Clark Vasey is co-founder and Executive Director of Blue Collar Conservatism, and a councillor in Redbridge.
Last week, Andy Burnham framed his big pitch to Labour conference around the idea of ‘working-class aspiration’. In a speech filled with nostalgia about the Labour movement, his recipe for big-state socialism was presented as Labour retaking its historic place as the party of the working class.
But new polling on working-class communities by Public First for Blue Collar Conservatism suggests that these voters are looking for something very different: lower taxes, jobs, restrained spending and improvements in living standards they can actually feel.
The research, conducted among more than 2,000 voters, was designed to look beyond voting intention and understand what working-class voters think has happened to their communities, which policies they believe would improve their lives and what the Conservatives would need to do to regain their trust.
On economics, the findings should give the Conservatives confidence.
We asked voters to make a fundamental economic choice. One option was to reduce taxes substantially on working people and businesses, in order to encourage work, investment and job creation – even if that meant significant cuts to government spending elsewhere. Another was to maintain broadly current levels of tax and spending. The third was to increase spending on public services and welfare benefits, even if that meant higher taxes on working people and businesses.
Among DE voters, 49 per cent voters chose lower taxes and lower spending. Sorry Andy, but only 12 per cent chose higher spending and higher taxes.
Support for the lower-tax option was even stronger among the C2 skilled manual worker cohort at 55 per cent. This was higher than the electorate as a whole on 53 per cent. These skilled C2 voters have long been a key part of the Conservative voter coalition and are the biggest supporter of substantially lower taxes even when explicitly confronted with the consequence of significant spending reductions. Just 15 per cent chose higher taxes and higher spending option.
That hardly looks like an electorate clamouring for Burnham’s big-state socialism.
When C2 voters were asked what the Conservatives could do to demonstrate that they had changed since 2024, the most popular answer was to set out a clear plan to cut taxes and government spending. When asked which policies would make working-class people more likely to consider voting Conservative, cutting income tax for people on low and middle incomes was the second choice of C2 voters and joint-second among DE voters (the top being immigration which is the rub I will come to in a moment).
The immediate concerns of these voters are intensely economic. Asked about the most serious challenges facing working-class communities, high utility bills came first and the cost of groceries second.
This matters because too much of our political debate about growth takes place in the abstract. Working people don’t experience growth through a Treasury spreadsheet. They experience it through what is left in their pay packet, whether their wages are rising, whether their energy and shopping bills are affordable, whether their children can find decent jobs and whether getting up and going to work leaves them better off.
Growth has to be felt, not just quantified.
Working class voters being closer to our values than Labour is why Esther McVey and I first set up Blue Collar Conservatism in 2012. The fundamentals remain the same: a message of self-reliance and fair reward is as attractive as ever to Blue Collar Britain, and when it comes to Labour’s message of dependency and state control we can win. However, unfortunately this is not 2012, and this is no longer a binary choice between us and Labour.
When we lost the trust of those working class voters who helped deliver our majority in 2019, we know most did not simply return to Labour with many switching to Reform. The realignment of working class voters rightwards, which was speeded up by Brexit, has continued, but it is now fractured between us and Reform. Polling over the past year consistently supports this.
The question is therefore not simply whether Conservative economics can appeal to working-class voters. Our polling suggests it can. The question is whether those voters are ready to listen to us on economics.
Here we cannot avoid immigration.
Across our research, immigration repeatedly emerges as one of the defining concerns of working-class voters. Large-scale immigration is identified by 41 per cent of DE voters as something that has damaged working-class communities over the long term. When we ask which policies would most improve the lives of working-class people, cutting immigration comes first among both C2 and DE voters.
When we ask what Conservatives could do to make working-class people more likely to consider voting for us, stopping people who enter Britain illegally from being able to remain here comes ahead of cutting income tax among both groups.
For Conservatives, immigration is the hump we have to get over.
This is far from unique to our poll. We know issues like the Boriswave and the impact of mass migration on communities are central to voter grievance. However, unless we can persuade these voters that this time we mean what we say, many simply won’t be prepared to listen to the rest of the Conservative offer. This matters to us, as just as C2DE voters are now more likely to support right wing parties, polling also shows many middle class voters have moved left, with Labour’s strongest support coming from AB voters.
To me immigration is the ‘on-ramp’ back to these voters.
