by Kevin Meagher
WE’VE all been there. You are out canvassing. You pass by that council estate or block of flats because hardly anyone there bothers to vote and precious few are even registered. Yet these are the same people to crowd the local MP’s surgery. Who rely on public services. The welfare state. The sort who benefit most from a Labour government.
But the arithmetic of politics is hard. If you don’t vote, you don’t count. And he who shouts loudest wins. That is why the poor are usually ignored. They do not pipe up. And there is not enough electoral mileage in putting their concerns centre stage.
But might this government’s attack on the welfare state have the perverse effect of politicising people at the bottom of the pile? After all, they are the ones losing out the most with regressive budgets, tabloid witch-hunts and their restoration as the undeserving poor.
The gap between the Conservatives and Labour at the last election was 2.1 million votes. Yet there are the 3.5 million people not even on the electoral register. Meanwhile, 2.7 million claim incapacity benefit. A million and a half are on jobseekers’ allowance. And around a million or so claim housing benefit.
Aggregated within all that is a class of state-dependant non-voters (SDNVs for short), whose world is about to be shattered by the various benefit changes. But who, if properly mobilised, would make a powerful electoral bloc.
This is no reserve army for socialism. Not all would vote Labour even if they were registered en masse. Many would, however, readily vote against the Tory-Lib dem government’s proposals. And no appeal to French workerist solidarity would be needed; pure, naked self-interest should do the trick.
Unlike Mr Cameron today, Mrs Thatcher’s great electoral trick in the 1980s was to make a decent offer to aspirational working class voters. She stuffed their mouths with gold. They could buy their council house and then trade up. They could buy shares in privatised utilities for a knockdown price and make a quick killing. They were brought into the middle class fold. What is the Tory offer today?
This government has no interest in people transcending their surroundings. It is not bothered about the poor, regardless of how aspirational some of them may be. Nick Clegg balked at Chris Bryant referring to the housing benefit cap as “sociological cleansing”, given the effects of pricing tenants out of costly London boroughs. Jon Cruddas apparently goes further in this week’s New Statesman, referring to the policy as a “modern highland clearance”.
Mr Clegg may smart at these attacks, but his boss, Mr Cameron, is actively defining his political credo against the SDNVs. He hopes that Labour will be lured into becoming their reductionist champion, so forfeiting the right to speak for aspirational voters.
He has miscalculated. Sticking up for SDNVs is not an alternative to courting aspirational voters in the “squeezed middle” – wisely the theme of Ed Miliband’s first speech as leader. They must remain the centre of Labour’s electoral universe. When Labour ignores endeavour, as in 1959, or 1987, it loses. But when it fuses together universal themes that attract middle and lower income voters, as in 1945, 1964 and 1997, it wins.
Labour’s broad message for both aspirational middle income voters and SDNVs can be the same: the Tory-Lib Dem government’s masochistic cuts are excessive. They may threaten the recovery, reduce spending power and affect the most vulnerable disproportionately. They will fray our social bonds.
In contrast, the Tories’ cynical strategy aims to create a human shield of supposedly indolent, feckless, benefit-scrounging deadlegs whose unsympathetic lifestyles make its package of welfare cuts more palatable to the public.
Of course it is foolish to think that such a message has no appeal. Old-fashioned Labour right-wingers like me will happily see bromide in the tea of those randy council estate romeos who have sired their own football teams. They deserve more stick and a bit less carrot. Labour voters do not want to see a soft line on those swinging the lead.
But there is ample space for Labour’s approach to welfare to be tough but genuinely fair. Not tough and blatantly unfair to the SDNVs, as the Tories want. They are counting on the fact that these passive millions are permanently excluded from the democratic club. By mobilising them and giving them a democratic voice, Labour can re-energise communities long disenfranchised from politics and make their interests count.
That hoary old cliché “oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them” remains relevant. And these downtrodden millions have something to come out and vote against. In numbers.
Just as the perverse effect of mass unemployment in the 80s was to see an increase in working class kids going to university, so, too, this bleak Tory era could see a shot in the arm for civic activism among SDNVs.
Community organising is the left’s voguish idea of the moment. Well, here you have it. Get to your nearest sink estate with an armful of electoral registration forms. Let’s plug that 2.1 million gap.
