by The slow but relentless pace of social change sometimes leaves political parties stranded. A century ago on Wednesday, Labor won more seats than the Liberals in the general election, and six weeks later Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labor government after negotiations in a hung parliament.
The Liberal party had seen organized labor coming, but had failed to do enough to meet it.
The rise in the number of graduates in the electorate has been noticed by the Conservative Party today, and it does not like it. But he won the last election on the votes of leavers without a degree, so he can’t decide what to do to secure her future in a changing country.
Professor Rob Ford from the University of Manchester presented new research at the Social Market Foundation this week on how education is now the new divide in British politics. Since the 2015 general election and the 2016 referendum, graduates have become more Labor and pro-EU, while non-graduates have become more Tory and anti-EU. And all the while, there are more graduates in the population, up from one-fifth to one-third in the last twenty years – a share that will continue to rise for 40-50 years, said Professor Ford, even if it, how to share. Tories have long wanted university expansion to be rolled back.
Professor Ford said: “Demographic change is alien to political analysis because it is slow and relentless, like a glacier.” It is an ice wall that threatens the Conservatives as well as all the short-term pressures on the government at a time when living standards are deteriorating.
He thought that the immediate causes of the discontent distracted the Tories from fundamentally harmful changes. They mean the playing field is tilting against the Tories all the time. They mean that when we realize that Boris Johnson won in 2019 because of stopping Brexit, the positive appeal of Jeremy Corbyn and Johnson himself, and none of that will apply next time, there is a fourth change, which is that the electorate has become a little more. for Labor and more for the EU.
The pace of change is slow but significant. The effect of this is that if graduates and non-graduates voted as they did seven years ago, holding an EU referendum again would now be 54-46 per cent for Remain.
Not only does this mean that the main Conservative-Labour battleground is more forbidding for Sunak, but there are large chunks of the Tory vote last time that could break away and suddenly fall into the sea.
Professor Ford is particularly interested in the top 40 graduate seats that the Tories must defend to stay in office. Among them is “a large crowd around London, where the Lib Dems are rivals, which could be a Lib Dem graduate constituency”.
Just because well-known Conservatives like Dominic Raab in Esher defied predictions that their seats were vulnerable last time, doesn’t mean they are safe. Next time, it is even more likely that the dominoes will fall due to the transfer of graduates. No wonder Raab is not standing again.
Professor Ford compared Tory complacency about the southern seats to the Labor Party’s lack of awareness of the threat to Scotland in 2015 and the red wall in 2019 – “‘Those seats will never go,’ until they will do it”.
The Social Market Foundation’s analysis has worse to come. While the Tories are at risk of losing some of their graduate vote to the Lib Dems, their core non-graduate vote is also under threat, on the contrary. Reform UK, formerly known as the Brexit Party, the company founded by Nigel Farage and still majority-owned by him, as Tom McTague of UnHerd points out, is doing well in the polls. About 8 percent of people say they intend to vote for him, despite minimal coverage in the mainstream media.
One of Farage’s reasons for going forward I am a Famous person to promote himself in order to take a role in the upcoming election. His party, currently led by Richard Tice, accepted the error in its rebranding by applying to be listed on election ballot papers as “Reform UK: The Brexit Party”.
Who knows what Farage and Tice can say with an anti-immigration message, “Brexit got everything wrong”, while standing in Tory seats where their candidates stood down last time. While Farage once attracted votes from both Labor and Tory supporters during the Ukip years, the grad shift means his support now comes largely from disaffected Tories.
Which means the Tories are retreating on three fronts at the same time. Nationally, they are being pushed back by a resurgent Labor Party, which now looks like a fairly competent choice, with a graduate voting base and strong bridges to socially conservative non-graduates whose cost of living is the highest more concern for them.
“Neither party can build an election-winning coalition without closing the divide,” Professor Ford said. In the last election, Johnson did it. This time, Starmer is doing it.
At the same time, the Tories are in danger from the Lib Dems in those seats in the Home Counties around London. And on top of that, their main vote is being eaten by Farage’s party, as capable of mobilizing anti-immigration votes as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Donald Trump in the USA.
That’s why Professor Ford said the Canadian case of 1993 – the Tory party went from governing with a majority to two seats – was a “real, under-discussed possibility” at the next UK election.