Immigration isn’t the entire journey. Controlling immigration on its own will not raise living standards, create jobs or deliver a Conservative majority. But it is increasingly the route through which we have to travel before many of the working-class voters we have lost will hear what we have to say about anything else.
And this is where another finding from our polling becomes particularly interesting.
Once you get beyond immigration, the economic distance between Conservative and Reform voters is remarkably small. On the tax and spending question above 65.6 per cent of current Conservative voters favoured the low tax option, compared with 66.5 per cent for current Reform voters.
For all the discussion about a divided Right, on this fundamental economic choice there is barely a percentage point between the voters of each party. Now that we have sensibly put to rest the idea of a pact with Reform, we must instead focus on winning over their voters. Immigration is just the start of the journey, the ‘on-ramp’, but once we have regained trust on immigration, our economic offer gives us the opportunity to persuade these voters to come home.
Trust has to be earned and our polling contains some sobering evidence of how difficult that will be.
Among DE voters, almost a quarter said there was nothing the Conservatives could do to demonstrate that we had genuinely changed because working-class people would never trust us again. Admitting the mistakes made by the previous Conservative Government was their most popular positive answer. For our all important C2 voters the picture is more encouraging. Their top answers were a ‘clear plan to cut taxes and government spending’ and tougher welfare rule and get people into work.
No one is pretending that winning these voters back will be easy, but our polling suggests there remains a substantial constituency for lower taxes, restrained spending, making work pay and an economy which creates jobs and raises living standards.
The challenge is rebuilding the political coalition capable of delivering it. Winning back middle-class HENRYs is important, but there simply aren’t enough of them to win the seats we need to win.
The route back to a majority runs through the working-class voters who once voted Conservative and are now looking to Reform.
Andy Burnham wants to make working-class aspiration one of the battlegrounds on which a future election is fought. Conservatives should welcome that fight, but our first challenge is to convince enough Reform voters that we are the ones best placed to beat his big state socialism and actually build a country which works.
The full dataset can be seen here Fieldwork was conducted between 4th and 8th September. The sample was a nationally representative UK-wide sample of 2,007 adults. Public First is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by their rules.
Clark Vasey is co-founder and Executive Director of Blue Collar Conservatism, and a councillor in Redbridge.
Last week, Andy Burnham framed his big pitch to Labour conference around the idea of ‘working-class aspiration’. In a speech filled with nostalgia about the Labour movement, his recipe for big-state socialism was presented as Labour retaking its historic place as the party of the working class.
But new polling on working-class communities by Public First for Blue Collar Conservatism suggests that these voters are looking for something very different: lower taxes, jobs, restrained spending and improvements in living standards they can actually feel.
The research, conducted among more than 2,000 voters, was designed to look beyond voting intention and understand what working-class voters think has happened to their communities, which policies they believe would improve their lives and what the Conservatives would need to do to regain their trust.
On economics, the findings should give the Conservatives confidence.
We asked voters to make a fundamental economic choice. One option was to reduce taxes substantially on working people and businesses, in order to encourage work, investment and job creation – even if that meant significant cuts to government spending elsewhere. Another was to maintain broadly current levels of tax and spending. The third was to increase spending on public services and welfare benefits, even if that meant higher taxes on working people and businesses.
Among DE voters, 49 per cent voters chose lower taxes and lower spending. Sorry Andy, but only 12 per cent chose higher spending and higher taxes.
Support for the lower-tax option was even stronger among the C2 skilled manual worker cohort at 55 per cent. This was higher than the electorate as a whole on 53 per cent. These skilled C2 voters have long been a key part of the Conservative voter coalition and are the biggest supporter of substantially lower taxes even when explicitly confronted with the consequence of significant spending reductions. Just 15 per cent chose higher taxes and higher spending option.
That hardly looks like an electorate clamouring for Burnham’s big-state socialism.
When C2 voters were asked what the Conservatives could do to demonstrate that they had changed since 2024, the most popular answer was to set out a clear plan to cut taxes and government spending. When asked which policies would make working-class people more likely to consider voting Conservative, cutting income tax for people on low and middle incomes was the second choice of C2 voters and joint-second among DE voters (the top being immigration which is the rub I will come to in a moment).
The immediate concerns of these voters are intensely economic. Asked about the most serious challenges facing working-class communities, high utility bills came first and the cost of groceries second.
