Politics turned upside down

A striking new poll reveals how Britain’s poorest voters have abandoned Labour - and flocked to Reform

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

Photo: Number 10, via Wikimedia Commons

FOR ALL THE impassioned commentary, intrigue and invective, politics is quite a simple business. Or, at least, it should be.

Anyone who has travelled beyond the boundaries of Britain’s fashionable cities and university towns in the past two or three decades will know that voters in such parts – what you might call ‘normies’ – are more united in their desires and demands than many within the establishment seem to realise.

These voters are often to the left on economic issues – so they want to see strong public services, full employment, decent wages and pensions, and an end to huge wealth and income disparities.

But they are frequently to the right on cultural issues – so they have a firm belief in the concepts of family, community and nation; they want immigration to be tightly managed and criminals to be properly punished; and, though broadly tolerant, they aren’t excessively enthusiastic about multiculturalism or trans rights.

For decades, these voters have been neglected by the main establishment parties. Sure, these parties will often pay lip service to them and claim to be on their side. But they aren’t really.

That is because, on social and economic issues, these parties have embraced hyper-liberalism – a creed characterised by worship of the market and the self over the common good. And, in doing so, they have alienated many millions who had little time for this new orthodoxy and saw that it was laying waste to much of what they held dear.

For a long time, these voters sucked it up. But then, through Brexit, they began to make their voices heard. And in the decade since, those voices have become ever louder.

The old tribal loyalties are now disintegrating. The obligation that millions felt to vote a certain way because that’s what their parents or grandparents did no longer holds. The two parties that dominated the scene for over a century are in the political equivalent of intensive care, and nobody can be sure if they will make a full recovery.

Every now and then, a piece of evidence will emerge to demonstrate the profound extent of the realignment that is taking place. This week, it was a poll, carried out by Ipsos, illustrating support for political parties according to the financial wellbeing of voters. Respondents were broken down into four groups: ‘comfortably off’, ‘financially stable’, ‘just about coping’ and ‘financially precarious or extremely vulnerable’.

The data tells a story about how dramatically the Labour party’s support base has shifted. Of those in the poorest category, only 12% intended to vote Labour. Think on that for a moment. Just 12% of the most hard-up people in Britain would vote for the party which was created over a century ago to represent them and has throughout most of its history managed to command their support. What a remarkable turnaround.

So where are these votes going instead? Well, the preferred choice of 34% of them is Reform UK. Again, this is something of a staggering statistic, not least because Reform is ideologically a right-wing, free market Thatcherite party, and the working-class provinces in which many of these voters will reside were badly scarred by that type of philosophy when it was inflicted on them in the 1980s.

It is likely that many of these voters understand that history only too well. But their support for Reform is perhaps a sign that they feel it speaks for them on issues beyond the economy which matter to them a great deal. So the party’s commitment to defending national sovereignty, reducing immigration and challenging the woke dogma that pervades our institutions – as well as its more traditionalist stance on cultural issues generally – resonates with them, because they feel, rightly or wrongly, that it gives hope of a return to the sort of country they loved but have lost.

The distribution of votes among the richest group surveyed in the poll is also quite striking. Among this ‘comfortably off’ cohort, 33% indicated that they would vote Labour (the largest share by some margin of any party), while just 18% opted for Reform. So the alleged party of the working class attracts a substantially higher proportion of votes from the wealthiest people in the country than does a party created and run by individuals who are themselves longstanding members of the financial elite. This truly is politics turned upside down.

For Labour, the poll findings stand as proof that there has been a massive oversteer towards servicing the priorities of the nation’s professional and managerial classes – such that its support among the working classes has plummeted.

Not that it is likely to happen, but if Reform were to ditch some of the free-market idolatry and adopt a more left-leaning economic programme, which included interventionist policies aimed at bringing about full employment, reindustrialisation and genuine levelling up, its current levels of support among Britain’s most hard-pressed voters might rise even higher. Left on the economy, right on culture: that remains the sweet spot electorally.

At any rate, what we can be certain about is that the tectonic plates continue to shift violently. And, as they do so, the landscape of British politics is being dramatically rearranged.

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An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.