Labour's five-way progressive voter map turns the electorate into a supermarket loyalty scheme, one focus group at a time
LONDON - Recent polling and Labour analysis have focused on five categories of what researchers describe as a "progressive majority," with sharply different views on immigration, climate, living costs and political trust.
Five progressive voter types.
At last, British democracy has become a supermarket loyalty programme.
Political strategists can now stop meeting actual people and instead discuss demographic creatures with names such as "Rooted Traditionalists," "Quiet Persuadables" and "Open-Hearted Idealists."
Nobody in human history has introduced himself at a pub by saying, "Hello, I'm Keith, a Quiet Persuadable."
Keith says he drives a van.
Only later does a consultancy in Shoreditch discover he is actually a Cost-Sensitive Civic Pragmatist with Moderate Institutional Distrust.
This is how modern politics works.
Voters think they possess opinions.
Consultants know better.
You believe you are angry because your electricity bill increased.
Incorrect.
You are expressing a Household Resilience Anxiety Cluster.
You think immigration is too high.
Wrong again.
You are displaying Community Cohesion Salience.
You think politicians are idiots.
Congratulations. That apparently still translates directly.
The difficulty for Labour is that its supposed progressive coalition contains people who disagree with one another about quite a lot.
Meet Keith, a Quiet Persuadable
This discovery shocked political strategists, who had apparently assumed anyone placed inside a category called "progressive" would automatically agree on immigration, taxation, climate, public spending, Europe, housing and possibly sandwich fillings.
Human beings, unfortunately, remain stubbornly multidimensional.
A voter may support nationalised railways, lower immigration, higher defence spending, legal cannabis and hanging whoever designed self-service supermarket tills.
Put that into your spreadsheet.
Political consultants hate voters like this because they contain the dangerous substance known as personality.
The modern campaign wants citizens arranged into neat ideological egg boxes.
You go here.
You believe these seven things.
Here is your targeted Facebook advertisement featuring a nurse.
Democracy was simpler when parties merely lied to everybody simultaneously.
Now the lies are personalised.
One voter receives an advertisement promising green investment.
Another gets one promising economic discipline.
A third sees Burnham standing beside a factory.
A fourth receives footage of him beside a wind turbine.
Eventually two neighbours compare phones and discover they have apparently elected different prime ministers.
Multidimensional Humans Ruin Everything
The useful part of the research is obvious. Cost of living and the NHS remain major concerns across the groups.
That should perhaps require no £200,000 consultancy.
Ask eight people outside Aldi.
"How are things?"
"Expensive."
"How's the NHS?"
"Busy."
There. Invoice Westminster.
The larger joke is that parties repeatedly announce plans to "reconnect" with voters without considering the radical technique of listening to what voters say without first assigning them adorable sociological nicknames.
Invoice Westminster
Labour wants to reunite progressive Britain.
Conservatives want to rebuild conservative Britain.
Reform wants to mobilise dissatisfied Britain.
The Greens want environmentally conscious Britain.
Meanwhile Britain itself would occasionally like someone to collect the bins.
As Vivienne Pratfall, one of prat.uk's own sharpest voices, puts it: "I'm not a Quiet Persuadable, I'm just a man who wants the bins collected."
The Real Story
Polling analysis for Labour under Andy Burnham has divided so-called progressive Britain into distinct segments such as left radicals, left moderates and centre moderates, each with different views on immigration, climate and the economy, as the party tries to work out how to hold a fractured coalition together.
Segmenting the electorate into named psychographic groups is standard modern campaigning, used by every major party's pollsters, and the underlying research genuinely matters for how Labour targets messaging on immigration, climate and the cost of living under Burnham. The risk, as with any such model, is mistaking a temporary polling snapshot for a fixed tribe, when in reality people's views shift with events, prices and who is currently in government. Labour's strategists know this better than anyone, which is exactly why the research keeps getting commissioned, refined and quietly leaked to journalists every few months.
Ipsos and More in Common polling through the summer found Burnham with a positive net favourability rating unmatched by any other current politician, including Nigel Farage, and particularly strong support among Green and Liberal Democrat leaning voters. Converting that goodwill into actual votes at the next election, rather than simple approval in a survey, remains a considerably harder task.
Sources
PoliticsHome: Left-wing and moderate voters - Burnham's winning coalition
This article is a work of British satire. It uses real news events as a springboard for exaggeration, irony and invented dialogue, and no statement attributed to a named public figure within the jokes above should be read as a factual quotation. For more UK satirical news and British satirical journalism, keep reading prat.uk.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
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