Labour has a working class problem

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

188 Responses to “Labour has a working class problem”

  1. MrJones

    edited for being dumb about the sorting

  2. Fearitself73

    “But a shitty job is better than no job”

    It really isn’t. Better to be unemployed then stuck on the merry go round of zero hour contracts.

    Of course it’s your own opinion, but you are also giving a diagnoses about the WC disenfranchisement with the Labour Party. I agree with a lot of what you say, but when it comes to the Unions I think you are talking as a WC Tory/UKIP supporter and not as a traditional WC Labour supporter.

  3. GhostofJimMorrison

    ‘This is in contrast to working class voters, who value family, patriotism and social and economic stability’.

    It’s an inconvenient truth – though known of since time immemorial – that
    your average working class voter is a Conservative at heart; many just can’t bring themselves to vote Tory.

  4. TN

    What it shows is that Labour is part-and-parcel of the political establishment which voters in non-London areas want to give a good thumping. This UKIP phenomenon isn’t based on individual policies as much as a wider cultural shift in voter mindsets. Labour have tried to push constant UKIP attacks about the NHS, privatisation, etc but none of that seems to be washing at all. Same with the Tories who have failed to sell the economic recovery to its former voters as a way of stemming UKIP’s forward march.

    Mainstream political parties don’t govern for or listen to ordinary voters anymore. Whether it’s legislation passed in Commons, how they communicate or the quality/backgrounds of their MPs. That is precisely why Nigel Farage found a void in British politics and has pushed this “people’s army” tag.

    Finally, you identified that working class voters ‘value family, patriotism and social and economic stability’. This is the glaring problem the wider left has problems with. All of this is Kryptonite to them, whether it is the hard left (SWP) all the way to metropolitan New Labour who may have been successful at first with these voters but whose immigration and EU policies switched off WWC voters. The historic links between socialism and the working class have become ever more tenuous. Working class voters are more socially conservative, a trait which those on the left (especially left of Labour) dismiss as ‘racism’ or ‘bigotry’. Same goes for trade unionism. Union activity is way down from decades ago. More working class people work in non-unionised jobs or are self-employed. Another reason why left wing politics has become the preserve of secure middle class types.

  5. Jason Smith

    Try a disenfranchised voter who’d love a none of the above option, who’d like to have something to vote for. UKIP are snake oils salesmens imo, they’re going to fail once they get a modicum of power like the Lib Dems because promising everything to everyone doesn’t work. And a waste of a vote at EU level they don’t do their jobs only he Lib Dems really did, coincidently. Tories are what the Tories are, though I do feel people don’t give them a proper hearing up north any-more for legacy issues of a past generation which is not healthy for democracy and creates the rotten boroughs and born to lead mentality.

    But that being said . Why do I need to have my views compartmentalised into a rival supporter , which subsequently makes it easier to ignore?

    “It really isn’t. Better to be unemployed then stuck on the merry go round of zero hour contracts.” And I see a legislative solution to that not a union solution. Ironically the mass unskilled immigration allows this to stay, always a replacement worker. I preferred every shitty job i’ve had then crawling up the walls as I am now.

    I’m not against unions as a concept, im against the unions we have. Their attitude changed it’d be better, I don’t think they’re responsible.

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