British Politics' Midlife Crisis

Why British Parties Can't Make Peace with Their Actual Voters

A couple of weeks ago, Britain’s Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Peter Kyle, said something quite remarkable: “Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge.” Busted.

As I remarked waggishly on social media afterwards, this promised other derivations: perhaps Wes Streeting saying “‘too often people go to hospital to have operations” or Heidi Alexander saying “‘too often people go to the station to catch a train’ or Shabana Mahmood saying “too often people come to Britain to work in skilled jobs”. Oh wait, that last one…

Anyway, it did seem a little odd that Peter Kyle was taking the opportunity of being on LBC to give universities another little dig in the ribs. This, though is something that the Labour government have quite enjoyed doing, with the next elbowing coming from a levy on international student fees. And while it looks like that the proceeds of this will at least go to poorer UK students as bursaries, it is nonetheless another cash-grab from the university sector. A sector with many institutions currently on the verge of bankruptcy. And a sector whose employees, students and graduates all typically vote (or voted) Labour.

In other words, Labour has chosen to make the university sector, if not quite an enemy, more of an embarrassing distant relation worthy of disdain. At the same time as relying on the votes of everyone vaguely attached to it.

It’s a bold strategy but Labour aren’t the first political party to turn on their core support. Their recent predecessors, the Conservatives, by the end of their time in government seemed positively embarrassed about managers, professionals, and local worthies. And yuppies? Don’t mention them. Shiver…

Both major political parties appear to be going through some odd form of psychopathology where they have become embarrassed to be supported by anyone who could be vaguely pigeonholed as ‘middle-class’. It’s the most extended imaginable version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshireman’ sketch, except performed by special advisors and journalists who think they might once have been through Yorkshire on the train to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival but can’t quite remember.

The desire to kick off the trappings of bourgeois life and return to a forgotten - and also never experienced - past as a horny handed sons of toil reminds me of nothing so much as a mid-life crisis. Divorced dad quitting his suit job, buying a motorbike and getting smashed at the kind of pub he used to hurry nervously by.

Like the divorce, I suspect this won’t end well.

Both Labour and Conservatives - MPs, press outriders, spads and associated hacks - have decided that modern Britain is unappealingly bougie, corporate, diverse, and globalist. That Britain is now an economy heavily dependent on exporting services and hence on the horrors of managers and professionals is an embarrassing family secret. Especially because almost all of the prole-whisperers in both parties come from precisely these sorts of managerial or professional backgrounds.

Told you this was a psychopathology.

And it is professionals and managers who play the antagonist in a memo circulating the offices of Labour MPs, apparently to great interest. The author is anonymous though people suspect someone who previously wrote for such prole-curious venues as Unherd and the Jason Cowley era New Statesman. I have no insight into who they are, though I would be deeply shocked were they not a member of the dread PMC - Professional Managerial Class - they so obviously despise.

Ah, the PMC. America, I missed you after leaving a decade ago. Glad to have your inane discourse back.

It’s a bit of a tell to be honest that someone is too online if they are blathering on about the PMC. Certainly too online in America-brained parts of the internet. You can read the memo here.

I have tried to do so. I feel like I know less about the world since I read it than I did before but perhaps it will have a less bleach-like effect on your brain. It reads to me like what would happen if you asked ChatGPT to write a mildly parodic memo based on the collected works of John Gray, Maurice Glasman, and below the line comments at the Telegraph, and then to re-edit it in the voice of someone who just lost their pub quiz to a member of the PMC. Still, you may find more in it than I did.

But, hey, it’s not a terrible framing device for the psychopathology I identified - that Labour (and hey the Conservatives too) seem to hate their own voters. You know whose voters would be cool though? People who voted for Reform, or who want to do so now. That’s the ticket. That such people might disagree with almost every value Labour MPs and voters hold dear? Well that just makes them cooler. Hard to impress.

Labour seem to have developed a strategy of getting ‘negged’ by Reform voters; shifting their policies in ever more socially conservative directions to attract such voters and somehow repelling them, and yet still, maybe, maybe this time will be the one. While Keir Starmer has belatedly realised that Nigel Farage might not be the point of light for Labour, Farage’s voters are still a great prize, always tantalisingly just out of reach.

