Transcript: Who still votes Conservative?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Who still votes Conservative?’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Just two still votes Conservative? We’re going to be crunching some numbers. I’m Lucy Fisher and this is Political Fix from the Financial Times. I’m joined in the studio this week by my FT colleagues Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s Stephen Bush. Hello, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
We are all recovering from varying degrees of glory last night, but I’ll save until later in the podcast to reveal exactly what we’re talking about, for those who don’t know. This week we’re going to look at how the vote share is looking broken down by different groups, by sex, by age, by religion. And why? Because we are now getting into crunch time ahead of the election. And this is how the parties are thinking, that in very cynical terms, looking at the cohorts they’ve got banked and the cohorts they need to win over. And to do that, they are looking at data, data, data, so we’re also very lucky to be joined by John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s chief data reporter, who actually inspired the theme for this episode. So hi, John.

John Burn-Murdoch
Hello. Thanks for having me.

Lucy Fisher
So first up, Stephen, I wanted to kick off with an excellent column by you this week in your Inside Politics newsletter looking at the metrics by which people assess parties and what drives their political choices. You call this valence voters versus values voters. Just explain what you mean by that.

Stephen Bush
So valence voters, broadly speaking, are voters who make decisions about who to vote for based on their perception of the relative competence of the parties on offer.

Lucy Fisher
So rather than the specific policies, just whether they’re effective, right.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, whether they’re effective, and they make a judgment based on, you know, like so and so are strongly . . . their competence running the economy, broad-based competence, assessment of the government’s record versus now this is a bit of an artificial division, but, you know, bear with me, versus values voters who, well the clue’s in the title, make decisions primarily based around the value positions, the policy platforms and their ideological closeness or lack thereof to political parties.

And yeah, one of the things I’ve argued in this piece is that I think that, broadly speaking, what we have seen since 2019 is the, particularly in the UK context, the importance of valence voters as opposed to values voters, right? I mean, just look at how Keir Starmer, for the first two years of this parliament was doing incredibly badly in by-elections and local elections, and is now doing stunningly well in by-elections and local elections. Broadly speaking, what is the shift? It is perceptions of the Conservative government’s competence.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, can I ask you how something like the big story of this week in British politics has been around Northern Ireland? The deal that seems, let’s not hold our breath, seems to have gone over the line. That means we’re gonna see the restoration of the Stormont executive, the Northern Ireland assembly back working and, thankfully, an end to what has been a far from ideal situation in which civil servants have been wielding a lot of power for unelected officials for almost two years. Given what Stephen’s saying about the importance of valence voters and people assessing competence, is this the kind of deal that could see the Conservatives get a bit of a political dividend?

Miranda Green
So I think the problem with using Northern Ireland as an example of proven competence is that voters on the mainland just don’t care enough about it. It’s absolutely true that Sunak himself and the people around him think that his successes — first of all, in the Windsor framework, which was the initial deal on which this builds, and then this week’s success in getting the Stormont assembly, we hope, back up and running so devolved government in Northern Ireland can take place again — you know, shows that Sunak is a man who can do business, a man who can make practical compromises, a man who can govern. But it’s not a topic which motivates voters. And I think really in government you’re seeking a sort of magic combination of those two things, valence and values, actually, because you want to prove your competence on topics that people actually care about and which make them feel that the country’s going in the direction they want it to.

I mean, on Stephen’s point, I think it’s really, really going to be very important in this general election, this idea of competence, because political scientists also have reminded us of all the things that have happened since 2019, most of which have been what they call competence shocks harming the Tory brand — the handling of Covid, Partygate, the various dying days of the Boris Johnson era scandals, the Truss-Kwarteng “mini” Budget — these are all things which have kind of taken a battering ram to the idea of the Tory party as a competent party of government. So I think it’s a very significant way to look at it.

Lucy Fisher
John, what does the polling show us? Does the British public, as Miranda says, see the government as having made a series of forced errors in their handling of some, you know, seismic shocks like Covid, like the Ukraine war? Or do people give the government of the day a little bit more bandwidth when there are these kind of huge events that take place?

