While the BBC has focused on more liberal attitudes to homosexuality, the latest British Social Attitudes survey contains some other interesting results.
The survey found that 27% of people identify as Labour supporters, compared to 32% for the Tories. That suggests Labour’s current poll rating is pretty similar to the percentage of adults who think of themselves as “Labour people”. That presumably reflects Labour has been reduced to a core vote of devoted party loyalists. The only remaining question is how many more of those 27-30% of Labour voters can be shaken from party identification (which is a much stronger measure of commitment than voting intention).
Most interestingly – and perhaps worryingly – only 9% of people identified as Liberal Democrats, despite current poll ratings around twice that level. I am not too surprised at this result, but I think it confirms that current Lib Dem voters are more likely to be uncertain about their political sympathies. That must be because we have not existed as a major political party for generations, and so very few people have grown up identifying as being “Lib Dem” as part of their heritage and family background.
It certainly highlights the fragility of our support, but it is impossible to say whether supporters still see us as a protest vote against the Lab-Con duopoly or, instead, have a contingent admiration for our current platform but not warmth to the party.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Damian Collins at Hereford Military History Festival in September
The Joy of Six 1529
Labour deputy claims that Farage is a threat to democracy
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
Jason Connor
Mick Taylor
Chloe
theakes
Kira Collins
19 Comments
I’m not sure that the situation is that Lib Dem voters are more likely to be uncertain about their political sympathies, maybe you mean party sympathies? With the (potentially superficial) move to more liberal policies by the Tories, it could mean that the Tories are simply better at getting their message across. Usually, and not unreasonably, this is argued to reflect media coverage of the parties. However, while traditional media outlets are stagnant and/or decreasing, new media is on the up, so it is a challenge to Lib Dems to put more effort into getting their message out through new media outlets, as the Obama campaign did in the US. Whether or not you agree with the policies of the Obama administration, you can at least credit them with a well run campaign. Lib Dems should learn and adapt from it – maybe HQ already has but it’s not reflected in the survey results – getting exploring new media, and offer substance as well as casual observation.
I am on twitter @beancook
Does the survey ask people to identify themselves only with parties, or does it also ask for people to describe their ideological view (socialist, conservative, liberal or whatever)? It would be nice to know how many people see themselves as small-l liberal. I suspect it might be a rather larger share of the population than our current polling, which would be positive for the future.
I understood the survey was asking about political parties. Sometime back around 2006 I heard that we had polling showing that c.40% of people described themselves as “liberal”. But, as we know from debates on this site, there can be different uses of that word!
@Richard Huzzey: But, as we know from debates on this site, there can be different uses of that word!
Very true! We’re not helped by the fuzziness caused by the overlapping European and American meanings of the word “liberal”. But if about 40% of the population describe themselves as liberal we clearly have more room to grow than either Labour (who presumably pick up socialists, social democrats and progressives) or the Tories (conservatives and “liberal conservatives”).
This again.
Yes, the Obama campaign had what seems to have been a very good online presence – but most of the campaign was done by a larger than ever before mobilisation of activists to meet people face-to-face, hand out leaflets and make telephone calls.
Lib Dems have always focussed on principles rather than party affiliation. It’s not overly surprising that they would respond this way.
We need to be clear what is meant by ‘party identification’ (as opposed to voting intention, the figure that appears in opinion polls). Identification is about much more than “getting our message across”, as @Alistair suggests above. It is about establishing the long-term loyalty of voters who see one’s party aligned with their values and interests. The British Social Attitudes Survey counts someone as ‘identifying’ with a party if: (a) they see themselves as a party supporter; (b) consider themselves closer to that party than others; and (c) would be more likely to vote for that party rather than another in a general election.
What the identification statistic therefore shows is the proportion of a party’s support that is ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’. The Tories’ current polling average is 40% so, if 32% identify as Tories, that means 80% of Tory support is hard and 20% soft. Labour’s current polling average is 29% so, if 27% identify as Labour, 93% of Labour’s support is hard and only 7% soft – as Richard says, this suggests that Labour’s support has been reduced almost to its core. The Lib Dems’ current polling average is 19% so, if 9% identify as Lib Dems, then only 47% of our party’s support is hard and 53% is soft.
This has always been a problem for the Liberal Democrats and the Liberals beforehand since the Second World War. It is why our support among pensioners is lower than any other generation. For example, let’s take the example of someone aged 76 who first had the vote aged 21 in the 1955 general election. In the 1950s, two-party allegiance was at its peak; in 1955, 96.1% voted either Tory or Labour and only 2.7% voted Liberal. If your formative political experiences occurred in that era, the chances are that today you still identify strongly with either the Tories or Labour. Even if you were a Liberal identifier, the Liberal Party fielded only 110 candidates in 1955, so the chances are that you could not have voted Liberal even if you wanted to.
The revival of Liberal fortunes over the past thirty years has been achieved primarily through local campaigning by exploiting local grievances, but this has proved a double-edged sword. The party has built up a strong local government base but it has done so basically because everyone agrees that the street lights need fixing or the dog shit needs cleaning up. When it comes to issues requiring a moral choice, such as Europe or immigration, the party has tended to fudge issues to avoid causing offence to anyone. This is why we can perform unusually well in a small ward but, the larger the constituency, and the more we rely on an ‘air war’ than a ‘ground war’, the worse we do. Hence the poor performances in successive Euro elections.
