It’s weird isn’t it, this bit? That period right after a new government has taken over with its all-new faces and fresh starts. The imperative to celebrate feels almost mandatory. Even more so after the past 14 years. The Tory government in later years began to feel like a nightmare – like one of those old-fashioned horror theme park rides where you gird your loins knowing something grotesque is going to arrive, screaming at you, at any second.
Once you’re off that sickening journey, having experienced politics for so long as a series of jump scares and gruesome characters and revelations, new government brings on a sense of relief and change that is even more intense than usual. What was once considered the normal business of basic governance now lands like a graceful acrobatic exercise. Look, a sensible cabinet appointment! And over there – goodness, a prime minister who seems to be enjoying himself. Hear that? No? Exactly. It’s so quiet. Nice, isn’t it?
Still. It all feels oddly disconnected from real life. My overwhelming sensation during the general election campaign and the result that followed has been variations of a sort of cognitive dissonance, mirrored in a participation concentrated among certain classes and professions. Turnout was higher in areas with an older population and where there was a high proportion of homeowners and lower in areas with high ethnic minority populations. Labour has a historic majority in the polls, but it’s a hard search to find the people who delivered it – or those who did so with any enthusiasm.
The result of this disconnect has been a contradiction – a “loveless landslide”. The ways Labour’s mandate has been described to date mostly fall along the lines of scale but fragility: of a “broad but shallow” majority. But there is something else, now emerging, that explains more fully that phenomenon of a landslide on the ballot sheets but indifference on the streets. A record number of people didn’t vote. And the profile of voters, particularly Labour voters, is changing.
A report last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) revealed that this election saw the lowest turnout by share of the population since universal suffrage. Finding popular excitement about the election is tricky because this was not a popular exercise. This isn’t a denigration of Labour’s win, or an attempt to invalidate it. It’s just an observation that its win is, literally, only half the story.
The report flags that only 52% of people voted this year, a steep drop from 2019’s 67%. It also shows how political participation has become increasingly concentrated among the middle classes and higher-income brackets, and has fallen among certain racial demographics.
“Put simply,” the report said, “the ‘haves’ speak much louder than the ‘have-nots’ in British democracy.”
This phenomenon constitutes a “new frontline” in British politics, according to the Economist, one where the “left behind” have been replaced by the “well ahead” in terms of political significance. Evidence of this can be found in the Liberal Democrats’ good results, which were the outcome of “hurling activists” at any town outside London that had a Gail’s, the upmarket bakery whose presence in a neighbourhood is as sure a sign of an area’s gentrification as the arrival of a Waitrose.
There seems to be an understanding across the board that politicians want to appeal to voters with an economic stake, and therefore political engagement and a sense of protectiveness over their assets and future mobility. People who have nice or nice-ish lives, or the potential to have those lives, are connected to politics because politics can tangibly lessen their lot. In a virtuous cycle, politicians are more responsive to their complaints, as these classes require not more forbidden spending and public investment, but currency, interest-rate and inflation stability, along with economic growth.
They are the homeowners worried about their mortgages after the Truss trauma, “hard-working families” whose bills have gone up, and business owners and entrepreneurs for whom VAT and post-Brexit arrangements are salient. The economy can be better managed in their favour, now under a government that has declared itself the party of wealth creation.
The result is no politics for those who can’t afford it. Labour’s vote demonstrated a “dramatic flattening of the class gradient” in the party’s support, according to the Financial Times’s chief data reporter. The party won its lowest share of the vote in deprived areas and the highest in affluent ones. What that reveals is a political system built on disfranchisement. If you are personally affected by the two-child benefit cap, have no hope of getting on the housing ladder, have no pension, savings, or the capacity to take on huge loans for training or higher education, then your future is cancelled, and politicians are banking on that sense of futility to keep you away from the ballot box.
Because the country in which you can achieve all those things that make you an engaged voter simply doesn’t exist for many people. In a conversation with historian David Olusoga last week, I asked him about how he views political apathy and the large number of people who voted for Reform. His response, as someone who went from a Gateshead council estate to university and then on to a successful career, was that a socioeconomic contract has been broken. Today, he said, you “couldn’t make that promise to a child on that same council estate”. A promise that if they worked hard they could make it, that they could go to university for free as he did, for instance, and prosper.
The things that a new Labour government can offer those on the margins to get them to vote – investment in public infrastructure, education and skills, regulated secure work, a rebalancing of the economy away from regional inequality – are not on the table. The promise made by Keir Starmer, that “whoever you are, wherever you started in life, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, this country should give you a fair chance to get on”, is one that clashes with a growth-centric, management-focused, pledge-lite campaign. One that appeals mostly to those with skin in the game.
People now exist, buried deep within the landslide, for whom working hard and playing by the rules will never pay off. The headlines and excitement about a new government, and all its competence and sensibleness, are drowning out millions of people who also have a voice and a vote but know that it is futile to use it.
Obviously, there are risks to this for any government and there are signs, already clear in the Brexit and Reform votes, that you cannot rely on the quiet of the excluded and sleep soundly. But beyond the political calculations, it’s profoundly sad and disturbing that what is emerging is a political caste system. One with a policy base fashioned in the interests of the members of a certain cohort, their votes efficiently distributed, their economic investment in the system connecting them to politics in a way that only increases their ability to shape it in their interests.
Their consumption habits, tastes and outlooks are joyously reflected in the style and vibe of the new Labour government. But for many, the celebration is a jarring, distant sound of merrymaking, wafting over a reality that no one wants to acknowledge lest it ruin the party.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 15 July 2024. An earlier version stated that David Olusoga grew up in Manchester. In fact, he grew up Gateshead
