As June 8th draws near, the polls are tightening up. Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May are both hoping that, come Friday, they’ll hold the keys to 10 Downing Street. With many divisive policies and topics under discussion, Labour and the Conservatives are perhaps more at odds with each other than in any other election in recent memory.
As a British company with an international workforce who work with companies all over the world, many of the policies being laid out by the two main parties will have a direct impact on our business. To help keep us, and our clients up to date, we looked at some of the trending election topics. But which policies are resonating most with the online public?
From Trident to the dementia tax, see a summary of our results in the graphic below…
The Labour Party is streets ahead when it comes to online search interest. However, we shouldn’t read too much into it as an indicator of voting intention as it’s hard to measure sentiment from unfiltered search interest.
The high search numbers are also probably a reflection of voter demographics. Labour was 19 points ahead of the Conservatives in a recent poll in the 18-24 age bracket, and we know that this demographic is more likely to be active online. Prior to the election announcement, Labour (60,500 online searches) already had on average three times as many searches than the Conservatives (22,200) every month, so this isn’t a big surprise.
This trend is again reflected in the high number of searches about tuition fees (Labour has pledged to abolish them) compared to other topics. Immigration is always a massive issue, so we weren’t surprised to see that up there, but social care is becoming increasingly prominent, especially with the recent Conservative ‘dementia tax’ policy, which had a lot of online interest.
As far as economic policy goes, we were intrigued to see that corporate tax as a topic has seen such a massive jump in online interest. While this is obviously a topic of interest to us as a business and our clients, it’s obviously something of interest to the average voter, too. The living wage – a policy championed by Labour – has also seen consistent interest.
Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @searchlabs.
Insights
