Once upon a time, the nature and appeal of the Labour party were easy to describe. It was a working-class party led by a mixture of intellectuals and trade unionists. It taxed mainly the middle class in order to pay for schools, hospitals, pensions and welfare benefits for its supporters. In the 1966 general election, when Harold Wilson led the party to victory and a majority of 100, 11 million votes came from working-class electors and just two million from middle-class ones.
Now the pattern is very different. In last year’s general election, Labour’s 4.4 million middle-class voters just outnumbered its 4.2 million working-class supporters. Whereas in 1966 the ‘class gap’ was 40 points (60 per cent of working-class voters backed Labour compared with just 20 per cent of middle-class ones), the gap last year was just six points (33 per cent of working-class voters backed Labour, compared with 27 per cent of the middle class).
In some ways it is much healthier for Labour to appeal to middle-class voters almost as much as ones from the working class. The numbers of middle-class electors are expanding, while the numbers of working-class voters are contracting. Labour can no longer win elections by capturing a majority of working-class votes and not worrying about middle-class votes.
That said, the party has a massive problem with the pattern of its support – or, rather, two connected problems. The first is that it has seen a big long-term decline in the share of working-class electors voting Labour. This has not happened at every election – Labour’s support in 1997 rose sharply across the board – but the long-term impact has been huge.
The second problem is that there are signs that the left, electorally, no longer – even if it ever did – embraces a single set of values. Rather, there is a divergence between the concerns of the traditional working-class left and those of the university-educated, middle-class left.
Some recent work by YouGov for David Goodhart, the editor-at-large of Prospect magazine, illustrates this. We studied attitudes to British culture, identity and immigration, and looked at two different groups of left-of centre voters in particular – middle-class, university-educated electors who voted Labour or Liberal Democrat last May and working-class Labour or Liberal Democrat voters who had not been to university.
On some issues, the differences in outlook between the two groups were huge. Look, for instance, at two statements we tested.
First, we asked people if they agreed or disagreed with the statement: ‘Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition. It sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me feel uncomfortable.’ Overall, 62 per cent of respondents agreed with that notion and 30 per cent disagreed. Among Conservative voters the respective figures were 72 per cent and 23 per cent. But now look at the divide between working-class, non-graduate, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters – among whom 64 per cent agreed with the statement and 26 per cent disagreed – and middle-class, university-educated, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, where the figures were almost reversed: 28 per cent agreeing and 67 per cent disagreeing.
Second, we tested the statement: ‘The government should give employers special incentives, such as lower national insurance rates, to hire workers born in Britain.’ Overall, 63 per cent of respondents, and 72 per cent of Tory voters, agreed with this idea and 27 per cent, including 21 per cent of Conservative supporters, disagreed. Between working-class, non-graduate, Labour and Liberal Democrats voters and middle-class, university-educated Labour and Liberal Democrat voters there was, once again, a huge divide: 65 per cent of the former agreeing and 25 per cent disagreeing and 35 per cent of the latter agreeing and 52 per cent disagreeing.
As these figures show, working-class Labour and Liberal Democrat voters who had not been to university held views that were much closer to Conservative voters than to middle-class, university-educated Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. Hence the label ‘blue Labour’. It should be noted, of course, that this data related to how people voted at last year’s election, before the coalition was formed and, therefore, before the Liberal Democrats lost much of their left-of-centre support.
But these figures give just a glimpse of one of the great challenges that Labour now faces. The stance of Labour ministers when the party was in power was broadly that of its better-off, university-educated supporters. My guess is that many readers will say: quite right, too. But then, I would also guess that most people reading this article have, or hope to obtain, a university degree and, if their work requires them to get their hands dirty, this is in a metaphorical and not a literal sense.
The harsh truth is that the public values of the Labour party now diverge from the private values of many of its traditional supporters. This is one reason why Labour now attracts so much less support from working-class voters than it used to do. This is not, of course, the only reason: plainly, Labour has also suffered from the decline of the industries where workers naturally came together in trade unions and a spirit of solidarity, such as the mines, shipyards, steelworks and car factories.
