Has UKIP really divided the left?

‘Rather than dividing the right, Ukip has divided the left and cut Labour off from the struggling voters it seeks to champion,’ wrote Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford last week. It’s a bold claim and certainly challenges the conventional wisdom that Ukip have tore apart the Conservative party instead.

But it is also a claim that needs further scrutiny, at the very least so we can better understand the people Labour is losing and has lost to Ukip.

Goodwin and Ford say that many Ukip voters are on the left on economic issues and should in theory be supporting Labour. They don’t, however, because they “no longer think about politics in general, or Labour in particular, in economic terms,” the authors of Revolt on the Right say, in a stance that somewhat contradicts the title of their new book.

But Ukip sympathisers aren’t a uniform bunch. Some support the party because they hate the establishment, or they want an end to immigration, or want out of the EU entirely, or just really like Nigel Farage because he tells it how it is.

Some of those voters come from the Labour party, many from the Tories and some from the Lib Dems. This isn’t a homogenous bunch and we shouldn’t treat them as such. This is also why Ed Miliband is criticising Ukip for “being more Thatcherite than Thatcher” – because he wants former Labour voters back, not former Tories.

Let’s put it a different way – Ukip has split both the left and the right, in different ways. The question is whether Labour made a mistake in changing direction that brought it here now. Let’s address that.

The Tony Blair question

Goodwin and Ford say New Labour played down traditional leftwing ideology in favour of social liberalism and pragmatic centrism. There can’t be any dispute about this. But from New Labour’s perspective they did this because voters were tired of old Labour’s class war rhetoric and warmed to Blair’s aspirational message. New Labour’s overwhelming victory in 1997 supports this theory.

The problem is less that New Labour ditched class war and more that the political economy it chose instead did not lift the working classes as much as others around them. But many of these people were adversely affected by globalisation and free movement of capital and people across Europe. Should Blair have shunned that? Should he have stayed out of the European free market and globalisation? The authors choose not to address this point.

The conservative voter problem

The second problem with this thesis is that not all Britons have voted entirely among economic lines. Margaret Thatcher attracted many working class Tories who either warmed to her message of economic individualism, or her focus on family values.

In other words, as I’ve said before, votes aren’t always dictated by economic policies. Some rich people vote for leftwing parties and some poor people vote for rightwing parties because they have other priorities than simple financial interest. As Peter Kellner earlier pointed out, many of the defectors who left Labour 36% described themselves as left and 48% as centre or right.

So should New Labour have not embraced social liberalism? Of course not. Not only was public opinion moving that way anyway (and this has hurt the Tories ever since), but it was the right thing to do. Economic liberalism is almost always accompanied by social liberalism. Even Piketty says it: “Private property and the market system are… good for our personal freedom.”

In other words, New Labour was not wrong to embrace social liberalism even if that lost some voters, because it gained them many more of the future.

So what do we take from this?

If Ukip voters were so easily persuaded by left-wing economic policies, why hasn’t Ed Miliband’s magic worked on them? The answer of course is that some of these defectors can’t be won on economic terms alone, and they were never going to vote Labour on that basis anyway.

This is a generational cultural war and some Ukip voters don’t like that they are on the losing side. Our politics has to transition through to when these old, socially conservative attitudes die out. There can be no going back to social conservatism for Labour; they are the past and Labour has to look towards the socially liberal future.

But some Ukip voters who do prioritise economically left-wing policies, and feel too much European immigration has unfairly hurt them, can be brought back. This is where Miliband’s refrain that Farage is “more Thatcherite than Thatcher” can work in a limited way (though it must be combined with progressive patriotism). So will his focus on the impact of immigration on low-paid jobs.

Social conservatism is causing a bigger rift on the Right than economically leftwing policies are causing on the Left. Occasionally, remnants of the New Labour guard turn up in the Times or Telegraph to say that Miliband has become too anti-business, but by and large the Labour party has moved on. The split is still far more palpable and real on the Right.