler. Why mention the book on a polling newsletter? Because although a work of military history, about deception pioneer Dudley Clarke, it has a link to the history of political polling too. As briefly mentioned near the end, after the Second World War Dudley Clarke went on to work for the Conservative Party as an in-house polling expert, at a time when such a role was a pioneering novelty. So I think that is a good enough excuse to give the book a plug here, including the excellent audio version by Al Murray: Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org. (The book is sufficiently good that I will forgive its failure to mention where the underpants for Operation Mincemeat came from.)

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Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.

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Should Labour move to the right on immigration?

In the run-up to the general election, I regularly covered why the polls and focus groups gave reason to doubt the electoral wisdom of the Conservative Party’s focus on immigration. Why repeatedly draw the public’s attention to a topic on which people mostly either thought the government was failing to deliver or disagreed with what it was trying to do anyway?

But now Labour is in government, and immigration is near the top (though only occasionally the top) of the issues the public says are most important, what should it do?

One way of helping to answer that question is to look at the experience of other similar governments around Europe, an experience helpfulfully summarised during the week by Professor Tarik Abou-Chadi:

Like many other European social democratic [SD] parties,¹ Labour is moving right on immigration, certainly driven by the recent success of Reform. We have researched this question for years now. There is an abundance of evidence of why this isn't a good strategy.

The first part of his argument, is that the idea of needing to move right on immigration is based on a misunderstanding of whose votes are being lost:

A strong motivation for “getting tough on immigration” is the narrative that social democrats have lost the working class to the radical right. Empirically this is false … Social democrats have lost few to the radical right (even among workers) and many more to the progressive left.

But, the argument goes, it is even worse than that as moving to the right on immigration ends up strengthening the parties such a move is intended to defeat:

Our research shows that when established parties move to the right on immigration this does not weaken the radical right but if anything strengthens them. It contributes to their normalization and legitimation.

Even worse, such moves repel support from others:

More socially conservative positions do not help SD parties electorally. They are not correlated with more working class support. However, they are associated with less support among educated and young voters.

As he therefore concludes:

In sum, Labour as other European social democratic parties should not expect electoral gains from moving right on immigration. Even worse, in the long run this strategy gradually moves public opinion away from progressive migration solutions and ultimately strengthens the far right.

There are of course many other factors to consider when deciding on immigration policy beyond the polling and electoral data behind the research above - particularly as immigration policies so directly touch people’s lives and values.

But from the electoral perspective, so far, it looks like Labour’s approach in this Parliament is likely to no more electorally successful than the Conservative one in the last.

Although I have not yet listened to it myself, this podcast episode with Abou-Chadi discusses the issue further (and despite the Spotify description, the episode is in English).

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates. As you can see Find Out Now has a particularly eye-catching result, though it is worth noting that, so far at least, it is the only pollster with that ordering of parties first, second and third. Also, although their final general election poll was reasonably good, it was 3.3% too high on the Reform vote.

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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Catch-up: the previous two editions

Why it's good that polls get reported so much

Why banning polls would be a bad idea

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Five of the six most noticed government measures are very unpopular, 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.

1. Widely noticed but very unpopular: that is the politically damaging combination