Why we should be thinking about 1985

Welcome to the 149th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which takes a hop back in time to 1985 for some perspective on the current polls.

Then it is 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 time, those ten include a piece on whether ChatGPT could replace focus groups.

But before we get down to the all that, a request for a small favour. Your feedback about my pieces on Channel 4 in particular has been very kind. But there is a simple fact behind how likely it is that Channel 4, or others I write about, will improve their act in future. It is how many readers this newsletter has. Criticism from a random person on the internet with a Substack account is one thing, criticism from a widely read publication is another.

Readership is growing steadily - but the faster it grows, the greater the impact of such stories. So could you please share The Week in Polls with your friends or colleagues, encouraging them to sign up? Thank you!

And with that, on with the show.

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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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How to explain, and beat, populism

The latest episode of my podcast, Never Mind The Bar Charts, saw Peter Kellner join me to discuss a new report on what is going wrong with our politics, and the solutions. No surprise then that our conversation focused on populism, its causes and how liberals can defeat it:

You can also take a listen in your favourite podcast app or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and the web.

The report we discuss is Disruptive Delivery: Meeting the Unmet Demand in Politics.

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A return to 1985?

The Times, 19 September 1985, after the SDP autumn party conference.

For much of 1985, British politics looked like it was becoming a three-party affair.

Politics was polarised and contentious. This was the year the Miners’ Strike ended, that Clive Ponting was acquitted over leaking documents about the sinking of the Belgrano, the IRA was regularly murdering people, both London and Birmingham suffered rioting which resulted in deaths, football was marred by tragedies resulting in mass deaths and its hooliganism was so bad that English football clubs were banned from European competitions. The economy was battered, with high unemployment and inflation hitting its highest level for several years.

There were some bright spots too - Live Aid and the first UK heart-lung transplant, for example. But it was a tough year.

Politically, it looked like it might be a turning point. The SDP/Liberal Alliance may have faltered at the 1983 general election, only just failing to get into second place on votes but failing disastrously to turn votes into seats, losing MPs as it fell back to just 23 MPs.¹ Yet it bounced back strongly in 1985, averaging in second place in the national polls for three months and over 30% for another two months.

The local elections that May saw the Alliance make gains while both Labour and the Conservatives fell back. The Alliance triumphed again in the Brecon & Radnor Parliamentary by-election.

The idea that the next Prime Minister might be neither Labour nor Conservative was plausible.

But, as with hopes for the Sinclair C5, also launched in 1985, the Alliance hopes crumbled into unsatisfactory under-performance when reality - in the form of the next general election - arrived.

Not only did the 1987 general election see a Conservative Prime Minister re-elected, but it saw the two party system entrenched rather than weakened as the Alliance fell back from even its 1983 performance. Indeed, the result was so bad for the Alliance that it resulted in merger plans that had such a troubled birth that the party nearly went bankrupt (with HMRC tax inspectors being carefully hidden away from journalists at one key moment) and nearly disappeared in the polls (even if Paddy Ashdown’s retelling of this in later years was a little exaggerated).²

All of which is why, as I survey the voting intention polls often showing Labour, Conservative and Reform clumped together, I am often thinking of 1985.

It is a long way from doing an outsider party well in the polls part way through a Parliament to breaking the political system. The Alliance showed that multiple times, or more recently, both the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party showed that in the 2017-19 Parliament.

As I have written before, paying attention to the polls, even outside elections, is a good thing. But 1985 is a warning about treating high poll ratings too seriously as a sign of political breakthrough.

Particularly as the Liberal Democrats demonstrated last year - both by finishing second in seats in the May local elections and with 72 MPs in the general election - that the link between national vote share and winning seats under first past the post can be very shaky indeed. (It is also why the Lib Dem approach in recent years has been to focus on seat totals, not national vote share tallies.)

Paying some attention to Reform’s rise in the polls is, of course, sensible. But it should also be put in context: such a rise may be the prelude to a new party becoming one of the top parties. More often than not, however, politics has taken a different turn.

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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 during the week 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

How populists win culture battles while losing the culture war

Channel 4 won't release poll data, sticks by Chief Exec's claims

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The salience of the war in Ukraine, 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. More in Common has a detailed report out about its ‘Progressive Activists’