A selection of our recent appearances in the UK media.
Conservative Home
21 January 2023
Over the past three years, More in Common has identified seven distinct segments of the UK population. The Tories’ 2019 electoral coalition was made up of four of them – two of which are reasonably reliably Conservative, and two on the fringes who will determine if the party stays in power after 2024. The divergent views of these two swing segments helps shed light on the precarious balancing act the Conservatives face on ‘woke’ issues.
Financial Times
18 January 2023
I think it’s far too cynical to see this as about the government seeking dividing lines, not least because, as More in Common’s polling makes clear, most people do not care all that much (This also accords with what I’m told about the government’s own focus groups and polling.)
inews
18 January 2023
A similar trend emerged in a report by the think tank More in Common last summer, which also found that Britons ranked “the debate about transgender people” as the least important issue facing the country today, from a list of 16 options. Only two per cent of people chose it as one of the three most crucial issues, compared with the cost of living, which topped the list and was selected by 64 per cent of those surveyed, while the NHS came in second, selected by 32 per cent.
Substack
17 January 2023
The most misunderstood debate in British politics
While a trans obsession delights and excites some corners of Twitter, in the real world it makes a party that alights upon it look at best distracted and at worst cruel. Research by the More In Common organisation found that compassion is the starting point for most of the public when approaching these issues. Any party that attempts to exploit these issues for political gain risks alienating the median voter:
The Telegraph
14 January 2023
With the Tories reliant on both older voters and Red Wall constituencies for their parliamentary majority, the perceptions of the NHS aired by the group pose a serious electoral danger to Mr Sunak. Luke Tryl, the UK director of More in Common, who moderated the session, told The Telegraph: “For this group their worries about the NHS weren’t theoretical, they were personal.
“Every single one of the pensioners we spoke to had a story of how they, or people close to them had suffered at the hands of a system on the brink.”
The Guardian
13 January 2023
Luke Tryl, the director of the thinktank More in Common, which conducts frequent focus groups, confirmed that he and his colleagues had been hearing from a growing number of former Brexiters who had lost faith.
He described “the horror on people’s faces – and you can literally see it on people’s faces in focus groups – when you talk about going back to Brexit debates”, adding: “The big reason they don’t want to touch the ‘rejoin’ thing is that they think it would be four more years when that’s all we would talk about.”