Jon Trickett warns Labour will lose unless it remembers the poorest and tells them what it has done for them
MANY unskilled manual workers and those living in poverty on state benefits feel that they have been taken for granted by Labour. We ought not to be surprised when these people do not vote for the party that should be their natural home. We need a new approach that speaks to the concerns of a wider coalition of groups if Labour is to win marginal constituencies.
Labour’s election in 1997 brought together a wide-ranging coalition – what Gramsci might have called a historic bloc – winning majorities across almost every social group and class.
Our policies need to be carefully modulated to cater for the needs of many different groups. But I believe that we particularly need to speak more directly to working class voters – specifically unskilled manual workers – so that our policies on housing, education and the world of work all resonate better with them. Labour needs to rebuild itself from the grassroots up, especially on the big estates and in communities where we are barely present any more. Indeed, in the most marginal constituencies, these groups will be critical for us to win over.
The party needs to take the class profiles of its new MPs as seriously as we have taken our gender and racial make-up. We can avoid an identity politics of “competitive grievances” by appointing Harriet Harman as head of a commission to explore how financial assistance, training and support could be offered to potential candidates from all under-represented groups, on grounds of gender, race and class.
The trade unions, which created the Labour Party to champion and organise the election of working people to Parliament, should have a crucial role and will need to ensure they again become a route for working-class political talent and not just white-collar union officials.
It is clear that the answer is not to go for a “core vote” strategy alone. We know this from our own history in the 1980s and we know it, too, from the failure of the Tory strategy before David Cameron became Conservative leader.
It has been argued that Labour’s focus on what are called swing voters in the southern marginal constituencies has skewed our politics and the Government’s policies. Yet we must recognise that Labour cannot win without these voters.
We know a great deal about the identities of these swing voters, what
their views are and how they react to specific initiatives. In particular, Labour has put huge effort into studying the C1 and C2 socio-economic groups. These are usually defined as lower middle class – supervisory or clerical, junior managerial or professional – and skilled manual workers.
These groups swung behind Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and subsequently voted for Tony Blair in 1997. This is why “new” Labour has made much of the “politics of aspiration” – a narrative that was successfully directed at swing voters in marginal seats. We are right to be trying to hold onto their loyalty in the face of the social and economic changes we are now facing.
However, we have focused less on the social groups D and E. These people include semiskilled and unskilled manual workers, as well as those at the lowest levels of subsistence, such as state pensioners, widows and casual workers. They have usually voted Labour overwhelmingly.
I recently discussed this with senior Downing Street policy advisors. Several points emerged. First, little work in terms of detailed analysis has been carried out with the Ds and Es. Frankly, we have assumed we can rely on them to vote Labour. But underlying this – and perhaps more disturbingly – it has been assumed that they tend to follow trends set among the C1 and C2 social groups. Also, I was told that the D and E groups are in a long-term historical decline and have a low propensity to vote at all.
All this is a mistake. We need a historic bloc which both mobilises swing voters and simultaneously retains the loyalty of core supporters. We need to work with the D and E groups as much as with the C1 and C2s.
There is a very political urgency to this. Every constituency has a large number of voters within the core vote categories. At the 2005 general election, the D and E groups easily outnumbered the C2s, even in the 10 most marginal seats in the country. It is evident that even tiny percentage movements among the core vote is capable of winning or losing seats for Labour.
Research reveals two important facts. First, a core vote strategy based principally on groups D and E cannot win us super-marginal seats. Second, a coalition which ignores these same groups cannot lead to a parliamentary majority.
Even the briefest of encounters with recent opinion polling, as well as the results in recent by-elections and council elections, demonstrates that Labour needs to work hard at recovering its support among the poorest.
This can still be done before the next general election. The clearest evidence is what happened in the period immediately after the departure of Tony Blair. In the early months of Gordon Brown’s premiership, support for Labour rallied across all social groups, according to Populus polling. And the extent of this early bounce among classes D and E was remarkable: these groups showed an increase that was four times greater than the average increase among all other social groups. Our traditional voters have a strong desire to come home to Labour.
So we need to recognise that the gap opening up between the Government and our core supporters is partly a consequence of the changing composition of MPs of the Cabinet and of the wider Party.
The number of leading politicians who come from poorer backgrounds and who reach the highest offices of state is at a post-war low. There are now fewer than
40 MPs who have worked in manual occupations and that number is set to decline drastically in the next parliament. I would argue that selecting candidates ought not to be reduced to a process of social engineering, but nevertheless it is odd that the public voices and faces of the labour Party so little resemble and reflect a substantial part of our electoral base.
The Government needs to get its narrative right. For a start, we need to reflect with great care on the nature of “aspiration”. This has been one of the key organising concepts for “new” Labour.
It is evident that the nature of aspiration differs between social groups and their expectations of life. Aspiration for many in our country means being persuaded that you should defer immediate gratification for longer-term goals. This means saving for a pension, buying an expensive house or spending time and effort securing education for yourself and your children. But there is a huge group of people for whom life is much more marginal and for whom there is a collision between aspiration on the one hand and financial necessity on the other and for whom talk of aspiration inevitably has less significance.
So we must show these groups what they have gained from this Labour Government. Labour’s anti-poverty policy has attempted to increase welfare payments for those who are not in work or are unable to work – Group E, welfare and benefits-dependent – and at the same time structure the system so as to reduce dependency and mobilise people back into work.
There has been a noticeable reluctance to speak publicly about the extent to which welfare payments have gone up – perhaps out of fear that some taxpayers will revolt at the idea of their money being used to aid the poor.
This has meant that those who have been helped the most by the Government and who ought to be most predisposed to support the Labour Party often have little idea that the benefits and services they receive come from the political actions of Labour politicians.
We need much more sophisticated ways of getting our message across on the doorsteps, but this will only work if it is not contradicted at a national level. These groups do not respond well to politicians seeking to vilify welfare dependency.
Finally, we need to offer better routes to more secure jobs for unskilled manual workers. This group has been told that technological change in a global economy means they face the bleakest possible future. According to the Leitch report, there are currently over 3.2 million such jobs in the United Kingdom. Within 12 years, there will only be 600,000. These people are being offered a declining number of insecure and poor quality jobs. Labour’s response has been to implement substantial investment in education and training, but many of these people did not do well at school and have no desire to go to college for training. Bearing in mind that these are groups who have traditionally had a high propensity to vote Labour, we need to find better employment solutions and support for them.
The problems facing core elements of the 1997 “new” Labour bloc have been transformed – and, in some ways, intensified – as a result of economic and social changes which have taken place over the past 12 years. Many people in groups D and E no longer feel that Labour is speaking to them or for them.
We saw the way the level of support for Labour among the Ds and Es dramatically recovered a year ago with Gordon Brown’s promise of change. What will no longer work is a recycling of Labour’s 1997 policies. There is much work to do.
Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Hemsworth
