The political landscape is increasingly fragmented and complex. Simplicity should be the hallmark of Labour’s response, argues Graeme Cooke

In one sense, Lenin was right. Widening the franchise did not inexorably advance the cause of socialism. The revolutionary left utterly neglected the potential for democracy to deliver huge achievements, like universal public services and the welfare state. And the extension of the vote made independent parliamentary representation for working people viable. However, the Labour party has governed for only 33 out of the 84 years since the arrival of universal suffrage in 1928, and for just 20 out of the 69 years prior to 1997. Despite far outnumbering owners and aristocrats combined, the enfranchisement of working-class men and women did not deliver the decisive and sustained electoral advantage that many on the democratic left in the 19th century and early 20th century had seen as inevitable.

This disappointment has cast a long shadow over centre-left politics, leaving a lingering insecurity and lack of confidence: ‘Why do people not vote for us, especially those who “should”?’ With victory proving to require more than arithmetical logic, the task for Labour has often been posed as a trade-off between what it believes and what (enough) voters want. The danger with this formulation is that it sets idealism against democracy, posing the task of building popular majorities as, at best, a necessary nuisance and, at worst, a brake on true radicalism. This misses the paradoxical dynamic between democracy and leadership necessary for political success – a dynamic which is itself a huge source of political energy. A common criticism of New Labour is that it went ‘too far’ in courting popularity and chasing public opinion. In fact, it did not go nearly far enough in rooting its politics in the experiences of ordinary people or in forging a partnership with them to advance its goals.

These democratic tensions are the essential starting point for thinking about how Labour might construct a majority coalition with the country by the next election. For most of the post-Attlee era this entailed turning out enough of the working class and reaching out to enough of the middle class. This was done most successfully by Harold Wilson in 1966, when he posed as a national leader with broad appeal. By the 1990s, major economic and cultural trends had altered the balance of the formula – there were more managers and fewer miners – but not its basic structure. Tony Blair motivated Labour’s ‘core support’ in unprecedented numbers and attracted large swaths of the ‘swing vote’, though even by this point neither category divided neatly along class lines. Since then, this coalition has frayed and fractured on all sides, eventually leaving Labour on just 29 per cent of the vote in 2010.

As Ed Miliband charts a course back to centre-left majoritarianism, there are reasons to think that the traditional Labour recipe needs rethinking. This partly reflects contingent factors, like the challenge of competing against coalition allies and the threat of Scottish separatism. But it is also prompted by deeper sociological, political and cultural trends which have changed the electoral battleground since the emergence of New Labour – and through which the contours of the new ‘centre-ground’ of British politics begin to emerge.

To start with, the death of class has been sociologically exaggerated, though the old labels now tend to hinder more than help. The expansion of those in professional and service jobs is set to continue, further dominating the electorate and even more essential to any Labour majority. However, the ‘middle class’ is now so large and diverse that as a political concept it provides little insight. Also, contrary to received wisdom in the mid-1990s, the ‘working class’ is changing rather than disappearing. As the cloth-capped caricature fades further from view, a low or moderately paid employee of a smaller private sector firm, perhaps a woman working part-time in a personal service occupation, takes his place. And while the sharp distinctions of an earlier industrial age have been significantly blurred, the geographic distribution of Tory and Labour MPs alone confirms that class might be different but it is certainly not politically dead.

Related to these changes, the major political trend is the declining number of ‘loyal voters’ as the size of the ‘swing vote’ rises dramatically. Support for the main two parties has been falling since the second world war, from 97 per cent in 1951 to just 65 per cent in 2010. This might temporarily stall if the Liberal Democrats fail to recover, but the long-term trend towards greater pluralism appears well established. Just a fifth of the electorate now claim a ‘very strong’ attachment to a particular party, down from half in the 1960s. A recent IPPR poll found that only 24 per cent say they ‘always vote for Labour’, with a further 40 per cent ‘up for grabs’ (the Tory ‘core’ was less than a fifth). Further analysis of our poll, soon to be published, confirms that, while ‘swing voters’ are ever more electorally decisive, this sprawling group does not fit a neat ideological or class profile. However, with high levels of non-voters concentrated in generally Labour-supporting demographics, there is a big prize in expanding the electorate overall.

Building enduring majoritarian alliances in this volatile context is not straightforward. However, the political antidote to the postmodern obsession with uber-complexity and hyper-fragmentation is simplicity. There are shared hopes and pressures felt across low- and middle-income Britain, further united by the gap between them and those at the very top of society. The opportunity for Labour is to speak to these common concerns, by staking out a small number of big priorities, like good public services for those who cannot afford to pay on their own; a welfare state that demands more and protects better; and an economy that offers good jobs with decent wages. The alternative is a self-defeating attempt to knit together a patchwork of niche or sectional interests through microtargeting policies and messages, which would sacrifice the prize of a coherent national appeal.

The third shift is primarily cultural in nature, and sheds further light on how these broad sociological and political trends are reshaping the electoral battleground. Our recent polling, combined with analysis of the British Values Survey, suggests that – despite predictions to the contrary – small ‘c’ conservative sentiment remains a resilient feature of modernity. It finds expression in attachments to nation, family and place, or the importance of recognition and roots, which the contemporary left’s staple diet of resources and rights has been ill-equipped to satisfy. At the same time, a broadly liberal or progressive outlook has also taken a stronger hold across society. This is manifested in instincts for individuality, universalism and diversity, which sit more easily with the modern left, but were offended by various aspects of Labour’s time in government.

These contrasting value dispositions cut across class divides, but our analysis suggests they roughly describe the two main blocks of voters most critical for Labour. They dominate among those who say they are open to voting for Labour, but who do not always do so. In places, they rub up against each other in ways that cause unavoidable tension, most obviously on issues like immigration and some social issues. However, on the central question of the economy there is much common ground which could be forged around a combination of fiscal responsibility and responsible capitalism. Arguing against the idea that American society is fundamentally divided into opposing political camps, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find that the majority of ordinary citizens are broadly ‘conservative egalitarians’, prizing both self-reliance and collective support.

Elections are won on the centre-ground, but the dynamics of that precious political space are always changing. The task for Labour is no longer best described as appealing to the working and middle classes, nor as motivating its core support and reaching out to swing voters. Both, of course, remain essential, but they have become slogans, not a strategy. Working-class voters are neither solidly loyal nor uniformly centre-left, while many swing voters are neither middle class nor necessarily centre-right. There are fewer voters in the bag for Labour, but also more are up for grabs. The precise challenge is this: advancing majoritarianism in the context of pluralism, by forging alliances between the ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ elements of any plausible Labour coalition.

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Graeme Cooke is an associate director at IPPR and a contributing editor to Progress

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Photo: Dominic Campbell