"The working classes smell" - Guardian (roughly)
Grrrr:
The invasion of Iraq aggregated everything else that was wrong with New Labour; it is the canvas on which every other discontent is placed. It's very hard, given that, to treat it as a stand-alone issue. We need to look at its political effects far more broadly.
The biggest drop in Labour's support since 2001 has been amongst manual workers (PDF file), 52% of whom voted Labour in the last election, but only 39% of whom now say they will vote Labour. There has been a slight swing towards Labour - relative to the Tories - amongst non-manual workers. This is adopting the crude, conventional sociological typology of "class": in practice, "manual workers" will include senior foremen and other lower middle-class types, whilst "non-manual workers" means working class call-centre operators as well as well-paid lawyers. But the pattern is reasonably clear.
The party that has gained the most from manual workers deserting Labour are the Liberal Democrats, widely (if erroneously) identified as anti-war above anything else. So why this assumption that is only the "middle class" that care enough about the war to desert?
(As an aside - Larry Elliot, whose name appears with Michael White on the by-line to the Guardian piece, is usually much too sharp to fall into this kind of lazy stereotyping. Rather disappointing.)
Labour plans to win back voters disaffected by the Iraq war with a manifesto pledge for international action on HIV/Aids treatment, a treaty to control the arms trade and a timetable for phasing out export subsidies to the west's farmers.
Alarmed at the prospect of large-scale abstentions and defections from a key group of middle class supporters, the party aims to make international development a key part of its push for a third term.
The invasion of Iraq aggregated everything else that was wrong with New Labour; it is the canvas on which every other discontent is placed. It's very hard, given that, to treat it as a stand-alone issue. We need to look at its political effects far more broadly.
The biggest drop in Labour's support since 2001 has been amongst manual workers (PDF file), 52% of whom voted Labour in the last election, but only 39% of whom now say they will vote Labour. There has been a slight swing towards Labour - relative to the Tories - amongst non-manual workers. This is adopting the crude, conventional sociological typology of "class": in practice, "manual workers" will include senior foremen and other lower middle-class types, whilst "non-manual workers" means working class call-centre operators as well as well-paid lawyers. But the pattern is reasonably clear.
The party that has gained the most from manual workers deserting Labour are the Liberal Democrats, widely (if erroneously) identified as anti-war above anything else. So why this assumption that is only the "middle class" that care enough about the war to desert?
(As an aside - Larry Elliot, whose name appears with Michael White on the by-line to the Guardian piece, is usually much too sharp to fall into this kind of lazy stereotyping. Rather disappointing.)
posted by Meaders at
10:36 am
