Abstract
In this assemblage of numbers and narrative, as John Goldthorpe might describe it, Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley endeavour to chart the changing political landscape of the UK and its relation to class via forensic examination of survey data from the past 50 years. They start off, after scene-setting, by documenting the fact that while the working class may have shrunk over the decades, class inequalities are as stark as ever: differences in pay, work conditions, employment security and opportunity have not gone away, and neither has an awareness of those differences (Chapter 2). Next, refuting the famous (but now perhaps passé) individualisation thesis, Evans and Tilley show that class identities are as strong as they ever were (Chapter 3). About the same number of people identify as working class nowadays as they did in 1983, a high point of class antagonism, even if people are admittedly less proud about being working class than they once were. After that, Evans and Tilley also affirm that the effect of class position on attitudes towards ‘material’ issues like taxation, redistribution and welfare remains substantial, though they also acknowledge the clear and considerable effect of education level on attitudes towards ‘moral’ matters like sexuality and crime (Chapter 4).
So why, ask Evans and Tilley, has there been a steady dealignment of class and political party in recent years? Why do the working class not vote Labour like they used to? The authors reason that if not because of a changing social structure or withering link between class and attitudes, this rupture can only be because of changes within the political parties themselves. Trawling through party manifestos and speeches for the last 60 years, they indeed make plain that there has been not only an obvious policy convergence between the Conservatives and Labour – mainly in the form of Labour moving closer to the Tories and presenting themselves as liberal – but a disappearance of the language of ‘class’ in favour of talk of ‘working families’ and such like (Chapter 6). Labour politicians have also become more middle class in background. Accompanying this has been a shift in how newspapers present the issues: whereas once they used to talk about warring classes and their party allegiances, now they talk about neither and largely try to present the world as homogenously middle class, though some get worked up over supposed threats from deviant outsiders like migrants or criminals (Chapter 5).
This is a top–down change, then: it is not the people or their politics that have altered, but the way the parties and issues are presented. The working class, seeing that the Labour Party no longer offers a policy programme fitting their interests, either abstain from voting in increasingly large numbers or turn to the Scottish Nationalist Party in Scotland (who are like ‘Old’ Labour in certain respects), or UKIP in England (Chapter 8). They turn to UKIP, furthermore, not because the latter fit their stance on material issues (UKIP are more like the Tories on economic policy) but because they fit their stance on moral issues. UKIP are traditionalist and anti-migrant, and the working classes are too but on account of their education levels rather than their class position. Evans and Tilley finish by arguing that Jeremy Corbyn cannot recapture the core working-class vote for Labour because he still champions a socially liberal agenda at odds with their worldview, and that the high turnout among the working class for the referendum on EU membership can be explained by its issue-based rather than party-based character.
As interesting and insightful as many of the analyses and arguments are, however, there are some foundational problems preventing Evans and Tilley from producing a more nuanced account. The first is their operationalisation of class, which takes the form of a modified version of the Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portacarero scheme. With just three fractions of the so-called ‘middle class’ distinguished (old, new and junior), and one category for the working class – they also distinguish service workers, but then show no interest in them at all – the scheme is too undifferentiated and homogenising to give anything but the bluntest of impressions. Some fractions of the working class, or of the junior middle class, are surely more inclined towards nationalist politics than others. Second, the authors show little interest in how class intersects with other factors. Their omnipresent logit regression models control for age, gender, race and an array of other factors, meaning the figures they report pertain to white Anglican middle-aged men. Any chance to disentangle cross-cutting, complicating forces, like those that may have contributed to the surge for Labour at the 2017 general election, is lost.