Working-class people who were a key part of the coalition of voters that delivered the Conservatives’ 2019 general election win have been deserting the party in droves under Rishi Sunak’s leadership, polling has found.
Only 44% of working-class voters who voted for the Tories in 2019 say they will back the party next time, according to research by YouGov released as Keir Starmer prepares to make what will probably be his last pitch for support at a Labour conference before a general election.
A report released by the centre-left thinktank Progressive Policy Institute, which commissioned the findings, said Labour’s lead was much narrower with working-class voters than the wider electorate and urged Starmer’s party to redouble its efforts to woo them.
This would include placing a “relentless focus” on raising wages for those on low to middle incomes and opening up housing to younger people, according to the report authored by Claire Ainsley, a former policy director to Starmer.
Other action Starmer’s party could take would be around restoring a basic sense of fairness after events such as Partygate, according to the report, Roadmap to Hope: how to bring hope back to working-class voters in an age of insecurity.
“Government should not be afraid to tax excess profits where companies are not passing the benefit on to consumers and make sure that UK taxes are paid in full,” it states.
The accompanying survey results – based on YouGov polling of more than 2,000 adults in September – gave Labour a six-point lead among working-class voters, a narrower margin than the 15-point lead the party enjoys among all voters in opinion polls.
Although the Conservatives won a majority of working-class voters at the last election, only 44% of those who voted for the party when it was led by Boris Johnson in 2019 say they will vote for it next time. About 12% say they would support Reform UK; 9% say they will vote Labour; but a large proportion (21%) say they now do not know who to vote for.
Ainsley, the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Project on Centre-Left Renewal, said Labour was “on course” to win over working-class voters who were feeling pessimistic about the future.
“The task for Labour is to inspire hope and belief that the deal can be re-made whereby if you work hard, you get on,” she said.
“That rests on offering concrete plans to improve people’s security and their prospects, and restore a sense of basic fairness to the economy and society.”
The polling comes before a big battle by the Conservatives and Labour for working-class support, with the Tories seeking to leverage concerns about “culture wars” issues and immigration.
However, economic concerns and policies such as controlling energy bills and inflation were found to be more important to working-class voters than cultural issues, which the report said had “gained disproportionate media attention”.
But on grounds where the Tories were seeming to exploit, working-class voters were more negative than positive on the effects of immigration.
However, as net zero becomes increasingly central as a battleground, other findings around attitudes towards the climate crisis showed there was an awareness of it across all social groups, with more working-class voters saying the government is not doing or spending enough to try to reduce carbon emissions (34%).
At the same time, there were stark signs that Sunak’s recent pivot away from green polices and tactics such as campaigning around London’s Ulez driving charge could find more widespread traction. A total of 53% of working-class voters agree that it is important to combat the climate emergency but “people like me should not be paying the cost of policies to reduce global carbon emissions”.
In findings that may hearten Labour – which has sought to remind the public of Sunak’s wealth – 74% of those polled describe the party he leads as not close to working-class people, strongly associating them with wealthy individuals and big business.
The PPI’s report notes that Labour’s working-class vote has been declining since the early 2000s, even if that decline was only really brought into sharp relief with the fall of the party’s “red wall” of constituencies in the north of England in 2019.
Referring to the economic turbulence of recent years, it argues that sense of insecurity – “not knowing what the future holds” – now seems semi-permanent. Working-class voters believed almost everything was going to get worse, it found, including on all of Sunak’s five pledges, presenting an opportunity for Labour to provide reassurance.
