Upside Down: Class Politics in 2024
In 2024, Labour is the party of the middle class, while the core of the right’s strength is found increasingly among the working class.
Such a sentence would have been unthinkable just over a decade ago. Some still try to ignore the fact that it is true. But the inversion of class politics in Britain happened in 2019, and this year’s general election reveals that this trend is only intensifying.
The process that led to this inversion of class politics can be seen in the figure below. Using polling from YouGov, this figure uses monthly averages of voting intentions broken down by class for the four largest parties in British politics: Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and at times UKIP, the Brexit Party, and most recently Reform.
Although they have led among both middle and working-class voters for some time, Labour has polled several percentage points better among middle-class voters than it has among working-class voters since 2020. In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives received, for the first time, a greater share of working-class than middle-class voters’ support. This remained the case since then, even as their support has slipped (to put things charitably).
As the Conservatives’ fortunes have declined, Reform has drawn more and more of the working-class support that the Conservatives had enjoyed since the previous general election. Even more so than was the case with the Conservatives post-2019, the Reform Party, today, are now within sight of competing with Labour to win a plurality of the working-class vote. Even though Reform’s support from middle-class voters is also growing, the fact remains that Reform has drawn considerably more support from the working class than it has from the middle class since the previous general election. This development — of the hard right’s support being rooted firmly among working-class voters — mirrors trends elsewhere, as seen recently, for example, with the Alternative for Germany in the 2024 European Parliamentary elections.
Also worth remark is the fact that the combined share of the working-class vote enjoyed by Reform and the Conservatives exceeds that of Labour. Despite continuing to view itself as the party of the working class, the evidence shows that Labour is outpaced — by as much as 10 points in recent polls — by the right. As Labour finds increasingly that its electoral fortunes will be determined by its support among the middle, not working class — something it has consciously recognized since Tony Blair’s Labour Party abandoned Clause IV — the party pivots to the use of language like ‘working people’ instead of ‘working class’ when defining its core constituency.
There’s a long version of the story about how and why this happened. That’s for another time. For now, though, suffice it to say that Labour never recovered from its time at the helm during the 2008 economic crash, and since then, the party’s distaste for its original base of support has only become more visible.
This became visible in episodes like that when Gordon Brown was caught on a hot microphone complaining about having a 40 minute conversation with a ‘bigoted’ elderly woman on the campaign trail who asked uncomfortable questions regarding immigration. The incident neatly illustrated what a growing number of working-class voters had by 2010 started to perceive in ‘their’ party, Labour: although they make nice and pay compliments to your face, the second they leave, they exhale with a mixture of relief and frustration before complaining about having been stuck with you.
After the 2010 election, Labour’s troubles with working-class voters only got worse. This can be seen in the upper left-hand corner of the figure above. Particularly on questions like immigration, though also on the party’s record in northern English manufacturing towns and cities where decades of supporting Labour saw the best of times increasingly distant in the rearview mirror, Labour’s working-class support evaporated.
Some of those supporters stopped showing up to the polling stations. The declining turnout that characterized turn-of-the-millennium elections was concentrated more among the working class than the middle class. As Labour lost credibility on the immigration issue, they began to face stiff competition from those who were willing to talk about immigration — and do so from a position similar to that of ‘bigoted’ old women (and others). The chief party making this case, and thus to draw the support of working-class voters, was UKIP. In the run-up to the 2015 election, UKIP saw their support increase to the point that they were on roughly level footing with Labour among working-class voters — see, e.g., pp.181–186 in Evans and Tilley, The New Politics of Class (2017, Oxford University Press).
This competition continued to intensify after the 2015 election until UKIP managed to achieve its raison d’être: forcing the Conservative government of David Cameron to hold a referendum in 2016 on the UK’s membership in the European Union (and winning said referendum). In the run-up to that referendum, working-class voters continued to drift towards UKIP, who successfully made connections in voters’ minds between the issues of immigration and declining economic fortunes in ‘left-behind’ parts of the country on the one hand and the European Union on the other — no doubt assisted in their task by the waves of migration throughout Europe in 2015.
After the referendum, the Conservatives promised to fulfill the voters’ wishes. Accordingly, UKIP’s working-class support transferred their allegiances to the Conservatives. Facing a reinvigorated Conservative Party, working-class voters on the left flocked back to Labour, in part out of (perhaps prescient) distrust of the Conservatives, though also to Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to leadership — a more committed socialist than his Blairite predecessors (and successors). From then through early 2019, class differences in voting intentions were muted at best (in the case of Labour) or non-existent (as with the Conservatives, who drew nearly level support from the middle and working classes).
Things started to come unglued as the European elections of 2019 that weren’t supposed to happen — given that the 2016 referendum to leave the European election had not yet been implemented and seemed more and more unlikely with each passing day — drew closer. As noted in an earlier post, it was this point that Nigel Farage — former UKIP leader who chipped away at Labour’s working-class base and mobilized working- and lower-class voters who had abstained from voting over several past elections to turnout for Brexit in 2016 — stepped back into British electoral politics. His Brexit Party, an eponymous reflection of the party’s only goal, disrupted things in a big way in the run up to May 2019’s European Parliament elections, not only relegating an embarrassed Conservative Party to fifth place in those elections but also displacing Labour to become the chief recipient of the working-class vote — and drawing significantly more support from working- than middle-class voters.
After being humiliated by the Brexit Party, the Conservatives got into high gear, ousting Theresa May as Prime Minister in favour of Boris Johnson to ‘get Brexit done’. In early elections called for December that year — called with the expressed aim of securing a mandate sufficient to complete the job of exiting the European Union — the Conservatives pivoted to court working-class voters on the issue of Brexit, as well as the related issues of immigration and economic disparity in left-behind regions of the country. Promising to help struggling working-class (former) manufacturing towns level up, the Conservatives made a strong pitch asking working-class voters to lend them their votes.
The result of this was that the Conservatives — the perennial party of the aristocracy, and since the demise of the Liberals in the early twentieth century, the chief recipient of bourgeois voters’ support — won a greater share of the working-class vote in 2019 than it did from middle-class voters. In focusing on concentrating enough of the 2016 Remain vote to edge out competitors like the Liberal Democrats and Greens to prevent the Conservatives from securing majority, Labour — consciously or not — ultimately concentrated on winning over middle-class voters. Not only did it fail, but in pursuing this electoral strategy, Labour began to attract an increasingly middle-class base of support — as it was middle-class Remain supporters who were most determined to prevent Brexit from ever getting done.
And so it is that while a Labour victory is almost certain, such a victory will not be supported by most working-class voters. Instead, the trends of the past decade should lead us to anticipate that the right will again eclipse the Labour Party among working-class voters. Surpassing the 33 per cent of the working-class vote in 2019 is possible given the Conservatives’ utter unpopularity. However, this (1) remains uncertain at best (seeing that share fall further is not out of reach) and (2) would likely still sit at a low-water mark for the party that was founded to represent the working class.
At a higher level, we have little reason to suspect that class politics will be set ‘right-side’ up — unless, of course, we mean this to say that the right will outpace the left among the working class. If anything, the trends that turned class politics in Britain upside down may only intensify, particularly if Reform make a lasting breakthrough, and particularly if Labour cannot credibly respond to the challenges posed to them by Reform on the issue of immigration. If Labour cannot capitalise on the unpopularity of the Conservatives in this election to win back working-class voters, the fact that electoral incentives dictate that they focus their efforts on courting the middle class mean that they are unlikely ever to restore their position among the working class.