What do the Middleton and Heywood and Clacton by-elections tell us about the Labour vote?
What do the Heywood and Middleton and Clacton by-elections tell us about the Labour vote?
In the Heywood and Middleton by-election Labour has scraped through by a whisker.
While it’s true that the Tory vote has collapsed – from 12,528 in 2010 to 3,496 today – Labour has failed to capitalise on it. In what should be a fairly safe working class Labour seat, Miliband has won with a majority of just 617. Despite needing to show that it is ready for government, Labour has increased its vote share on 2010 by just 0.8 per cent.
More depressing perhaps is the fact that 40 per cent of voters have backed UKIP and another 12 per cent the Tories. That’s a majority for the right whichever way you look at it.
And then there is that other by-election, in Clacton, where UKIP has won its first seat in the House of Commons by winning just short of 60 per cent of the vote – in a working class Essex seat. Labour lost a huge number of votes there too, falling from 10,799 to 3,957.
Predictably the Liberal Democrats were nowhere to be seen in either constituencies, picking up just 483 votes in Clacton and 1,457 in Heywood.
So in sum, a poor night for Labour and the Tories, a disastrous one for the Lib Dems and a happy one for UKIP. But what does it tell us about the ascendance of UKIP and the relative stasis of the Labour vote?
While UKIP still take around three Conservative votes for every one Labour vote, Labour evidently has a working class problem. Ed Miliband often gets the blame for this, being a fully paid up member of the ‘Westminster elite’ and having ‘never had a proper job’, as the saying goes, but this is unfair; the problem goes much deeper and goes all the way back to New Labour.
The left will undoubtedly respond to today’s by-election results by attacking Labour for offering a dearth of ‘hope’ to working class voters. In contrast, the right of the party will either blame Miliband himself or will go after the party for ‘not listening to voter concerns’ on immigration.
Without getting into the Miliband question, both criticisms ring true to some extent, as was aptly summed up earlier this year by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin in their book Revolt on the Right. The thesis of the book was that, apart from reactionary shire Tories, UKIP was picking up so-called ‘left behind’ voters – that is, working class voters who felt like they and their families were getting a raw deal from globalisation, be it economic or cultural.
The left has some ground it can work with here – part of the fear of globalisation is around job security and wages – comfortable ground for social democrats such as Ed Miliband. The bigger issue is connecting with voters who dislike the other side of globalisation, namely immigration.
However much the left continues to extol the virtues of the working class, there is a growing divide between the views of the largely liberal and metropolitan make-up of the Labour hierarchy and the so-called Labour ‘core vote’.
Here it is worth noting the work of David Goodhart, much disparaged by the left but probably onto something. The liberal left, he says, is today dominated by people whose worldview is “universalistic, suspicious of most kinds of group or national attachment, and individualistic…they don’t “get” what most other people also get – loyalty, authority and the sacred’.
This is in contrast to working class voters, who value family, patriotism and social and economic stability.
In other words, there is a schism between the liberal left and many working class voters; a schism that’s also apparent on issues surrounding welfare – Labour’s core voters are the most enthusiastic proponents of welfare reform, quite at odds with most middle class left-wingers.
The progressive response to working class disillusionment with globalisation has thus far been to focus on economic insecurity and to propose the remedies for that – a living wage, jobs that pay properly and decent housing etc.
What it hasn’t done (with a few exceptions) is grapple with that other source of discontent – immigration.
A large number of people (around 80 per cent according to most polls) consistently want a substantial reduction in immigration. *Some* of this is undoubtedly due to plain old xenophobia, but a lot of it is evidently not – second generation immigrants also want a significant reduction in the number of migrants coming to Britain, for example.
Migrants are good for Britain, both economically and culturally. But when Nigel Farage says he feels ‘uncomfortable’ traveling on a bus or a train where nobody speaks English, despite his poor choice of adjective he is tapping into a real sense of alienation that is fairly widespread – especially in working class communities.
The question for the left – and more importantly for the Labour party – is what it does about this, beyond clinging to the idea that it is really just code for economic concerns or the fault of the tabloids for ‘brainwashing’ voters (but also beyond engaging in myth-making about things like benefit tourism).
A party that considers itself socialist has to be able connect with working class voters at the very best of times. For a party that is relying on a so-called 35 per cent strategy to get into office, it should be absolutely de rigueur.
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The results
Middleton and Heywood
Labour Liz McInnes 11,633
UKIP 11,016
Tories 3,496
Greens 870
Lib Dem 1,457
Clacton
Conservatives 8,709
Greens 688
Labour 3,957
Lib Dem 483
UKIP 21,113
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188 Responses to “Labour has a working class problem”
Simon Fay
Ah but all that barbaric stuff raises the spectre of social strife that entails the creation of well-paid rebarbatively-titled posts in the public sector to manage/pre-empt/exacerbate. You don’t think this article’s writer’s iPad bought itself, do you?
MartinC
You must be a fully paid-up member of the progressive Labour party to make such a comment.
Like everything else that is true, there is only one opinion poll that matters, and it will become brutally apparent to you exactly how important the opinion of individuals really is, next May.
derekemery
Elite millionaire metrosexual ministers have nothing in common with ordinary people.
{The liberal left, he says, is today dominated by people whose worldview is “universalistic, suspicious of most kinds of group or national attachment, and individualistic…they don’t “get” what most other people also get – loyalty, authority and the sacred’.
The liberal left only have the one moral driver harm/care see http://www.livescience.com/6329-.html.
In contrast most people have all five moral triggers – loyalty, authority and the sacred’. Hence the elite are not equipped to understand ordinary people or their concerns. All they can do is use confirmation bias to continue ignoring the people’s concerns as they are incomprehensible and of course ‘wrong’ as confirmation bias tells the elite.
Globalization is the major cause of increasing inequality in countries like the UK. Mass immigration from the EU increases the number of less skilled workers who go for bottom end jobs. The law of supply and demand tells you that as supply increases then ‘price’ decreases.
Price in this case means the wages and working terms and conditions of those near the bottom. Hence we have zero day contracts, reduced pay, and far less job security. Many bottom end jobs belong to Labour voters.
Thus our out-of-touch one moral driver elite telling workers at the bottom end that mass immigration is “good for the UK” only grates even more.
What they really mean is that its good for them because they are millionaires and nearly all new wealth created today finishes up with the top few percent (people like themselves). The middle class have been hollowed out for years and globalization is making this process even worse today http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3660/A_hollowing_middle_class.html
andrew
Eurgh. Just because people think something is true, doesn’t make it true. If labour has been “hijacked by phoney, white,middle class, London intellectuals” (and i dont disagree with you on that) then the primary concerns and worries of what should be their core vote is bring hijacked by a bigoted, equally elitist minority party, who support hyper neoliberal economic solutions and isolationist politics. Issues with immigration are symptoms of much wider structural problems (caused by economic systems that UKIP wholly endorse, in the case they have any policy at all). UKIPs politics are utterly reactionary, and they’ve found something exceptionally emotive, and run a mile with it. Don’t let them (and rhis goes for all candidates in 2015) get away with cheap answers, with simplistic solutions, or turn your attention away from the actual issues which will make an actual difference.
The_Average_Joe_UK
Could that be Harriet Harman in disguise?