Andy Burnham is succeeding in winning back to the Labour Party a significant portion of voters who had defected to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. The Greens are six percentage points down from their high point last April and the Liberal Democrats are down four points from their high in September 2025.
Temporarily at least, Burnham can take comfort from Labour consolidating more than half the left vote in Britain's polarised two-bloc party system. Thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system and with 27pc of the vote, Electoral Calculus predicts Labour would win 313 MPs, enough to support a Labour minority government or dominate a coalition including Liberal Democrats.
A condition of Andy Burnham having a long tenure in Number 10 South and Number 10 North is that the right-wing bloc remains fragmented between the Conservatives, Reform UK, and Restore Britain. Thus, even though the collective vote of the right-wing bloc is almost identical to that of the left-wing bloc, it is divided much more evenly. Reform UK is only four percent ahead of the Conservatives. Our analysis gives the Conservatives 123 MPs and Reform UK 95 MPs. Labour has 95 MPs more than the total number of MPs in the right-wing bloc.
But what if the right-wing vote begins to consolidate? Rupert Lowe's hard-right party, Restore Britain, claims anything from three to seven percent of opinion poll support but only one seat in in the Commons. To gain votes at the next general election, Lowe will need to recruit and vet up to 600 candidates.
If building a party from scratch overwhelms the 69-year-old Lowe and he becomes his party's sole candidate, most of Restore Britain's vote would go to Reform. A rise of four percent in Reform's share of the vote would place it neck and neck with Labour in votes. Electoral Calculus analysis indicates Reform UK would have 181 MPs and Labour 256 MPs. Neither the right bloc nor the left bloc would have a parliamentary majority.
More problematic is the future of the 62-year-old Nigel Farage and the party he leads. Reform UK has a core of supporters committed to a hard line on immigration. However, contributions to Farage's personal finances and to his party are under investigation in Parliament and by the Electoral Commission. Polls show that the party has lost a quarter of its support from its peak in this Parliament. Reform has dropped to third place, 28 MPs behind the Conservatives.
Kemi Badenoch's immediate need is to consolidate the Conservatives as the leading party on the right. For example, if Reform's vote at the next election were to fall by half from its current level and half its defectors were to go to the Tories, this would create the appearance of a Badenoch bounce. While the Conservatives would catch up with Labour in vote share, its projected 226 seats would lag 75 seats behind Labour's 301 MPs.
For Andy Burnham to be threatened by a loss of office the right-wing bloc would have to consolidate a lot more. An Electoral Calculus projection shows that if Reform's current support were to halve to 12 percent, all of which shifted to the Tories, the Conservatives would be in first place with 306 seats and Labour trailing in second with 238 seats. Intriguingly, in this scenario a coalition of all three left parties would have 289 seats leaving both blocs short of forming a government with a parliamentary majority.
Professor Richard Rose's of the University of Strathclyde is Britain's senior psephologist. His new book, The Disruption of the British Party System, is published in paperback by Manchester University Press.