The Labour Party is in danger of losing its nerve again. Ten years ago, the story that Labour spent all the money and caused the country’s massive debt was allowed to go unchallenged. The Labour Party, paralysed by the shock of the election, failed to fight back. By the time the party had recovered its composure and started to challenge the narrative of fiscal incompetence it was too late. No-one was listening.
This time the story that is going unchallenged is that Labour has lost the support of the working class. Worse still, the Conservatives are becoming the party of the working class. The great class inversion is the story of the moment. When even Keir Starmer says that Labour has lost the trust of the working class, well, it must be true, mustn’t it? Since the elections earlier in May, Labour has collapsed in the opinion polls. Of course it has. The story has become self-fulfilling.
But is it true? Are the Tories really now the party of the working class? Is Labour now only the party of metropolitan poshos?
The data don’t bear any of this out though. Christabel Cooper has looked at the British Election Study data from 2019. It shows the Conservatives doing better among all income groups except the poorest and especially well among the richest.
General Election 2019 vote by household income
But look what happens when you strip out retired voters. The split between Labour and Conservative voters is about where you would expect it to be, with the tipping point somewhere just above the median income.
General Election 2019 vote by household income – excluding retired voters
Marios Richards did an analysis of BES data for the under-55s, using gross personal incomes. It’s a similar picture, with a Labour majority among lower earners. As Jonn Elledge notes, of the working class voters that are working, Labour still has the largest share of their support.
It’s retired people that swung the vote for the Conservatives. There are a lot of them and a larger proportion of them vote than in younger age cohorts. As Marios points out, after adjusting for turnout, the median age of voters at the last general election was 53.
What these income figures don’t tell us is the impact of housing costs. Around three-quarters of those aged over 65 own their own homes outright. They may be income-poor but they are asset-rich. Without the need to spend on housing costs, their state and occupational pensions can leave them quite comfortably off, especially if they live in areas where the cost of living is low. As the Resolution Foundation’s Intergenerational Commission found, once you factor in housing costs, pensioner household incomes are slightly better than those of working-age people.
There is a cohort of voters whose working lives coincided with the period when middle earners got the largest slice of the economic pie. A lot of those middle earners didn’t have degrees because they could get relatively well-paid jobs without needing the sort of qualifications their counterparts would need to do similar jobs today. Furthermore, they were able to buy property relatively cheaply by today’s standards and the government helped with the sale of council housing and mortgage tax relief. In the decades when the 1945-55 cohort were in their early twenties, it was much easier for two people on average earnings to buy property than it is now.
Joe Chrisp has broken the voting patterns down by age and housing tenure, again using BES data. In broad terms, older people are more likely to vote than younger people, homeowners are more likely to vote than renters and graduates are more likely to vote than non-graduates. The data indicate that the majority of younger non-graduate renters did not vote.
Looking at the breakdown of both main parties’ support, it is clear that older non-graduate homeowners form the largest section of Conservative support. As Joe points out, some of those people in the dark blue section in the 2019 bar were also in the dark green section in the 1992 bar.
The home-owning baby boomers who propelled Major to victory in 1992 (when they were under 55) are now the bedrock of the Tory coalition as they age. In 2017, approximately half of its voters were homeowners over the age of 55 without degrees.
A similar breakdown of the Labour vote shows that Blair captured some of the non-graduate home owner vote in 1997 but a lot of it had been lost again by 2010. The caricature of the typical Labour voter as a young urban graduate is some way wide of the mark. Graduates are still a minority of the Labour vote. The majority of Generation Rent, it seems, doesn’t bother to vote.
The Resolution Foundation’s analysis of the 50 ‘Blue Wall’ seats that were gained by the Conservatives from Labour in 2019, in the North, Midlands and Wales, showed that these seats had a higher rate of home ownership than constituencies that stayed Labour.
