The seat of Sittingbourne and Sheppey has been a bellwether since its creation in 1997. Nestled on the Kent coast between the Thames Estuary and the ancient city of Canterbury, the constituency encompasses the Medieval town of Sittingbourne, built on the Roman road Watling Street, as it winds its way into the heart of the City of London. It also includes the Isle of Sheppey, which houses three prisons.
Less than an hour’s drive from the glitzy skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, just off the M2, lies the Tudor Rose, a classic English pub that has stood on the site since 1750. A popular spot for a Sunday roast, it was relatively quiet when ten people arrived on a damp Monday evening in October and began filing upstairs. They included a teaching assistant, a plumber, a London Underground engineer, a carer and part-time cleaner, and a retired newspaper printer. All were from the constituency or neighbouring Kent seats – an area with one of the highest patient-to-GP ratios in the country. And, one that ranks as one of the most deprived constituencies in terms education and skills training, despite its proximity to the lucrative financial centre of the UK.
Here, nearly two-thirds of voters backed Brexit in 2016, with a historically high turnout of over 70% in the borough of Swale; then in the 2019 election, Sittingbourne and Sheppey voted Tory by a ratio of three to one. When people headed to the polls in July, it became one of the closest three-way ties between Labour, the Tories and Reform. The Labour candidate, Kevin McKenna, beat his Tory rival by just 355 votes, with 1,407 between him and third-placed Reform.
The ten people around the table in the upstairs room of the pub had all been part of that swing. They helped hand Boris Johnson a landside majority in 2019, then did the same for Keir Starmer four and a half years later. There were five men and five women, with ages ranging from 31 to 72, who all broadly self-defined as being part of the working class. Just over 100 days into a new Labour government, the opinion research agency Public First had gathered them together and invited the New Statesman to observe, hoping for a snapshot of how Labour was doing with a cohort crucial to the party’s victory. So how did they think it was going?
The question was met with hollow laughter.
That Labour has had a bumpy start and faced some damaging stories in its first three months in power is hardly up for debate. But MPs back in Westminster might be taken aback by the level of bitter disappointment expressed by these swing voters. One participant kicked off the discussion by making a thumbs-down gesture and admitting she already felt regret over her choice in July; another accused the government of having “lost the plot”.
Chief among their concerns was the removal of the winter fuel payment – a move every person at the table had heard about. “First thing they did was go for the pensioners,” said one woman, while an older man argued it “victimised old people”. They were angry that pensioners just over the threshold for pension credit lost out on the whole amount.
And, in a juxtaposition that shows the impact of Labour’s lacklustre comms strategy over the summer, the winter fuel cut was held up in comparison to the designer clothes, Taylor Swift tickets and VIP Arsenal treatment enjoyed by Starmer and members of his team. The freebies saga that has raged over the past few months had clearly had considerable cut-through, with little distinction between the perks duly recorded by Labour figures and the unregistered gifts enjoyed by Boris Johnson, such as expensive Caribbean holidays and wallpaper for the Downing Street flat. “He’s no better than Boris Johnson when he took all that money – he’s worse” was one assessment of the Prime Minister. Another called the gifts from the Labour donor Lord Alli “a bribe”.
There was disillusionment, too, with Starmer’s character. The words “woolly” and “evasive” were thrown around. To the focus group’s participants, the PM’s knighthood made him seem out of touch, even though most were aware it was not a hereditary title – “Why is a knight leading the Labour Party?”
In parliamentary terms, Labour’s victory in July is the biggest in the party’s history. It is also, to quote the political scientist Rob Ford, a “masterpiece of political Jenga”. Labour won two-thirds of MPs with just 34 per cent of the vote. Its coalition is sweepingly broad but dangerously shallow. In seats like Sittingbourne and Sheppey, a few handfuls of votes could make all the difference next time around.
It was not hard to determine what these voters wanted to see to keep them onside. “Every public service is falling over,” despaired one man, the youngest in the group. A woman with four children talked anxiously about the lack of resources in schools, lost learning due to Covid and the mental health challenges faced by young people. An older woman recounted an all-too-common experience of waiting on the phone for hours to get a GP appointment, saying she had been trying for nearly eight weeks, while a father shared his frustrations at the dire state of the local roads that made driving his disabled son around virtually impossible. When it came to speculation about the upcoming Budget, the verdict was clear: “More spending.”
None of this will come as a shock to Labour. The disintegration of the public realm was one of Starmer’s big themes during the election campaign. But three things should concern the new government.
First was the disappointment in the room that there had been no tangible improvements on this front so far. While Labour has warned that failing public services will take years to fix and is talking about “a decade of national renewal”, half the group had already lost faith three and a half months in. One man said he understood the financial pressures but had still hoped to see more investment immediately: “You vote in a Labour government because you think that they’re going to come in and spend.”
Second was the dismissal of Rachel Reeves’ argument that the Conservatives handed Labour an inheritance that was even worse than anyone had realised. On the multi-billion-pound black hole, one man accused the government of “blowing it out of proportion”. A woman suggested Labour “must have known what was going on” while in opposition, arguing the party behaved dishonestly by campaigning as if they were unaware of the state of the public finances. The lack of patience for the government’s excuses so far goes some way to explaining the disappointment.
