Many of us assess policies based on whether they would work, and how they could be implemented.
For politicians there is an extra layer of consideration – are the policies popular in and of themselves (are they popular), and are they a priority among voters (do they have salience).
Any campaign plan starts with a list of policies. Perhaps these are ideologically attractive to a given party, perhaps they are just plain sensible (they fix known problems in public services or social mobility, for instance). Both need to be filtered for popularity and salience before they get anywhere near a manifesto or key speech.
Abolishing tuition fees is not a salient policy, and neither is it a popular one. That is the challenging central finding of this morning’s Public First polling – that, in campaigning terms, Keir Starmer’s apparent decision to scrap the Corbyn era commitment to free higher education was the right one.
