Only the Conservative Party stands to gain from the myth that Labour cannot hold the support of its traditional working class supporters while reaching out to ‘Middle England’.
What is more surprising, however, is that some in the Labour Party are willing to swallow, and promote, such a weak analysis, however genuine their concerns about the continuing exclusion of millions of Britons from social and economic opportunity.
There is nothing new about this debate. In 1900, Keir Hardie urged the newly born Labour Party to transcend, not intensify, class divisions. Then, shortly before the election of the 1945 Labour Government, Herbert Morrison left the safe seat of Hackney South to fight marginal Lewisham East, thus demonstrating his belief that Labour had to appeal to ‘all sections of society – manual workers and black coats alike.’
In terms of pure electoral considerations, Labour simply cannot win by relying on its traditional sources of support – the working class – alone. Socially and politically, Britain has changed enormously in a comparatively short space of time. Between 1964 and 1997, the size of the working class vote fell from 58 percent of the electorate to 40 percent.
Today, the Conservatives’ natural core vote, the middle class, constitutes 60 percent of voters. Labour’s failure to adapt to meet this challenge accounts for its poor electoral performance during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
Labour’s task has been made more complicated, though not necessarily more difficult, by the decline in class-based voting and the weakening attachment of voters to their traditional political allegiances. Up until the 1960s, voters tended to support political parties in accordance with their perceived class interests. Thus about two-thirds of middle class voters backed the Tories, while a similar proportion of the working class supported Labour.
But since the 1960s this correlation has begun to break down. As the class structure changed, the attachment of manual workers to Labour weakened, but so did the allegiance of middle class voters to the Tories. Moreover, the number of voters who ‘identify’ with a political party, and the strength by which they do so, has also fallen sharply. In 1964 the percentage of British voters who claimed to ‘strongly identify’ themselves as Labour was 22 percent. By 1992, this figure had fallen by two-thirds to just 7.7 percent. Even in 1997, only ten percent of voters identified themselves as strong Labour supporters.
‘Essex Man’ was the personification of this trend, symbolising as he did the support of ‘naturally’ Labour, increasingly affluent, skilled working class voters for the Conservative Party. Indeed, one of the weakest elements of the heartlands argument is the notion that, in the couple of decades before Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader, working class voters were enthusiastic and loyal Labour supporters.
In reality, during the 1980s Labour managed to lose seats overwhelmingly populated by its supposed core supporters. The defection of working class voters in constituencies like Basildon, Welwyn and Lewisham was in no way a South East England phenomenon. In the North East, seats like Darlington and York returned Tory MPs in 1983 and 1987. Labour even came close in 1983 to losing the city of Durham seat, which hosts the annual miners’ gala. A similar pattern existed in the Midlands, North West and, to a lesser degree, Scotland and Wales.
Labour’s victory in 1997, and especially the magnitude of it, was built upon the party’s ability to build a broad-based electoral coalition. Forty percent of middle class voters supported Labour, nearly double the number who did in 1964. Mirroring this, middle class support for the Tories declined sharply: from 62 percent in 1964 down to just 38 percent in 1997.
However, Labour managed to achieve this without alienating its traditional supporters. Nearly 60 percent of the working class voted for the party in 1997. Geographically, too, Labour’s support rose just as strongly in its traditional heartlands seats of Northern England, Scotland and Wales as it did in London and the South East. Philosophically, there are a multitude of reasons why Labour should not fear fashioning an appeal which can win the support of all sectors of society. Moreover, Labour also has to face the fact that by opting for a political strategy which is narrow, exclusionary and class-based, it is inevitably opening the door to the return of a Conservative government, with all the consequences this entails for those whom the party claims to speak.