Training | 2009.09.21
The next election will be a battle of Worcester vs Lidl | Julian Glover
As Britain becomes more diverse, voter intentions occur at microscopic levels that party pollsters struggle to measure
Worcester woman is dead, Mondeo man has been run off the road. They were invented creatures with imaginary friends, brought to life as harbingers of political change. If they have successors, they are different: Apple Mac Achiever, perhaps, in the rat race but concerned not to be a rat; or Lidl loser, out of a job in Stevenage and jealous of Watford\'s Primark profiteers.
Geography, however, is not the point. These blocs of voters are scattered to the four winds, their concentrations very localised: sometimes a couple of streets.
All three main parties – and the Greens too – now use a marketing system called Mosaic UK to power their campaigns, which breaks Britain into 155 types of individual, 67 different households and 15 groups. It is shockingly acute: depressing both in its reduction of individuality to marketing categories and in its accuracy, a statistical confirmation of inequality.
There are always problems with stereotypes – political marketing\'s magic bullets that aim to explain who will win the next election and why. But the greater the number of these descriptive groups, the more precisely we can pinpoint their likely addresses, the closer we come to describing the kaleidoscope of clusters that modern Britain has become.
The coming election will be more fragmented than ever, as the nation explodes into micro-societies, each with its own set of values and responses. There is no longer a shared national political experience, not even an economic one, as this strange recession with its booked-out restaurants yet rising unemployment shows. The expenses crisis and the rise in support for small parties have accelerated the breakdown of predictability.
Once it was assumed that everything important about elections could be deduced from national swing: the theoretical 4.3% shift from Labour the Conservatives need to become the largest party at the next election, or the mountainous 8.3% required to take a Tory majority to 50. That model worked best when class and party loyalties were strong, and shifts could be predicted across the country. Political campaigners have increased the magnification.
Britain has always had divisions: between north and south, or rich and poor – the extremities of opinion that caused Margaret Thatcher to be hated and loved. But the variations have become more dispersed and unpredictable, driven by the breakdown of class, job, gender and family constraints. More people work, want to shop, and go to university: apparently uniform trends whose perverse consequence is to make people less like each other, not more.
We have become a nation where everyone dresses much the same, but underneath we are drawn towards other like-minded and like-lifestyled people.
All general statements about the election are questionable because of this: claims such as the Tories are heading for a landslide, or the economic recovery will be good for Labour, or David Cameron will never prove popular in the north. Political responses are occurring at a microscopic level that the media and even pollsters find hard to measure.
This is not to say that Labour is about to whisk victory out of nothing – a 1992-style surprise. National opinion polling is a refined art and the polls are correct that the government is in trouble and the Conservatives substantially ahead. But constituencies are made up of many different sets of people, in different quantities, reacting in different ways.
The lesson taught by Mosaic is that there is a little bit of Worcester woman in every constituency, and probably a Primark profiteer or two as well. The ratios vary and the balance of their numbers and differing attitudes will determine the outcome. Seats with similar voting patterns can be made up of quite different communities of interests. It sounds like politics reduced to painting by numbers, but it works and is democratic in a reductionist sort of way.
A great leader, perhaps, could break the constraints, inspiring people to broader ideals. But Britain\'s next election will be a less glamorous battle – between what Mosaic calls the "suburban mindsets" (13.2% of Britain) and "claimaint cultures" (4.5%) and "elderly needs" (4%), against "liberal opinions"(8.8%).
The more micro the classification of society, the less influential macro national messages will be. Parties know who they can afford to upset and who they must keep on side in each seat. They also know where they live.
Experian, the company behind Mosaic, gave a briefing last week that hinted Labour may be less affected by recession than people think: the biggest victims are in Lib Dem and Tory seats, probably because they are richer and people have more to lose. But the wider message is that while the Tories learn how to build coalitions of support, Labour is learning how to lose them.
Some of this is subtle. Communities are more than building blocks for party leaders to play with; many people are disillusioned with all parties; elections are not just about economic self-interest. But a pattern repeats itself: small groups of people with much in common are deciding who to support. It is tempting, from inside these groups, to assume that the rest of the country must be thinking much the same. But it won\'t be. The election will take place in 650 different ways in 650 different seats.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ions-politics-marketing-voters
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