In Britain’s uninspiring and relatively uneventful general election campaign, featuring two prospective prime ministers — Conservative incumbent Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — with low approval ratings and plenty of baggage, one image sticks out. It’s a photograph of a dozen or so workmen at an industrial plant in Teesside, a port in the north-east of England where Johnson made a campaign stop a few weeks ago. The men’s overalls are splattered with paint, most wear hard hats, and one has a large makeshift cardboard sign hanging around his neck that reads, “We Love Boris.”
Not long ago, such workmen were likely to oppose the Tories. But it is on voters like these — in traditionally Labour-supporting, but Brexit-backing, parts of the country reaching from Wales, across the midlands and north of England, to down-at-the-heels ports on the east coast — that Johnson’s Conservatives have pinned their hopes of electoral success in Thursday’s vote, the country’s fifth major democratic event in six years.
Comparisons between Johnson and President Donald Trump, two blustery blonds with messy private lives, tend toward the superficial. In reality, while Trump seems to have been beamed into politics from another planet, Johnson, an Old Etonian Oxford graduate turned conservative journalist, has a fairly conventional résumé for a prime minister and fairly conventional politics. But this week’s vote will underscore that, superficialities aside, both men are symptomatic of similar, bigger forces reshaping politics on either side of the Atlantic — regardless of who wins.
British politics is undergoing a profound transformation that is expected to be reflected in a redrawn electoral map once the votes are counted early Friday morning. Working-class Brits, long a Labour mainstay, are now trending Conservative, while middle-class, college-educated voters are trending Labour. The tectonic plates of British politics that have been shifting for some time could soon deliver an earthquake that turns old assumptions about British politics to dust. As a result, British politics could feel a lot more American, echoing the cultural divisions and hyperpartisanship in the United States.
For decades, British politics was understood largely in class terms, with Labour the natural party of working-class voters and Conservatives generally banking on the support of more affluent voters. Now, the Conservatives’ support is growing in whiter, poorer areas outside the affluent southeast. In parts of the country once dominated by heavy industry, the links between workers, organized labor and the Labour Party have grown weaker. Memories of the miners’ strike, a brutal showdown between Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and the National Union of Miners in the 1980s, have faded in communities that not so long ago seemed inoculated against voting Tory. Labour, meanwhile, is set to become the party of the cities, solidifying its base in built-up areas, while hoping to make inroads in suburbs and commuter towns that were once safely Tory but are becoming more ethnically diverse and younger.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn acknowledges supporters following his address in Hoxton | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
As the average Labour voter gets younger and better off, and is more likely to have a college degree and more likely to be non-white than was once the case, the party starts to resemble the Democrats more closely. For Conservatives, the party’s base is trending older and whiter, compared with national demographics, and is less likely than the rest of the electorate to have a college degree. This will ring a bell to observers of the Republican Party in recent years.
A recent YouGov poll captures the socioeconomic dimension of the change. It gave the Conservatives a 10-point lead across the electorate as a whole: 43 percent of voters said they intend to vote Conservative this week versus 33 percent Labour. The contest among voters in the top three socioeconomic groups (labeled, in Britain, ABC1) is far closer, with a Conservative lead of just 5 points. Among working-class voters (C2DE), however, the Tories’ lead widens to 17 points. If a similar gap exists in the final results, it will be a landmark moment. According to polling by Ipsos MORI, the Conservatives have performed better among middle-class voters than they have among working-class voters at every election since at least 1974 (as far back as their records go).
It is tempting to chalk these changes up to Brexit. The Conservatives have positioned themselves as the only party willing to deliver on Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, while Labour promises to renegotiate a deal with the EU, then hold a second referendum giving voters a choice between that deal and Remain. Recent research by the Policy Institute at King’s College, London, suggests the Brexit issue indeed is a defining one for Brits: Just 22 percent of voters said they identify very strongly with a political party, while 55 percent said they identify very strongly with their side of the Brexit debate.
But the UK’s vote to leave the EU has only expedited a process that was already underway, as analysis by Paula Surridge, a lecturer at the University of Bristol, shows. Using data from the British Electoral Study, the most authoritative survey of voters in the UK, she demonstrates how voters with economically left-wing views on the merits of redistributive policies, free enterprise and trade unions have been growing less homogeneous in their voting patterns for years: “Since 2010, those on the left who are not also ‘liberal’ in their social values have become less likely to vote Labour, whilst the ‘liberal’ left have become more likely to do so.” In 2017, a third of left-leaning voters with either centrist or more authoritarian social views voted Conservative.
Few doubt the fact that this realignment is happening in the UK. The uncertainty about the election’s outcome is whether the change is dramatic enough to be captured by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system; the Conservatives could make big gains in Labour districts without actually winning those seats, and same for Labour in formerly safe Conservative districts. Complicating the picture further are the Liberal Democrats, a center-left party vying for votes in affluent parts of the country where voters are opposed to Brexit but equally wary of Corbyn’s left-wing economic agenda.
Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson on the General Election campaign trail | Aaron Chown — WPA Pool/Getty Images
Whatever the result in terms of Parliamentary seats, the Tories might well find themselves with the most socially and culturally conservative set of voters (in relation to the views of the electorate as a whole) in living memory, while Labour’s base will likely continue on the path toward greater social and cultural liberalism.
The polls suggest that the Conservatives stand to gain from the realignment in the short-term. They have leaned into the shift more than other parties, pivoting to the left on economics and taking the kind of robust line on Brexit, crime and national security that should go down well in traditional Labour seats. In the long run, however, this strategy poses demographic problems. The constituency of voters the Conservatives are appealing to is getting smaller. Labour’s base is getting bigger. Still, as recent American history has demonstrated, the political consequences of demographic change are not something to be taken for granted.
But the realignment underway in Britain is about more than the electoral map. If voters do return Johnson to Downing Street, he will have to govern in a political landscape divided on more American lines than ever before — a politics centered on new identities and a tribalism that will outlast the current Brexit divides. Rather than debating left- and right-wing means to common goals, British politics seems to be entering a broader culture war. As Americans on both side of that divide know, that is not necessarily something to look forward to.
Oliver Wiseman is U.S. editor of the Critic, a British monthly magazine.