The margins between success and failure in politics are narrow. Understanding the emotional landscape and how to respond, to empathise, to connect, can be the difference between Andy Burnham surviving as Prime Minister or being rejected by the public.
Burnham has stepped into the leadership role as Prime Minister espousing more empathy, promoting hope and with a positive outlook. But he still needs his team to act on the lessons from previous leaderships’ and governments’ failures around the often-violent passions arising on a range of issues.
The inability to understand, recognise and manage these passions, which are often on the edge of hatred, was one of Keir Starmer’s great failures.
Emotional political intelligence now competes with economic intelligence when it comes to understanding the electorate.
It is no longer just “the economy, stupid”, the slogan made famous by James Carville, President Bill Clinton’s campaign manager. The idea that politics and voting will all come good for the party if the economics are right could be a description of Labour’s first two budgets. Clearly, it didn’t work.
Those two budgets demonstrated that a slow, long-term response alone cannot deal with the current emotional needs of the electorate. The gloom and doom agenda – winter fuel cuts, farmers’ inheritance tax, welfare cuts proposals – all ignored the emotional narratives and immediate reactions of the public.
My proposition that “half of all politics is the management of hatred” is intended as a reality check for the Labour team riding the wave of “hope” accompanying Burnham’s ascendancy. Hope is not sufficient.
Burnham will be receiving many opinions from senior figures, many of whom were active in the 2014-2026 period. However, they are part of the problem, having themselves failed to see or address the rising hatred and passions among the electorate. Be careful of taking their advice: saying sorry over and over is not enough.
At some point leaderships need to say “enough” and stop cowering in front of hard cases and self-appointed victims groups, their lawyers, uncharitable charities and publicists.
In the Financial Times in December 2025, the political correspondent George Parker was one of the first to recognise that something profound had changed in public attitudes. He pointed out that polling now showed that the standing of political leaders of all parties had gone beyond the traditional “midterm blues” and morphed into clear emotional hatred of government, mistrust of mainstream political parties, and specifically to hatred of party leaders including the Prime Minister.
Elections and by-elections since then have confirmed that the public mood towards Keir Starmer was one of hatred in all but name – a hostile, fixed emotional response towards a leader so strong that it overwhelmed other issues and was not retrievable.
How does Andy Burnham avoid the same fate?
What is the step change in political management that spots and recognises the issues that can move from disagreement and dispute to an emotional journey that turns into public hatred?
Managing hatred is a permanent challenge. It always rises again in different forms, and is never completely defeated, only contained.
For me, this reflection started in the four years I served as Neil Kinnock’s political secretary. We were bringing to a close a period of extreme hatreds in the 1980s and early 1990s that culminated in the Poll Tax revolts and the expulsion of Militant from Labour. But there are lessons from all political parties’ failures over five decades that have led to the current rise of populism in politics.
In other walks of life, too – business, charities, universities and public bodies – we see leaders, chief executives, vice-chancellors and chairs floundering and forced into resignation by spasms of public fury which they failed to effectively manage or address. Thinks about #metoo, Black Lives Matter, Antisemitism, Gaza, Trans rights and climate issues.
If political leaders were badly served by teams who did not understand the rising emotional needs among voters, so in business and the corporate world the corporate servants in HR, PR and Legal services provided inadequate counsel. Too often, leaders in trouble were advised to avoid, duck and dive, or kick into the long grass of suspension and slow process. In the end, this led to leadership failures such as the treatment of Kathleen Stock at Sussex; the treatment of Paul Gambaccini and Cliff Richard by the BBC; the hopeless response of health, public authorities and the Scottish government on trans rights; the Edinburgh University response over the legacy of David Hume and the name of David Hume Tower, the treatment of the lecturer, Dr Neil Thin, who was completely cleared, and the treatment of the Edinburgh University Rector Ann Henderson. The process became the punishment and those in authority cowered in front of a modern mob.
The demand for emotional responses from leaders, not just cold policy, is visible across all walks of life. Just look at social media and even the mainstream newspapers.
The rise of extreme emotions, the passions turned to hatred that we see driving aspects of electoral behaviour, can start as local issues (grooming gangs were first raised by the left-wing Labour MP Ann Cryer, who found herself ostracised by her left wing colleagues), before growing into wider grievance and becoming attached to some common state failure (small boats, grooming gangs, shoplifting, immigration, the decline of the high street, energy transition, deindustrialisation). This then becomes a general hatred of the current political settlement and mainstream parties.
A sense of disrespect for people’s views, (remember Hilary Clinton’s notoriously disrespectful denouncement of “the deplorables” voting for Trump?) and a perceived lack of agency turns into mass voting to disrupt and demand change, using any political vehicles to hand – Trump, Reform, nationalists, Greens in the UK and a variety of polarising movements across Europe from 5 Star in Italy, ADF in Germany to Vox in Spain and National Rally in France.
While there was much talk about how Andy Burnham gathered all the anti-Reform vote around him in Makerfield, closer attention should be paid to the Aberdeen South by-election, which showed voter fluidity is a key lesson for all parties. The herd can change direction dramatically – on the same day, in different parts of the UK.