This matters because too much of our political debate about growth takes place in the abstract. Working people don’t experience growth through a Treasury spreadsheet. They experience it through what is left in their pay packet, whether their wages are rising, whether their energy and shopping bills are affordable, whether their children can find decent jobs and whether getting up and going to work leaves them better off.
Growth has to be felt, not just quantified.
Working class voters being closer to our values than Labour is why Esther McVey and I first set up Blue Collar Conservatism in 2012. The fundamentals remain the same: a message of self-reliance and fair reward is as attractive as ever to Blue Collar Britain, and when it comes to Labour’s message of dependency and state control we can win. However, unfortunately this is not 2012, and this is no longer a binary choice between us and Labour.
When we lost the trust of those working class voters who helped deliver our majority in 2019, we know most did not simply return to Labour with many switching to Reform. The realignment of working class voters rightwards, which was speeded up by Brexit, has continued, but it is now fractured between us and Reform. Polling over the past year consistently supports this.
The question is therefore not simply whether Conservative economics can appeal to working-class voters. Our polling suggests it can. The question is whether those voters are ready to listen to us on economics.
Here we cannot avoid immigration.
Across our research, immigration repeatedly emerges as one of the defining concerns of working-class voters. Large-scale immigration is identified by 41 per cent of DE voters as something that has damaged working-class communities over the long term. When we ask which policies would most improve the lives of working-class people, cutting immigration comes first among both C2 and DE voters.
When we ask what Conservatives could do to make working-class people more likely to consider voting for us, stopping people who enter Britain illegally from being able to remain here comes ahead of cutting income tax among both groups.
For Conservatives, immigration is the hump we have to get over.
This is far from unique to our poll. We know issues like the Boriswave and the impact of mass migration on communities are central to voter grievance. However, unless we can persuade these voters that this time we mean what we say, many simply won’t be prepared to listen to the rest of the Conservative offer. This matters to us, as just as C2DE voters are now more likely to support right wing parties, polling also shows many middle class voters have moved left, with Labour’s strongest support coming from AB voters.
To me immigration is the ‘on-ramp’ back to these voters.
Immigration isn’t the entire journey. Controlling immigration on its own will not raise living standards, create jobs or deliver a Conservative majority. But it is increasingly the route through which we have to travel before many of the working-class voters we have lost will hear what we have to say about anything else.
And this is where another finding from our polling becomes particularly interesting.
Once you get beyond immigration, the economic distance between Conservative and Reform voters is remarkably small. On the tax and spending question above 65.6 per cent of current Conservative voters favoured the low tax option, compared with 66.5 per cent for current Reform voters.
For all the discussion about a divided Right, on this fundamental economic choice there is barely a percentage point between the voters of each party. Now that we have sensibly put to rest the idea of a pact with Reform, we must instead focus on winning over their voters. Immigration is just the start of the journey, the ‘on-ramp’, but once we have regained trust on immigration, our economic offer gives us the opportunity to persuade these voters to come home.
Trust has to be earned and our polling contains some sobering evidence of how difficult that will be.
Among DE voters, almost a quarter said there was nothing the Conservatives could do to demonstrate that we had genuinely changed because working-class people would never trust us again. Admitting the mistakes made by the previous Conservative Government was their most popular positive answer. For our all important C2 voters the picture is more encouraging. Their top answers were a ‘clear plan to cut taxes and government spending’ and tougher welfare rule and get people into work.
No one is pretending that winning these voters back will be easy, but our polling suggests there remains a substantial constituency for lower taxes, restrained spending, making work pay and an economy which creates jobs and raises living standards.
The challenge is rebuilding the political coalition capable of delivering it. Winning back middle-class HENRYs is important, but there simply aren’t enough of them to win the seats we need to win.
The route back to a majority runs through the working-class voters who once voted Conservative and are now looking to Reform.
Andy Burnham wants to make working-class aspiration one of the battlegrounds on which a future election is fought. Conservatives should welcome that fight, but our first challenge is to convince enough Reform voters that we are the ones best placed to beat his big state socialism and actually build a country which works.
The full dataset can be seen here Fieldwork was conducted between 4th and 8th September. The sample was a nationally representative UK-wide sample of 2,007 adults. Public First is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by their rules.