Labour's leave voters might be less certain than some think. Wikicommons/Ilovetheeu. Some rights reserved. Prevailing wisdom dictates that to avoid harm being done to you by politicians, you must not trust them. There are good and valid reasons for this, but the logic leaves us vulnerable to one key risk : that we doubt politicians when they are in fact telling the truth. As a result we are left exposed to the threat we anticipate rather than a security we refuse to believe in.
In recent times there have been no political soap operas with so ready a supply of bad faith actors as Brexit and the saga of Corbyn and Labour. Shadowy think tanks (Legatum), misrepresented wills of people (Farage et al), billionaire media (Murdoch, Barclay Brothers, Rothermere) the machinations of Labour’s Blairite rump, still spurned and licking its wounds. As so many of these quarters bemoan a supposed loss of truth, new research from the British Election Study (very neatly summarised here) details attitudes that reveal much about Labour’s crucial Leave voters, and in so doing offer useful, and corrective, advice to those still hoping to clinch remain from the jaws of leave. The research points strongly towards the idea that leaving the EU was a means and not an end.
The research, first of all, shows that Labour’s leave voters still care more about housing and public services than about the leaving of the EU, with 26 per cent of respondents citing it as their number 1 concern (24 per cent cite Brexit). The proportion citing foreigners or immigration is lower again, at 17 per cent. It goes almost without saying, but nevertheless still should be said, that the same does not go for Tory voters - just 15 per cent of leave-voting Tories prioritise housing and public services (interestingly, in what it says of the assumed progressivism of remain voters, a higher rate of concern than the 10 per cent of remain-voting Tories), while 24 per cent of leave-voting Tories have a primary concern of immigration and foreigners.
