The left–right spectrum can be measured — Britain has done it the same way since 1986. On those yardsticks the public's average economic and social attitudes have drifted left and become markedly more liberal over the past 15 years. Yet a right-wing populist party has just posted its best-ever result and now leads the polls. What changed most is not the centre of gravity, but the shape of the divide.
The intuition that a country has “moved right” is testable. Since 1986 the British Social Attitudes survey has placed people on two value scales, each built from a fixed battery of agree/disagree statements and scored from 0 to 100: an economic left–right scale (redistribution, business, fairness) and a liberal–authoritarian scale (rules, order, personal freedom).15 Read together, they are the closest thing Britain has to a thermometer of where the public sits.
Two different stories emerge. Economic attitudes are cyclical: Britain edged right under New Labour — the score peaked near 42 around 2004 and was still 41 in 2010 — then swung back. By 2022 it stood at 33, close to where it was in the mid-1990s.1 Social attitudes show a one-way, secular shift: the liberal–authoritarian score held around 69–71 for a quarter-century, then fell to 56 by 2022 — a sustained move toward a more liberal outlook on sex, family and personal choice.1 The one recent wrinkle, and the kernel of truth in the “moved right” feeling, is a small reversal: the score edged back up to 59 by 2025, the first clear turn toward the authoritarian end in the series.1
There is a real sense in which the spectrum has widened. For decades, young and old held almost identical average economic views: in 1986 both the under-35s and the over-55s scored 37, and as recently as 2019 both scored 38.1 Then they parted. By 2022 the under-35s had moved sharply left to 28, while the over-55s barely moved, at 36 — opening an eight-point gap where there had been none.1 The widening is driven by the young moving left, not by the country moving right.
Your instinct that younger people have grown more liberal while older generations have not is broadly right — and it is the deeper engine of the whole picture. Throughout the survey's 40 years, the young have always been the more liberal; the country liberalises chiefly because each new generation enters more liberal than the one it replaces.1 Crucially, NatCen's age–cohort–period modelling finds this is a birth-cohort effect, not an ageing one: people do not generally turn conservative as they get older, they largely keep the outlook they formed young.1 Take one marker of liberal family values — disagreeing that people who want children should marry. Just 5% of those born in the 1920s took that view; 41% of the 1960s cohort do (almost unchanged from the 43% they recorded back in 1994); and 55% of those born in the 1990s.1
The bigger structural change is not where people sit but how their values map onto parties. British politics used to run mainly along the economic axis. Now a cultural axis — liberal versus authoritarian, the dimension that tracks Brexit, immigration and identity — is roughly as decisive.1 In 2015, libertarians were 21 points more likely than authoritarians to back Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens; by 2024–25 that gap had doubled to 42 points. The mirror gap on the right — authoritarians favouring the Conservatives or Reform — widened from 19 to 32 points.1
This is the heart of your question: with the same economic and social scales, can we see whether voters are still moved by bread-and-butter interests, or pulled away by identity and culture-war debates? NatCen's anatomy of the Reform vote is the cleanest test. Support for Reform is sharply sorted by the identity (liberal–authoritarian) scale — 34% of the most authoritarian third back it against just 5% of the most liberal, a 29-point gap — and by welfare attitudes (a 21-point gap). But it is barely sorted by the classic economic left–right scale at all: a 6-point gap, with only 37% of Reform supporters even sitting on the economic right.1 The party's surge since 2024 came overwhelmingly from the authoritarian end (up 12 points there, against 4 among liberals).1
So voters have not simply abandoned their material interests for populist theatre. Reform supporters are more discontented — more likely to be struggling financially and dissatisfied with the NHS — but NatCen's modelling finds that their ideology, and the identity axis above all, predicts support far more strongly than discontent does.1 The honest summary: a second, cultural axis now does much of the mobilising that economics used to, cross-cutting the old left–right line rather than erasing it.
If one division has genuinely opened, it is education. Support for Reform climbs steeply as qualifications fall — from 9% of graduates to 40% of those whose highest qualification is below A-level — while the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats lean the opposite way.1 It is the modern analogue of the old class divide, but it now runs more on identity than on pay: graduates cluster at the liberal pole, non-graduates at the authoritarian one.