Aberdeen South is a seat that was held by the SNP’s Stephen Flynn at the last general election, and historically by Labour’s Anne Begg till 2015, but voters coalesced around the Conservative Douglas Lumsden in a huge anti-establishment vote against the SNP government in Edinburgh and the Labour Government’s UK polices on oil and gas.
This is the new fluidity in politics, driven by increasingly emotional responses to the narratives around how people feel about their lives and their place: do they feel listened to and respected? Do they have any agency to change things?
The dominant belief in politics for the past 40 years has been that if you got your stance on the economy right then all else would follow. This is a determinist approach to predicting public voting and also retail behaviour, aligning with the economic categories pollsters assign to people: A, B, C1, C2, D and E, depending on their wealth and social position.
But there is a clear risk if a government neglects the other visible emotional needs of the electorate, the ones that cut across these categories; their sense of identity, patriotism, their aspirations for their children’s future. If there is no strategy to address these nationally and locally it leaves the party in government without a defence when emotion boils over.
Tony Blair faced it with the rising power of the Countryside Alliance, which started as a grievance against limits on fox hunting then morphed into discontent with the decline in country life and rural services and then foot and mouth alienated many rural constituencies from Labour.
Yet no sooner had Labour won many rural constituencies back in 2024 than the hastily imposed Farmers’ Inheritance Tax from Rachel Reeves’ first budget reignited old hatreds and alienated the Labour government from a key section of the electorate – by some counts affecting 100 Labour rural constituencies.
The ineptitude of the Treasury’s slow “correction” by increasing tax-free limits on farms worth up to £5 million was staggering. It turned out to give more relief to bankers with pony fields on old agricultural land than to modern highly leveraged farmers supplying food to hard-nosed supermarkets.
The “determinist approach” historically saw seats go with the economic interest, or with religion, or with “working class area” identity. But this does not describe the fluidity and scope for change that has been visible in UK politics from the 1960s onwards, from the day of the Hamilton by election in 1968 through the SNP vote in 1974 and in many by-elections through the 1980. There was the rise of the SDP and on into general elections such as the massive Labour losses in Scotland in 2015. Then came the Brexit vote of 2016, which demonstrated that the emotional hold of the mainstream parties could be broken.
The historian Eric Hobsbawn, in a 1982 article, “The forward march of Labour halted”, looked at the decline of concentrated Labour-voting industrial areas (shipbuilding, mines, potteries, clothing) as presaging an inevitable decline in the Labour vote. This was certainly a driver of change, but it underestimated how changes in emotional attachment could be realigned to produce the Blair run of three substantial electoral victories and office from 1997–2010.
Hatred-driven politics was growing almost unchallenged in both mainstream parties. The Conservatives struggled with the divisions over Brexit, leading to to Boris Johnson expelling many leading figures from his party. This was mirrored across the aisle by Labour’s swing left, with the 2010 election of Ed Miliband and then the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, and a cycle of internal feuding, suspensions, expulsions and divisions over antisemitism.
In both cases the mainstream parties were tearing themselves apart, with leaderships appealing to powerful emotional passions, trying to use old and manufactured hatreds of class and the EU, only to find that this was bringing them all into disrepute and the electorate were seeing and experimenting with other solutions – Reform and the Greens.
Which brings back the question of how our parties, government and institutions “manage hatred”. Traditionally this has been through a contested two-party system. Those parties contained within them their broad churches, giving voice to grievance and injustice. But recently, under media pressure, they have narrowed their tolerances, expelling the early voices of doubt and leaving them prey to the populists.
Government and parliament have moved from being institutions of agency, voted in to take big, impactful decisions (1945 and 1979), to prevaricating departments, beholden to constant judicial review, consultation culture and lobbied to a standstill by stakeholder quangos, self-righteous charities and single-issue campaign groups. All this allows grievance and hatred to grow.
The road back is a long one, but it has to start with devolution that puts control back into the hands of elected officials who give the public a sense of agency: that if they vote for someone they will see action. Those who try to diminish Andy Burnham’s work on the Bee network of buses fail to understand how positive that makes him look compared to failures on small boats, asylum hotels, shoplifting, the declining high street, and the unemployed 16-24 year olds which every mother, grandmother, brother and sister worries about.
Devolution also needs to bring innovation and pluralism in ways that Scottish devolution has not in the past 16 years. There have been few public service experiments, difficult decisions or innovations since Scottish Labour’s free university education, free long-term nursing care and the smoking ban. Instead, there has always been the invitation of hatred towards the “outside” force of London, which it is claimed denies you freedom and respect
Devolution, Burnham style, means double devolution. Can Holyrood let the strengths of Edinburgh and Glasgow rise again? It has always puzzled me why the advocates of an independent Scotland have never established a new Scottish Stock Exchange, a signature building, linked no doubt electronically to London and Europe but building access to Scottish firms and Scottish business networks.
Playing to the dislike of big business instead of managing it, or running with the biases of the Greens on issues such as the oil and gas transition, is no way to deal with hatred. The first rule in managing hatred is to manage your own feelings and emotions towards others and on the issues they care about – articulate their issues, yes, but do not cower in the face of the loudest but wrong solutions. This is something a whole generation of Scottish politicians must relearn if we are to move forward.
Neil Stewart is the founder of the Narrowcast Media Group and former political secretary to the Leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock. His Managing Hatred pamphlet can be read in full here.