John Burn-Murdoch
I think during Covid, there was a bit of that, you know, saying, OK, look, you know, this is a global thing. No one’s having a good time. There was a little bit of sympathy with the government then certainly in the early days. Obviously, that petered out, especially with things like Partygate, as you mentioned. But yeah, the last year or two now, the competence thing has just been really clear. So if you look at any number of polls and how people rate the leaders and the parties and all these things, a lot of these numbers, you know, they’re bad, but they’re not out extraordinarily bad. They’re numbers that you just see from cycle to cycle. But on competence, they’re all-time lows. You know, these are numbers that we’ve not seen for like 20 years and that kind of thing. And so yeah, I think it completely supports what Miranda and Stephen have both been saying.

Miranda Green
But do you not also think, Lucy, there’s this interesting thing that the scientists also call the cost of ruling, which is just that when you’ve been in power a really long time, the chickens come home to roost, because you can also see that this week with the SNP, with Sturgeon on the stand at the Covid inquiry. All your decisions, all your mistakes come back to haunt you when you’ve been in power for a long time.

Lucy Fisher
I also wonder when it comes to competence or the perception of competence, how politicians changing their mind can sometimes be a good thing, but sometimes can undermine the perception of certainty and confidence that a particular administration has. And I just wonder, Stephen, we’ve seen quite a lot of flip-flopping recently. I’m thinking, you know, there’s still a lot of uncertainty hanging over Labour’s pledge to spend £28bn as part of their green prosperity plan by the second half of their first term in office. So this week, I’ve just been fascinated by the sort of slightly haywire messaging from Jeremy Hunt on tax cuts, having signalled in Davos last week that, you know, giveaways are coming, to trying to seemingly rein that in a bit following the warning from the International Monetary Fund this week.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, it’s really interesting on U-turns because broadly speaking, voters are much more open to them than people in the bubble are, right? The flip side of that is in both of these cases where you have U-turns or potential U-turns that carry quite a lot of political risks, right? If you’re Keir Starmer, the risk of resiling yet further from the £28bn is it deepens the clear weakness that Keir Starmer has in the polling that people go like, well, what’s this guy’s stand for, right? So that comes with a risk.

Also, the fact that we all increasingly kind of, when we talk about it on TV or in our copy go, why can’t these guys decide what their position on the £28bn, what’s up with them is in of itself a negative competence cue. And with the Conservatives, I mean, one of the reasons why Jeremy Hunt keeps sending different signals about taxes there is an ongoing argument in the Conservative party about what the wise approach in these fiscal events is. So that is, again, a very visible competence cue or lack thereof that the party is divided.

I mean, I think I completely agree with everything Miranda said about how, you know, broadly speaking, voters in GB don’t care very much about what happens in Northern Ireland. But I also think, you know, if you imagine that this wasn’t a week in which there wasn’t still background chatter about Conservative leadership plots and it was instead like, oh, the government has done another thing right, then it could be part of a broader mood music. And I think it’s the thing about U-turns is that when a government does something from a position of strength and they’re very clear about why they’re U-turning and they do it at speed, it can look like a government that is listening, sensible, evidence-led. When a government or an opposition takes, you know, I mean, I feel like at this point the Labour party has been trying to exit from the £28bn for longer than it has been supporting the £28bn. That obviously does reveal things to voters about parties’ competence, unity or lack thereof. And ditto, the Conservatives on tax. That teveals that too.