The Conservatives too are obsessed with Reform voters. To be fair on them this makes substantially more sense since while Labour have lost fewer than ten precent of their 2024 vote to Reform, the Conservatives have lost almost a third. That’s obviously terrible. But this shift in a Reformier direction may already have hurt the Tories in 2024, what with them losing sixty-odd posh seats full of PMCs to the Lib Dems. And worse for the Conservatives - Labour used to rely on working-class socially conservative voters to win elections - so you can see why they still pine for them. For the Conservatives their success with this group was just during a brief dalliance with Boris and we know how such brief dalliances usually play out.

Anyway back to Labour for now. Are they indeed too reliant on the dread PMC? Could they shift effectively on economic or cultural positions to win back voters they are losing? Glad you asked. I have graphs.

But before I do, it’s worth noting that the travails of Labour, desperate to win back working class voters, embarrassed by its middle-class ones reflect a much wider trend on the left. Jane Gingrich and Silja Hausermann’s seminal article shows just how much more dependent on middle-class voters, social democratic parties have become. Here’s the key figure, where they break countries in four groups.

Everywhere except maybe in Southern Europe (bottom right), the base of the working class has switched from working class in 1980 to strongly middle class by the 2010s. That took a little longer in ‘liberal regimes’ like Britain than elsewhere but it’s clear by Blair’s second term. The sense of embarrassment in Labour comes I think from a folk memory of the 1970s and 1980s, which today’s Gen X and Millennial special advisors cling to as a sepia-toned story of what proper Old Labour was like. Though the era where the working class were the dominant part of the base is forty years old.

That is in part true because the old working class no longer exists in anywhere close to its previous magnitude anyway. That’s the Thatcher-induced shift in Britain’s industrial structure that made us a services powerhouse. There are of course poorly paid workers who still vote Labour - but they work in a fulfilment warehouse or cleaning floors, not in a mine. And they may have very different social and economic attitudes than the miners and factory workers of yore.

And it’s important to understand that the attitudes of people who voted for Labour in 2024 are very different from those who chose to vote for Reform then or indeed now. As my colleague Jane Green and Marta Miori shows in an important recent piece, relatively few Labour voters are attracted to Reform and most of Labour’s lost vote share has moved in very different directions - to the Greens, Lib Dems or that old muddle ‘Don’t Know’. Labour have lost voters since 2005 to Reform but as Green and Miori show these people are very long gone and will not be coming back. What’s more, the very few people who have switched from Labour to Reform since 2024 look very different to everyone else. Something I’ll demonstrate presently.

But first, the PMC. Who are they, what do they want, and why do they make Blue Labour cry?

To analyse the attitudes of people by different occupational groups I have used two surveys. First, the best in class face-to-face 2024 British Election Study survey and second the 2025 edition of the long-running internet panel run for the British Election Study in May this year. Both surveys have information about how people voted and their NS-SEC classification of occupation which splits people into the following groups: Managers, Professionals, Lower managerial or professional (I call Low PMC), Intermediate, Small Employers, Supervisory, Semi-routine, Routine, and Unemployed or never employed. So, this is job type not industry of work. I am using the two digit version, should you care about these things.

I also need data on attitudes. Here I use questions that are used in standard left-right scales. The BES 2024 has the following twelve prompts that cover a set of economic and social questions:

• Ordinary working people get their fair share of the nation’s wealth

• There is one law for the rich and one for the poor

• Young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional British values

• Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards

• There is no need for strong trade unions to protect working conditions and wages

• Private enterprise is the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems

• Major public services and industries ought to be in state ownership

• Govt’s responsibility to provide a job for everyone who wants one

• People should be allowed to organise public protests against the government

• People in Britain should be more tolerant of those who lead unconventional lives

• For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence

• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences

I use the magic (OK linear alegbra) of factor analysis to convert these into two dimensions that pick up commonalities among the questions. Long story short, factor analysis creates weighted averages of two sets of questions - one largely on economic concerns, one largely on cultural concerns. The weights mean that not every question contributes equally - they are weighted more to the degree they better ‘reflect’ the underlying economic or cultural dimension. This magic trick gives us scores on two different variables for each respondent - economic and cultural views. Each score is increasing in conservatism.

