Labour's policy not as popular as they think

Labour will claim they have colossal popular support for Corbyn's Education Tax. But they will be wrong.

Yesterday’s post set out a range of falsehoods that have been peddled by Labour MPs, senior ones, that undermine the manifesto legitimacy of Corbyn’s Education Tax. Despite being around, like a bad smell, since 2019, it’s obvious Labour haven’t thought it through and that MPs, even senior ones, either don’t understand it or are willing to lie about it. Still less can anyone assume voters understand it, care about it, or considered it as a strong motivator to vote one way or other.

Today’s (short) post contains polling data supporting this point. Whatever is motivating people to vote Labour, it is not Corbyn’s Education Tax.

Yesterday I included a poll from YouGov, which is pretty compelling. Education policy just isn’t a big deal…and within the 7pc who said education IS a top-three issue, or the 1pc who said it is THE top single issue, dare I suggest that opposition to the Education Tax will be more prevalent than support for it? It’s a salient issue if you have kids at independent school; it’s less of a big deal if you don’t.

Today there’s a new poll on X, again from YouGov

Neither Labour, nor their Education Tax, are positive motivators for voters

• A stonking 65pc of those polled support Labour on a negative basis (get the Tories out, needs a change, lesser of two evils, oust the SNP, distrust Rishi)

• Fewer than 1pc of those polled explicitly mention “education” - they’ll be in the 3pc “other” category, somewhere

• At most 10pc (highlighted) of those polled might implicitly include education somewhere in their thinking, but that’s entirely indeterminate and swept up with all other matters of taxation, benefits and public spending.

Does this policy really poll well?

Ipsos Mori reckoned there was 57pc support for the policy in November 2023. That, of course, was before the Education Not Taxation campaign started and before the Adam Smith report was published.

What’s more interesting is the positioning of the question:

There are endless issues with this question. Just three:

• Labour was already polling strongly, at around 47pc. Introducing the alleged benefits of the policy with “Labour is proposing….Labour said that…” clearly tends to bias anyone sympathetic to Labour, in juxtaposition to “critics say….” A more neutral positioning would have said “Some say….while others say” or “proponents of the tax / opponents of the tax”.

• Mentioning Labour also raised an indirect association with their ubiquitous and successful “tax breaks” rubbish, which, as you can read in the link above, was the strongest reason for supporting the policy. It’s like “it was polling well because we’ve been lying about it”.

• The question positions benefits to most respondents “improvements to state schools”, against harms to a few respondents “some families unable to afford private school.” So the respondent is being offered a one-way bet, no sense of “this might not be great for me”.

  • It’s like: “Would you like some of that person’s money?”

  • It should have read, for example “if families can’t afford private school, the tax will raise less money and those families will need state school places which aren’t funded and may not exist”

  • …let alone listed all the many other downside risks of the tax: job losses, harm to children, SEN, bursaries etc.

Conclusion

There will be strong grounds, if Labour form the next government, to challenge the legitimacy of the claim to popular support.

• Back in November, there was strong but superficial support in a leading poll that underplayed objections to the policy (to be fair to Ipsos, there had been virtually no coverage of objections to the policy at that time).

• In election week, two separate polls clearly show that virtually nobody is motivated to vote for Labour’s Education Policy or Corbyn’s Education Tax; and it seems reasonable to believe most of those who are excited about the policy are (like me) in opposition to it.