Kevin Meagher is a campaign consultant and former ministerial advisor.
Tags: benefits, electoral registration, Kevin Meagher, SDNV, state-dependant non-voters
Voter registration forms won’t do it. SDNVs also don’t follow politics very closely and therefore they’re a fair way away from being mobilised.
I organised a by-election campaign in a ward with a fairly large SDNV population this summer and whilst we increased our vote quite substantially, there were still streets where our promised vote was practically non-existent. We managed to convince a few to vote, but you can’t just expect national issues to do it, because they think all parties are the same.
You need to do it by building up trust. This means a lot of work from a good and energetic MP, or councillor or (if you can’t get either of those) community activist. It means coming round again and again, bringing information, offering help and hectoring them to vote.
It’s also worth considering those who live next to fairly run-down areas. There’s good anecdotal evidence that where one or two houses in the street have front gardens filled with rubbish, turnout along the whole street is down, because it pisses people off and if nothing is done they lose faith in politicians. So this is another reason we need politicians close to these communities, both so they can try to make the troublemakers clean up their act or have action taken against them and so everybody else can see that somebody’s doing something about it.
Edward – agree with all that. Just being flippant about voter registration forms!
Main point is that there is an untapped resource of people who may be about to feel that politics – in the shape of marauding government action – really matters to their lives. Coalition spending plans rest on realising big savings from the welfare state, so they won’t back off from a fight, as Cameron is indicating re the housing benefit cap.
Regards
Kevin
“Unlike Mr Cameron today, Mrs Thatcher’s great electoral trick in the 1980s was to make a decent offer to aspirational working class voters.”
And the point is that such an offer cannot be made by the Tories given their choice of large-scale and rapid spending cuts.
We can make such an offer, though, as I suggest here: http://www.labourlist.org/ideas-for-electability-the-right-to-own
Sure, but we won’t engage them through thinking about ‘politics’. It needs to feel relevant to them, and if politics did – even when it was about issues that will affect them – then turnout amongst these voters would be at least 20% higher.
So that means personalising it, and linking it in with unrelated campaigns – plenty of SDNVs are concerned about anti-social behaviour, for example, and that’s not normally viewed as a political issue, so that may be a better way to bring them in, with issues like benefits used as something to keep them politicised.
Not sure how much that makes sense to you, but I don’t think that this is something we can approach directly, because we’ll be shrugged off on the basis that we’re all the same before we even get a hearing.
Aggregated within all that is a class of state-dependant non-voters (SDNVs for short), whose world is about to be shattered by the various benefit changes. But who, if properly mobilised, would make a powerful electoral bloc.
This is no reserve army for socialism. Not all would vote Labour even if they were registered en masse. Many would, however, readily vote against the Tory-Lib dem government’s proposals. And no appeal to French workerist solidarity would be needed; pure, naked self-interest should do the trick.
“Vote Labour – the party of benefits claimants.”
“Vote Labour – because a tax-free gift of £21,000 per year just is not enough.”
I’m not sure this would work.
The kinds of people I refer to as SDNVs are that part of the traditional working class who sunk without trace during the Tory years. New Labour’s need to appeal to middle income voters kept these people on the periphery.
SDNVs benefitted from a Labour government, but were carried them along in our slipstream. We never made an overt appeal to them because, quite simply, they don’t vote. Not is sufficient numbers to alter the terms of political exchange.
The point I am making is that it should be no skin off anyone’s nose to try and engage with SDNVs now because they are the biggest losers in the forthcoming evisceration of the welfare state. There may now be a window when politics gets a hearing on the sink estates of Britain. Self-interest is the ultimate motivator. If a fraction of the 3.5 million unregistered voters participated in elections, it would revolutionise British politics. The attacks on welfare may light the fuse…
The state dependent people you described were:
“Meanwhile, 2.7 million claim incapacity benefit. A million and a half are on jobseekers’ allowance. And around a million or so claim housing benefit.”
These are all benefit claimants (and many of them are the same people). If you try to get them to vote Labour by promising to give them more money than the Tories will, you may not make Labour more popular with the 35 million people or so who are working in the private and public sectors.
Especially in view of the recent headlines to the effect that 75% of incapacity benefit claims turned out to be fraudulent.