For the BES 2025 panel I have to use ten slightly different questions, which have already been presorted into economic and cultural domains. Nonetheless I still do the factor analysis on all ten questions just to be consistent. Here are the 2025 questions, which are very similar to 2024.

• Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off

• Big business takes advantage of ordinary people

• Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth

• There is one law for the rich and one for the poor

• Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance

• Young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional British values

• For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence

• Schools should teach children to obey authority

• Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards

• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences

OK, so for both surveys I have estimates of individual economic and cultural attitudes. Now I can look at groups in society - say occupations or parties - and see where they sit on the political compass.

Let’s start with the dreaded PMC (and non PMC). Here is the 2024 data. And I think it’s pretty clear. Members of the PMC are more economically right-wing and culturally liberal, on average, than other groups. Managers are actually culturally middle of the road and very right wing on economics, professionals are cultural very liberal and economically moderate. But the larger Low PMC group are a bit of both. Small employers are conservative on both dimensions. Intermediate people are blah. And then we have traditional working class people - both left leaning economically and culturally conservative. The dashed lines give the averages (both about 0).

Now hold on before we all say, oh Morgan is right, Labour do need to become much more culturally conservative. Because we haven’t seen yet who these people vote for. And also, have a quick look at the axes. The economic one runs between -0.2 and 0.4 more or less and the cultural one between -0.4 and 0.3.

Now let’s do the same thing by who you voted for in 2024. I am just keeping this to the five largest parties, so apologies to my Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish readers. Note the axes have stretched out… we’ll come back to that. Second, there are big differences across the parties. Labour’s supporters are moderately on the economic and cultural left. The Greens are further out on both. The Lib Dems are slap bang in the middle economically and culturally like Labour. The Conservatives are all the way out on the right, very economically conservative and pretty socially conservative. And Reform voters? Don’t care about economics but really really socially conservative.

The first thing you might think is that since Reform voters are almost as distant from Labour voters as the Conservatives are, it’s kind of weird for Labour to obsess over them. Not least with the Lib Dems and Greens being much closer.

But the second is that differences by parties are just way bigger than differences by occupation. This is something I wrote about on this Substack a couple of years ago - the value differences in Britain across people are about politics not their job. And you can see that other than the Greens, Britain’s parties are all a similarish difference from the cluster of occupations.

But we can do more. We can break people down into who they voted for and what kind of job they have and then you get something pretty cool.

Here we see that every party has occupational splits. Their voters in supervisory or routine jobs tend to be more socially conservative than their PMC voters. What’s more, except for Reform, the Low PMC group actually seems to anchor the average position of the party (you can check by comparing to the graph above). So if anything Low PMC voters (teachers, nurses, middle managers, social workers and hilariously journalists) are the rock on which each party is founded.

You can also see Labour’s challenge which is that its voters in supervisory, routine, semi-routine and intermediate jobs are a bit more socially conservative and actually a bit less left-wing economically than their PMC base. However, Labour actually clusters more coherently than the right-wing parties do. And God knows what is going on with the Lib Dems - that’s just weird.

OK but what about today, now that Labour are riding, er low.

Well here is the occupational graph again (this time missing un/non-employed). Looks identical to last time really, even though the questions we are using have changed a little bit (from 12 to 10).

What about by party? This is intended vote choice in 2025 so it picks up Labour and the Conservatives’ loss in support. Reform is the biggest party in this survey. I will do the thing with splitting out by party and occupation again because I think it looks cool. To be honest, it looks pretty similar. Labour still dominate in the little bit left on both space. The Lib Dems look more normal now (bigger sample) and are basically indistinguishable from Labour. The Greens are largely in the same place they were, a bit further to the left than Labour.

But look at the right. It’s actually further away from Labour than in the 2024 election. There has been more of a clear partisan split. I think Reform have shifted a bit more to the economic right and they remain the most socially conservative. Not much has changed for the Conservatives - in general they are more socially liberal and more economically conservative than are Reform. They are certainly more distinct from Reform than are the Lib Dems from Labour…

So far it doesn’t really seem very sensible for Labour to be trying to attract Reform voters who are miles from them, as opposed to Lib Dems and Greens who are close. But if we add people who currently say Don’t Know who they would vote for to the mix we can see the logic of Labour trying to move in a more socially and economically conservative direction. DK’s are right in the middle.

