Labour’s first year: from voter opinion to market reaction – in charts
It is a year since Labour’s landslide victory on 4 July 2024, when Keir Starmer promised “to end the politics of performance and return to politics as public service … it is now time for us to deliver”.After a rollercoaster week in which the prime minister suffered a large Commons rebellion and caused bond markets to spike when he appeared not to back the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, we consider his government’s record in Westminster, Whitehall and across the country.In the first year since the general election, Labour’s stock with the electorate, as measured by opinion polls, has fallen considerably.After a honeymoon period, during which few polls were conducted, the party’s polling has steadily declined.Then came a very strong Reform performance in the 1 May elections, in which Nigel Farage’s party took more than 600 council seats, and won a mayoralty and a byelection.
Since then, Reform has continued to rise in the polls, while Labour has languished.The most high-profile piece of legislation in this parliament so far has probably been the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, but that was not a manifesto commitment and was put forward as a private member’s bill, without party whipping.The government has laid 28 bills in this session of parliament.Many of its pledges rely in part on passing this tranche of legislation: the commitment to reduce the number of people arriving in small boats is targeted, along with stronger sentences for people smugglers, in the asylum bill, and the promise of more housing is bound up in an overhaul of planning rules.The table below shows all the government bills in this session.
To become law, proposed legislation has to pass three readings in both houses of parliament,There are numerous stages at which amendments may be made and voted upon, chiefly between the second and third readings, during the committee stage,When a bill has passed through a third reading in both houses it is returned to the Commons (where it started) for any amendments made by the Lords to be considered,If MPs do not accept amendments made by peers, or vice versa, the bill can “ping-pong” between the houses until consensus on the exact wording is reached,After that, the bill receives “royal assent” and becomes law.
After Starmer failed to voice strong support for Reeves at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, yields – in effect the interest rate – on UK bonds rose sharply, which was interpreted as concern in the markets that the chancellor might not stay in the job, and the government’s record for financial discipline would be undermined,This was all the more surprising since the markets had barely reacted the previous day when the welfare bill was amended to substantially reduce its financial impact,Over the past year, the bond markets’ response to Labour’s administration has been fairly stable, although it is also true that they are lending to this government at higher interest rates than they did to Rishi Sunak’s,And despite a heated afternoon on Wednesday, there has not been a repeat of the wild swings of Liz Truss’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s brief time in Downing Street,The attitude of the bond markets is possibly explained by the struggle led by Reeves to retain a grip on the national finances.
With greater spending on public sector wages, and uncertainty about improved tax receipts from growth, the government has so far struggled to keep the lid on,Whether it can continue, especially after the savings expected from the universal credit bill were slashed by this week’s rebellion, and without raising taxes, remains to be seen,The picture here is mixed; overall international migration is down, and the government is having some success at continuing an effort under the last Tory administration to reduce the backlog in asylum applications,Sign up to Headlines UKGet the day’s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morningafter newsletter promotionOn the other hand, the number of people arriving in the UK on small boats is at a record high, with more than a thousand arriving in a single day on some days,Nearly a year into the term, it was only this week that the government unveiled its 10-year plan for the NHS, based on a move to local health centres, better use of technology and a focus on prevention.
In the interim, it has signed off improved pay for NHS staff and abolished NHS England, which ran the service in England.But at a day-to-day level, the health service seems to be continuing a trend of slight improvement that began under Sunak.The government is under pressure from campaigners and its own MPs not to balance the books at the expense of Britain’s most vulnerable people.It has postponed its child poverty strategy and just this week narrowly saw off defeat on its universal credit bill.But as the Resolution Foundation thinktank has pointed out, child poverty is rising while the government prevaricates, and abolishing the two-child benefit cap would greatly reduce the number of children living in poverty.
