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The Realignment of British Politics

Andrew Cooper

Famously, there was a sign at the top of the stairs in the war room of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign headquarters. Put there by his irascible campaign manager James Carville, it was intended to serve as a constant reminder to the campaign staff of what the election was all about: ‘The economy, stupid.’ The phrase quickly became a political cliché. It seemed to be a truism – capturing the essence of what, more than anything else, determined how most people voted, explaining the central story of elections in the post-war era.

As a crude shorthand for understanding the core of party support, Carville’s phrase could be applied to the UK too. Reflecting this country’s particular history and neuroses, the structure of party support was often defined more in terms of social class than economic position and outlook, but the essential story was the same.

There was a consistent pattern in post-war elections. The Labour Party’s demographic core was people with lower incomes and blue-collar jobs: the working class (technically defined, in the clunky, occupation-based coding of the market research world, as socio-economic groups C2, D and E). The Conservative Party’s demographic core was people with higher incomes and white-collar jobs; the middle class (A, B and C1, in the same research-sector parlance).

As the British Election Study1 summarised in 2019, the ‘fundamental structure’ of British politics was that ‘the vast majority of the working class’ voted Labour and the ‘vast majority of the middle class’ backed the Tories. Each party routinely won elections by margins of 30 per cent or more in these respective heartlands and the governments they formed were built on those demographic foundations.

At their most successful, of course, both Labour and the Conservatives succeeded in reaching well beyond their economically defined core vote. The Tories in 1983 and 1987 and then Labour in 1997 and 2001 won landslides by also winning outside their traditional core. Nevertheless, they were building on that traditional economic base; the foundation remained the dominance of their established economic heartlands. The economic situation and demographic profile of the average Conservative voter was, therefore, more or less the same in 1983 and in 1997, respectively the biggest Tory landslide since 1924 and the heaviest Tory defeat since 1832. There were, obviously, a lot fewer Tory voters in 1997 than in 1983, but in terms of their average economic profile, they were very alike.

In the years since the New Labour triumph in 1997, the picture has changed radically. It has become increasingly clear that the main driver of voting is no longer just ‘the economy, stupid’. The axis of politics has rotated significantly, fundamentally disrupting the demographic structure of party support. The Brexit referendum of 2016 and the results of the two general elections in the subsequent three years made this unmistakably clear. Factors that were nothing to do with economic position and outlook had plainly become significant drivers of who people voted for. Culture, identity and social values were exerting a growing influence on voting behaviour. A person’s educational background, feelings on cultural issues and the diversity of the community they live in were becoming at least as important as their economic situation in shaping their political priorities and attitudes.

Open vs. closed

Tony Blair was the first political leader to see this and to describe in clear terms the nature of the structural political realignment that was underway. Speaking in 2006 – a full decade before the vote for Brexit made the realignment glaringly obvious – he noted that ‘there is a debate going on, which confusingly for the politicians often crosses traditional left/ right economic lines. The debate is “open” versus “closed”.’2

What Tony Blair identified was that the key battle line dividing the UK into two broad political tribes was ceasing to be characterised by voter attitudes on the left/right spectrum of economic issues and becoming ever more defined by people’s reaction to the social and cultural consequences of globalisation. The world was opening up and becoming ever faster; borders were loosening; cultures were blending; national sovereignty was becoming more contingent. The upheaval was immense and powerful. Many people’s response was to welcome these changes, to embrace them and to see them as, fundamentally, the opening up of new opportunities. Many others had the opposite reaction, seeing these winds of change as threatening and unsettling, and wanting to try to shut out as much of the impact as possible. These two, opposing worldviews – respectively ‘open’ and ‘closed’ – were starting to exert a strong influence on who people voted for, regardless of their economic situation.

This rotation of the political axis is not just happening in the UK. The same structural shift is evident in numerous Western democracies. The extent of the disruption to voting patterns and parties varies depending on national and regional factors as well as electoral systems. But the same general story has been playing out in, to cite a few examples, the United States, France, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia: the rising salience of cultural factors and identity politics among particular demographic groups causing political parties to shift ground as they try to respond to a different agenda and to a growth in populism on both the left and the right, which has also been spawned by the rotation of the axis.

At the time, the Brexit referendum and the aftershock of the Trump victory a few months later – and the significance in these results of cultural factors and identity politics – felt like quite an abrupt disturbance of established drivers of voting behaviour. Now, looking back with hindsight, the ‘open’ vs. ‘closed’ divide has been increasingly visible in the entrails of elections, at least since 1997.

This pattern can be seen, for example, in the composition of Labour’s vote as it started to decline from its high watermark of 44 per cent in 1997. Labour had won a majority of nearly 200 seats promising that ‘a new day has dawned’; their soundtrack was ‘Things can only get better.’ Hopes were impossibly high. Inevitably, as the months and years passed, some people who had voted Labour started to feel disappointed and switched their support away from Labour to other parties. But, rather than happening fairly evenly across different voter types, the erosion of Labour’s 1997 vote had a very particular skew. The people who voted Labour in 1997 but then in 2001, 2005 or 2010 voted for another party were disproportionately those on lower incomes and with fewer qualifications;3 those who were the party’s traditional core. More strikingly still, they were very disproportionately people who in the UK census defined their national identity as ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. Very disproportionately, when the time came years later, they voted in favour of the UK leaving the European Union. Culture and identity politics significantly shifted the centre of gravity of Labour’s demographic coalition between 1997 and 2010.

In the four elections preceding the Brexit referendum, the Conservative Party’s demographic coalition was changing too. The average Tory voter was becoming steadily less well off and less well educated. The Conservatives were losing ground in urban areas; population density and diversity were increasingly important factors in party support, while economic status was becoming less of a predictor of voting.

The Brexit referendum undoubtedly accelerated this shift in the geology and geography of UK politics. But the social and cultural fault-line that Brexit exposed had in fact been there, widening and growing in significance, for years. On 23 June 2016, the question on the ballot paper was whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave it. But, for most people on both sides of the argument – even if they weren’t necessarily conscious of the fact – the Brexit question went much deeper. It was a proxy for their core social and political values; a signal of their world view.

We know this because reams of poll data align on the extremely strong relationship between the way people voted in the 2016 referendum and their stance on a range of social and cultural questions. Someone, for example, with a strongly positive view overall on the impact on the UK of immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation, feminism and the Green movement was overwhelmingly likely also to vote for the UK to Remain in the EU. Someone with a firmly negative view on these issues was extremely likely to vote for Brexit.

Support for Brexit also aligned closely with authoritarian attitudes on numerous social and cultural questions, which were ostensibly unrelated to the question of EU membership – just as liberal attitudes on those questions tended to coincide with support for remaining in the EU. Feelings about national sovereignty are for most people, in other words, shaped by a world view and core values, rather than by pragmatic considerations. How people felt about the impact of globalisation and its cultural as well as economic consequences was more important in the Brexit referendum than...