Of course the problem with DK’s is they might not vote for anyone at all, or might not ever vote for Labour. To understand Labour’s strategy we need to look at people they have lost since 2024 and where they sit.

We can do that by looking first at the average placement of each group by their trajectory. The graph below of 2024 Labour voters shows their average scores on each factor for each group given what they plan on doing now. Remember we are looking at part of the graph that is left on both dimensions already. So Labour loyalists are coloured red - and they remain left wing on both dimensions. People going to the Greens are much more left wing. People going to the Liberals by contrast are basically no different to loyalists. And people going to Reform are very socially conservative indeed. Finally, we have people going to other parties (Conservatives, SNP, Plaid, Corbana etc), who on average are slightly more conservative in both dimensions and people who have moved to Don’t Know (the largest group - in pink) who are a little more socially conservative.

If I’m a Labour strategist - and I suspect my snark on here has probably ruled that out - I would look at the losses to Lib Dems and Don’t Knows as the most easily retrievable. And they don’t really involve doing very much. It does seem like it will be hard to win back Greens and it will be really hard to win back Reform defectors.

And we can do this splitting by occupational group too. Lots of juicy targets for Labour who aren’t too far away - especially Low PMC voters. As we move up to Don’t Knows who are factory supervisors etc we are getting closer to the kind of people who went to Reform.

So the moral of this tale is that moving in a radically Reform like direction is not especially advisable since those people, whatever their occupation, have much more socially conservative views than anyone else in Britain and certainly than Labour voters. There is also an equivalent challenge to the left of Green voters and I think that kind of left populism is a real quandary for Labour because it is also a long way from the views of their base. By contrast, non-voters and Lib Dems really do look a lot like Labour voters and it’s their PMC members who are most capturable. So a plan to lean against PMCs not only hurts Labour’s base it also hurts the people who aren’t voting for Labour who should be easiest to attract. Seems kinds dumb if you ask me.

Finally, let’s look at the Conservatives and their ex-voters. By the way, to remind you, they have lost many many more voters to Reform than have Labour - four times as many! And those lost voters are, interestingly, much more socially conservative and left-wing than those who have remained True Blue. I think that suggests there is a limit to further Tory collapse to Reform since socially more moderate, economically conservative people are staying loyal. The Conservatives have lost almost no-one to Labour or the Liberals but those they have are social moderates, economically slightly conservative. There is a handy group though - Conservative to Don’t Knows (light blue). They are more moderate on both dimensions than the Conservatives loyalists. So in other words, there might be benefits in moving to the centre. Send Kemi the smelling salts.

When we break down by occupational group we also see that PMCs who have defected to Reform or to Don’t Know are very much the most capturable groups for the Conservatives - they aren’t going to win back working class defectors to Reform but they might win back more economically conservative and socially slightly more moderate professionals and managers who used to vote for them. That damn PMC again.

OK that’s it for graphs. But one thing I forgot to tell you when we began our journey into the PMC hellscape is that this benighted group, to blame for all ills of the world according to the oddly popular Labour memo, accounts for just over half of all employed voters. The old working class professions? About twenty percent.

I understand the desire of white-collar politicos - be they spads, MPs, strategists, or journalists - to pretend that they are working class heroes. It’s a hackneyed enough theme of hundreds of British comedies and movies. Sometimes it’s quite endearing.

Right now, though, Labour’s strategists seem to be being pulled by the very strings of the puppets they think they are making dance. They have imagined a socially authoritarian working class Labour voter who really is long gone. And as they ventriloquize through their creation, they are following their fantasy’s grievances. The Andy Capp in their head has left containment and is making increasingly incessant demands.

All to avoid the shame of acknowledging the horrible, psychologically troubling truth. Labour has for a long time been a party of the PMC, by the PMC, for the PMC. It’s just, here’s the thing about the PMC. They are the electoral majority. And they are how Labour won, will win, and can only win.