“I’ve never known a night like it”. It’s 1987, the day after The Great Storm. My dad is weaving through the felled trees trying to get me to Old Hall, a commune in East Bergholt. I’m off to meet my childhood sweetheart at a mate’s party. Fast forward to today and I’m back at Old Hall. There is no childhood sweetheart this time, she’s long gone. I’m just driving through on my merry way to the new phenomena of A12 road congestion. I’m contemplating instead our current storm. British politics is in full gale. The Conservative Party is tearing itself asunder over the Brexit debacle. And Labour? Their MPs range from dejected to despondent. Disgruntlement has led to the ultimate rejection. Some quit the party and form The Independent Group. The embryo of a new party, Change UK, their rationale for this drastic move is clear: Labour has been sabotaged by the hard-left narrative, destroying the fine work laid down by previous Labour Prime Ministers. Chuka Umunna, their spokesperson, is asked whether Jeremy Corbyn is a Marxist. He replies, “I think so, yes”. He may of course be misguided; he doesn’t have a PPE degree or any significant background in the study of political economy. However, another of the 7 quitters voices the same quibbles. Chris Leslie, with a postgraduate degree in Industrial and Labour Studies, remarks: “There’s a very well-organised clique of ideologically determined people inside the Labour party who have captured the leadership…”. The consequences have become gut wrenching for such a moderate politician: “It’s passing on to the public what are effectively hard-left policies under the guise of most people’s familiarity with the Labour brand, which has of course traditionally been on the centre-left.”
The question is: Are The Independent Group correct in their complaint? A hasty look at voting trends does tend to raise questioning eyebrows. Between 1987 and 2010, as the party embraced New Labour’s third way moderate politics, it somehow mislaid five million votes. Labour under Corbyn also saw the highest increase in its vote share since 1945. However, as always, we should be careful of reliance on raw data. We would expect a swing away from a sitting government. There is always increasing risk of voter disillusionment, from specific policy gripes to ‘the grass is greener’ impatience. The jury is therefore still out; more involved empirical investigation is required.
The Economist will typically start that investigation with a theoretical rationale, using it to justify the empirical methodology that they select. Let’s do that and sneak in a reference to market power. Traditionally the focus is on the fear of monopoly. It creates economic inefficiency. A reduction in innovation adds a further layer of misery to its deadweight loss. However, on this political issue, the focus is really on oligopoly. There are a small number of political parties. They are interdependent, and we should model that interdependence. Location in this modelling is key: to ensure that a party alienates the fewest voters, they should locate their policies closest to the median voter. A significant move away from the centre ground will allow a more moderate party to swoop in and steal votes. Pandering to hard-left sentiment, the party eliminates any chance of electoral success. The Independent Group, according to this logic, are those moderates ready to pick up the lapsed Labour voters.
Let’s therefore have a gander at the nature of the median voter. To do this I’ll refer to British Social Attitudes data (NatCen Social Research, 2017). When asked where they belong on the left-right spectrum, the median is left-wing. This doesn’t necessarily translate into support for a swing to the left by Labour. We don’t really know how the respondents are translating terms such as left-wing and right-wing. Could being left-wing be more akin to JK Rowling’s tweet politics and their celebrity celebration of moderation? Let’s therefore go even deeper. To do that I’ll engineer a new index. Ranging from 0 to 1, let’s call it the Momentum Index. The extremes of the index are determined by two figures: the voting behaviour of John McDonnell (Labour’s Shadow Chancellor) and Anna Soubry (a Conservative MP who subsequently joined the Independent Group). Closer to unity and you are more in line with McDonnell. Closer to zero and you replicate Soubry’s opinion. Issues included in the index refer to major economic debates: redistribution versus supply side economics; austerity versus increased public spending; nationalisation versus privatisation. With responses to 10 BSA questions included, we need to consider how they can be aggregated to produce one figure. A weighting system, dependent on the level of comparability with median voter politics, seems fitting. Each component in the index is therefore weighted according to its correlation with being moderate left wing. The results from this exercise gives a median for the Momentum Index of 0.64, closer to McDonnell.
Simply put, by leaving the Labour Party and aligning with Conservatives such as Anna Soubry, Chuka Umunna has arguably drifted away from the median voter. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean the formation of Change UK is an outcome to jeer. Perhaps competition will encourage further policy innovation? That may be crucial if we are to believe the views of one former UEA lecturer, Yanis Varoufakis. Remarking that “the business model for Britain is broken”, it will be interesting to see how Change UK participates in the national debate on the subject.
Reference
NatCen Social Research. (2017). British Social Attitudes Survey, 2016. [data collection]. UK Data Service. SN: 8252, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-8252-1
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