This January will mark the twentieth anniversary of my joining the Labour Party. I chose an inauspicious moment. In the week following my first branch meeting came defeat in a by-election in Bermondsey, supposedly one of the safest seats in the country. The SDP-Liberal Alliance appeared to be sweeping all before it and, just six months from an election, Labour was hurtling towards what turned out to be its worst ever humiliation in June 1983. Many will remember the relief that greeted the fact that Labour had even managed to come second in that election.
It is worth recalling that, at the time, the crisis enveloping the Labour Party was perceived to be much more than just that of division and ideological extremism. Conventional wisdom had it that social and economic trends were conspiring to exclude Labour from ever holding power again.
We were told in endless numbers of documentaries and articles that we were entering the Age of Leisure, the new era of endemic mass unemployment that would be engendered by robots and computers taking over mechanical tasks, where the retirement age would fall to 50, and we would spend more time travelling, reading and playing sport.
As we contemplate the ever-increasing number of hours worked by our ever-expanding workforce, these are salutary reminders for those who speculate on social trends and their political offspring.
However, some of the accepted wisdom of the mid-80s was indeed pertinent, even if the political conclusions that arose from it proved eventually misplaced. The scenario presented was that the decline of (mass) manufacturing, the associated fall in the membership of the major unions, the sale of council houses and the depopulation of the cities in favour of the suburbs were combining to shrink Labour’s electoral base to a point where victory was impossible. Thus the SDP-Liberal Alliance were not just the offshoot of a political split, but a manifestation of these shifting social and ideological sands, of a ‘broken mould’. As the Alliance collapsed, the theory metamorphosed until, after 1992, it briefly became that of the permanent one-party Tory state.
Of course, many of the major social and demographic changes described were significant. It was only by the process of adjusting to these realities that Labour proved the determinists wrong. So any anticipation of the landscape ten years hence must be tempered by the realisation that demographic trends are themselves subject to crosswinds and their social consequences are sometimes obscure or uncertain.
Speculation, even if it is informed, is thus a risky business. It is difficult even to get some agreement in interpreting the past.
We are now beginning to see the initial results of the 2001 census, the first to be carried out in an election year for fifty years and which therefore provides a wealth of almost simultaneous data on the demographic and political landscape. The census and the features and trends that it identifies may well cast a new light on some of the voting (and non-voting) patterns evident in that election.
What, for example, will it tell us about the demography of the seaside towns which provided many of the best Labour results, or the new towns where turnout slumped and the Tory message appeared to have some attraction? What has happened in the public housing estates, for so long regarded as Labour’s ‘heartland’, but where right to buy and allocation policies may radically have changed their character?
The eye-catching headline thus far is that, for the first time ever, the number of over 65s exceeds the number of under-16s – a landmark change, which seems likely to become permanent as life expectancy increases rapidly. The social policy issues which flow from this are obvious in health care, pensions, housing and taxation and are already informing decision-making. For political parties and strategists the consequences are more uncertain.
Age differentials in the voting patterns of 1997 and 2001 were arguably of more significance as a predictor of vote even than the increasingly redundant social grade criteria. Using a range of polling data, we can surmise that amongst those over 65 the Conservatives were certainly within five percent and possibly even slightly ahead of Labour, while the under-40s split at least two-to-one the other way.
The Conservatives have always benefited from differential longevity between manual and white-collar workers. Moreover, the greater life expectancy of women and especially, of course, middle-class women, has been a major source of the gender gap. In the last two elections it can fairly be said that the Tories’ elderly heartland has effectively kept them afloat, and indeed in the 1999 European elections delivered a kind of victory.
The current cohorts of pensioners grew up politically in the two-party hegemony of the 1950s and 1960s. They still contain a bulk of those who have voted without fail for the same party.
Inevitably such partisans will become even more of a minority as the generations of the 1970s and 1980s, including those who broke their lifetime habits in 1979 or 1983 or who have drifted in and out of voting for third parties or voting at all, gain their political maturity. Coming behind them, we have the post-Thatcher children who know little of the ideologies of public ownership or council housing.
At the younger end of the electoral spectrum, social trends have also been conspiring to fragment the strength of party allegiances. The tendency to marry and to have children at a later age and the break-up of family units have not only created many more single-person households, less susceptible to familial political preferences, but have also mitigated against the inheritance of political choice from generation to generation, which has been a major force underpinning vote choice.
As well as a more aged, more diverse population we can surmise in general terms about a more ‘consumerist’ electorate. Access to information of all kinds will be literally at the fingertips, with the ability to make commercial transactions or to engage in a range of interactive media. In a world of choice and an apparent moral relativism where no decision is unquestioned and where the decision-making process appears to be open to constant scrutiny, how are political values to be asserted?
If the traditional ideological battle-lines have been blurred by social, industrial and political trends, then electoral choices may well depend increasingly upon more diffuse regional and local factors, and on the effectiveness of community campaigning and of personality. It goes without saying that this by itself is a sterile cul-de-sac without a basis of values that can distinguish one assiduous community politician from another. The instability of the Liberal Democrats’ local base demonstrates that, however effective it is in the short term, pavement politics is not an end in itself. It may, though, become an essential means of demonstrating political action and thus conveying a political message.
Whatever the fate of the Conservative Party itself, there will probably always be a place for a reactionary response to change, one that feeds on fear and takes refuge in ‘traditional’ values and a retreat to the comfortable certainties of the past, whatever they may be. The appeal of such conservatism in the right circumstances is historically demonstrable.
For Labour, the elections of 2010 and beyond will be fought among an electorate which may largely have shed its tribal allegiances. The resulting political messages will not just be about resisting the reactionary response to change and its sinister xenophobic underbelly, nor just about managing that change for the benefit of the ‘many’ and not just the ‘few’, but about finding ways of demonstrating those values in action.
We are moving well beyond the days of C2s, Worcester Woman and Mondeo Man, when vague and clichéd stereotypes were devised to encapsulate the tiny segment of the electorate upon whom the whole political edifice was supposedly balanced. Instead, we must recognise that any serious analysis must now depend not just upon objective demographic statistics but also upon a sensitivity to culture, to community and, indeed, to politics.