In 1946 there was a referendum in Britain, which the governing party lost 52 per cent to 48 per cent. It took place in Stevenage, over the proposed 1946 New Towns Act. When Lewis Silkin, the minister in charge of the expansion of Stevenage, arrived at the railway station, he was greeted with jeers and banners declaring the town should henceforth be known as “Silkingrad”.
A report issued yesterday by Labour Together suggests Stevenage might be the most important site of the next election and Lewis Silkin, the man who put more people in Stevenage, might just be the most influential person in politics whom you have never heard of.
In their report, Red Shift, Labour Together identify a character living in towns and suburbs who works but struggles to pay the bills, who feels hardly engaged in politics at all but who, when she does think about it, leans towards being a Conservative on lifestyle matters and wonders why the Government cannot do more to help economically.
Labour Together call her “Stevenage Woman” and she counts. In 2019, 44 per cent of people who answer this description voted Tory. At the moment, the Tory vote among this group has collapsed to 23 per cent and Labour are polling 51 per cent. Stevenage is one of those seats that always votes for the winning party. Win in Stevenage and you are the government.
If you go back to the time of Silkin and the Attlee government, this type of voter segmentation was a lot easier to do. In 1951, when the Attlee government was defeated, surprisingly, by Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party, income and occupational status coincided almost perfectly with voting affiliation.
There were two large economic blocs — the working class and the middle class — which translated efficiently into votes for, respectively, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Slowly, from 1951, that strong relationship began to break down. Slowly, party affiliation started to weaken. Slowly, social class ceased to be a perfect predictor of an electoral outcome.
As class weakened as a source of political favour, the search parties were sent out to find the mean voter, to discover where in the country the battle needed to be fought, and over whom. In the Thatcher years, Basildon in Essex was thought to be the representative place because it contained the sort of not-very-wealthy voters, in towns on the edges of cities, who had deserted Labour in despair at the state of industrial relations. The representative character of the Blair victories was known as “Worcester Man”. In 2019 the think-tank Onward coined “Workington Man” to describe those voters who had once been staunch Labour supporters who had flirted with Nigel Farage’s various parties and who had then gone over to Boris Johnson via a Leave vote in the 2016 referendum on the EU.
Indeed, that other 52-48 referendum — the second in British political history after Stevenage 1946 — was supposed to have crowned Workington Man as the representative type. In his latest book, Values, Voice and Virtue, the politics academic Matthew Goodwin argues that the Brexit rupture stands for a deep-seated realignment around questions of culture. The long and steady and decline of economics as the primary determinant of affiliation has given way to a division of attitudes — social liberals versus conservatives.
Yet it doesn’t look that way at the moment. It looks, in fact, as if Brexit might finally be done as the political idea of the day. The Labour Together report contains numbers that should alarm the Conservative Party. In the Workington Man seats, which stretch through the Midlands into the North East and North West of England, the Tory vote has collapse from 49 per cent to 15 per cent. The cultural vote for Brexit and Boris has given way to anxiety over the cost of living. Politics based on economic security is by no means over yet. It is foolish to have thought it ever would be.
The next general election will, of course, be a little more complicated than a referendum in Stevenage (although it would save a lot of trouble if we could do it that way). Perhaps the cunning plan being employed by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt — that they might actually run the country — will inspire something of a Conservative recovery. Maybe Suella Braverman can restart a culture war over illegal immigration. But the new towns have turned on them and, at least for the moment, Stevenage looks like Starmergrad.
