The Conservative Party is haemorrhaging working-class votes across the country under Rishi Sunak’s leadership, particularly those of working age, with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on course to reverse its historic decline with working-class voters.
New research released by the Progressive Policy Institute on the eve of the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool shows that the voters that were so crucial to the Conservatives’ majority at the 2019 general election are abandoning the party. Only 44% of working-class voters who voted Conservative in 2019 say they will vote for them next time. 74% of all those polled describe the Conservatives as not close to working-class people, strongly associating them with wealthy individuals and big business.
Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour is on course to turn around its historic decline amongst working-class voters – but Labour’s lead is much narrower with working-class voters than the wider electorate, with many yet to make up their minds on who to vote for. The research reveals that those who are feeling more optimistic about the year ahead are more likely to vote Conservative; however, there are far fewer of them than those who are pessimistic about the year ahead. Overall, working-class Britons believe almost everything is going to get worse, including all of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledges: the rate of inflation, the cost of living, NHS waiting lists, climate change, their personal financial situation, the number of people arriving in small boats, the level of national debt, and the country’s financial situation.
In the report, ‘Roadmap to Hope: how to bring hope back to working-class voters in an age of insecurity’, project director and former policy director to Keir Starmer, Claire Ainsley, argues that Labour must redouble its efforts to reach disaffected working-class voters as it eyes a general election campaign, with concrete plans to ‘remake the deal’ for working people.
The report includes exclusive comparative analysis of the electoral coalitions of centre-left parties around the world by Professor Oliver Heath for PPI, which shows that far from the base of social democratic parties moving uniformly to middle-upper earners, those on low to middle incomes still form the social base for winning centre-left parties. The UK Labour Party has a particular challenge to attract older voters, compared to its centre-left contemporary parties around the world.
Overall economic concerns and policies to address them, such as controlling energy bills and inflation, are much more important to working-class voters than cultural issues that have gained disproportionate media attention. However, tackling illegal immigration and crime are highly salient for working-class voters. 59% tended to agree that you get less in return for working hard than you did a decade ago, compared to 12% who said you get more in return.
‘Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour is on course to win over working-class voters who have been so failed by the Conservatives. They are feeling pretty pessimistic about the future, so the task for Labour is to inspire hope and belief that the deal can be re-made whereby if you work hard, you get on. That rests on offering concrete plans to improve people’s security and their prospects, and restore a sense of basic fairness to the economy and society’, said Claire Ainsley, Director of PPI’s Centre-Left Renewal Project.
The report includes PPI’s practical ideas to ‘re-make the deal’ for working people:
1. Relentless focus on raising wages for those on low to middle incomes.
2. Stabilise supply and costs of essential goods and services.
3. Open up housing investment to the next generation.
4. Reform school education to become the driver of progress.
5. Replace ‘one rule for them’ with ‘same rules apply’.
More working-class voters said the government is not doing or spending enough to try and reduce carbon emissions (34%), compared to those saying they are doing too much (25%), or getting the balance about right (16%), showing the awareness of climate action across all social groups. That said, they have a clear view when it comes to who pays: 53% agreed that it is important to combat climate change but ‘people like me should not be paying the cost of policies to reduce global carbon emissions’, whilst 16% said they would be prepared to pay some costs and 19% said they do not believe climate action is necessary.
PPI’s new Project on Centre-Left Renewal resumes our long-running conversation with centre-left parties in Europe and around the world. Its purpose is to exchange ideas, strategies and tactics for making centre-left parties more competitive and improve their governing performance.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Brussels, Berlin and the United Kingdom. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
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Media Contact: Amelia Fox, afox@ppionline.org