The Lib Dems try to make a virtue of their ability to win seats in any type of location with any type of demographic by using the slogan “We can win everywhere!” Yes, but the resulting support is transitory and we can lose everywhere.
As a result, the Lib Dem vote is like a bath with the taps left on and the plug left out. We haven’t built up a core vote so, at each election, a disproportionate amount of effort must go into winning most of our votes afresh. As a result, the party’s strategy resembles one of those old variety show plate-spinning acts, and the party’s vote reaches about 20% then stubbornly plateaus.
If the Lib Dems want to get beyond that plateau, some tough choices are necessary. Cementing the loyalty of a core vote means establishing some real core values – the motherhood-and-apple-pie of ‘fairness’ doesn’t even begin to achieve this. Doing so will enthuse and attract support from some voters, but it will also repel others.
The trouble is, the Lib Dems can’t make that leap. They shrink from risking causing offence to anyone. It’s both a psychological barrier and a practical problem. When anyone in the party DOES propose a controversial policy, the range of vested interests is so diverse that there’ll always be an MP or councillor somewhere who can veto the move on the grounds that “it won’t work on my patch”.
But the rewards of taking a clear moral stand can be immense. Consider the benefit to our 2005 general election campaign of the controversial Lib Dem policies on the Iraq war and tuition fees. Now consider how well the party might do if, say, it opposed the Afghanistan war or, better still, openly repudiated the neoliberal consensus of the past thirty years.
There is an obvious target demographic and a consequent strategy for attracting and cementing the loyalty of a core vote – I explored that in more detail on Lib Dem Voice (22nd November 2008) here: https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-the-bnp-membership-list-and-the-lessons-for-lib-dems-6175.html
But unless the party is happy sticking with a core vote below 10% and around 50-60 MPs in perpetuity, it is vital to get off the fence, learn to attract, and risk repelling.
What has this figure been in previous years? It’s the movement not the absolute figure that interests me.
The BBC graph suggests a big drop from 2005 to levels not seen since the pre-Eastbourne post merger days. That is a cause for concern.
@Hywel – The figures for previous years are here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tpoO_VQb2OpVPIe9a9r7C-Q
The earliest year for which figures are available is 1983, when party ID (presumably for the Liberal-SDP Alliance, not just the Liberals) was 15%. The best year was 1987 (immediately before the merger), when the figure was 19%.
@Benjamin Apologies if you have discussed this elsewhere but campaign tactics are clearly something that need to be talked about and high handedness isn’t really helpful in moving forward. I agree that mass mobilisation of citizens to door-knock and telephone is key but other areas also need to be advanced especially where there is easier access. Online recruitment of people to carry out these tasks was a way the Obama campaign used to encourage its core mobilisers to host campaign evenings in their homes for a couple of people and to sign up their friends; it was also a way for the campaign to share tactics and learn from others in locations across the country. Not too dissimilar to this forum I imagine but I’ve not looked into their campaign in much great detail. Perhaps you could share your knowledge of it? How else did the campaign use online resources to coordinate grassroots activities? Was one more successful than another? It would be great if you could share your knowledge about this. Thanks.
@Niklas there is a good website http://www.politicalcompass.org which asks a series of questions and then places you on a grid square. It positions people who answer the questions as either liberal or authoritarian (social), and either left or right wing (economic). As liberal covers both economic liberals and social liberals, they can be very different beasts. There was some talk of this when the orange book came out so, in other words, being more libertarian both socially and economically liberal. It would be interesting to know where the LD membership sits in general on these issues. Then again, as pointed out by @Simon Titley the 47/53 split between hard and soft voters, it would be equally important to figure out where the soft voters sit. So there are two important conversations to have one is over policy and the other connected area is constituency, who has voted for you and what are the issues that are attracting more voters? Is it simply disenchantment with the other two parties or is it a commitment to actual policy priorities, like university tuition fee policy in the last election?
@Simon Titley: A very powerful analysis. We do need to be willing to stick our necks out, provided of course that the policies we use to do so are liberal and so build our long-term base of support.
Thinking about this reminds me that the Swedish Liberals also have a very small base of core supporters; maybe this is a problem for liberal parties in other countries too? Is it perhaps a result of liberals refusing to represent one narrow economic interest in the way that conservative and social democratic parties traditionally do? I sometimes find it difficult to understand this issue because I joined (and vote for) the Lib Dems because I identify myself as a liberal and the party as a liberal party. Are people like me a minority, at least when it comes to deciding how to vote?
@Alistair: Yes, politicalcompass.org is an excellent site. I took the test four-five years ago. Maybe I should do so again…. I recommend it strongly to people on this thread who haven’t taken the test yet. And you can get a very nice certificate at the end 🙂
@Simon Titley: Reading your earlier LDV article, I came across this and just have to quote it. Re Stephan Shakespeare on “drawbridge issues” being the new dividing line in politics:
‘Drawbridge down’ is clearly where the Liberal Democrats belong. No other party represents such people, so why compete with the Conservatives, Labour, UKIP and the BNP for the bigoted ‘drawbridge up’ vote? It is quite mystifying why the Lib Dems seem more concerned to appease the people least likely to vote for them, than to energise the people most likely to.