Finally, there was widespread consensus that tax rises would be utterly unaffordable, at least for voters like this group. The impact of the cost of living crisis – energy prices, food, fuel – has not eased. “Everyone is being taxed so much for everything,” said a woman with school-aged children. “Myself and my partner work, and by the end of it you sit there and go, there’s nothing left.” At the same time, the group was certain Labour would try to raise their taxes (one man called himself a “soft target” compared to businesses like Amazon or the very wealthy), with suspicion that things like inheritance tax and capital gains tax would affect their finances and count as increasing taxes on working people. It is anyone’s guess how the Chancellor can hope to square this impossible circle in next week’s Budget – but the view from the Public First group was not optimistic.
Hanging over the conversation, whether it turned to Labour’s record-short honeymoon or the Budget balancing act, was the spectre of immigration. The failure of successive governments to control the UK’s borders came up again and again, with both legal and illegal immigration (at times conflated) in the firing line. The news report that 600 people had crossed the channel in small boats a few days beforehand had resonated, as had the tragic death of a baby. The ballooning cost of housing would-be asylum applicants in hotels was held up by several people when pressed on how the government could invest in public services without raising taxes. The call to control numbers with a points system like Australia was made multiple times. (Boris Johnson’s government implemented a points-based system modelled on Australia’s in 2021; net immigration in 2022 was 764,000, a record high.)
Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s former campaign director and now Starmer’s chief of staff, is known to be particularly anxious about how the party tackles the challenge of concern over immigration. One of his first campaigning jobs was confronting the far-right BNP in Barking and Dagenham in East London in 2010 – he is said to have warned Starmer that failure to get a grip on border control risks opening the door to populists like Nigel Farage. On Thursday he warned Labour MPs that they would face losing their seats after just one term if they did not talk about the question head on.
Despite only winning five seats in the 2024 election, Farage’s insurgent Reform UK (previously known as the Brexit Party) gained over 19 per cent of the vote in 102 constituencies across the country. Many of these are clustered along the Kent and Essex coastline: just north of the Isle of Sheppey, South Basildon and East Thurrock has a Reform MP, while Farage’s own Essex seat of Clacton is few constituencies up.
Given their abject disillusionment with Labour in July, it was interesting to see what this group of swing voters made of Farage. Sittingbourne and Sheppey should be a Reform target seat; over a quarter of voters here backed the party in July. One woman had already decided she’d probably vote for them next time, saying Farage “talks common sense”. But others were split. A man who had a moment before been raising concerns about migrant hotels accused the party of “using the emotions of people”; another participant said Farage and his colleagues “focus on immigration to the detriment of anything else” and strip the nuance out of the debate. Several people said Reform was “still just a little bit too right-wing for me”.
Still, feelings towards Reform were significantly warmer than those towards the Conservatives. The Tories lost half their 2019 voters in July, and none of the ten participants said they’d consider voting for them again. There was little interest in the leadership, despite Robert Jenrick’s heavy immigration pitch as his main campaign issue. The only cut-through either candidate had were Kemi Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay being too high – “bonkers”, according to one man. No one had a view on who they wanted to be the next Conservative leader. Both candidates were considered so right-wing “you might as well vote for Nigel, really”. “They won’t win with either of them,” was one man’s blunt assessment of the Tories’ prospects.
Should Labour take heart from this universal antipathy? In one way, it makes Starmer’s predicament slightly less dire. The Prime Minister’s popularity has plummeted and is currently at its lowest point since May 2021. But there is not yet any prince across the water offering something more appealing. For all the the swing voters in the Tudor Rose’s dismay and frustration with Labour, they didn’t think the Conservatives were any better. They had not forgiven them for lockdown-breaking parties, or for the state they left the country in.
At the same time, the focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey laid bare some disturbing truths for the new government.
Participants felt Labour had abandoned being “the party of the working man”. They didn’t think Starmer understood the true extent of their day-to-day struggles, and felt even high-profile working-class figures like Angela Rayner had stopped being advocates for the traditional Labour base once they were in power.
And, they had mostly not been all that enthusiastic about voting for Labour in the first place. One man admitted: “I had to really think hard about putting an X on a bit of paper thinking, am I doing the right thing here?” Others spoke of Labour being “the best of a bad bunch”. While some members of the group acknowledged that the government should be given more time to make improvements, it was clear there would be little sympathy for excuses if serious progress wasn’t made soon. The precarity of Labour’s seemingly huge victory was evident.
Most worrying, though, was the general sense of apathy. There was a unanimous view that British politics was essentially corrupt: “I’m just so disillusioned with them all, I don’t trust any of them”, “I don’t think anyone with integrity and honesty would survive in government – they have to be crooked”. One man suggested tearing down the entire political system and starting again from scratch. The only non-political figures participants thought might make good leaders were the money-saving expert Martin Lewis and TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
Sittingbourne and Sheppey isn’t representative of the UK as a whole. But it is a microcosm of many of the trends that led to Labour’s historic win and the near annihilation of the Conservative party. Labour MPs in Westminster might think they have four years to show results to voters who switched to them from the Tories – maybe if they can make real progress on NHS waiting lists and the cost of living crisis by then, this early disappointment won’t matter. But 50 miles away on the Kent coast, lights on the dashboard are already flashing red.
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