Political commentators in Westminster often focus most heavily on those things that matter the least to those outside of it.
Probably the best example of this is reshuffles - where gallons of ink are spilled on speculating about which group of politicians the vast majority of voters have never heard of are about to be switched for which other group of politicians they’ve heard of even less.
However, an equally good example can be found in Westminster’s un-killable belief in the significance of ‘U-turns’.
This belief that a Government reversing an unpopular policy is somehow a moment of great political humiliation that will fundamentally damage public perceptions of them forever has survived for decades.
Its origin can perhaps best be traced back to the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “the lady is not for turning”. This quote, which came to define perceptions of Thatcher for her supporters, has helped to trigger the belief in the undesirability of a politician reversing their policies that has survived to this day.
And yet whenever someone bothers to ask members of the public what they actually think about U-turns, they find something quite different.
As the above YouGov tracker poll shows, despite the conventional wisdom in Westminster, voters are significantly more likely to believe that a government U-turning on an unpopular policy is actually a good thing that “shows they are willing to listen and change their minds when people complain or situations change” than to believe the opposite.
That this is the case should be obvious. If a Government is trying to do something that voters don’t want them to, then it is clearly better for them to change course rather than to stubbornly carry on regardless.
Now that is not to say that U-turning cannot undermine a politician. To take perhaps the most extreme example, when Liz Truss was forced to scrap her so-called mini-budget and sack the Chancellor responsible for it, that was obviously not a good day in the office.
Yet just as in less extreme examples, the real political damage was not caused by Truss’ U-turn, but by the economic policy itself and the impact it had on millions of mortgage payers.
Again, it was not the U-Turn that was really damaging, but the policy that was being U-turned away from.
You Turn If You Want To
The same clearly applies to Keir Starmer and his recent decisions to change course on his planned cuts to the winter fuel allowance and disability benefits.
That it took so long for Downing Street to realise these policies were a mistake is obviously worrying for Labour MPs. The fact that just days ago Starmer was dismissing their concerns about the disability cuts as “noises off” only for him to completely change position within 24 hours, is not a sign of a Prime Minister whose political judgement is where it should be.
There are also signs that the rebellion against the policy still has some legs in it, with some Labour MPs understandably concerned that Starmer’s partial U-turn risks creating a “two tier system” in which new applicants are given less support than those disabled people already claiming it.
Yet the fact remains that Starmer and his Government are in a significantly stronger position now that they have decided to start U-turning, than they were before they began doing so.
Now again, this is not to say that this is where the Government should have got themselves.
It would obviously have been much better for Starmer not to have pushed ahead with these unpopular policies in the first place, rather than to spend months ignoring all warnings about doing so, only to be forced into changing course at the very last minute.
But it is to say that Westminster’s belief in the uniquely damaging import of the ‘U-turn’ is just that - a belief. And a belief that appears to have very little evidence to support it.
I discussed all of this and more with my Byline Times colleagues Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu this afternoon over at the Byline Supplement. You can watch the whole recording of our discussion in the video at the top of this post..
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