‘There can be no sacred cows if we are to reconnect to win’

On both sides of the Atlantic, mainstream democratic politics is under threat from the populist right.

In the US, Donald Trump’s Republican administration is upending the rule of law and using the power of the Presidency to pursue his political opponents and intimidate civil society.

In the UK, Reform UK, the party of Trump’s long-time ally Nigel Farage, threatens to deploy the same playbook and is piling pressure on a Labour Government that is struggling to demonstrate it can deliver the change people want.

READ MORE: ‘Be careful what you wish for…’

This rise of the populist right has not happened by some conspiracy and accident. It has occurred because many traditional Democrat and Labour supporters have turned away from parties of the centre and centre-left.

Over more than a decade and a half, our traditional working class vote has eroded steadily. In the 2008 US Presidential election, Barak Obama won almost two-thirds of voters earning less than $50,000 with a 28% winning margin over his Republican opponent.

In last year’s election, Trump won 49% of this voting group to Harris’s 48.5%. That means the Democrats lost almost a third of its support among low-income voters in just 16 years.

The decline is particularly marked in white working class men but Trump also won big swings in working class support among Black and Hispanic voters too.

This shift is reflected in the UK too. In 1997, 59% of voters in the lowest socio-economic groups supported Tony Blair’s Labour Party. By the 2024 general election, this figure had dropped to 32%.

A recent analysis by The Economist using British Election Study data revealed that less than a fifth of voters from households with incomes lower than £30,000 would vote for Labour if a general election were held today.

If we in the centre and centre-left are to reconnect to these voters we need to demonstrate that we can offer solutions to the problems they identify with in their daily lives – on the cost of living, on immigration, on housing and, yes, on identity and culture.

This is not easy, not least because our respective parties and those of us who are active and engaged in politics on a regular basis have become socially and culturally detached from the people whose support we need to reclaim.

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Labour and Democrat activists have steadily become more affluent and liberal, are overwhelmingly university-educated and prioritise issues that are disconnected to the concerns of many.

Recent work by political economist Laurenz Guenther reporting in the FT found a wide gulf between the values and policy preferences of politicians and the public on sociocultural issues such as immigration and criminal justice.

The result is the opening up of a wide “representation gap” which the populist right is now rapidly expanding to fill.

We in the centre need to compete in this space, not by betraying our core values, but by listening and understanding issues of concern and by being willing to confront some of our policy and political shibboleths that have, for too long, prevented us from doing so.

Let’s be honest, we are on the centre-left appear particularly prone to adopting positions – often aligned to specific institutions or processes – that become non-negotiable, sacred even, regardless of whether they are delivering the outcomes our values should be demanding.

You can see this in some of our internal party debates on higher education or trans rights. Labour has been often been unwilling to entertain new models of providing publicly-funded health services while the Biden administration’s resistance to respond to the concerns of the public on border control was electorally fatal.

Frankly, it means that we, the parties that should be the political changemakers, have become the guardians of a status quo that many of our voters believe to have failed them.

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Unless we are willing to have a no-holds-barred conversation on these and other key issues then we will continue to fail to reconnect to a vital part of our electoral coalition and weaken our ability to deliver the changes our countries need.

It’s time for a much needed and overdue debate in order to secure the future of mainstream, democratic politics. There can be no holding back, no pulling punches, and no sacred cows.

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