Keir Starmer’s poll collapse is personal, not economic

Labour’s approval ratings have cratered since the general election, and a growing body of political analysis suggests the problem isn’t the state of Britain’s finances — it’s Keir Starmer himself. New polling from YouGov this month put the Prime Minister’s personal approval rating at minus 42, a figure that would have seemed unthinkable just 14 months ago when he won a landslide majority of 174 seats.

The numbers don’t lie

Labour’s vote share in recent local by-elections has dropped by an average of 17 percentage points compared to the 2024 general election. That’s a brutal slide by any measure. But what makes it particularly damaging for Starmer is that economic indicators, while not spectacular, aren’t catastrophic either. Inflation is running at 2.6%, wage growth is outpacing prices, and unemployment remains below 4.5%. So voters aren’t punishing Labour purely over empty pockets.

They’re punishing the man at the top.

A trust problem that predates Downing Street

Critics point to a pattern that stretches back years. Starmer abandoned ten policy pledges from his 2020 Labour leadership campaign, including commitments to abolish university tuition fees and to increase income tax for the top 5% of earners. Each reversal was explained away as pragmatism. But voters have long memories, and the cumulative effect has been corrosive. A senior Labour backbencher, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it bluntly: “People don’t know what he stands for, and at this point they’ve stopped trying to find out.”

That’s not a problem you can solve with a good GDP figure.

Yorkshire feeling it most

Across the region, constituencies that swung hard to Labour last year are showing signs of serious buyer’s remorse. In Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, a seat Labour held with a majority of just over 1,200 votes, local organisers are describing the mood on the doorstep as “cold” — a word that comes up repeatedly in canvassing reports leaked to regional media. Rotherham, Wakefield, and parts of Bradford tell a similar story. These are working-class communities that gave Labour the benefit of the doubt in July 2024. They feel, many of them, that the benefit wasn’t reciprocated.

The winter fuel payment cut hit hard here. Roughly 780,000 pensioners in Yorkshire lost eligibility under the new means-tested threshold, and many of them are furious. Still, analysts are careful not to reduce everything to one policy decision.

What comes next

The question inside Labour isn’t whether there’s a problem — it’s whether the problem is fixable before the next election cycle. Some MPs believe a policy reset and a sharper communications operation can reverse the slide. Others are less optimistic, arguing that once a leader’s image calcifies in voters’ minds, no rebrand sticks.

Starmer has roughly three years before the country votes again. That’s enough time to recover, in theory. But political capital, once spent, is very hard to earn back — and right now, the overdraft is looking deep.