A year ago, a chance encounter between Gordon Brown and a Rochdale pensioner provided the iconic moment of the 2010 general election campaign and delivered the death knell to Labour’s already hyper-slim chances of winning a fourth term.
Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter all her life who had worked for the Cooperative Society in Rochdale, was by no stretch of the imagination a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. She had, as she told the former prime minister, concerns about tax, the national debt, and immigration from eastern Europe. There was no racist or xenophobic slang used to voice her concerns, which she expressed in language far milder than many will have encountered on the doorstep.
Brown’s response – to describe the conversation as a ‘disaster’ and the pensioner as a ‘bigoted woman’ – confirmed to many, including large numbers of his party’s natural supporters, what they already suspected: that Labour didn’t get their worries about immigration and that any attempt to raise them would be dismissed as motivated by base instincts.
But while Brown’s words may have been offensive and ill-advised, his thought process may not be totally unfamiliar to many of us. Indeed, a YouGov poll last summer indicated that while the public (and many Labour voters) believed Labour having been ‘too soft on immigration’ was a major cause of the party’s defeat, relatively few party members either agreed with the criticism or saw it as a major cause.
Thus if the story of the 2005 general election – symbolised by the loss of seats such as Cambridge, Bristol West, Manchester Withington, and Hornsey and Wood Green to the Liberal Democrats – was the departure from Labour’s ranks of large swathes of ‘progressive left’ voters, that of 2010 – the exodus of white working-class voters – was encapsulated by Brown’s ‘Duffy moment’. Defeats in constituencies like Thurrock, Crawley, Harlow and Basildon attested to the collapse of Labour support among a section of the electorate who helped Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.
One year on, the polls indicate that Labour may have begun to recover some of that lost ground. According to Ipsos MORI’s latest polling, the party’s share of the skilled working-class vote has jumped from 25 per cent last May to 40 per cent now, much of that gain coming from a slump in Liberal Democrat support. Nonetheless, that recovery among ‘C2 voters’ needs to be seen in context: while its current polling rate may be akin to that achieved by the party in 2005, it’s still far short of the 52 per cent achieved by Labour in 1997.
The debate about how Labour turns disillusionment with the coalition into more solid, positive support at the next general election is still in its infancy. The blue Labour analysis – to which we devote this special issue of Progress – is perhaps the most developed contribution to that debate. It is – as one of its foremost proponents, Maurice Glasman, told me in our interview on page 18 – an attempt to ‘improve and strengthen the early days of New Labour’ and not a rejection of it. Glasman’s recognition of the importance of issues like welfare reform and immigration; understanding of the complexities of the debate around the meaning of fairness (whether our conception is based around the notions of need or desert can produce radically different policy outcomes); and antipathy to top-down statism are all ones that will be shared by many Progress readers. Indeed, as Graeme Cooke argues on page14, from an attempt to unearth the points of friction – let alone agreement – between these two ways of thinking, we can see the beginnings of a new and interesting political project around which many in the party will find common cause.
But while blue Labour’s analysis of the shortcomings of New Labour is well developed, proponents of the latter have yet to develop a coherent response to the former. Moreover, while common ground should be sought, that should not be at the expense of an understanding of where the two schools of thinking differ. Philippe Legrain’s defence of the benefits of immigration on page 22 is, for instance, a compelling one. And, as YouGov’s Anthony Wells argued in Progress last September, however much Labour becoming an anti-immigration party might ‘appeal to some of their traditional supporters, it would also repel the educated middle classes who are also a keystone of Labour’s modern electoral alliance’.
This, perhaps, brings us to the crux of the politics of the debate. Blue Labour may offer a way of appealing to many of the party’s lost working-class voters, but, as yet, it appears to have little to say to its middle-class ones; indeed, it seems unaware of some of the electoral trade-offs its choices may involve. This is no mere academic point. Labour’s support held up better among AB middle-class voters last May than it did among C2 voters. And, with a turnout some 18 points higher than skilled working-class voters, these archetypal ‘middle Britain’ dwellers are ones that Labour can ill afford to ignore or alienate.
That’s not to suggest, as Deborah Mattinson’s Speaking Middle English research that we featured in the last issue, convincingly demonstrates, that the middle class is a homogeneous group to which a single appeal can be made. The outlook and attitudes of affluent floating voters who might have switched from Labour to Tory in 2010 may be rather different from similarly affluent ‘progressive’ voters who left Labour for the Liberal Democrats in 2005. And, while many of the former may find something attractive about the blue Labour agenda, most of the latter may not. Indeed, and to complicate matters further, as Peter Kellner outlines on page 20, even within the ranks of those who voted Labour or Liberal Democrat last year, there is a sharp divide on many of the issues at the forefront of the blue Labour agenda between middle-class, university-educated voters and working-class electors who have not been to university. Many of the latter, furthermore, appeared – on these issues at least – to be closer in their attitudes to Tory voters than middle-class Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters.
What Roger Liddle and Michael McTernan term the ‘cultural challenges to social democracy’ – the issues of race, immigration, identity and diversity – are not, of course, issues that the British left has to struggle with in isolation. But, as they show on page 24, the experience of centre-left parties in Europe is not a happy one. Indeed, many seem to have shed their traditional working-class supporters to far-right, populist parties who have proved themselves rather more skilled than the BNP at repositioning themselves to exploit this opportunity.
The debate, in other words, has only just begun. Gillian Duffy may have returned to the Labour fold, and done a Paxman on Nick Clegg, but many of those she spoke for on that fatal day last year have yet to. Blue Labour offers an important answer as to how the party meets that challenge. But it’s far from being the final one.