Lucy Fisher
I want to skate on to the next breakdown of voters, which is by gender, because, John, you wrote this fantastic piece last week about this rather unusual gender divergence that has emerged in the political opinions of Gen Z. Tell us more.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. So this one’s really interesting. And I should start by saying I will probably make a lot of generalisations which are not intended and, you know, this looks different in different countries. But relatively speaking, there seems to be this pattern that has emerged at some point in the last decade, so sort of between the mid-2010s and today, where among young adults — so we’re talking under-30s generally — we’re starting to see this gap open up between young men and young women. And you know, there’s always been gaps in politics on ideology, whether it’s with age, whether it’s with sex, with gender. But what we’re just seeing is that is a larger gap opening up between young men and women. And so you’ve got young women pretty much across the board, whichever country you look at, liberalising quite significantly. So, you know, generally speaking, certainly the last few decades, each generation is more liberal than the last. But we’re seeing young women really accelerate off that trend. And at the same time, depending on which country you look at, young men are either actively becoming more conservative or at least they’re not following young women on that sort of progressive journey. So there’s this sort of tension and a bit of space opening up between the two.

Lucy Fisher
Really interesting. And I thought the figures were pretty stark. I think it’s in the UK, a 25 percentage point gap between women and men, women being more liberal in their political viewpoint. And you also talk in your piece about the US and Germany having even bigger gaps between the sexes. What’s been the trigger for this? Because you point out in your piece, it’s quite unusual. Normally you see generations, as you say, get more liberal or change, but move as a cohort. They normally have the same formative experiences, are exposed to the same culture. What’s happened here?

John Burn-Murdoch
It’s a great question. And, you know, if we had an hour, I’m sure we could get through all of it. But there’s many theories. For me, part of this is you’ve gotta separate like the longer-term trends and then the triggers. So one long-term trend that a lot of people bring up, for example, is that, you know, young women today are much more likely than young men to go to university. So that exposes you to different cultures, different spaces, and can lead to the formation of different values. But that’s a sort of decade-long trend. So that sort of can explain why it used to be like that and now it’s like this. But why did it happen when it did? And that’s when we start talking about things like the Me Too movement and its sort of sister protests around the world, which were really a sort of overnight radicalisation I think of a lot of young women, you know, for very good reasons, in the progressive direction.

And then a sort of medium-term factor could be social media and online spaces. So the fact that young people spend more and more time online and then when they’re online, there are fewer and fewer sort of shared male and female spaces. And, you know, again, this is a generalisation. Most young men and women are in the middle. You know, they’re mixing in the same spaces online and offline, but you’ve got these pockets starting to emerge on either side where young men are, you know, considerably more likely than young women to encounter people like Andrew Tate online. Young women, there are sort of different female, more female pockets of TikTok, for example. So it’s all of these things. It’s just sort of longer-term issues that could lead some young men to feel more resentful of women’s sort of upward mobility. Plus your online spaces and then movements like the Me Too, which could really sort of spark some of these things into interaction.

Lucy Fisher
And how does this look like it’s mapping out in terms of the polling and how there is the sex divide when it comes to favourability of political parties in the UK?

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. So again, we do see this in the UK. It’s not, you know, it’s not nearly as stark as what we see in a country like Korea or even as much as Germany. But even in the latest data from YouGov, what you see is among young men and young women, the split really, it’s not so much Labour and Tory, you know. Young women and men massively back Labour, don’t really vote for Tories. But the split is among young men. You’ve got a lot more, it’s a small number, but a lot more people voting for Reform. And, you know, we can talk all day about are people actually voting for Reform or not but they say they are. And young women are going for the Greens. So it’s in those sort of small and very clear examples of sort of very progressive party in the Greens, socially speaking, country speaking and very conservative with Reform. So that’s where you get these gaps among young men and women in the UK.

Lucy Fisher
Fascinating. Miranda.

Miranda Green
It’s so interesting. And some of those international comparisons, I mean, it seems to be a global phenomenon, doesn’t it, ‘cause you found examples on every single continent. But, you know, focusing on the UK, also what fascinates me as it’s so recent. You know, this is only happened here since the 2017 general election. In the 2010 election, it was absolutely even. There wasn’t really a difference in how male and female voters behaved. And before that, women tended to skew Conservative always. And in the sort of ‘50s and ‘60s, it was really dramatic, the advances that the Tories had among women, and that was thought to be to do with kind of stability, family values, you know, keeping society on an even keel. But it’s completely changed in a really, really short recent period of time. And this question of why is obviously a really hot topic in academic circles. It was always thought to be a trend over time, perhaps women into the workforce more. But, you know, actually it would be much more interesting to sort of talk about what’s happened in the last five or six years, because it seems to be that kind of period of time in the UK.