You’re absolutely right! A very thought-provoking article.
But an important point is raised in the comments thread there: it’s all very well that we have disproportionate support from young intellectuals, but if they don’t turn out on polling day it doesn’t do anything for us. Since I’m campaigning among students in Cambridge to elect Julian Huppert this May I welcome any tips that people have to get younger voters to turn out!
One idea I’ve had is to collect mobile numbers from definites and probables when we canvass and send text reminders on polling day, perhaps followed by personal calls if they haven’t voted towards the end of the day. The traditional knocking up strategy is a tad difficult with students, both because of halls of residence and because they may be in faculties, colleges or libraries for most of any Thursday.
@Niklas Smith – Thanks for your kind remarks. I agree that a younger constituency is harder to mobilise, and that the party has to rethink its campaigning methods if it wants to reach these people. However, this is basically a problem of strategy rather than tactics.
To build and consolidate a core vote, the party must stick its neck out, adopt clear and hard-hitting policies, and make a series of bold statements that have people punching the air and cheering, and saying “Yes, at last there is a party that speaks to my values and my interests.”
Instead, the party tends to be mealy-mouthed, afraid to challenge the consensus, frightened what the next day’s Daily Mail might say, worried it might offend people who profoundly disagree with liberal values, and lacking the confidence to bring its own values out of the closet and enthuse its natural support base.
The consequence is that, at the next general election, the biggest danger to the Liberal Democrats is of being blanded out. To most punters, we’ll look like just another of the establishment parties. In short, the party lacks balls.
One thing no-one seems to have mentioned is that in recent elections only 60% have voted. Hence, given the evidence of the last election, relative percentages of the electorate are as follows:
Lab Con LD
36 33 23 – share of the vote
21.6 19.8 13.8 – share of the electorate
30 40 20 – estimated 2010 share of the vote
21 28 14 – estimated share of the electorate at 70% turnout
27 32 9 – current identification of support per this survey
Which indicates that both Labour and the Conservatives will get fewer votes than their level of identifed support, but that we will get more.
@Simon: In short, the party lacks balls.
LOL! Looking on the bright side, even if we lack balls we also lack Balls – which is something we want to lack! (Sorry, awful pun…) Puns aside, I think your point about this being more a strategy than tactical problem is probably right (though there must be some ways of increasing student turnout apart from changing strategy).
@Tabman: Very interesting! How could we forget turnout? I wonder if that changes the interpretation we’ve been putting on the survey results in any way…?
@Niklas I think you’re idea about SMS and call reminders is a good one.
@Simon strategy and tactic mean the same thing, a plan of action to achieve a desired goal. Both your concerns about manifesto design and getting out the vote are both central to the LDs doing better. I don’t think they can be separated so to encourage more interaction we should ask people to contribute to both understandings and hopefully the discussions will feed into both.
An interesting and important question to ask this discussion, is what were the most attractive/ talked about policies when out campaigning? What year was this?
For me, the most important concern was student tuition fees in 2005.
This policy does need some wider debate because one thing that is not being addressed is where the current policy going. What’s its aim? The problem at the moment is the current policy is shifting towards the onus to raise funds being on the university/college from student numbers (through government grants and overseas tuition), research money (through faculty and staff funding grants) and alumni contributions. This seems to be the understanding by universities of what their funding structure looks like. However, if this is where the policy continues to go then we can legitimately ask, is this structure realistic for the environment in which it operates. It is based on the premise that the university/college system is moving towards a hybrid of the US system. Most notably, it is missing the ‘alumni contributions’ in the UK which is not culturally embedded i.e. people don’t think about donating money to their former university because they feel that is what they paid tuition for. This leads to an over reliance on enrollment increases and staff cuts, leading to researchers not having time to pursue as much research, in turn, decreasing their funding opportunities. This is a real concern for the long term success of our universities/colleges. I wanted to flag this as an area where a clearer idea of where this policy is going is needed because people interested in this will also want to know whether it is a short term policy or whether part of a longer term goal. The LD policy brief just says tuition fee abolition but when I am asked I don’t know what the answer is or if there is a longer term vision?
Niklas: turnout is something I’m always painfully aware of. When you look at a local election where we get say 35% of the vote, but the turnout is 50% (such as the last county elevtions in the division I campaigned in), that represents less than one in 5 of the eligible voters in that division who supported us.
@Alistair – “strategy and tactic mean the same thing”? I don’t think so! An inability to distinguish between the two is fatal in politics.
Strategy is the big picture, the overall plan for achieving your goals based on the perspective of a long-term view. Tactics are the way in which a strategy is executed. They are the little things, the day-to-day components of your strategy.
You are right that the two cannot be separated but they can – and indeed must – be distinguished. A strategy is what connects your tactics to an overall plan. Without a coherent strategy, tactics become a meaningless jumble of activity.