A new academic study, published by the British Election Study today, has found that UKIP are far more likely to harm the Conservative Party than Labour at the next election.
Professor Geoff Evans has studied voter behaviour and found that most ex-Labour voters who are planning to vote UKIP in May had already stopped voting Labour by the last election. The hit to Labour’s voteshare will therefore not be as great as that to the Tories, who are continuing to lose votes to the anti-immigration party.
The research claims that these former Labour, now UKIP supporters deserted the party between 2001 and 2010 due to the pro-immigration policies of the Government.
Professor Evans said:
“BES data shows quite clearly that it’s the Conservative Party who need to worry most about the threat of Ukip – because those people who supported Labour have in the main, already made the switch.
“New Labour’s move to the liberal consensus on the EU and immigration in 2001, 2005 and 2010, left many of their core voters out in the cold a long time before UKIP were around.”
Evans points to the Heywood and Middleton by-election as further proof of the theory. Although UKIP polled very well in the safe Labour seat, the Labour voteshare held up, suggesting that the rise in support for the party was coming from places other than our 2010 support base. While these people will have voted for Labour in the past, they will have left prior to the 2010 election.
“In October, Labour narrowly held Heywood and Middleton in a strongly contested by-election, which showed high levels of Ukip support in a traditionally Labour voting constituency”.
“But BES data shows how labour had lost these voters some time ago. Most Ukip voters who had voted Labour in 2005 had not voted for them in 2010. Ukip support in Labour constituencies is more likely to be taken from disaffected former Labour voters, and these are far more likely to be manual workers than the middle classes that New Labour appealed to.”
More from LabourList
Rochdale Labour says brick thrown at candidate’s home with ‘f*** Labour’ note
‘Frank’s poverty mission lives on at his charity – but he’d scrap two-child cap’
‘I disagreed with Frank Field, but he was no Tory and I loved him all the same’