Should Labour move left or right?

Neither? The situation Labour face today looks so similar to that which faced the Conservatives in 2024.

The parallels between what is happening to Labour now in 2026 and what happened to the Conservatives in the lead up to July 2024 are quite striking.

In both situations, a traditional powerhouse party of British politics faces a populist challenge from an insurgent party, creating a crushing pincer movement on their once trusty voter coalition. Both suffer big, hard-hitting defeats in parliamentary by-elections and take hammerings in local and devolved electoral contests. Public (and private) conversation focuses mainly on which political direction the party should turn toward in order to come out of the situation as best as possible.

In 2024, the question was whether Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives should move right to directly counter Reform, or shift to the centre and claim back voters drifting off to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The former were eating away a much more obvious chunk of their vote share, but the latter two were their principal opponents in the vast majority of seats being defended.

Fast forward to 2026, and Labour are facing an existential threat from an enthused and mobilised Green Party (as well as Plaid Cmyru and the SNP in Wales and Scotland respectively), who under new political leadership have just knocked the government out of the park in their backyard stronghold of Manchester, and (at least in the short term) surpassed them in the vote intention polls. But they too are facing significant threats from Reform, with Farage’s party the main challenger to Labour in the majority of their parliamentary seats.

The post-Gorton and Denton conversation is now mostly concerned with whether Labour should embrace its ‘soft left’ and try to win back the progressive voters who have left them, abandoning the political direction scoped out by Morgan McSweeney et al. in the lead up to GE2024.

Or, whether they should stay the course and continue to largely ignore (or at least remain far less concerned about) their left flank in favour of trying to win back voters who have jumped ship to Reform UK on their right.

In both cases, Labour 2026 and the Conservatives 2024, the argument essentially boils down to ‘faced with competing pressures, should X move left, or should they move right?’

Labour are losing far, far more voters to parties on their left (and in the centre) than they are the right, and that cannot be ignored. However, my personal view on that question is essentially the same as it was vis-à-vis the Conservatives back in 2024: if shifting left or right is the answer, then you’re asking the wrong question.

There are a number of reasons why I ultimately come to that conclusion, but I’ll discuss the two most important in this post.

Firstly, the political right and political left are useful categories for us as keen observers, students, and bubble-dwellers to understand political parties and systems, but they are rarely ever categories which voters themselves use to frame, understand and communicate their political views and demands.

The public is, quite frankly, far more ‘a la carte’ in their approach to politics. They care not whether a particular policy might be ideologically incompatible with another, nor whether values or principles preclude or facilitate the meshing of policies together.

A bigger, more interventionist state increasing government spending to help ease the cost of living crisis is, as far as the public are concerned, completely compatible in terms of a policy programme with a smaller state lifting tax burdens on lower and middle earners.

A state which ploughs funding into national welfare programmes such as the NHS is completely compatible with a state which slashes welfare programmes for those out of work.

A government which is willing to slap higher taxes on billionaires and big businesses and push for net zero is completely compatible with one which lays down tough immigration and asylum rules and introduces harsher sentences for serious criminal offences.

Really, rather than focusing on whether the party ought to follow a path laid down by a Shabana Mahmood or a Wes Streeting over one laid down by an Angela Rayner or an Andy Burnham, some combination of the above is probably the closest Labour can get to what the public want.

It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense therefore as a question of electoral strategy, political positioning, or acquiescence with the(ir) median voter for Labour to ask, “should we go more left wing or right wing from here?”

Yes, policy platforms should broadly make sense in the whole, and be able to tell a coherent story which can be communicated to voters (“What, and Who, are we for?”). But the glue which knits them together need not be, and is frankly probably best off not being, ideological.

The second reason I believe “left or right” is the wrong question to ask is that the public’s issues with the current Labour administration are much more rooted in issues surrounding credibility, reliability, and authenticity than they are the specific policy platform(s) being pursued by the government.

We can look at the November 2025 Budget for some great evidence of this. A large number of the things announced by Rachel Reeves that day were very popular with the public; including higher taxes on gambling profits, freezing rail fares, increasing minimum wage, reducing environmental levies, new taxes on millionaire properties, decreasing hospitality business rates, and extending the sugar tax.

But nonetheless, Brits were still more likely to view the Budget as unfair (48%) rather than fair (21%), and the event itself – despite the introduction of said popular policies – did nothing to improve any Reeves’, Starmer’s, or the Labour government’s position in the court of public opinion.

More recently, Starmer’s positioning on conflict with Iran has been closely aligned with where a war-wary, Trump-hostile, British public sit. Only 25% of the British public support the US in their military action, and fewer than one-in-ten (8%) believe the UK should be joining in the conflict.

Despite UK government policy aligning well with public opinion in this regard, by a margin of 47% to 37%, the British public are more likely to think that Keir Starmer has handled the UK’s response to the conflict badly rather than well.

That whole situation again reminds me of polling we saw in the lead up to the 2024 election – you could find a pretty decent number of individual Conservative party policies which commanded at least moderate-to-good ratings with the public (including even national service). But did they make anyone really more likely to vote for Sunak and his party? Absolutely not. They were, to coin a term, cooked.

Which brings me back around to the central point of this post – the “left or right?” debate misses the fundamental points which explain why this government is where it is with the public, and is ultimately likely to serve Starmer and his government in 2026 about as well as it did Sunak and his in 2024.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, the public opinion obstacles that he and his administration face are far more fundamental in nature. They are, mostly, about him and his government’s perceived ability, reliability, and credibility.

Starmer made competency – doing the job of government – a huge part of his (and Labour’s) 2024 pitch, but as early as just five months into his premiership, more than double the number of people thought Labour were incompetent than thought they were competent. That figure which has now grown to 4x.

What the public mostly see from the government is a steady stream of u-turns, scandals, electoral defeats, negative press, and a seeming lack of ability to arrest either the constant, stinging sense of national decline or the ever-growing financial pressures facing voters in their day to day lives. Six, thirty-tonne anchors round the neck of an albatross, none of which have much to do with being “too left” or “too right”.

The answer to “what should Labour’s response be to Gorton and Denton, Caerphilly, and the rest?” obviously will have to include some repositioning on some policy areas to bring them more in line with the sorts of voters who are likely to back them again and – by extension – (re)construct a voter coalition which gives them a shot at winning the next election.

However, the more pressing and important challenges - the questions which Starmer and Labour should be trying to answer - are how to change the reputation, perceptions, and general atmosphere that surround this Labour party in government. How to change the story that is being written about them? That will require far more work than changing position(s) on policy issues.