John Curtice: Politics has 'fragmented' and social class is no longer so important
The polling expert said ‘culture war’ issues are now a key fault line
Politics is "deeply fragmented", the UK’s leading polling expert has said, with social class no longer determining how people vote.
Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said age and educational background are now much more important than in the past.
Meanwhile, the division between socially conservative and socially liberal voters - encapsulated by so-called culture war issues - has emerged as a key fault line.
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sir John said Brexit “is still disrupting the structure of our politics”.
The EU referendum was not a “left-right issue”, he said, but rather linked to whether people were socially conservative or socially liberal.
“It’s not that the left-right division has disappeared, but it means our politics became two dimensional, rather than one dimensional, and that is inevitably much more complicated,” he said.
“Oh and by the way, it makes it much more difficult to simply try to occupy the centre ground, because I might be a centrist on left-right issues, but I might be a raging social liberal on socially liberal-socially conservative issues.”
Sir John said Reform voters are “social conservatives almost to a man and a woman, because they are Brexiteers almost to a man and a woman”, adding: “It is not simply a protest vote. It is very, very heavily embedded in a particular section of our society.”
Elsewhere, he said there had historically been “a very clear link between class and vote”.
He added: “But Brexit was not a division by social class. It was a division by age. Older people voted to leave, younger people voted to remain.
“It was also a division by educational background. Graduates voted to remain - they, after all, have the labour skills to profit from freedom of movement.
“People who have less in the way of educational qualifications, and are much less likely to be advantaged by freedom of movement, were much more likely to vote to leave. And so, although because of the education link there is a bit of a link with social class, it is relatively weak.
“So in so far as our politics is focusing on Brexit and on cultural arguments, the demographic division swings towards age and education and is much less centred on social class.”
Summing this up, he said: “Social class no longer so important, age and education much more.”
Sir John said these changes would likely mean a more fragmented political landscape going forward.
“It doesn’t look very likely that we’re simply going to go back to an era in which class equals vote, and it’s all about left versus right, and the culture war issues and the other demographic divisions that have emerged are going to disappear,” he said.
This suggests that “we are probably looking at over the longer term a rather more fragmented politics than we have been used to in the British House of Commons for most of the post-war period,” he argued.
Responding to a question from the audience, Sir John said Brexit “crystallised a demographic and value division” that already existed.
“But within our particular politics, Brexit proved to be the event and phenomenon that put that process on speed,” he added.
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