Our cultural references, and especially those of our politicians and commentariat, seem to be stuck in the 1970s. When we talk about the working class, we still have an image of a man in a donkey jacket standing outside a mine or a steelworks. When TV news channels travel to small towns in the Midlands and North and interview people during the day, they find people who look and sound like we think the working class should look and sound. Some of them can usually be relied upon to have a go at the Labour Party. Many of them may have once had working class jobs but, as home owners with good pensions, these days, they are not too badly off. As a result, they are largely insulated from the economic threats faced by the younger population. As Jonn put it:
A retired Teesside steelworker can be working class in terms of their family, career history, self-image and so forth, while still having a different set of economic interests to a 25-year-old renter on a zero-hours contract.
Some have argued that this means the Labour Party is finished until the Boomers die off but this is a bit premature. Labour’s critics are right in that it should have done better among those of working age with low incomes. As Joe’s charts show, there are lots of non-voters to go at. All those non-voting renters should be fertile ground for the Labour Party.
There is little point in getting embroiled in what it means to be working class, as arguments will go on well into the night without resolution. It’s perhaps worth going back to some core principles though. One of the reasons the Labour Party was formed was because landlords and corporations were oppressing and exploiting people, often with the collusion of the state. There is still a lot of that going on. The Windrush Generation, the Cladding Scandal and the unbelievable corporate abuse at the Post Office spring to mind.
The pandemic has disproportionately affected all the people you would expect it to; lower paid workers, the young, ethnic minorities and those in rented accommodation. Covid has laid bare some of the UK’s systemic inequalities. As Torsten Bell put it:
We may be in the same storm but we are clearly in different boats.
The Labour Party needs to get more of people in these groups out to vote. It won’t do that by telling everyone that it has lost the support of working people. The story that Labour spent all the money and left the country in debt never really went away and the party paid a heavy price for allowing that meme to take root. Stories like this, once they become established, spread like Japanese Knotweed and are just as difficult to kill.
Labour hasn’t lost the support of working people but it has lost the support of the retired. That will make it more difficult to win elections but starting from a clear understanding of what has happened in the last decade goes some way to helping decide what to do about it. The cause of Labour’s election losses isn’t the Blue Wall or the Red Wall, it’s the Grey Wall.
Flip Chart Fairy Tales 
This is as always a very well researched and written post. Just a couple of points.
Firstly, people’s voting habits are not static with age. As people acquire assets they tend to vote for parties that are committed to preserving the capital value of assets, namely the Conservatives. The issue for Conservatives is to ensure the current generation of young folk have a path to acquiring property and pensions available to them, or else they will vote for a party that will simply seize the assets from the old and distribute them to the young.
Secondly, the problem for Labour is that the non-Conservative vote doesn’t all vote Labour. It is a naturally stroppy and opinionated group and prone to in-fighting. It is quite possible that the next election will see the combined Labour + Green + Lib Dem vote well in excess of the Conservative vote and we will still get a Conservative majority. There will be lots of moaning about how if only we had PR we would have a coalition Labour/Green/LD/SNP government like those clever continentals, but we haven’t got PR, and everyone knew that when they voted for non-conservative candidates who were obviously going to lose.
Oh. And the Windrush scandal is a scandal of the home Office failing to implement Conservative Party policy. It doesn’t necessarily play against the Tories. And a lot of Conservatives are also outraged by the cladding scandal. The Conservatives are the insurgent party struggling with a left-wing civil service establishment (think Brexit). You may think that’s nonsense, but there’s enough people who believe it, rightly or wrongly, to mean these issues don’t cut through electorally.
… and in the telegraph ‘Boris is fighting a lonely battle against his own officials to reopen Britain’. Heroic Boris, taking the fight to the vested interests on behalf of the people.
Do you think that a good chunk of the actual working class has soured on Labour because of resentment of lockdowns? (Especially since some of the hardcore Corbynite left especially have gone full-on Zero Covid…)
When the people behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign investigated why much of Texas (particularly the Latino-heavy Rio Grande Valley) actually swung in Trump’s favour in 2020, it turned out that lockdowns were the main reason.
