How does Labour win back the working class voters who’ve abandoned it? This question, part of the soul searching the party fell into when it lost the 2010 election, has gained even greater currency since the Scottish referendum. This evening Michael Dugher and John Denham had a stab at answering it at a conference fringe. And the answers were really quite unsettling.
Denham told the fringe that ‘we’re talking to people who’ve come to the conclusion that governments are a bonus if they don’t make their lives worse’ and therefore just one policy wasn’t going to solve it. He said: ‘We have to get back into a relationship with people who have good reason to believe politics isn’t working for them.’ Dugher talked about the Right to Buy and the way it changed the Tories’ appeal to the working class in a way that the Labour party took years to understand. He said Thatcher ‘understood our voters’ and ‘she murdered us amongst working class people… because she gave them something they wanted’.
The overarching theme of both men’s talks to the IPPR event was that politicians needed to talk to and listen to these voters. Sure, from this talking and listening would come policies that would appeal to those voters – ones that Michael Dugher hoped would mirror the Right to Buy in its iconic appeal to working class voters – but the main thing Labour needed to do was listen and find out what working class voters wanted. ‘Somebody who is not working class who listens is more useful than someone who is working class who doesn’t listen,’ said Denham. This really was unsettling, because though everything these two men said was insightful and thoughtful and useful to the party, it is astonishing that the party ever found itself in the situation where it simply needs to listen to its core vote. It’s not just a problem that Labour struggles with: it’s the problem that afflicts all politicians and is a major reason why voters are becoming more cynical and more anti-political.
Now all politicians like to say that they are listening, that ‘we hear you’, and that it is time for change. But they do need to change to become what their voters tell them they want to become, not what they themselves would prefer to become. If listening wasn’t hard enough for your average modern party, then doing something about what you hear will be even more of a challenge.
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