Where have Labour gone? posted by Meaders

It's been making me suspicious. Canvassing over the last few weeks has dug out stacks and stacks of Respect voters, right through Tower Hamlets: in just under an hour yesterday evening, I reckon two of us canvassing picked up more than 30 pledges to vote Respect across one of our weaker patches in Whitechapel.

But where are all the Labour voters? I'm assuming the election is going to be a close-run thing; there is a century's worth of Labour support out there that will not disappear overnight. Thousands of people will vote for Labour candidates. I'm stuffed, however, if I can find anyone prepared to admit they're going to vote Labour. They'd state their support in the general election - often rather emphatically. Not this time. It's getting like the Tories in 1997.

Nor have I seen any Labour Party canvassers. A couple of local councillors have been glimpsed, occasionally, skittering between houses with leaflets. Michael Keith, council leader, has appeared at Saturday morning markets with a posse of some sort. But of ordinary members, doing the leg-work - not a glimpse, despite the Party's stirring call for support last Saturday. (I'm told the constituency office, abuzz with apparatchiks at this point in the general election, remained deserted throughout the day.)

It doesn't look good, either here, or nationally:

Labour support has dropped to the lowest point since the party's heavy defeat in the 1987 general election, according to an ICM opinion poll for the Guardian. Its share of the vote has dropped by five points since March, putting it on 32%, two points behind the Conservatives.

Amusingly, the Tories' support is "flatlining... despite the massive - and largely positive - publicity Mr Cameron has enjoyed." They've increased their support by a colossal 1% since the 2001 general election, but will no doubt pick up quite a few local council seats.

The real story here, and it's something that's been coming through since at least the 2004 Euro elections, is the breakdown of the two-party system. The neoliberal consensus - or, better, the neoliberal-plus-Iraq consensus - in the political centre is an increasingly decrepit way to sustain national party organisation. At present, the Lib Dems stand to gain most from this, almost by default: however, as bitter experience in Tower Hamlets has shown, they've demonstrated themselves to be no better locally (and in many circumstances significantly worse) than New Labour. That the Lib Dem's weak political leadership has set itself the monumental task of propping up the crumbling centre hardly augurs well for the organisation.

An aside: the fact that Respect can talk with a great deal of credibility about international issues is a major strength locally, in a way I had't anticipated. Although Canary Wharf is the focus, a creeping gentrification has taken place elsewhere in the borough. These are people who haven't lived here long and don't necessarily notice the same local concerns - but do know that Respect has a record in opposing the war on Iraq, opposing Islamophobia, and supporting Palestinian rights. We immediately have something to say to them where the other parties do not.

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The discussion about Respect here turned up this useful report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the BNP's support. A few points have been commented on already, most noticeably the maintenance of fascism's classic petit bourgeois social base - something that disappears behind the BNP's own rhetoric, aped by the mainstream press, of appealing to the disaffected white working class. Similarly, the correlation with income is pronounced, but not in the way we've been led to believe:

...where the income of the wards increases, so the BNP vote increases, with a correlation of 0.248 for the net weekly household income and 0.183 when housing costs are taken into account... Overall, it seems, the poorer the ward the less likely the BNP are to do well.

Something else that struck me was this:

...seems that up to a certain percentage (around 7 per cent), electoral support for the BNP increases with the percentage of Asians in the local population. Above that level, however, the level of BNP support actually goes down, particularly for Leicester and Birmingham which have very high proportions of Asian residents, but lower levels of BNP support than, say, Burnley.

This runs rather against the, er, "thesis" advanced by Trevor Phillips that British society is being pushed to the brink by non-integrated ethnic minorities. It ties in well, however, with the slightly more credible opinion of the government's voluminous State of the Cities report (PDF, 3Mb). Using the best available measure of segregation, the researchers find that (p.148):

Segregation between Whites and Non-Whites, measured at ward level, has fallen in the vast majority of cities between 1991 and 2001... There are only eight cities... where segregation has increased in the last decade. In only two cases was it by a significant amount, Blackburn +0.08 and Norwich +0.06...

Segregation by income, wealth and employment is greater than segregation by ethnicity.

What's been disturbing of late is how much conventional liberal discourse has mirrored that of far Right. Confronted with deliberate racist provocation, too many liberals started bleating with Nick Griffin about their "right" to be racist. Confronted with a fascist rhetoric of "ghetto towns" and "no-go areas", too many liberals have addressed themselves to alleged "segregation" - this at the same time as actual segregation has been declining. What emerges most clearly in the Joseph Rowntree report is the crying need for an alternative to both political tropes.