Not round my way they didn’t ! They didn’t work in ‘comfy offices’ but workshops factories or driving trucks , so life pretty much carried on for them .
“everyone knew that when they voted for non-conservative candidates who were obviously going to lose”.
Very few people do vote for candidates who were obviously going to lose. That’s why they are obviously going to lose.
We’re talking about maybe 10% of the voters in maybe a third of the constituencies, or 3% of the voters, or 2% of the electorate.
And at least some of them will believe they voted for the best anti-Tory party (in particular, Labour does a lot of national anti-Tory messaging that gets people to vote Labour because the Greens or Lib Dems can’t win nationally, even though the result is a local Tory MP – this makes some sense in terms of multiple elections; more Lib Dem or Green MPs is a problem for Labour in the longer term)
There is a fuck-ton of effort that goes into those million (at most) people, but they are (pretty much by definition) very thin on the ground.
Having knocked on more such doors than I care to remember, these are mostly people who are not highly politically aware, who either have long traditional roots in one party (usually Labour, but there are a few Liberal areas still around), or who are voting on the basis of a national “vibe” for one party – the sort of people who picked up on Cleggmania in 2010 or were big fans of 2017 Corbyn. This second group don’t think of a vote instrumentally in terms of consequences, but they tend to see it as a sign of an affiliation to a particular cause or leader.
Pingback: Labour’s problem is not the working class – it’s the Grey Wall | sdbast
“The story that Labour spent all the money and left the country in debt never really went away”
Who left the note on the incumbent’s desk? Then you should explain why that Labour politician thought it was a clever thing to write
and Blair/Browns clever bit was hiding the debt in PPPs and off the books so the likes of Rik could go on denying it
Those notes were traditionally meant to be a private joke. David Laws didn’t know that tradition and no-one told him until after he’d made it public.
But this blogs hatred of elderly home owners is comedy gold
Pingback: The myth of the “working class voter” – Just Two Things
it could have been much more simply put – Labour as it currently is , is irrelevant to the working class (whatever that is) , and that is something to be regretted .
Pingback: Poor neighbourhoods, powerful firms and missing research on race • Resolution Foundation
Pingback: I'm starting to think everything I thought about the Conservatives and housing was wrong – The Globe Today
Pingback: I'm starting to think everything I thought about the Conservatives and housing was wrong – News of the world
Yet another article which pretends at analysis by drowning us in bar charts while avoiding the many elephants in the room. Voters are won over by authenticity and passion, which is why Tony Benn and his protege Corbyn won begrudging respect even from those who don’t share their worldview. Truth is Labour is not the party of the 60s, with its genuine intellectuals and war veterans. Also no-one fights on rent control or tuition fees so as not to offend universities who may take them on when their Westminster days are done. Then there are charities or think tanks, maybe the post of mayor or media role. It’s all too cosy. The shadow cabinet is invisible and forgettable. Why take a stand on any issue? Look what happened tp RLB, now rendered a non person in true Orwellian fashion.Most under 30 would be pushed to even name Starmer
Pingback: The right's intellectual decline | Market World
Pingback: The right’s intellectual decline – The Providence Times
Pingback: Labour Must Look to its Opportunities and Beyond its Failures | New Politic
Polls are never right. The Grey Vote have voted in greatest numbers, as we are grateful to Suffragettes who were our great grandmothers / grandmothers. But we have voted Labour for a century, with entire extended families never having voted anything else but Labour.
There is no formal data gathering by parliament of what age votes for what party, so the political only polls are another means to keep the Left out of government.
For decades now young people have not voted in sufficient numbers, especially over this last
2 years. As new parties on the Left only focus on people aged under 40, you get derisory few hundred votes, with one election down to only 30 votes.
As new parties on the Left, have no pension policies, never mind policies against the increasing discrimination against women aged over 50, even beyond those issues, it means you cannot get into government.
Right wing Labour does not want to win elections, proven by the leaked Forde Report and its actions over the last 2 years.
Seeking support to start Over 50s party (policies for ages 1 to 100)
over50sparty org uk