The Tories shrinking class base

One of the great changes in public opinion during my adult lifetime has been the collapse in Tory support from younger people and the ABC1s. For example, a recent YouGov poll (pdf) found that whilst the Tories have an overall lead of nine percentage points, they trail Labour by 57%-21% among 18-24 year-olds and lead by only 39%-36% among ABC1s*. By contrast, in 1992 – when their overall lead was very similar - they led 54%-22% among ABC1s and trailed Labour by only three points among 18-24 year-olds.

To see the reason for this, you need only look as far as the universities’ strike. This draws our attention to another great development of recent years – the degradation of erstwhile middle-class work. Academics are protesting about the loss of pension rights, increased workloads, casualization and falling real pay imposed by managerialists.

And they are typical of many professionals. Journalists have suffered a massive loss of real pay and prestige in the last few decades: the best one can now hope for is to become a billionaire’s gimp. Criminal barristers, even with years of experience, make only around £28,000 a year. And doctors are stressed out and overworked in a way that Sir Lancelot Spratt never was.

It’s not just pay and conditions which have deteriorated. Housing is now unaffordable for young graduates even on good jobs. And there is an increasing gulf between what used to be the middle-class and the richest 0.1%.

A few decades ago, a moderately successful professional had much in common with the very rich: the difference in income between them wasn’t huge; both owned property; and both enjoyed autonomy at work. But there was a huge difference between them and the working class who suffered dangerous, dirty and mind-numbing work in factories and mines.

Today, though, the opposite is the case; a 30-something professional has more in common with a contemporary working in a dull job than she does with anybody in the top 0.1%.  

Very many ABC1s, then, are objectively proletarian – suffering from a lack of property, stagnating incomes and oppressive working conditions. And they are voting accordingly. Social grade is, increasingly, a worse way of defining class than the Marxian method of asking: what is this person’s relationship to the means of production?

This also helps explain youngsters’ antipathy towards the Tories. What’s going on here is what Alfred Hirschman called the tunnel effect. If you are stuck in a traffic jam in a road tunnel and then see a line of cars moving you cheer up, thinking that you will soon move. So it was once with young people. Back in the 80s, even poor students could reasonably look forward to a good job and property ownership. So they voted in the interests of the class they expected to join.

Today, things are different. Even bright hard-working students can expect only stressful, oppressive and poorly paid work, and to live in an over-priced hovel. And they are burdened with huge debt. Sure, much of this will be written off – but many young people are cursed by having a moral code which stigmatizes debt. It’s no surprise, therefore, that so many vote Labour.

All this explains why Tory support depends so much upon the legacy vote from older people and upon the populist slogan, “Get Brexit Done”. Their historic client base has shrunk. Sure, this legacy vote and populism might be sufficient to get them over the line next week. But the Tories’ longer-term prospects are surely poor. Like Ramsay Bolton being killed by his own vicious dogs, they are being killed by the neoliberal managerialism they themselves unleashed.

* It’s a common myth that the ABC1s exclude pensioners. They don’t. They only exclude those dependent upon the state pension. Better off pensioners are classified as belonging to the social grade matching their occupation when they were working.

Comments

[Richard Malim]

The really interesting percentages are in the change between the 18-24 yearolds in one take and the same group 5 years later in the 25 to 32 year olds who are the SAME people. That is the chsange that needs measuring.

[Leon]

The problem is the Tories are also aware of their shrinking base and will come up with strategies to counter it like Brexit. The most obvious would be to carry on down the Trump route with a combo of lying, controlling the media, voter suppression and attacking minority groups. There might come a point where continuing down that path starts to look a lot like fascism and voters are turned off by it. However, I thought Trump would be too toxic for the americans and was proved wrong.

[Tasker Dunham]

Rig the constituency boundaries, shrink the independent media: this election could be the end of democracy.

[Jim]

If we're considering shrinking bases, perhaps we should consider the shrinking working class Labour vote........C2DE voters are now more likely to vote Tory than Labour.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-is-labour-the-party-of-the-working-class

But I suppose that doesn't matter, because university edumacated people are sooo much more important nowadays than the working man (or woman)........

[Scratch]

"Social grade is, increasingly, a worse way of defining class than the Marxian method of asking: what is this person’s relationship to the means of production?"

The newly distressed professional classes seems to have responded to this situation through the dialectical expedient of declaring the echt working class so far beyond the pale that they no longer constitute a proletariat at all. The execrable Paul Mason, having outlasted the equally charming Stuart Hall and Yasmin Alhabi Brown, seems to be the current lineal heavyweight champion of this position.

I think this is the class equivalent of LBJ's observation (or, more likely, projection) concerning the "lowest white man."

[Scurra]

The US Republicans are having exactly the same experience - they have found their "baseline" but it is steadily shrinking. Their solution is to attack the systems (gerrymandering, voter registration, census questions etc.) because it is becoming increasingly difficult to actually persuade people of your policies - perhaps ironically because of the confrontational media approach that they originally encouraged.

The Tories are facing a similar problem. I can now see them winning this time (just - which may be a bigger problem for them than they think), but the inexorable slide has been clear for a while now.
The question will be whether they go for the US Republicans approach (there are signs of that, in the voter ID nonsense and so on), or whether they will figure out that electoral reform actually is the only long-term chance they have of ever being part of future governments.
Based on prior evidence, I suspect the former, alas.

[Jim]

"The Tories are facing a similar problem. I can now see them winning this time (just - which may be a bigger problem for them than they think), but the inexorable slide has been clear for a while now."

That'll be a share of the vote thats gone from 31% in 2001, to 32% in 2005, to 36% in 2010, to 37% in 2015, to 42% in 2017, and looks to be similar or more in 2019.

Much more inexorable sliding like this and they'll be staring down the barrel of 45%+ in a few elections time........disaster!

[john b]

"C2DE voters are now more likely to vote Tory than Labour"

When you look at the data, this reflects the fact that pensioners and skilled manual workers who own their own homes are nonetheless classed as C2DEs, rather than a genuine shift in working class views.

[George Carty]

"When you look at the data, this reflects the fact that pensioners and skilled manual workers who own their own homes are nonetheless classed as C2DEs, rather than a genuine shift in working class views."

Plus of course the decline in factory employment means that C2s (skilled manual workers) are increasingly self-employed "white van man" types rather than proletarians in the Marxist sense.

[Peter Briffa]

I don’t get this. Politcal parties evolve. People evolve. Today’s young Corbynistas are tomorrow’s blue rinse brigade. The idea that people spend their whole lives voting for the same party is a little 1975, isn’t it?

[Staberinde]

Reports of the Tories' deaths have been greatly exaggerated for decades.

More problematic is the state of the Labour Party, which chose to throw this election by fielding a uniquely unpopular leader, letting the antisemitism story overshadow its campaign and offering people random nationalisations nobody asked for (there's been a clear majority for rail nationalisation for a very long time - but broadband? Seriously?)

Johnson could murder a nurse on live TV and people would still think twice about Corbyn. Blair, Smith, Kinnock, Wilson and Attlee would have destroyed Johnson by now.

And it gets worse for Labour if Scotland goes independent. Labour needs Scottish seats to win majorities. No Scotland means Labour will never win a general election again.