Twenty years ago this week Tony Blair came to power with a thumping majority, claiming Labour to be ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. As a phrase it sounds mildly deranged but it wasn’t totally cut off from reality. New Labour had claimed support among a cross-section of the public, including over 60 per cent of DE voters and a clear majority of those in the C2D category. Today, the Conservatives have a 17-point lead among working-class voters, despite there being a squeeze on health and education spending, and the party offering not much in the way of optimism or charisma.
What went right, then? Of course much of it is to do with the Labour leadership, but the Tories also seemed to have, almost by accident, successfully pulled off Ukip’s ‘northern strategy’ of winning socially conservative working-class voters away from Labour. Large numbers, it appears, are going either straight from Labour to the Conservatives, or via a brief dalliance with Ukip.
It was obvious that large numbers of traditional voters would desert Labour at some point; there is a clear pattern across the western world of what’s broadly called ‘the white working class’ moving rightwards.
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