Andy Burnham's conference speech was remarkably popular
4 min read
Our research found Andy Burnham's conference speech to be well received beyond the hall in Liverpool.
Polling by Persuasion UK before Labour conference kicked off showed Andy Burnham was comfortably the most popular leader of a national party in Britain, more than ten points ahead of Kemi Badenoch, fifteen points ahead of Nigel Farage, and twenty-six points ahead of Zack Polanski, even if people were somewhat unclear on just what it was that they liked about the Makerfield MP.
The good news continued for Burnham in our tests of his conference speech, available in full here, which he delivered on Tuesday to a positive response in Liverpool. We cut the speech into sections – clips of the Prime Minister talking about economic power and public control, electoral reform, public ownership of water, the triple lock and social care, and paying tribute to his father – and tested them amongst more than 3000 voters, with a control group seeing no sections of the speech.
All of these clips improved people’s assessment of Burnham: all of them left the groups exposed to the speech feeling more than ten points more positive about the Labour leader. The sections on public control and public ownership of water did the most for the leader’s ratings, pushing them up to 19 and 18 points above control respectively.
In assessments of how likely these groups are to vote Labour, the results are also striking: the sections on ownership discussed above push Labour voting intention up by between 8 and 10 points, as does the section where Burnham discusses social security and his plans for the triple lock.
On Burnham's embrace of cost-of-living populism, it is in a form that understands that it is the bigger picture – power and control, profit and profiteering – which matters to people, rather than viewing it as a series of retail offers. In our focus groups, retail offers adding up to small amounts of money a month are often dismissed or distrusted, labelled by voters as small beer, insufficient to the challenges facing them and the country.
What people do respond well to are proposals for bigger change aimed at what people see as the sources of corruption and high costs, with retail offers more directional, acting as (as I heard one minister describe it over conference) a “down payment” on broader transformation.
This round of video testing would support this theory from a public opinion point of view, showing the popularity of the bigger picture on ownership, a picture which Burnham – the first Prime Minister to be elected as a Labour and Co-operative MP – has been aiming to scale up, now that he’s gone from Bee Network championing Manchester mayor to Downing Street resident.
That said, at Persuasion UK we study public opinion, not policy delivery. Pursuing these aims might not prove as popular as announcing one’s intention to pursue them. We are confident in our views of what the public responds to, and leave assessments of viability to others.
Our aim with these kinds of tests is to simulate the public encountering messaging from Burnham in the wild, on their televisions or on their social media accounts, hence testing the BBC segment to get at how most people actually experience it (this also significantly boosted favourables and voting intention).
There are problems with such experiments – the way in which people have to watch what is presented and answer questions on it draws a more intense level of scrutiny than, say, someone idly scrolling past news clips on the bus – but it is rare to see such a striking result in this kind of testing on a politician.
Burnham should feel confident his message is landing outside the conference hall as well as in it. However, short-term public opinion or approval is not the whole of politics, as interesting as this demonstration of the Prime Minister’s upper-end potential might be.
Morgan Jones is Deputy Director of Persuasion UK
