How Labour Can Win Over UKIP Voters

(Top photo: Simon Cooper EMPICS Entertainment)

In the aftermath of the Labour Party's historic by-election defeat in Copeland on Thursday, opinion pollster James Morris highlighted the extent of the malaise facing the party: only 16 percent of working class voters would choose the party of labour at a general election. Morris also nodded to something that some of us have been shouting about for ages: this malaise started well over a decade before Jeremy Corbyn took charge.

By forensically targeting aspirational middle class voters – "eight people sipping wine in Kettering", as Peter Mandelson's former assistant Derek Draper put it – 13 years of New Labour in power devastated its historic base.

Between 1997 and 2005, Labour lost 4 million votes, a heavy proportion of which were among its traditional working class electoral base. In 1997, half of the skilled working class (designated "C2") voted Labour, down to just 30 percent in 2015. The pattern is similar for the unskilled working class (DE) – almost 60 percent in 1997, down to 37 percent in 2015. A staggering decline.

The problem was noted, but went unaddressed. The week after the 2015 election, when Corbyn was still a little-known backbencher, Labour MP Jon Trickett called it a "cataclysmic decline" and accused his colleagues of "fundamentally failing to understand why the Labour Party exists". The clue is in the fucking name.

It's not enough to simply use the phrase "hard working families" to connect with those very people. If Labour wants to reverse its terminal decline, it needs some bold, grandstanding policies that strike a chord with embattled workers.

Last week the BBC reported on Crisp, a Swedish software consultancy company with 40 employees and, as of the last few years, no CEO. They were all very Swedish about it – speaking impeccable English, calm, self-assured and understandably proud of the fact that working without a boss has freed them up to get on with their work in peace.

Not everyone was so keen on the idea. "You have to have a leader," chided Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman in the BBC film, possibly thinking about her $19.6 million annual earnings while her employees face foreclosure on their houses, because they hadn't been paid properly, according to a report by Business Insider. "Many times, a decision needs to be made," she said, "and, in the end, at the highest levels, that decision maker has to be me."

After the film had aired, YouGov asked the British public two questions about what they thought about the prospect of working without a boss, and the results were astonishing. The first question outlined the Crisp model (without a CEO, staff are empowered to make key decisions, and are trusted to discuss among themselves) and asked: "Is this is a better or worse way to run a business?" The second question asked was more direct: "Would you work better with no boss over your head?" The results were unequivocal. Respondents said the boss-free model was a better way of running a business by 54 percent to 12 percent (there were a lot of "don't knows") – while 44 percent to 24 percent said they would work better without a boss.

Where the YouGov survey got even more interesting, though, was in the demographic breakdown of the answers. What kind of Britons were more likely to endorse a working life without a boss? Older people – by some distance. Lower social classes, in C2DE grades – which is not surprising, as they are liable to get dicked on by bosses more often. People outside of London – especially in the "Midlands and Wales" and "North" categories. To anyone who has pored over demographic data about the EU referendum vote as much as this nerd, these are the people who voted for Brexit – but wait for the kicker.

YouGov also broke down respondents' answers by their voting intention: Labour and the SNP both registered higher anti-boss feeling than the average, as you might expect from their more working-class, more left-wing demographics. But UKIP voters – yes: UKIP voters, the supposed Captain Mainwarings of the British electorate; sturdy, old-fashioned advocates of hierarchy and deference – were actually way out in front as the most boss-hating group in Britain.

This news should be like a siren going off in Labour HQ, at a time when they are in desperate need of messages to connect them to the voters they shed during the 2000s. In December, we were promised that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership would undergo a "populist relaunch", trying to ride the Trump and Brexit wave for change, pushing Labour as for "the people" versus "the establishment", but from a more inclusive, left-wing perspective. But aside from some more Bernie Sanders-like tweets from Corbyn, a speech in which he declared "Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement" and a brief and poorly-articulated intervention on curbing high pay, this proposed change has been notable by its absence in 2017.

Arguably a work-based campaign could have been of use to Labour in the Stoke-on-Trent by-election, where they fought off the UKIP threat last Thursday, no doubt aided by Paul Nuttall's self-sabotage.

The largest local employer in Stoke is gambling website Bet365, which employs over 3,000 people. The website Glassdoor aggregates anonymous reviews of the company from employees, and while the company's CEO has an 80 percent approval rating on the site (she is connected to Stoke City football club and took home £117.5 million last year), if you exclude Bet365's higher-paid staff, like software engineers, and look at comments from customer service staff, paid around the UK's median salary of £22,000 pa, the comments are typical of life in Britain's post-industrial service economy; the kind of jobs that have replaced those in factories. "This company is a dictatorship", says one. "Management are bullies," another. "Tyrannical supervisors and managers," says a third. "You will be treated like trash," according to another. There are numerous references to harsh disciplinary action, terrible working conditions and excessively long shifts: "It is a soul wrecking place to work".

VICE approached Bet365 for a response to the allegations made on the site but received no response.

The people making those allegations need to be reached out to – and these grievances need addressing. The idea of "populism" has been much debated and much misunderstood in the last 18 months, but in essence it relies on the identifying and uniting of "the people" against a common enemy, real or imagined. The worrying rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump – but also Geert Wilders in Holland, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine le Pen in France and UKIP in England and Wales – desperately needs challenging head-on, with a common enemy that is not "immigrants" or "Islam". That enemy should be "bosses".

The academic Will Davies wrote one of the most clear-headed and insightful pieces on the EU referendum in his "Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit" analysis – in particular, on the feeling of hopelessness that led to the Leave vote:

"The slogan 'take back control' was a piece of political genius. It worked on every level between the macroeconomic and the psychoanalytic. Think of what it means on an individual level to rediscover control … What was so clever about the language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to [a] feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it. The promise had nothing to do with economics or policy, but everything to do with the psychological allure of autonomy and self-respect. Farage's political strategy was to take seriously communities who'd otherwise been taken for granted for much of the past 50 years."

Boss-less workers co-operatives take many forms, from the revolutionary farmers' communist utopia in southern Spain I wrote a book about, to the altogether more hygge Swedish tech company Crisp. But what would Labour's practical proposals be?

Beyond the fine French tradition of chasing bosses over fences and ripping the shirts off their backs, think-tank IPPR have followed up the YouGov poll with some sober and practical thoughts on how reforms might help democratise decision-making at work. Even before we get to issues like the rising precarity of the modern British workplace, where the number of employees on zero-hours contracts is fast approaching 1 million, the situation in British workplaces is desperately bleak, as the IPPR explain:

"One third of employees report being afraid in some way at work, less than half feel satisfied with the amount of involvement they have in decision-making at work, while on average real earnings are still below where they were in 2007."

The conclusion for the embattled Labour leadership should be clear: side with the people, and against multi-millionaire bosses exploiting the vast majority of British citizens who are struggling just to get by. Tell British voters that it is you who will help them take back control – not from the EU, not from migrants, but from their bosses.

@danhancox