Stephen Bush
I think this is the thing everyone always forgets about, the Labour party’s embrace of all-women shortlists in the ‘90s, right? This was because specifically, one of the things they were very preoccupied in their last long stint in opposition was the fact that they were doing much worse among women than men. And one of the ways they thought they could combat it was by getting more women MPs.

Lucy Fisher
And it’s worth saying, isn’t it, that I think that now a majority of Labour MPs are women. Now, less than a third of Tories are women.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Now, interestingly, that will slightly invert when Labour . . . Sorry. Once again, failing to caveat my prediction about the next election. Sorry. Whoever wins the next election, who can say, but you know . . . 

Lucy Fisher
That’s a sarcasm alert, for the casual listener.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Like, you know, if/when Labour enter office after the next election, that will invert because their candidates in marginal seats are much more male than their candidates in held seats. And I suspect there’ll be a lot of internal Labour discourse about that, although, ironically, the reasons that they wanted to fix that electorally, they may now actually have quite a good reason to want to have more men MPs because they are maybe starting to have a men problem. But as Miranda says, this is one of those things where, we all understand the trend, but we’re all a little bit like, OK, well, what was the event that caused this to happen?

Miranda Green
The trigger, as John said. Yeah.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. As John says Me Too. One interesting thing in the UK is that Brexit, which of course really shook up how people voted, but actually, in the reverse direction to the gender gap that emerged in UK politics, women voters who voted leave were much more likely to prioritise their economic position over their remain/leave position. So the Labour party did much worse among men who voted leave than it did among women who voted leave. Now, again, there are loads of really plausible theories as to why that would always be the case, you know — more caregiving responsibilities, more exposed to the vicissitudes of austerity, more exposed to higher cost of childcare because of various expectations of women. But all of that was also true in 2010 and 2015. So we’re kind of similarly left going, what’s up with that?

Miranda Green
But women were much more heavily remain voting, right? So there could be some sort of Brexit factor hangover in the last two elections.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And it’s the thing is that the thing which is interesting was, I think, you know, the 18- to 30- effect in John’s piece is really interesting. But I would kind of know there’ve been some accelerant things, right? Social media is I think probably the biggest change in how we get our media since the printing press in lots of ways so we kind of expect it to speed things up. To me, the thing which is weird because there have been so many reasons for it to happen before, and it’s kind of odd that it’s happened now, is that your marginal 40-something-year-old woman and man has inverted in the UK.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to talking a bit about age, more specifically. There’s been a fascinating poll by YouGov this week, which just, I mean, my jaw was on the floor, that it was only in the age bracket of the 70-plus group that people were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour. The opposite was true for every group but below that. I think it’s worth just pointing out that at the last election, 2019, the crossover age at which it became more likely that a person would vote Tory than Labour was 39. So the fact that has gone up seemingly by several decades I think is really stark. John, what’s your reflection on why that is?

John Burn-Murdoch
I think part of that, we should say, is just the Tory vote as a whole, has, as you know, plummeted through the floor. The sort of steepness of that age gradient could be unchanged. It’s just the sort of whole thing has been shifted down. But yeah, I think it’s still underdiscussed and actually, as a sneak preview, I’m planning to write about this next week is that I think because for us in the UK, it’s the most obvious thing in the world that young people hate the Tories; older people much more supportive of the Tories. But other countries don’t have this deep divide. There’s the assumption that ah, it’s the same in America. It’s not the same in America. Forty per cent of millennials in the US voted Trump in 2020. Look, 40 per cent. And here the equivalent number is about 10 per cent who say they vote Conservative. So I think that’s a real underappreciation of certainly in some quarters of how the Tory brand has become toxic for young people. You know, people hear the stories of like young women saying, I’d never kiss a Tory and that kind of thing. And it sounds, you know, as this sort of glib, like social media thing, but the rank unpopularity of the Conservative party with young people, I think, is a massive issue and it will take considerable efforts to fix that. We hear about things like, oh, if they just fix home ownership or when, you know, that’s not a thing you can just fix overnight. Or what about childcare? Individual things just don’t seem to cut it. It’s like there are several, like parallel reasons that young people have decided this is me and that’s the Conservative party and, you know, we don’t overlap. And I think it would therefore take a lot of effort in a lot of spaces to start turning that around.

