Politics: false prophets
By Richard North - October 15, 2024
Pollsters didn’t have a good general election, almost to a man (and they were largely men) over-estimating the Labour lead, some predicting a complete (as opposed to a partial) Tory wipeout.
That isn’t stopping them from commenting on the Tory leadership campaign though, with the great sage Peter Kellner holding forth in the Prospect magazine about whether Jenrick or Badenough can win back lost Tory voters.
For the record, on 30 June – only days before the count, Kellner went against the grain predicting in the Sunday Times a Labour win of 400 seats as against the 411 they actually gained. His figure for the Tories was 155 seats when they actually took 121, while he gave the Lib-Dems 50 when they actually won 72. To Reform, he awarded two seats instead of the five they gained.
With that record, he can lay claim to no great element of perspicacity, but he does have prestige, so he gets pole position when it comes to offering his thoughts.
The sub-heading gives a clue as to the way he is thinking, when he cautions that: “Both leadership candidates should avoid a Reform-lite immigration policy that only helps Nigel Farage”.
In the run-up to his argument, he revisits the general election, noting that the Conservative/Reform split helped Labour win its landslide victory with barely one-third of the national vote.
He’s also done the arithmetic on the alternative scenario where Tory and Reform voters had lined up behind a single candidate. In that event, Labour would have won 144 fewer seats, almost 60 seats short of a majority.
On the other hand, if the Left had united, with Labour, Lib-Dems and Greens all backing a single candidate in each constituency, the result would have been 447 “progressive” MPs and 162 Conservative/Reform MPs. That is not vastly different from the actual 483-126 result.
Overall, says Kellner, more than 15 million people voted for the “progressives”, against the marginally less than 11 million who voted Conservative/Reform. He argues that the reason for this is that the Tories lost almost as many votes to their left this year as to their right.
He cites a post-election survey which found that 23 percent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 voted Reform this year. But another 22 percent voted either Labour (12 percent), Lib-Dem (7 percent) or Green (3 percent).
Thus, Kellner argues, while the Tories need to win back as many Reform voters as they can, they have a problem if they are the only target. A shift to the nationalist right could alienate the potential switch-voters from the likes of the Lib-Dems, who tend to have less robust views on immigration.
With his baselines thus set, Kellner asks if the circle can be squared and there is a way to appeal to both the nationalist voters who switched to Reform, and the more “moderate” internationalists who moved in the opposite direction.
What then follows is a classic illustration of London-centric bubble-speak, where Kellner argues that the whole issue of immigration is bedevilled by misinformation on a massive scale and that the British public, as a whole, don’t want immigration reduced.
He quotes an Ipsos survey, carried out for the lobby group British Future, which asked respondents whether they would like the number of immigrants to be increased, stay the same or reduced in each of 13 specific roles.
In not a single case, Kellner says, do a majority of the general public want the number reduced. The most unpopular immigrants are bankers: 37 percent want their numbers cut. But fewer than one in five voters want immigration reduced in seven of the 13 groups: doctors, nurses, engineers, care home workers, academics, seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers, and computer and software experts.
Among Reform voters, the percentages that want immigration reduced are higher. But even here, the number that want immigration reduced tops 50 percent – and then only narrowly – in just two cases: students and bankers.
In other words, Kellner asserts, much of the apparent hostility to immigration – particularly but not only among Reform voters – is based on false beliefs about what is actually happening today.
However, it is axiomatic of opinion polls that they tend to produce findings which support the prejudices and this is the likely case here. Entirely absent from the questioning is any reference to the admission of dependent, and largely non-productive relatives, who become a burden on public funds.
Nor is there any indication of the effect of the recent finding by the OBR that “low-wage migrant workers”, on 50 percent less than the UK average, is a net fiscal drain from the moment they enter the country. By the time they reach 81, they will have cost the taxpayer £465,000.
When it comes to groups such as doctors, nurses, there is no exploration of public attitudes to increasing the number of training places for UK students, where the existing places are deliberately restricted and vastly over-subscribed.
In this context, it would be instructive to learns of the response to a question that asked whether the government should recruit its medical professionals from the UK, and fill vacancies by increasing the number of training places.
If the comparison was made with stripping third-world countries of their staff, who are often trained to lower standards and where language skills are an ongoing issue, polling results might be very different.
On the basis of the actual survey results, though, Kellner invites our 650 MPs – and especially Jenrick and Badenoch – to conduct a thought experiment. Put the past to one side, he says. Design an immigration policy from scratch: one that would be good for our economy, society and public services, and which, if implemented successfully, would command broad public approval.
He then argues that the polling evidence suggests that the key is to separate out two things: letting in the people we do want to come to Britain (in fact the great majority, when considered job by job), and keeping out those we don’t (in fact a small minority).
But what Kellner is actually saying, by way of a sub-text, is that we need not expect any help from the London bubble when it comes to devising an immigration policy – not that that comes as any great surprise.
Furthermore, there is another extraordinary gap in Kellner’s thinking. He talks of the 15-11 million split in the last election between the “progressives” and the right, arguing that there was a shift from the latter to the former. But, like so many pundits, he takes no account of turnout.
In the 2019 general election, out of a registered electorate of 47,562,702, 32,009,698 actually voted, a turnout 67.3 percent. When it came to this year’s election, only 28,924,507 voted, despite an increased electorate of 48,208,507, representing a turnout of 59.8 percent. On the basis of the 2019 turnout, nearly 4 million voters stayed at home.
This actually puts a different construction on Kellner’s analysis. Rather than attempting to shift voters from one camp to another – and being forced to make concessions to achieve that – the right potentially could achieve a victory just by bringing the stay-at-home voters into their fold.
If they could then enthuse disillusioned voters who had given up on the electoral process, and capture their votes as well, there would be no need to look for a swing from existing voters.
Jenrick, should he be so minded – Badenoch is an unlikely recruit to the cause – he does not have to win back the voters from the “moderate” left. By attracting the stay-at-homes, and beating Farage at his own game, he could still win the election.
And here, there is another element Kellner neglects. In this general election, the Muslim vote took five seats. In 2029, it could take many more, substantially eroding Labour’s vote. This time round, it also split the vote in two constituencies which let the Tory candidate win. That number could also increase.
Kellner wants the new Tory leader to demolish Farage’s “false prospectus”. But, for Jenrick to win the general, if he is elected leader, he would be better off demolishing false prophets.