Shortly after the 2015 general election, Jonathan Wheatley, a political scientist at the University of Zurich, published an analysis of voters’ attitudes which overturned conventional Westminster wisdom. Labour had suffered a crushing defeat, the story went, because the British people refused to be led towards Ed Miliband’s left-wing “Marxist universe”. David Cameron’s victory was a common-or-garden win for traditional, stolidly English economic conservatism. Nothing to see here.
Wheatley’s research confounded such complacency. On a conventional left-right spectrum he located Ukip voters slightly to the left of the Liberal Democrats, with both joining Labour and the Greens inside the left hemisphere. Not only that, but considerable numbers of Tory voters, too, were economically left of centre (the converse of which could not be said of Labour voters); the clear inference being that there was a “progressive majority” for centre-left economics. Far from being an electoral albatross, Ed Miliband’s cost-of-living platform should have romped home.
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