What, then, is to be done? One option is to adopt new values and policies closer to those of Labour’s current and former working-class voters in the hope that this would encourage many of those who abstained last year to come out and vote, and those who have been tempted to vote for fringe parties, such as the British National party, to return home. There are two problems with this strategy. The first is that it would alienate millions of Labour-voting middle-class graduates (including possibly you and certainly me). The second is that such a move might be seen as a cynical ploy rather than a genuine change of heart. Experience, common sense and polling evidence all tell us that voters instinctively see through such ploys and spurn any temptation to vote for a party that offers them.
Rather than change tack, Labour needs to address the issues that underpin these blue Labour attitudes. YouGov research at the time of the European elections two years ago, when almost one voter in four backed the BNP or UK Independence party, suggests that disenchantment is the result more of experience and insecurity, rather than a fundamental conversion to far-right doctrines. The real problems are to do with jobs, homes and crime. Restore full employment, ensure decent housing for all, and bear down on crime, especially on less well-off housing estates, and far fewer people will be looking for scapegoats to blame. That’s easy to state, of course, but devilishly hard to do. But it’s the challenge Labour must rise to if it is to turn the values of blue Labour back to red.
exactamundo,well said dude.
Spot on.
How about a YouGov poll Part II, in which the two types of Labour supporters are questioned on a range of other potentially contentious topics? My initial suggestions would be: a) gay marriage b) reproductive ethics c) higher education funding
Were these respondents also asked whether they had actually been to a “foreign country”? Perception is reality. Some of us have been involved in fighting crime, successfully, but have been less successful in fighting the fear of crime, for example.
A very well defined and argued piece which chimes with so much personal experience. The very mention of trying to listen to and understand the complaints of the white English working class who have moved away from supporting Labour, often to flirt with the BNP/EDL (as opposed to the hard line cheerleaders) can bring accusations of pandering to reactionary or racist views. However as you outline, the stated support for xenpphobic policies can be seen as a reaction to a general disenchantment; deal with the disenchantment and you have a chance of moving people away from the siren voices of the EDL/BNP/UKIP. It would be interesting to poll attitudes toward English identity, as so much of the attitudes I have witnessed are packaged up in resentment to do with that. For example anti-Scottish feeling regarding decisions made at Holyrood differing from actions affecting England voted on by a UK-wide parliament or the perceived lack of attention given to St.George’s Day compared to other patron saints’ days. It could be argued that developing an English identity, one that is inclusive rather than the mono-cultural one that is being defined by the EDL and their like and reaction to inflammatory press reports about banning of St George’s flags etc, would be a first step towards nullifying the disenchantment.
‘The real problems are to do with jobs, homes and crime.’ The statement above is actually the biggest misconception that Labour faces. It is only one part of the problem. You’ve already forgotten the core statement from the survey you mentioned avove, that: ‘Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition. It sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me feel uncomfortable.’ Culture and integration are massive issues that can no longer be ignored. No one asked for their country’s culture and values to be changed beyond recognition. The simple fact is that the more educated one is, the more affluent they become and the less visibility they have to the problem because they live primarily in non-immigrant enclaves. In other words, they are creating a world where only the wealthy feel comfortable in their own country. I’m an immigrant myself and I can see this quite clearly.
I guess the turn off for me is calling it blue Labour. The core issues of full employment and decent homes are ones that do resonate with the poorer areas of the UK and where they have not been delivered to leave us wide open to losing voters to the BNP and indeed Liberal Democrats. Also the historic working class aspired to a better life for its children. By resurrecting these commitments and encouraging Labour where it is in power locally to push this agenda we would achieve a reconnection with the voters and indeed make a tangible difference to a lot of lives. Something I got interested in politics for.
The point is always lost when the blue labour nonsense is used. The laughable part of it comes from the Yes campaign who in their “MP’s will have to work harder to attract support” selling point forget if what is ignorantly put as blue Labour hadn’t been created (to appeal to the electorate) and Labour had stuck to it’s ‘red labour’ ways the party would never have made it into Government.