Pulse Check - August 2025

August 2025

Checking the pulse of the nation
 

Support for new left-wing party
20% of the public would consider voting for the new left-wing party. A third (33%) of 16-34s would consider backing a new left-wing party, dropping to just 9% among those aged 55+. When looking at GE2024 voters, one in three people who voted Labour in 2024 would consider voting for the new Corbyn-Sultana initiative.

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Britons back age checks
While seven in ten Britons (69%) support the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms hosting harmful content, the public is sceptical about the Online Safety Act's ability to protect children and sees risks for data privacy and free speech.

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Immigration tops Britons’ concerns
Ipsos Issues Index reveals that immigration remains the biggest issue facing the country this month, in the eyes of the public. However, the public is divided on the acceptability of protesting outside hotels housing asylum seekers - 36% acceptable vs. 39% unacceptable.

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Do the Conservatives have a Badenoch problem?

By Cameron Garrett, Associate Director of UK Politics, Ipsos, for ConservativeHome.

It doesn’t take a pollster to see that the Conservative Party is in trouble. They haven’t just failed to recover from their historic defeat at last year’s general election – they’re going backwards.

Their low polling numbers could be partially caused by a seeming lack of relevance. In July, Ipsos polling suggested that half (49 per cent) of the public didn’t recall seeing or hearing from a member of the shadow cabinet over the previous couple of weeks. On the major issues of the day, often the Conservatives are nowhere to be found.

Kemi Badenoch receives the most blame for this situation, and with some good reason. She appears to have very little ‘cut through’ with the wider public and what little they know of her, they don’t like. Ipsos’ July Political Pulse tracker found just 17 per cent of the public have a favourable view of her, the lowest of any major party leader.

It is little wonder then that just a third of Britons think it’s likely she will be leader of the Conservative Party by the time of the next general election. Based on the ever-increasing number of briefings from party insiders, there is even a risk that Badenoch is removed as leader by Christmas.

Could someone else do any better? And is Badenoch really the fundamental problem?

Exclusive Ipsos in the UK polling for ConservativeHome finds that when the public is asked to pick from a list of prominent Conservative politicians who they would back as the next leader of the party there’s two clear winners: “none of them” (27 per cent) and “don’t know” (23 per cent) garnering the support of half.

Very few have an opinion on actual contenders:

• Boris Johnson (11 per cent) leads the pack,
• followed by James Cleverly (six per cent),
• then Robert Jenrick, Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and Rory Stewart, all on five per cent.

Among Conservative voters, Johnson (24 per cent) is more of a clear winner, ahead of Cleverly (14 per cent), Sunak (12 per cent) and Jenrick (10 per cent).

In short, among the most popular alternatives for Conservative leader, many of them are intimately tied to previous administrations; Johnson was literally in charge of one of them. There’s also the second problem that many of them aren’t currently sitting MPs.

That’s a huge issue, because the data points toward the conclusion that the biggest problem for the Conservatives right now isn’t any one leader. It’s the Tory brand, weighed down in the public’s eyes by 14 years of their record. For instance, when asked what the main negatives would be if Badenoch became prime minister, Britons are most likely to say the Conservatives can’t be trusted after their previous record running the country. That isn’t something that will be solved by a Johnson comeback.

The challenge facing the party is to build a new brand identity: one that moves beyond the legacy of the last decade and offers a credible, forward-looking vision for the country that resonates not just with the party faithful, but with the public and its priorities.

Read the full article here