Party conference speeches are supposed to touch multiple political bases. Ed Miliband’s to Labour in Manchester is only remembered by most people because it failed to do exactly that. Yet British Prime Minister David Cameron’s conference speech in Birmingham can be boiled down to one single, overarching question he himself posed towards the end of what was, without argument, a highly accomplished piece of oratory.
The big question for the 2015 general election, said Cameron, was this: “On the things that really matter in your life, who do you really trust?” Was the answer to that Miliband’s Labour? Or was the answer the Tory party — which has spent the last four days in Birmingham dutifully giving voice to Lynton Crosby’s instruction that the economy must be “front and centre of communications” in the election campaign that has now begun. The result, on May 7 2015, will turn on the answer.
“Who do you really trust?” may seem a blindingly obvious election campaign question. But it is one on which the Conservative party has been on the defensive for most of the last 20 years. What is more, it is still on the defensive about it today. To understand the Tories’ stubborn problem on trust is to understand why Cameron’s pitch was much more of a gamble than many of his audience grasped.
Fifty years ago American pollsters began to use the term “the Michigan question” to describe a piece of research pioneered by University of Michigan political scientists. The question did not ask the public whom they intended to vote for; instead it asked whom they identified with. It was a question in which the political gut took precedence over the political mind. In the form used in this country by the pollster Ipsos-Mori over many years, the question takes the form: “Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green or what?”
Over the last two decades the answers have been consistently bad for the Tory party in ways that explain a lot about current politics. Twenty years ago this month, in October 1994, the answers were Labour 42 per cent, Conservatives 27 per cent, Liberal Democrats 11 per cent and the others 3 per cent. The Tories have got ahead of Labour on this measure only once since 1994, just after the 2010 general election. In May this year, though, just before the European elections, the Labour lead had been restored — not as strongly as in the Tony Blair era, but still giving Labour 31 per cent, Conservatives 27 per cent, Liberal Democrats 9 per cent and the others, doubtless boosted by Ukip this time, 15 per cent.
Over the years, the mainstream parties have been losing their collective appeal, down from 79 per cent identification to 67 per cent. In some ways, though, the surprise is not that one in three people no longer think of themselves as mainstream party supporters as that two out of three still do.
But the Michigan question results say something much more forceful and reliable than other poll results. They basically tell us the core electoral strengths of the parties. They suggest the levels below which party support is fairly unlikely to sink. And they tell us that, even in 2014 and despite all the problems Miliband’s party faces, Labour’s core appeal still remains somewhat larger than that of the Tories. It says that, in their gut, more people in modern Britain are still Labour voters than Tory voters.
The Michigan question also gives a third extremely relevant lesson: That, in order to win a majority, the Tories have to broaden their electoral appeal more than Labour has to. This had been a live issue in Birmingham last week. Though the Tory conference has been brilliantly managed — Tories 4–0 Media, was the general four-day verdict among the disconsolate hacks — this remains a party that needs, as Lord Ashcroft’s research last week so powerfully shows, to reach out to a very large proportion of the electorate who are at present not disposed to support it.
Earlier this year, Ipsos-Mori also asked the public whether they “would never consider voting” for each of the main parties. The results showed that four out of 10 voters would never consider voting Tory (40 per cent), Liberal Democrat (41 per cent) or Ukip (42 per cent). Anti-Labour feeling, by contrast, was significantly lower, at only 33 per cent. In other words, as the two big parties try to increase their appeal over the next seven months, Labour has more voters to fish for than the Tories do.
All of this is thrown into even starker relief by the observations of the YouGov pollster Peter Kellner. In August, he pointed out that the Tories and Cameron have one great strength in the electorate’s eyes — the public’s support for their economic management — but some serious negatives.
Most voters believe that the Tories are out of touch. Most believe they are not really committed to better public services. Most believe they do not aim to help all groups in society. And most voters think the Tories are too obsessed with Europe —this includes my favourite polling fact of the conference season, which is that 60 per cent of Ukip supporters think the Tories are too obsessed with Europe. Many of these Tory negatives remain stubbornly high.
So the big tests of Cameron’s speech are twofold. Can it shift some of these negatives? And can it attract some of those voters who do not consider themselves Tories but who do not rule out ever voting for Cameron’s party? Read in that context, Cameron’s speech, with its tax cuts for middle-income Britain and its promise to ringfence spending on the health service, makes some sense. Whether there was enough laser-like concentration on the needs and anxieties of Tory-sceptic voters — the promised tax cuts are uncosted, for instance — is another matter.
Cameron has changed a lot of things in the Conservative party in the past nine years. But he has not changed the underlying fear of many voters that the Tory party remains at heart a party of the rich, the privileged, the southern, and those who do not depend upon public services. In some ways he has solidified those fears. Like the Conservative party conference in general last week, Cameron’s speech implicitly understood a lot of the questions that needed asking. But it supplied all too few of the answers.
—Guardian News & Media Ltd