Lucy Fisher
We talk a lot on this podcast about intergenerational fairness or unfairness. I just wanted to ask you about another piece you also wrote in the past couple of weeks that touches on something you just mentioned, which is the housing crisis and how that disproportionately affects the young. I thought it was absolutely fascinating that your research found that while in 1980, almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds in Britain lived in their own property with children of their own, making that the most common arrangement for young adults. Today, that’s only true of about one in five, and the most common set up for 18- to 34-year-olds is to be living with their parents.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, and I should hat-tip to Torsten Bell of Resolution Foundation, who initially did this and caused me to sort of explore that for other countries. But yeah.

Lucy Fisher
Resolution Foundation being a think-tank.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, sorry, sorry. But yeah, it’s a massive impact on sort of how this generation thinks about itself and its position in the world. And people have done fascinating research on this idea of delayed maturation. And that can have all sorts of effects. So you conceive of yourself differently, and therefore your politics differ depending on how far you believe you progressed over time.

And so it’s not just home ownership, it’s all these knock-on effects. It’s having kids, it’s marriage, it’s all of these things. You know, these things could all be partial explanations for why we see this big gender divide in the UK, because young people just don’t hold the values that you traditionally associate with the Conservative party, and that’s because they’ve not reached the same milestones.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen.

Stephen Bush
I think there’s, yeah, I mean, one of the things I love about John’s columns is you can, you know, then do like seven columns about the column afterwards. I think one of the ways we see this effect is the debates over free speech in universities. I was talking to a fairly senior academic at the university level, and the point they said and they kind of suddenly realised and said, they’re like, oh, you know, why are these new undergraduates talking like they’re children? And they thought about what, their, you know, the age of their own children and the milestones they’ve hit.

Lucy Fisher
What do you mean by that? Just unpack that, talking like children.

Stephen Bush
As they’ve said, why do they continue going, Oh, well, you know, that’s bad. Or you know, why do we have to study this? And then they thought about it and they said, well, actually, now I think about it, you know, in terms of the freedoms the average 14- and 15-year-old have, you know, much more surveilled by their parents, much less likely to have some form of, you know, low-grade sexual relations with people their own age. Right? They said, you know . . . 

Lucy Fisher  
Is that true?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, they’re hitting . . . Yeah. There’s like some really, yeah, kind of . . . Obviously there’s a big caveat over all the 2020 data. But there is a long-running decline in the number of teens who, you know, go outside and meet other people in unsupervised play, long-term decline in the number of teens who engage in, you know, what people of a certain age refer to as heavy petting. And all of that does, of course, mean that the average teenager arrives at university aged 18 and they haven’t hit those maturation hits.

And so therefore, you know, of course, universities and, you know, lots of universities are very angry about this because they don’t feel like government wants them to act like schools. But of course, they are inheriting people who have had far fewer freedoms as sixth-formers than people 10, even five years ago. I think it is a hugely underexplored dynamic.

One very thoughtful Conservative MP, the thing they worry about is that they think it might be that the British economic model has created a class of people, mostly over a certain age, who do sufficiently well out of the incumbent that they just vote to re-elect them, you know, because they have paid off their mortgages or they’re in social housing or they’ve got, you know, triple lock.

