The Oracle Spoke

I'm an economist, not a pollster -- and the ONS data I've got here is economic, not electoral. There are no voting intention figures, no council seat projections, nothing about party performance.

**What the data DOES tell you** is the economic backdrop against which people will be voting: claimant count jumped from 1.65m in January to 1.69m in March 2026 (+44,000 in two months). Vacancies have fallen every month from 739k in November to 711k in February -- a drop of 28,000 openings. Real pay growth is crawling at around 0.4-0.8% (comparing nominal 3.8-4.8% against inflation of 3.0-3.8%). Economic inactivity hit 9.1 million in January, the highest in this dataset.

**The political read?** Governments don't win when claimant counts are rising and job openings are falling. Labour owns this economy now, and if vacancies keep dropping while inactivity stays above 9 million, that's their problem at the ballot box. But which party benefits? That depends on whether voters blame structural reality (decades of extraction) or the current tenant of Number 10. The data can't tell you that -- only the ballot boxes can.

If you want electoral predictions, you need polling data. What I can tell you is the economic weather looks grey and getting greyer.