Britain’s Labour Party just collapsed in blue-collar England. Democrats should consider themselves warned
The headline results were a disaster for Labour leader Keir Starmer. The party lost the parliamentary constituency of Hartlepool by a whopping 23 points. The seat resides in a working-class area that Britain’s Conservative Party had never won previously and that had once been occupied by Peter Mandelson, the Labour politician who served as former prime minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor. Labour also lost 327 local councillors in England, mainly in blue-collar areas that were once Labour’s heartland
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Other results were more positive. Labour gained support in some wealthier areas of the country that opposed Brexit.
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https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news/peter-kellner-on-the-labour-party-crisis-7960234
In 1987, almost four-fifths of Labour’s support came from working class, or C2DE, voters (7.8 million out of 10 million). By 2019, that number had almost halved, to 4.1 million. In contrast the number of its middle class voters almost trebled, from 2.2 to 6.2 million. These ABC1 voters comfortably outnumbered Labour’s C2DE support.
A large part of the reason is that there are millions more middle class and millions fewer working class voters than during the Thatcher era. However, if that were the sole explanation, one would expect similar changes in the structure of the Conservative vote. As the chart shows, this is not the case. In raw numbers, the changes have been much smaller: 500,000 fewer working class Tory voters, 800,000 more middle class voters