And the ground is shifting under it. The share of working-age adults classed as graduates (above A-level) has roughly doubled — from 24% in 2002 to 42% by 2017.9 Because graduates are the most socially liberal and least Reform-leaning group, this steady expansion keeps enlarging the liberal pole by sheer weight of numbers. That is a large part of why the population's social average drifts liberal across the decades even as the populist-right vote climbs — the right is winning a bigger share of a group (older non-graduates) that is itself shrinking as a proportion of the country.
The feeling is not imaginary — it is mostly about votes, not values. The principal right-wing populist vehicle (UKIP, then the Brexit Party, now Reform UK) took 12.6% in 2015, fell away in 2017 and 2019 as the Conservatives absorbed the Leave vote, then surged to 14.3% in 2024: the best general-election share a right-wing populist party has ever won in Britain.23 Researchers note the 2024 Reform vote was almost a mirror image of UKIP's 2015 map (constituency correlation r = 0.86) — a re-emergence and consolidation more than an unprecedented new tide.3
That vehicle has since gone further. Through 2025–26 Reform led national voting-intention polls, peaking around 34% in September 2025 before settling near 25% in spring 2026, with Labour and the Conservatives tied well behind.6 Those are volatile poll estimates, not a recorded result — but the direction is clear, and the combined Conservative-plus-Labour share at the 2024 election, 57.4%, was already a record low.8
The two value scales are robust but partial. They were designed around economics, order and personal morality — and capture immigration and gender/trans debates only weakly, the very issues that animate today's culture-war politics.7 So “more socially liberal on the scale” does not mean more liberal on every flashpoint. Vote intention is also not the same as a settled value, and current polls are volatile: Ipsos changed its method in mid-2025 (now prompting for Reform), so comparisons across that break need care.6 Averages can also hide a more mobilised flank — see the caveat below. None of this establishes cause.
Whether the country is “polarising” is genuinely disputed among credible researchers — partly because the word hides several different things. This is an empirical dispute, and the evidence points in both directions.
Party support has splintered: the two main parties' combined share hit a record low, and Reform and the Greens are rising at opposite poles.8 “Affective” polarisation around Brexit identities is real, the share of Britons who say the country feels divided has reached a record 84%, and analysts find some social and geographic divides hardening rather than healing.43
Classic issue polarisation — opinions spreading apart — is weak: on most social questions Britain is converging on more liberal answers.7 And 62% of the public think politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a tactic, up from 44% in 2020 — suggesting much of the “war” is elite-driven rather than a deep split in values.4
A reasonable reading: identity-based and party-system fragmentation are real and growing; a wholesale spreading of underlying attitudes is not. Both can be true at once.
The figures plotted above, so the work can be checked. Value-scale scores are 0–100 BSA averages; vote shares are GB general-election results.
| Series | Year | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic left–right | 2004 | 42 | peak (right), New Labour |
| Economic left–right | 2010 | 41 | — |
| Economic left–right | 2022 | 33 | ≈ mid-1990s level |
| Liberal–authoritarian | 2011 | 69 | — |
| Liberal–authoritarian | 2022 | 56 | secular liberal shift |
| Liberal–authoritarian | 2025 | 59 | recent uptick (authoritarian) |
| Economic, under-35s | 2022 | 28 | was 38 in 2019 |
| Economic, 55+ | 2022 | 36 | was 38 in 2019 |
| “Children → marry” % disagree, born 1920s | 1994 | 5 | generational marker |
| “Children → marry” % disagree, born 1960s | now | 41 | 43 in 1994 — held |
| “Children → marry” % disagree, born 1990s | now | 55 | most liberal cohort |
| Reform support gap, identity scale | 2025 | 29 pts | auth 34 vs lib 5 |
| Reform support gap, economic scale | 2025 | 6 pts | right 21 vs left 15 |
| Reform support, by qualification | 2025 | 9–40% | graduate 9 → below A-level 40 |
| Graduate share, working-age | 2002–17 | 24→42% | ONS LFS (above A-level) |
| Radical-right vote | 2015 | 12.6% | UKIP |
| Radical-right vote | 2019 | 2.0% | Brexit Party (Leave vote absorbed by Cons) |
| Radical-right vote | 2024 | 14.3% | Reform UK — best-ever |
Threads deliberately held back to keep this piece focused on the national spectrum.