So broadly speaking, that is the bit of the state which hasn’t really been cut for that demographic at all. And their argument is, well, if we lose the next election, what guarantee is there that the 70-year-old in social housing who gets the triple lock who I know is gonna vote for me this time won’t go well, Keir Starmer hasn’t killed me yet.

Miranda Green
Just because we got ’round to education in a circuitous way, another thing that’s a really good, weird new proxy for voting intention is actually education levels. So as well as age, which you and John have been talking about, if you ask somebody whether their highest qualification is a school-leaver qualification or whether they have an undergraduate degree, you can pretty much predict how they vote. And because of the graduate population swelling massively and moving outside cities into suburbs, that’s also changing the voting patterns really very dramatically in this coming election.

Lucy Fisher
And in favour of Labour.

Miranda Green
Very much in favour of Labour. So it’s another part of that puzzle of where does the Tory party think its future voters are coming from.

Lucy Fisher
I just want to move on to one more group quickly because it’s been in the news and this is voting by religion, because we’ve seen reports from the Guardian that Keir Starmer’s office has begun polling British Muslims amid concern in senior Labour ranks about the damage done to this base, you know, generally regarded as a staunch Labour cohort who are very fed up over Keir Starmer’s position on Israel and the war in the Middle East. And it seems, to my mind, it’s actually opened up a broader conversation in Westminster about whether Labour has been taking for granted these voters for some time. Stephen, you’ve written a bit about this this week as well. What’s your take?

Stephen Bush
Well, so the thing which has been a bit weird for experienced watchers of municipal politics in the UK is that the thing lots of us expected — and I think I’ve said this on the podcast before — is that there would be a direct electoral tariff because of Labour’s position on the war in the Middle East, as we’ve seen them suffer to respect in the past, the Liberal Democrats in the past over the Iraq war. And that, weirdly, doesn’t yet seem to have happened in any local elections or by-elections. But clearly the idea that this might happen does really spook the Labour leadership.

And, you know, purely anecdotally, on Instagram, you know, as someone who grew up in Tower Hamlets, one of the epicentres of these voter revolts in the past, lots of people I went to school with are very angry about it on my Instagram. You know, they’re posting shareable graphics and whatnot about it. Now, one argument that Labour MPs who are less worried, so as they say, well, look, we are vulnerable to losing voters from, you know, the Muslim working class and the multi-ethnic liberal middle classes.

But, there isn’t a figure like George Galloway who can will wield those two together other than Jeremy Corbyn, who’s said he’s gonna run in Islington North, so we don’t need to worry all that much about that. But then you have others who say, OK, but no, look, when we get to the election, it will get really bad on WhatsApp. The Greens will attack us, we’ll lose Bristol Central. We’ll have a bunch of, you know, of close-run things in other constituencies. I think the Labour party has always had a fraught relationship with its core vote, right, partly because the Labour party often likes to imagine that its core vote is someone quite different from what it is, you know, but like broadly . . . (Overlapping talk)

Lucy Fisher
What do you think it imagines? 

Stephen Bush
I think the Labour party imagines that its core vote is someone who has a well-paying blue-collar — well, they maybe don’t think of it as a well-paying blue-collar job, but they kind of romanticise this idea that like their voters are, you know, plumbers and electricians. And actually, broadly speaking, they are the reason why there have always been 10,000 Tory voters in the East End of London. And actually, their real core vote are working-class people at the very bottom of the labour market and the socially concerned liberal middle classes.

Now, for a variety of reasons, those are two groups of people who are very exercised by the Labour party’s position on the war in the Middle East. You know, for British Muslims, as in most of the Muslim world, there is a feeling that, you know, the west is hypocritical and it’s supporting, you know, ethnic cleansing or genocide. And then among liberal middle-class voters in the UK, there are quite a lot of people who think that as well.

