How attitude changed cross pressured working class voters

 Steve Rayson in his book The Fall of the Red Wall describes research that shows working class voters to be cross pressured. The Conservatives took note of this and other research and boiled it down to an emotional heuristic - “get Brexit done.” Whereas Labour without any attempt to understand voter attitudes had the strapline, “time for real change.”

Time for real change get Brexit done.

There’s a lot of work ahead for the Labour party and we need to understand how to work with and where necessary change attitudes.

Attitudes are simply a measure of how much a person or group likes or dislikes something. They can be measured using focus groups. Shortly after I joined Bournemouth University from Southampton we did focus group work to understand attitudes with the Labour party c 1994. The Conservatives did it in 2019. Our main work on attitudes at Bournemouth was with the pharma sector on the take up and prescription of drugs and similar.

Attitudes can be changed or strengthened. Most attempts to change attitudes have the opposite effect.

Put together a diagram to show this. When I worked in the university sector you could knock up diagrams like this on an OHP or whiteboard as you went along and they worked. Couldn’t do it now though.

Using the political measure of left and right we can put the majority of British attitudes to the right of centre. If we put forward left wing - socialist - arguments we will entranch the current attitudes or push them further to the right.

In order to bring these attitudes closer to our position we need to start with arguments they will accept and straddle the current attitude position with messages. This is a long process and we should start now. Gradually we can bring the attitudes closer to our position. As Labour is generally a centre left party it shouldn’t be too difficult.

There’s a slight difficulty.

Steve uncovered research that showed working class voters are cross pressured. That is they are to the left of labour on economic issues and to the right of the Conservatives on cultural issues.

The diagram is something like this

At the 2019 election the Conservative strategists, Cummings and team understood this and boiled down messages to hit both pressure points with simple emotional (post truth heuristic) messages. Get Brexit done, levelling up and take back our borders. 

Where labour missed the target entirely.

The way forward.

The research is already done, much of it on behalf of the Conservative party who stupidly didn’t embargo it, so enough of it is in the public domain. Labour needs to understand the cross pressures and boil down simple emotional messages that resonate with the voters.

John McDonnell has some great ideas but they need boiling down almost dry. I favour the old Keynesian adage of a ‘mixed economy’. Although the public sector can’t be as it was in the 1950s - 1970s.We can still have a mixed economy and we can attack the Cumming Tory deregulation as dog eat dog.

In fact dog eat dog is exactly what Boris Johnson means by levelling up. He’s pushing social Darwinism.