LABOUR 2020: HOW THEY CAN WIN BACK UKIP VOTERS
Author’s note: This article was written and originally published online on 8 June 2016, prior to the EU referendum and Labour leadership contest.
Since Jeremy Corbyn’s election, the focus in the media and among party members has been whether or not a Labour 2020 manifesto would be too Left-wing to win back the voters it needs to return to power.
This post will challenge the idea that the electorate thinks in the linear terms of a Left-Right spectrum, or that Labour should return to the economically conservative policies of the Blair years to move back into a mythic centre ground.
Instead, the Labour 2020 manifesto must win back voters from a range of parties (and encourage some of those who didn’t vote in 2015) including the SNP, Lib Dems and UKIP as well as the Conservatives. Research shortly before the 2015 election demonstrated that 30% of the public intending to vote UKIP in 2015 voted for Labour in 2005, a core group of former Labour voters who must form part of their 2020 electoral strategy.
Professor Evans of Nuffield College, Oxford, who conducted the research, said:
“New Labour’s move to the liberal consensus on the EU and immigration in 2001, 2005 and 2010 left many of their core voters out in the cold a long time before Ukip was around”.
In the media, Labour appear increasingly out of touch with these voters, denouncing them as “bigoted” or “horrible racists” without engaging with their very real concerns over the pressure put on public services by immigration.
Of course, Labour’s response to this should not be to simply accept that immigration is the problem but to make a stronger case for how they will support public services (particularly outside of London). A stronger case also needs to be made by Labour for the benefits of immigration, particularly the large number of migrant workers propping up public services. Whilst these arguments have been made recently during the EU Referendum campaign, they must become central to a Labour 2020 manifesto.
TOWARDS A LABOUR 2020 STRATEGY
What does a strategy to win back these voters look like? Well, for a start polls have shown that there is significant public support for railway nationalisation. Others suggest that the public would support rent controls, cuts to tuition fees and higher taxes for high earners. Whilst there is no guarantee that the voters who support these policies are all UKIP voters, supporting research did also highlight that many voters felt that neither Labour nor the Conservatives sufficiently represented the views or priorities of working people.
The Political Compass is usually pretty useful for demonstrating scenarios like this. As their diagrams show, Labour in the 2015 election were not as right-wing as the Conservatives, but still fell into the Authoritarian Right quadrant in terms of policy.
It is interesting to note here that UKIP policy fell into the same quadrant, even further to the right and even more authoritarian. Yet the concerns consistently voiced by UKIP voters, and by those voting to leave the EU, suggest that their biggest concern is the effect that unlimited migration has on public services in their towns with limited infrastructure. UKIP’s success, therefore, has been to convince these voters that the failure of government to build houses, support public services and sufficiently fund the NHS across the UK is actually the fault of immigrants.
How, then, can Labour take advantage of this? For a start, I believe that many UKIP voters are more accurately by the position on the graph below.
Now, this position has hardly been verified scientifically as it is based on the answers I personally gave to the Political Compass questionnaire. But the answers I gave were intended to represent a voter who has formally voted Labour and who is (in terms of economics) left-wing, whilst remaining socially conservative in some ways. In this way, I have tried to reflect the position outlined by Professor Evans outlined above; that of a former Labour voter who is fed up with tax breaks for the rich, the Westminster bubble, and a Labour party dominated by a metropolitan London elite, unwilling to discuss immigration and lacking empathy for the reality of society outside of the capital.
If Labour could get closer to this position by adopting some of the policies which have genuine public support (outlined above) then they have a real chance of winning back voters not only from UKIP, but from the Greens and SNP as well, maybe even without losing voters to the Conservatives.
However, it would not by any means be a complete strategy, as an 7.6% swing from UKIP to Labour (roughly equal to the UKIP to Labour swing since 2005) would take roughly 11 seats from the Conservatives. This is clearly not enough to win the election, even if Labour were inclined to form a coalition with the SNP. But there is a real possibility that such a tactic could form part of a wider strategy to regain large sectors of the electorate by delivering on popular policy.
Even if it does not achieve great progress in terms of seats, the threat from UKIP to Labour is huge (as recently highlighted by Frank Field MP). UKIP came second to Labour in 44 seats in the 2015 election. At the very least, a Labour 2020 manifesto should address UKIP voters before it is too late.