‘The bubble had to burst’: the inside story of the Lindsey oil refinery collapse
It was mid-April and the government had just finished nationalising British Steel, to prevent thousands of job losses at the Scunthorpe steelworks, when word reached Whitehall that another national infrastructure asset was wobbling.Prax Group, owner of the Lindsey oil refinery on the Humber estuary in northern England, was rumoured to be in financial trouble, stoking fears about jobs and disruption to critical fuel supplies.In a hastily arranged meeting at the department for energy security and net zero (DESNZ) on 13 May, well-placed sources said, a concerned Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, took solace from Prax’s owner and sole director, Winston Soosaipillai.Prax had suffered some setbacks, the seldom-seen oil boss is understood to have said, but it was not in any imminent danger and was even planning investment for the future. Within weeks, these assurances had crumbled to dust
Rachel Reeves needs wider headroom against fiscal rules, ex-Bank of England deputy says
The former Bank of England deputy governor Charlie Bean has urged Rachel Reeves to create much wider headroom against her fiscal rules – a decision likely to require significant tax rises or spending cuts.Bean suggested that the current slim margin of less than £10bn, had led the chancellor to “fine-tune” the government’s tax and spending plans to meet the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) forecasts five years ahead.“Government spending is about one and a quarter trillion, so £10bn is a small number … and it is a small number in the context of typical forecasting errors,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.He added: “She should aim to operate with a larger margin of headroom, so previous chancellors have typically operated with headroom of the order of £30bn.“Because she has chosen about a third of that … it is very easy for numbers to go in the wrong direction and she finds she has to neurotically fine-tune taxes to control the OBR forecast that is several years ahead
‘An unjust transition’? Teesside locals divided over net zero after deindustrialisation
“We’re basically going through a deindustrialisation of the country at the moment and I think we’re losing a lot of jobs,” says John Mac, over a pot of tea in a bustling Caffè Nero in the centre of Stockton-on-Tees.The local candidate for Reform UK worked for years at the Billingham plant of Imperial Chemical Industries’s (ICI), before taking voluntary redundancy in the 1990s.Having witnessed decades of industrial decline on Teesside first-hand, including the dismantling of the once-mighty industrial behemoth, Nigel Farage’s pivot to court the working class is speaking Mac’s language.The Reform leader is targeting voters in post-industrial communities across Britain, outlined in a Guardian series showing how Farage views the “next Brexit” as reversing net zero to create a manufacturing renaissance.This, the third in the series, looks at the future of another of Britain’s industrial heartlands
UK electric car sales up by a third in first half of 2025, preliminary data suggests
British electric car sales rose by a third in the first half of 2025 after the strongest June for overall car sales since before the Covid pandemic.The number of battery electric car sales rose 34.6% to 224,838 units in the first six months of the year, according to preliminary data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group.New car sales rose 6.8% year-on-year in June to 191,200 units, the best sales figures for the month since 2019
UK government ‘closely watching’ £120m legal claim against Vodafone
Ministers are closely watching a court case in which Vodafone is alleged to have “unjustly enriched” itself at the expense of franchise operators, and have raised the prospect of a regulatory crackdown on the sector.The small business minister, Gareth Thomas, has said he will “track very carefully” a £120m legal claim brought against Vodafone last year by a group of 62 of about 150 franchise operators.They allege that drastic cuts to commission rates on selling Vodafone products in the group’s high street stores caused many of them to run up huge personal debts. They say they fear for their livelihoods or homes, and some have reported suicidal thoughts.Their court filing claims the company “indiscriminately … operated to enrich Vodafone at the expense of its franchisees”
First-time buyers turn from rural areas to Britain’s regional cities
With the rise of home working and surging house prices in many urban areas, one might have assumed that British cities had lost some of their appeal to homebuyers over the past decade, but it turns out the opposite is the case.An analysis of the first five months of this year shows the number of would-be first-time buyers in Great Britain looking to move to cities is up by 16% on average compared with the same period in 2015.The location to record the most significant jump in first-time buyer inquiries over that period is Dundee, Scotland’s fourth-largest city and, it is said, its sunniest.Some will be surprised to learn that homebuyers’ love affair with cities has intensified, bearing in mind that the pandemic apparently prompted many to think about a new life on the coast or in the countryside.The data was crunched by the property website Rightmove, which looked at Great Britain’s 50 largest cities, excluding London, and 50 of the most popular coastal areas
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