FEATURE IT’S MY PARTY
2017 were women, while just 29% of Conservative members were female. For another, the average age among the Tory rank and file is 57, rather than the absurdly old 72 that gets bandied about in the media despite the absence of any reliable source that we’ve been able to find. But while that doesn’t seem much greater than the average for Labour members (53), it disguises the fact that the Conservative Party has a significantly higher proportion (44%) of members who are over 65 years old than does Labour (where the proportion is 30%). Some readers may be surprised that, although
Fifth, and finally, our ‘leavers’ survey’, also
conducted in 2017, already contains a panel element and will allow us to conduct the most comprehensive study of why people give up their membership – something which should prove interesting not just to academics but also to parties, who are understandably keen to improve retention as well as recruitment. So what have we found out so far? A lot – indeed so much, that here we’ll focus on the parties that have dominated British politics for nearly a century: Labour and the Conservatives.
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Some 47% of Labour’s members were women, compared to just 29% of Conservative members.
Labour (because of its sheer size) now has far more young members than its main rival, the party’s membership as a whole isn’t necessarily as young as all the photos and footage of Momentum activists and Glastonbury-goers chanting ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ would suggest. But our work on those who joined the party fairly recently reveals that quite a few of them were actually ‘re-treads’ – folk who left Labour as Blair led it into the centre and the Iraq war – but who are now convinced they’ve ‘got their party back.’ Yet it’s ideas and issues rather than demographics that throw up the biggest divides between Labour and Tory grassroots. Take austerity: some 98% of Labour members
Gay marriage is supported by
just 41% of rank-and-file Tories but 85% of their Labour counterparts
First up, what do they look like and what (at least in that respect) do they have in common? Well, based on our latest research, which Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End Institute has just published as a report called Grassroots, we can say that members of both parties are overwhelmingly white and very largely middle class. Members of the black and minority ethnic communities may make up around 13% of the UK population, but they constitute just three and four per cent respectively of the Tory and Labour grassroots. And while only just over half of British adults can be put into occupational groups ABC1, those same ABC1s make up 86% of Conservative and 77% of Labour members. But there are more significant differences
between the memberships of Britain’s two main parties. For one thing, partly as a result of so many more women joining the party to elect and/or defend Jeremy Corbyn from 2015 onwards, Labour is much closer to gender parity than its main rival: some 47% of Labour’s members in the summer of
16 SOCIETY NOW WINTER 2018 ”
think it’s gone too far, compared to just 11% of Conservative members. Or how about the idea that government should redistribute income to the less well-off? Only 15% of the Tory rank and file agree, compared to 94% of their Labour counterparts. Their contrasting support for the idea that ordinary working people don’t get their fair share of the nation’s wealth is – at 19% versus 97% – similarly striking. Social and moral issues throw up big differences too. Take law and order: 54% of Tory members support the death penalty, compared to just nine per cent of Labour members. Or gay marriage, supported by just 41% of rank-and-file Tories but 85% of their Labour counterparts. And finally, even inevitably, there’s Brexit. Only around a quarter of Conservative members appear to favour staying in the single market and the customs union – an option favoured by around 85% of Labour members, some 78% of whom (compared to just 14% of Tories) would like to see a second referendum on leaving the EU. How much longer Labour’s grassroots will
stay content with Mr Corbyn’s ‘constructive ambiguity’ on Brexit, then, is surely a moot point. n
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The ESRC Party Members Project (PMP) is a three-year project run by Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti and funded by the ESRC. It aims to study party membership in the six largest British parties: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the Greens, and the SNP. Email
partymembersproject@gmail.com Web
esrcpartymembersproject.org www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/media/publications/Grassroots,- Britain’s-Party-Members.pdf
fullfact.org/news/how-old-average-conservative-party-member/
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