Deciphering the Mystery of the Working-Class Voter: A View From Britain
How is class defined these these days – asking specifically about Britain here but the question certainly resonates globally – and when did that definition replace the classic one? That’s a fine and fertile question for both social scientists and journalists, and one that Laura Hood – a journalist used to wrangling social scientists as part of remit as political editor at The Conversation UK – addressed in just completed five-part podcast series.
That series, Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, sees Hood talk with some of the UK’s top political experts – both academic and practitioners – to understand one of the key realities of Britain’s electoral landscape: why the so-called “working class” no longer votes solidly for Labour and why that sea change isn’t something Conservatives can automatically bank on, either.
As Hood explained in an article announcing the series:
Social Science Space asked Hood some questions about the podcasts (which can be fund through this link) and what the project taught her about electoral politics in the UK and beyond.
Looking at reaching an audience, what led you to use a podcast format for this specific series as opposed to written communication? (And I do realize it allows accents to be heard …)
Class is very personal and often doesn’t make a whole heap of sense. Everyone we spoke to for this series was an expert in one way or another, but they are also all people with their own stories to tell about class identity and class confusion. We wanted to bring out the funny and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the two sides. Geoffrey Evans is a particularly good example of this. Geoffrey is a leading expert in the relationship between class and politics, but he is also someone who has come from a working-class childhood and ended up a professor at Oxford. His books are incredibly insightful and provided much of the evidence we needed for the series. But in person, he’s also super funny and open about how lucky he feels to be where he is — and how absurd life in the highest echelons of academia can be sometimes. I think audio is the ideal way to capture that.
As a political editor, you in particular know there are so many ways to deconstruct electoral behavior. What led you to choose class as your framework? (And were there other frameworks you considered for the series?)
I think that so many of the problems in British political life can be traced back to the abandonment of working-class communities and unresolved questions about how to improve their lot in life. Inequality, an unbalanced economy, the rise of populist parties and culture wars, Brexit, immigration, you name it and there’s a class dimension to it.
The working-class voter was once an integral part of British political life — one of our two main parties is literally called the Labour party — but somewhere along the line, working-class voters started to be taken for granted and disrespected. They began to slide out of democratic participation and we’re all worse off for it. Now we find ourselves in a situation in which populist politicians are trying to inflame class antagonism to feed their own agendas.
In reporting this, how applicable was social and behavioral science v what practitioners say/believe? Is there a divide?
When it comes to class, there appears to be a chasm between our own perceptions and the objectively measured reality. We found that far more people consider themselves to be working class than is objectively the case in this modern, post-manufacturing economy.
But in the case of class, you might argue that the perception is just as important as the empirical evidence. After all, class is a made-up construct! It’s a fictional system that we created as a way to understand the world and our behaviour in it.
So I think to truly understand how class and politics interact, you need to both get across the evidence and embrace some of the inconsistencies that are inherent to the class system.
Given your own background, what was the most surprising thing you learned in this endeavour?
Halfway through making the series, I asked my Dad, who comes from a working-class background, when he thinks he became middle class. He said without hesitation: “When I married your mother.” The answer made perfect sense to him and some sense to me, but where is it written in the rules that you become middle class when you marry a middle-class woman?
This was one of the many examples I came across that showed me that we all have our own very clear internal ideas about what makes you one class or another — and they bear absolutely no relation to what the next person uses as their own rules.
What’s more, that person will be very confident about their own version of the rules. They’ll have decided that they’re working class because they don’t own a car. The next person is working class because their great-grandfather worked in a factory, even though they’re a middle manager in a bank. One of our leading politicians claimed to have ‘become working class’ while working briefly in McDonald’s.
Each of these people will be very quick to tell you that your own definitions are nonsense. That chaos fascinates me and has opened up many surprising conversations.
What conventional knowledge was overturned (or at least recalibrated)?
The current received wisdom is that working-class voters switched wholesale from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019 and then from the Conservatives to Reform in 2024. But the reality is that they’ve actually stopped voting at all. The class divide is in turnout, not party choice.
That’s a depressing state of affairs, of course, but the difference is important for the next election, which is going to be a tight race. At the moment, the two main parties think they need to woo voters back from the far right, but they actually need to win them back from the sofa. That calls for a different strategy and realising that could potentially save us from having to have another round of culture wars.
Did you interrogate your own views and biases in this process? If so, and if you don’t mind sharing, what did you learn?
I had not realised – and I don’t think many people do realise – just how cynical the decisions made around working-class voters have been over the years. My own (frankly, complacent) perception was that Tony Blair and New Labour had huge aspirations for all of us, which is why they started talking about living in a ‘classless society.’ It didn’t occur to me that they were really saying: “the working-class vote will no longer win us elections, so we’re focusing on the middle-class voter instead now.” The consequences of that decision are so profound that I wish I’d understood it better before now.
I’m writing from North America. What are you learning that’s applicable outside the UK? And what is uniquely British?
In terms of what’s uniquely British, it has to be having a three-class structure but only ever talking about two of the three classes. Anouk Millet, the incredible producer on this series, is not from the UK but has spent time living here. Anouk was constantly asking why we would never talk about the upper class – only the working class and middle class. I’m not even really sure what the answer to that question is, all I know is that we Brits would always just bat the question away — “oh there’s no need to talk about them, they’re irrelevant!” Well, that’s manifestly not the case. The upper class is an incredibly powerful force in this country. Perhaps understanding why we’re so reluctant to talk about the upper class is the next series.
And what’s applicable to other countries? The class system! Everyone seems to think we Brits are mad to be so obsessed with class, but my hunch is that plenty of countries in the western world have class systems as ingrained as our own, they just don’t label it the way we do.
