4 July 2024 is the Election Day in the United Kingdom. The position of the ruling party, the Conservatives, has not been looking very strong since the early 2022, if the voting intentions poll are to be believed. To be fair- there is little surprize in this: the Conservative Party have been at the steering wheel, so to speak, for the past 14 years (from 2010) and, looking back, for another 18 years in the late 20th century (1979-1997). All the way back to the mid-1940s, the Labour-dominated periods of British history appear like relatively short stunts, mostly 1-6 years long, looking a lot like a little dance of desperation with the Conservatives that the British public performs from time to time. The longest period that the Labour party managed to rule continuously in this time was under Tony Blair/Gordon Brown: 13 years (1997-2010). Telescopically speaking, between the end of the second World War and year 2024 (almost 80 years), the Labour party ruled for about one third of that period, and the Conservative party ruled for two thirds of it. Is Britain facing another short period of excitement under Labour?
It is difficult to prophesize. The Conservatives have not been trending high in voting intention polls recently. A certain degree of dissatisfaction with them was well-felt already in the late 2021. Political turmoil surrounding the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss in September 2022 seems to have further reduced their popularity. Though the current predicament of the Conservatives is not just that the British electorate wants to punish them for a short while by pretending to love the Labour all of the sudden. The Labour gained something on the basis of the deteriorating popularity of the Conservatives, that is true. However, it is also important to note that there is a new political force in the UK, Reform UK, that positions itself as a bold, tough and authentic version of the Conservatives. Their stance on immigration, British values, law and order and woke culture should be attractive to all those who wanted (and never managed) to see a similar political programme carried out by the Conservative party. What is more: Reform UK is led by Nigel Farage, a political leader that has under his belt an unambiguous political success. Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, known as Brexit, is something that Farage can reasonably claim credit for. Not many politicians can present similarly-sized successes.
The bottom line, furnished by YouGov: on 3 July 2024, a day before the election, the Labour party attracted 39% of British voters whilst the Conservative party attracted 22% of them. Is this a done deal then for the Labour party? Not sure-all I can say, and that is because Reform UK seems to appeal to 15%. Given the fact that (1) potential voters on the Right side of the political map tend to under-report themselves and (2) miracles happen every day, I would not rule out political outcomes other than the Labour party victory.
And what of the British Jews? Where are they in all this? In the recent report, published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research/JPR, Jews are not too different from the British electorate as a whole. By and large. Among Jews, the Conservative party is not as popular as the Labour party at present, and the distance separating these voting preferences is about 20 percent units, very similar to the British electorate as a whole. Going back, it is clear that the British Jewish preferences changed over the last 5 years, also in a way that resembles the change seen in the British population as a whole; meaning, a growing disenchantment with the Conservative Party. It must be said, parenthetically, that surveying Jews has never been easy due to their very small numbers in the general population and surveying Jewish voting preferences presents additional difficulties. Most surveys of Jewish populations in Europe suffer from a degree of selectivity in them. The pollsters, more often than not, survey the more communally-attached, synagogue-affiliated Jews, by means of convenience samples. This inevitably affects the results as patterns of voting are related to degree of religiosity and/or traditionalism: as JPR report makes it plain, the strictly Orthodox and mainstream Orthodox voters are still very much Conservative-leaning. In this case, JPR has put a very considerable effort into ‘getting thing right’, i.e. making sure that selectivity of the polls used to produce the Jewish voting intention figures is ‘neutralised’ and the results reflect the view of the British Jewish population as whole , rather than the more traditional segment of it. In short, there are good reasons to believe what you see in graphs below (sourced from the JPR report).
6% of Jews intend to vote Reform UK. This is a smaller figure than the one observed in the British electorate as a whole but not negligible still. Does this surprise you? It should not , really, given that Reform UK is equally popular with other minorities in Britain. In a survey of ethnic minorities conducted by YouGov, 7% of ethnic minority voters declared the intention to vote for Reform UK. Incidentally, the voting pattern of the Indian minority, the closest minority to Jews in terms of socio-economic positioning in Britain, is strikingly similar to the one exhibited by Jews. At the same time, both Jewish and Indian patterns are very different from those displayed by the British Pakistani/Bangladeshi (an approximation of the Muslim voting preferences), dominated by the combination of the Labour and the Green party. They are also very different from the pattern seen among the Black British, marked by the very strong hold of the Labour Party and marginal positions held by anyone else really. Note that Reform UK has a noticeable presence in all minority groups although it is not as strong as in British population as a whole.
There is quite a bit to ‘unpick’ there…what drives these preferences? Significant majorities among all ethnic groups indicate that the cost of living and the state of the health services are most important to them and determine the way they vote. We learn that much from the YouGov survey of ethnic minorities. ‘The situation in Gaza and Israel’ matters close to nothing to Black British (3% mentioned this as an issue that impacts on their voting preferences) and relatively little to Indians (18%). About 40% of Pakistani /Bangladeshi relate to ‘Gaza and Israel’ as impactful; it is less important than the cost of living (60%), but still. We do not have a similar insight into the drivers of Jewish voting but, given how close Indians and Jews are in voting preferences, this part of the picture may well be similar too. But this is a different story for a different day.