When last month’s general election registered a historically low turnout, many already expected it. Labour’s victory had long felt assured. The Conservatives had conceded weeks before polling day and Rishi Sunak had retreated to campaign in his home constituency.
Against this backdrop, few were surprised that just 52% of the British adult population cast their ballots on 4 July. Perhaps it’s for this same reason that when the first detailed breakdown of the results was released earlier this week it received little attention.
However, for those seeking to understand the anatomy of Labour’s ‘loveless landslide’, IPSOS’ ‘How Britain voted’ report makes for essential, if concerning, reading. Turnout across the UK among registered voters was 60% but this is far from the complete story.
Young, working-class voters were far more likely not to turn up. IPSOS estimates that just 37% of 18-24-year-olds cast a ballot. Not only is this figure a 10% drop compared to the previous election, it is half the turnout among those over 65 (73%). Indeed, among no age group younger than 45 did turnout breach 50%.
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From these numbers it follows that, just 37% of private and social renters voted compared to 71% of homeowners. Turnout among working-class voters fell by eight points to 45%, 22 points lower than the highest social classes. You get the picture – and it’s not a good one. ‘How Britain voted’, one might quip, is a misleading title for a report that reveals that only certain older, wealthier sections of Britain did, in fact, vote.
Such a disproportionately low turnout among young, poorer people has been an all too common fixture of recent elections. IPSOS notes, for example, that across the UK working-class turnout has fallen consistently since the EU referendum.
As this apathy grows unabated, a failure to urgently understand its roots will only cede ground to the far-right. It is worth remembering that, without running an election campaign, Reform UK won 7% of the vote in Scotland, where we like to kid ourselves that Nigel Farage’s brand of politics does not have a base.
Jimmy Reid anticipated the ‘rat race’ to come when he railed against alienation at Glasgow University in 1972. Neoliberalism’s assault on the post-war settlement would soon threaten societal fragmentation but in the early 1970s social democracy survived. Housing security was still a possibility. University education was free across Britain. Most workers were in a trade union.
The ‘gig economy’ was yet to enter the vernacular. 50 years later, things are different. Real wages have fallen consistently. Young people face a lifetime of exorbitant rents. Debt is almost unavoidable. Precarious, zero-hours employment plagues our working lives.
My point is not to look upon the post-war period with rose-tinted spectacles – funded as it was with the profits of the empire – but to situate today’s disconnect between young people and politics within the social and economic context of the last four decades. It’s true to say that the major parties offered little to young, working-class voters in this election.
However, a purely retail understanding of last month’s results can only take us so far. In 2006, the Scottish poet Tom Leonard wrote that men and women were citizens of the world, “responsible to that world and responsible for that world.” But by then, Leonard’s understanding of humanity – and the importance of caring for one another – was out of fashion. Margaret Thatcher and her ideological descendants saw to that.
If, as Thatcher, argued, “there was no such thing as society”, then all that remained was the individual. Over decades, the social ties that once bound communities together were shattered by a concerted effort to pit neighbour against neighbour and worker against worker.
Atomisation followed as individuals, cut adrift from responsibility, were taught to look out for themselves. What Mark Fisher called ‘magical voluntarism’ – “the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be” – took root.
Labour won the election (Image: Keir Starmer)
People’s powerlessness to resist falling living standards, for example, could be explained by the simple fact they weren’t working hard enough. Questions of economics retreated from the political arena as neoliberalism’s core tenets went unquestioned.
People were denied the right to shape their destinies by an apparently unmoveable economic framework that instead empowered the market. This forty-year frustration is the context in which we must understand contemporary apathy. It is no coincidence that the lowest turnout anywhere in Glasgow was in the city’s North East, where just 47% of the electorate voted.
Once the site of substantial heavy industry, areas like Springburn were decimated by deindustrialisation and never recovered. The Caley railworks, for example, closed as recently as 2019 after more than 140 years. Owned by the UK subsidiary of a German firm, it did not matter that the works were operating at a £4 million profit. They shut anyway.
Motivating people to vote after they have been systematically deprived of a stake in their community for four decades is no easy task. What’s more there’s a tendency to think about deindustrialisation in the past tense. However, as the imminent closure of Scotland’s last oil refinery reminds us, for thousands of Scots it remains a lived reality.
Owned in part by Britain’s richest man Jim Ratcliffe, Grangemouth accounts for 8% of Scotland’s manufacturing base. Petroineos’ decision to move their business abroad and throw the town’s local economy into turmoil is illustrative of exactly the economic dynamic outlined above, where workers and their communities are left to the whim of the market.
Those not directly affected, live in deindustrialisation's shadow – working low-wage jobs in the bars and cafes that filled the gap vacated by industry, renting next to swathes of derelict land or unable to escape the cycle of intergenerational poverty it initiated. Young people today have grown up in an economic environment where things are done to them – rent hikes, wage cuts and austerity – while their say over their own lives dwindles.
In a 2011 article entitled ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall noted that, “excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions.”
Last month, the Labour Party failed to win the endorsement of those sections of society most in need of the ‘change’ they promised. If Hall was correct, Keir Starmer’s missing mandate will ensure his government faces widespread opposition. This seems optimistic.
Demoralised by 14 years of Conservative degradation, Britain’s expectations for its new government are on the floor. What those who did vote do crave – an end to the political circus – Labour can deliver, at least in the short term. However, competence can only animate politics for so long. Dull and technocratic governance will do little to address the challenge of pervasive alienation posed at the top of this article.
What’s more, as even the briefest of glances across the Channel conveys, it is far more likely to accommodate the far-right than mount a coherent challenge to their politics.
Coll McCail is a writer and activist.
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