Emmeline wrote:Good article by Stephen Kinnock today. I recommend all of it but I particularly like what he says about the working class vote:
Now is the time to renew, not retreat
(...) People simplistically say that, in order to win, Labour has to ‘reconnect with its working-class roots’, and that it is possible for us to gain votes by ‘moving to the left’. But a cursory glance at some basic statistics tells us such superficiality is nonsense. It is true that 45 years ago, manual workers and their families (the normal definition of working class) dominated our vote, accounting for 10 million Labour voters back in the early 1970s, compared with just two million middle-class Labour voters at that time.
In 2015, the composition of the British electorate, and of our vote, is completely different. In the early 1970s two thirds of all voters lived in working-class households, but in Britain today the number of middle-class voters exceeds the number of working-class voters by seven million. In addition to being substantially smaller in size than it was 40 years ago, the working class has been fragmented by de-industrialisation and the technology revolution, and so it is no longer possible to talk about it as some sort of monolithic bloc that can be mobilised around a given political cause. Indeed, it is patronising as well as illusory to do so.
It is therefore vitally important that we wake up to this new reality: we will never win another election if we attempt to present ourselves as a party that represents a narrowly defined social group. It is, quite simply, mathematically impossible.
http://labourlist.org/2015/10/now-is-th ... t-retreat/
Interesting read.
The parts I struggle with are where they fixate on class, which is an entirely arbirtary distinction and also a bit too mathematically clinical. However, as this is just a stepping stone to saying "we need to reach out to as many people as possible" is perfectly sound. It doesn't say a great deal about this should be achieved mind you. But then, if I had the answers to how that could be done, I'd already be the campaign manager for the party which won the last election.
However, this isn't about the working class as the core vote or targetting the wider middle class - this is about working out what your electorate needs and wants. In particular, do you have anything to offer that 35% of the electorate who didn't vote, something that will motivate them to the polling both, what can Labour do to engage them?
The biggest worry I have in the article is this ongoing nonsense about devolving power to the regions. This still reeks of a westminister centric view that "we don't know how to run any country that isn't London +SE" and therefore rather than try to crack that nut, they'll just abdicate responsibility to the regions and then blame them for failing as they do nothing to stop more and more jobs and money being pulled into London.
"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion." - Arthur C Clarke
"'Science doesn't know everything' - Well science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop" - Dara O'Brian
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