One of the interesting reasons, I think, why that dog doesn’t seem to have bark as much as we thought is effectively the non-aggression pact between Labour and the Liberal Democrats means although the Lib Dems voted differently to the Labour party on those votes, they haven’t made any hay about it. There has been basically no Liberal to Labour attack on it. But if I were a Labour MP I would go like, well, what’s my guarantee that won’t change? And yeah, what about the Greens? Obviously we don’t really think about because they don’t have much-guaranteed airtime, but they will during the election campaign.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, you’ve mentioned that you’ve recently been to a presentation on ethnicity. Tell us about what that found.

Miranda Green
Well, it’s very interesting learning about the Labour party doing their own private polling on this, partly because the available public data is so bad on ethnic minority voters in the UK. We are expecting, John and I are eagerly expecting some of that that’s due in the next couple of months. That actually should shed a bit more light on this because, you know, quite often it sort of lumps together in a slightly ugly way, as if the ethnic vote is some sort of homogenous thing — and it isn’t at all.

There’s a lot of different social mobility patterns within different ethnicities, which tends to govern whether people skew Tory or Labour. You know, even within generations of the same ethnicity, prosperity is quite different. The younger generations tend to just fall in their voting patterns, much more like their, you know, white fellow citizens. For example, in the older age group, some of them still carry memories of Powellite rhetoric from the Tory party, which they find off-putting.

Lucy Fisher
And remind our listeners what you mean.

Miranda Green
Well, that you know, Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and that feeling of hostility towards immigrants from those Commonwealth countries is something that’s a sort of live memory with some groups of older ethnic voters, then amongst their children and even grandchildren now. They might also be going to university, taking white-collar jobs and voting the same way as their white friends and, and, you know, university peers. So it’s way more complicated than conversations about the ethnic vote. So it’s gonna be really interesting when we get this decent data to see what it tells us.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. What are you expecting to find in it, John?

John Burn-Murdoch
Well, I think the interesting things here is that it’s really useful to look at America, because America is basically slightly further along the journey of a diversified population than the UK. But all of the things that Miranda is talking about here have been happening in the US, and all of the things that are happening in the US can give us clues of what might happen here.

So exactly what Miranda was just saying there about memories of Enoch Powell, for example, we’re seeing similar things in the US. So over the last couple of election cycles, younger Black voters, African-American voters in the US, especially men, have been shifting slightly away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans. And there’s been a huge amount of hand-wringing and head-scratching over this.

But what seems to be happening is that there’s again this sort of cohort effect. So if you grew up during the civil rights era, of course, this is massively salient and you know that one of these parties very much had your back and the other didn’t. If you didn’t grow up through that, of course, you know, you’re aware that that was a thing, you’re taught about it at school, maybe you occasionally hear about it from your parents. But there’s a new generation of African-American voters in the US, especially young men who are just thinking I’m gonna vote based on my interests, and maybe I am now upwardly mobile and I don’t wanna pay such high taxes.

So I think we’re gonna start seeing similar dynamics here and you know, Miranda already mentioned that different groups, different ethnic groups in the UK simply do better economically and therefore, you know, that leads to different values, different policy preferences. So yeah, I think it’s long overdue that we stop talking about, you know, ethnic minorities or like . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Which we don’t at the FT.

John Burn-Murdoch
Indeed. And, you know, get more into like individuals and groups and yeah, more detailed talk about what’s actually happening.

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Lucy Fisher
Looking forward to reading your piece on this. Now, before we get to stock picks, here’s a little something the Political Fix team did earlier.

Stephen Bush audio clip
So in fourth place are Miranda Green, Lucy Fisher, Chris Cook and George Parker in the FT team. And our winner is Unpopular Front. So stand up, Unpopular Front. (Crowd cheering)

Lucy Fisher
Well, Stephen, that was a wonderful evening for the Inside Politics debut quiz at a pub in Moorgate. I can’t believe it was absolutely packed with your fan club and I’m not surprised. Miranda, I thought we did valiant effort. I was actually sure we’d come fourth. Or whether you were just giving us a little shout-out.

Stephen Bush
No, no, you did come fourth.

Lucy Fisher
We did? OK, good.

