THE ELECTORAL BATTLEGROUND

Polling Analysis and the Views of Wavering Voters

This chapter presents the quantitative polling research carried out by Ipsos Mori alongside the key findings of our qualitative survey carried out among voters across England, Wales and Scotland. The poll was conducted 10 days before the general election; it provides a snapshot of the electorate's attitudes and views as they weighed up which way to vote in the period up to 7 May. The chapter focuses on voters' perceptions of Labour and examines why so many were not prepared to support the party at the 2015 election.

The results underline the scale of the political challenge now facing Labour in the wake of its election defeat. In 2010, our research for Southern Discomfort Again found deep disillusionment after 13 years of Labour government and the financial crisis. Since then, the party appears to have gone backwards: its strategic position is, in key respects, worse than it was five years ago. We found evidence of important differences of social class and geography in voters' attitudes, which partly explains Labour's variable regional performance and its inability to connect with large swathes of England. These voters recognise that Labour has a social conscience and wants to make Britain fairer, but they have little confidence in the party's economic management credentials seven years on from the financial crash. They will not take much notice of Labour's social vision until they can be sure the party will not plunge Britain back into economic chaos.

Britain today is an economically anxious country where faith in politics has fallen to an all-time low. Middle-income, working- and middle-class Britain feels increasingly betrayed, unable to have confidence in any of the established political parties. These voters are aspirant and as anxious to get on in life as ever, but they are cautious about their prospects in the face of rising job insecurity, declining real wages, plummeting living standards and, as a consequence, a major increase in household debt. They want a better future for their children and grandchildren, but worry that life is set to get even tougher and that the advantages of a middle-class lifestyle – a steady, well-paid job, owning your own home, regular foreign holidays, a decent education – will be even harder to attain for the next generation. Middle-income Britain wants hope in the face of pessimism and uncertainty.

LABOUR HAS GONE BACKWARDS SINCE 2010

Labour today is seen as less of a national party than it was in 2010:

• Only one-third of voters (34 per cent) now say that Labour is close to people in the south of England, compared to 55 per cent in 2011 (see Table 2.1). Unsurprisingly, 71 per cent say the Conservatives are close to people in the south.

• This is mirrored by a fall in the proportion of voters who say that Labour is close to the middle class, down from 55 per cent in 2010 to 40 per cent today. This compares to 68 per cent for the Conservatives.

• In 2010, Labour and the Conservatives were seen as relatively equal in terms of being close to those who own their own home (55 and 60 per cent respectively). By 2015, the proportion of voters who saw Labour as close to home-owners fell to 39 per cent, while it remained at a similar level (62 per cent) for the Conservatives.

• Labour's pursuit of the '35 per cent strategy' targeting 'core' Labour voters and disaffected left-leaning Liberal Democrats appears to have markedly narrowed its base of support. The party is now perceived as close to the working class by a margin of 62 to 24 per cent.

Despite reforming its links with the trade unions, a similar proportion of voters (68 per cent) perceive Labour to be close to the unions as in 2010 (67 per cent). One area in which Labour has apparently made some progress is in pursuing a tougher stance on immigration. Less than half of voters (47 per cent) now believe that Labour is close to immigrants, compared to 57 per cent in 2010 – then hardly surprising perhaps in the wake of Gordon Brown's travails with Gillian Duffy in Rochdale. The Conservatives are now seen as somewhat closer to immigrants (24 per cent compared to 19 per cent), which is no doubt reflected in rising support for Ukip. When asked whether Labour was more interested in helping immigrants instead of those born in Britain, voters were evenly divided (33 per cent agreed; 33 per cent disagreed). We return to this theme below.

Labour's electoral strength is that many voters would like to trust and support the party: they identify with Labour's broader mission of a fairer society with opportunities widely spread. As one voter said: "I would like to vote Labour next time. They represent my sort of experience more than the Conservatives." Another added: "For me, it's always a struggle not to vote for Labour. I would naturally vote Labour, I voted for Blair and Brown." When Labour had been on the brink of government before, one younger voter felt a sense of optimism about the future: "A couple of times in my life I felt there was some kind of hope, like when you had [Bill] Clinton and Blair. I felt change was possible ... I am from a strong Labour family. Labour was part of my life. I was so excited when Tony Blair got into power. I genuinely believed it marked a new era of politics."

THE PARTY OF ECONOMIC INCOMPETENCE

Labour has made little progress since 2010 in addressing its key strategic weakness: a reputation for economic incompetence. Only 16 per cent of voters trust the party most to run the economy – exactly the same figure as in 2010 – compared to 33 per cent for the Tories (in the south-east, the margin is 42 to 11 per cent). In the south of England (outside London), the figure falls to 11 per cent. Just 12 per cent of voters trust Labour most to reduce the budget deficit, the same figure as in 2010 (falling to eight per cent in the south). In the West Midlands, the Conservatives are more trusted than Labour to reduce the deficit by 44 to 10 per cent. The Labour leadership's argument that the deficit was rising under the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne, because of falling real wages (and therefore of declining tax revenues) completely failed to connect with voters.

Since the financial crash, Labour has utterly failed to restore its economic credibility with the electorate. When asked to choose which term best described today's Labour party, 44 per cent of voters in the south selected "incompetent": across Britain, the figure was 37 per cent. The voters we interviewed had little sense of what Labour's economic policy actually amounted to. What they did remember was scarcely advantageous to the party's reputation: "There was a sense they were against people who generate wealth."

Labour was still blamed for the crash and the deficit by most of the respondents, and not felt to have policies to deal with the deficit: "They messed things up in 2010. They...