Chris Dillow writes that an under-appreciated feature of last week’s election in the United Kingdom is that “social class has become less important as an influence upon voting behaviour.” His argument is that, based on Lord Ashcroft’s polls, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour got a higher share of the well-off’s vote than Tony Blair’s Labour got in 1997, and Blair did far better than Corbyn among the working-class.
But there’s another way of looking at the class dimensions of the most recent election—not in terms of who voted but how they voted.
One of the interesting questions in Ashcroft’s exit polls concerns capitalism:
Q.12 Do you think of each of the following as being a force for good, a force for ill, or a mixed-blessing? Please give each one a score between 0 and 10, where 0 means they a very much a force for ill, 10 means it is very much a force for good and 5 means it is a mixed blessing. Capitalism
As it turns out, 61 percent of those who voted Labour consider capitalism at best a mixed-blessing, in contrast to 36 percent of Tory voters. (Green and Scottish National Party voters are even more opposed to capitalism—with 68 and 67 percent, respectively.)
A similar but somewhat less dramatic difference exists between socioeconomic groups (the closest the UK Office for National Statistics gets to classes). Only 44 percent of AB voters (in higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, professional occupations) consider capitalism a mixed-blessing or worse, as against the 58 of DE voters (in semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations, unemployed and lowest grade occupations) who hold a negative view of capitalism.*
One possible interpretation of the snap election called by the Theresa May and the governing Conservative Party, then, is it was less a referendum on Brexit and more on capitalism. And on that score, with rising inequality and the threatened cutback in social services for those at the bottom, class still does matter for voters in the United Kingdom.
*The one surprising result in Ashcroft’s poll is how little difference there is in terms of age: while 53 percent of voters age 18 to 24 hold a negative view of capitalism, that falls to only 45 percent among voters 65 and over.