Miranda Green
I’d call that a fairly honourable defeat.

Stephen Bush
I did at one point go over to the people counting the scores, and I said, you know, look, it’s very important that we don’t win this quiz. And they said, oh, don’t worry, it’s . . . (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Can I, in our defence, please. And we had the brilliant name picked by Miranda of Evil Plotters. That was a nod to Kemi Badenoch and Michael Gove’s WhatsApp group. That there was this chaos element in the quiz, which I loved, Stephen, which there was not a uniform amount of marks each round. So I think we, our big mistake was not using our joker in a round with lots of marks, or at least with lots of the questions we got right. Right. We’ve just got time for Political Fix stock picks. John, who are you buying or selling this week?

John Burn-Murdoch
I’m gonna go for, my heart says sell Andrew Tate. My head says buy Andrew Tate. That’s the, you know, the gender divergence and the fact that there seems to be this growing market for what an academic, Alice Evans calls cultural entrepreneurs. So people have realised that you can make a lot of money from, you know, riding the cultural waves.

Lucy Fisher
And for anyone who’s been hiding under a rock and doesn’t know who Andrew Tate is.

John Burn-Murdoch
A very unpleasant misogynist man-influencer, who is making great waves among teenage and early 20s males.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s left me thoroughly depressed. But thank you. Miranda, who are you buying or selling?

Miranda Green
Well, so listening to you and my colleagues last week, I realised that others in our wider group are taking a rather more strategic view of the stock picks these days and actually trying to make wise investments rather than trying to make a point. So I went back and looked, and it turns out I already hold some Kemi Badenoch stock. So I’m gonna sit on that because I think that she’s, you know, the coming woman in Tory circles. But I’m actually going to also buy Daisy Cooper, who is the deputy leader of the Lib Dems, on the basis that Ed Davey hasn’t covered himself in glory in the last few weeks over his role as Post Office minister and Daisy Cooper’s the deputy leader. And should things go badly on another election night for the Lib Dems, she’s probably in best place to take over.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, so I am going to, yeah I think I actually may be one of the first people to start spoiling this game by making defensive acquisitions. I think I’ve failed to buy any Kemi Badenoch, so I’m gonna do some now because broadly. . .

Lucy Fisher
She’s expensive. But yeah, go for it.

Miranda Green
Gone up.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. But look I, sometimes you’ve just got to accept you weren’t in on the ground floor but you can at least get in on the third floor before, you know, before it becomes a Fang-level acquisition. I think essentially, right, the sweet spot to be in the next leadership election in the Conservative party, who’s to say when that will be, will be to be the person who is both able to be a plausible candidate of the right but that people on the Conservative, the middle of the party and the left of the party don’t make a face like you’ve just kicked their dog when you raise the idea of them as leader. So, yeah, I’m just taking the haircut, and I’m buying my stock in her.

Miranda Green
And what about you, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
Well, to end on a really earnest note, I’m going to buy anyone who is putting themselves up as a candidate in the next election, whether incumbent or new blood, because I really do respect people who put themselves and their family in the kind of risk now that faces British MPs. And I was really shocked by Mike Freer talking about stepping down because of the risk to his safety. There’s been an arson attack on his constituency office, persistent abuse and death threats.

I was also having coffee with a female MP this week who was showing me the lone-worker device she carries around with her in her handbag. It’s a device that’s connected to a specialist unit in the Met, protects MPs. You know, countless others I’ve spoken to have panic buttons installed in their homes, panic rooms, even, for those who’ve had very serious and credible death threats. And of course, we’ve had the murder of several MPs in recent years. So I don’t want to end on a bleak note, but I just think we love to take politicians down a peg or two in this podcast but I do respect those who put themselves forward for office.

John, Stephen, Miranda, thanks for joining.

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John Burn-Murdoch
Goodbye.

Stephen Bush
Thank you.

Miranda Green
Thank you.

Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. So do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Also, leave a star rating or review if you have time. It really does help us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next week.

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