In this year’s general election, 19% of graduates voted Conservative, only three percentage points more than voted Liberal Democrat; 43% voted Labour. You might expect such a finding after a contest in which the Tories crashed to their lowest-ever number of Commons seats. But the contrast with non-graduates is striking. The Conservatives gained a bigger share than any of their competitors among those with other types of qualifications – 32% to Labour’s 30%. Among those with no qualifications at all, their lead was bigger: they took 39% and Labour 28%.
Look back five years to a very different election – Boris Johnson’s crushing 2019 victory – and the pattern is much the same. The Tories may have won that poll, but they lost among graduates, with 34% to Labour’s 39%. And in the general election of 2017, Labour’s lead among them was 15 points. The tale of the Conservatives’ downturn among graduates last year is part of a longer decline.
It is resolutely counterintuitive – as much of the right fixates on Donald Trump’s victory in the US, the buoyancy of the hard and far right in Europe, and prospects in Britain for Reform – for a project about the Conservative party’s future to focus on graduates. Or, rather, on a particular segment of those with formal qualifications: lawyers, doctors, teachers, police, architects, surveyors and other people who work in the professions – Professional People, as the Conservative politician Angus Maude, writing with Roy Lewis, called them in their study of 1953.
Late last month, Francis Maude – Angus Maude’s son and a cabinet minister in David Cameron’s coalition government – joined Edward Faulks, a fellow Tory peer and former Cameron minister, Rachel Wolf, a founder of the New Schools Network, and Luke Evans, a GP and Tory MP, on a Policy Exchange panel to ask: how did the Conservatives lose the professional classes? What went wrong for the Tories – and is it possible for the party to put it right?
Unsurprisingly, perhaps inevitably, some present claimed that the Conservatives’ dismal showing in 2024 was about a failure of communication. So far, so obvious: but most of those on the platform dismissed the suggestion that the Tories had failed to get their case across. The consensus was not only that there hadn’t been much of a case at all, but that the professions have recoiled from the Conservatives’ case for quite some time.
Why? Perhaps the best starting point from which to look for an answer is social change. Half a century ago, the trade unions were associated in the minds of many voters with blue-collar manual work, and white-collar professional people reacted against the strikes that many believed were damaging the economy (and their own interests). Professionals identified with capital.
Fifty years later, that world has vanished – and with it the class divides of pre-Thatcher Britain. The average professional of the 1970s was a white male homeowner with a good deal of workplace autonomy. None of those labels necessarily applies to his equivalent today – and women, plus ethnic minority voters, tend to vote left (though the disposition of some of the latter is changing). Nor are the prospects of home ownership, let alone access to it, as open as they became in the 1980s and remained until the financial crash of 2008. Why vote for the party of capital if you don’t have any?
It is tempting in an event like last month’s – and in future work on professional people in Policy Exchange’s new Future of the Right project – to assume that the professional people we considered can simply be lumped together. This would be an error. Particular factors are at work. For example, there is a trend on the left to stress the role of the courts rather than parliament in determining our laws: it would perhaps be surprising were many lawyers not to respond sympathetically. But if there are commonalities, the simplest one may be strongest: the left will be associated with bigger pay rises, with Labour governments more likely to meet union demands.
Furthermore, professionals were left alone until the age of Thatcher – at least in comparison with what has followed since. Conservative governments are not the only ones to seek to reform the services that professionals help to deliver and change the ways in which they work: consider the Blair government’s academy schools and foundation hospitals. But most of the past 50 years has seen Tory-led governments and the recent pace of change has been particularly frenetic. There has been a sense of an ever-changing cast of ministers rushing out announcements at the behest of Downing Street to make media headlines. No wonder – when housing, for example, saw 16 different ministers take charge in 14 years of Conservative-led government.
These are early days for our project at Policy Exchange. But it may be that the best way forward, rather than fixating on electoral support, is to concentrate on public services themselves. The educational reforms led by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb may not have delivered teachers’ votes, but they have helped to maintain education standards – at least if Pisa scores are anything to go by. In both education and health, the Tories could do worse than revisit the devolution of power and responsibility – for example, by reviving the experiment with mutuals that Maude conducted under the coalition. Their most striking alternatives are, first, simply to compete with the left for who will provide higher public sector pay or, second, to sidestep professional people altogether and concentrate on older, more male, more provincial and less qualified voters.
The latter option has been the fashion on the right during recent years – especially in the wake of the recent US election. We believe it is simplistic. No electoral coalition it forms will succeed without the support of more professional people. Conservatives need Wokingham as well as Workington.
Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange
