THE events of the Labour Party conference—in particular, the policies announced by Ed Miliband in his speech on Tuesday—have provoked much reflection on the shape of British public opinion. “Ed’s speech has shown that he has pretty much abandoned trying to woo the swing voter,” argues Ben Mitchell on Labour Uncut. Mr Miliband is “vacating the centre ground,” adds John Rentoul of the Independent. “This was Ed Miliband trusting his instincts, which is bold because they take him away from the centre ground that strategists are so fixated upon,” says the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman. Mr Miliband "is not challenging his party's comfort zone," writes Philip Collins in today's Times. But as I have noted on Blighty before, there is no simple, static 50/50 (or 60/40, or 70/30) right-left split in British politics. Nor is there a static three-way split between right-wing voters, left-wing voters and centrist swing voters.



First, it is not as one-dimensional as left and right. Polls suggest the average Briton thinks the government wastes taxpayers’ money but wants the rich to be taxed more: right- or left-wing? He values private enterprise but wants to renationalise the railways and the energy companies (which, as George Eaton puts it, puts him to the left of Ed Miliband): is he right- or left-wing? He thinks the welfare state is too generous but wants to ban advertising aimed at children: is he right- or left-wing?



Second, British politics is a shifting kaleidoscope of views; no coalition of voters is fixed. Jobs move, and people with them. Rhythms of work and family life change. Social structures and attitudes evolve. Different political priorities rise and fall. Old voters die and young ones join the electorate. The ethnic makeup of different parts of the country changes. The notion of a static "centre ground", inhabited by the apocryphal "swing voter" is absurd.



Witness the shifting party coalitions in America (best charted in the far-sighted 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority”) and in Germany (where last Sunday’s election accentuated the decline of the SPD and FDP and the rise of the CDU). The lesson is that the designs of party bosses are no more influential than the tectonic plates moving beneath their feet. That is why parties need to refresh their politics and bring on new leaders at least once a generation: they need new faces to appeal to new coalitions of voters.



The true complexity of Britain’s political make-up is evident in quantitative work like Project Red Alert by Lord Ashcroft, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, and Labour’s Next Majority by Marcus Roberts, deputy general secretary of the Fabian Society. Both look at the distribution of voters and their propensity to vote Labour—and show that the electorate available to the party in 2015, though no smaller, will be different from those of the past.



In his study Mr Roberts argues that Mr Miliband’s leadership of the party, far from abandoning the “swing voters” it needs, has set out to woo them. Its potential electoral coalition comprises at least 40% of the electorate, he argues: the Labour base (about 28% of voters), former Lib Dem voters (6-7%), young and new voters (3%), former non-voters (2-3%) and former Conservative voters (1%).



What do these people look like? And what would an electoral offer spanning this coalition look like? It helps to think about their circumstances and priorities:



Labour base (28%)

Sue lives in an industrial port in a Labour seat narrowly held by the party against the Tories in the last election. She is a bus driver who always finds the time to vote on election days. She does not think the Tories and Lib Dems look out for people like her, so habitually votes Labour. When the party was in power she benefited from minimum wage legislation and (often experiencing anti-social behaviour on her bus) approved of Labour's tough criminal justice policies.



Lib Dem-Labour switchers (6-7%)

Ken is a retired head-teacher who voted for Tony Blair in 1997. He liked the party's investment in public services but was unsettled by the private-sector involvement that accompanied it. He loathed the party's authoritarian criminal justice policies and particularly objected to the introduction of tuition fees (fearing they would dissuade his pupils from applying for university), so voted Liberal Democrat in 2005 and 2010. He lives in a Midlands commuter town, a Labour-Tory marginal.



Young and new voters (3%)

Lucy is in her first year at university in a Lib Dem marginal in a large northern city. She prides herself on being open-minded on issues like race, sex and drugs—topics that make her religious parents uncomfortable—but is worried about paying off her tuition loan when she enters the workforce (she wants to work as a surveyor). Friends from her secondary school who did not go on to university are struggling to get stable jobs—though she frowns on the ones who are claiming benefits.



Non-voters (2-3%)

Mark lives in a Tory marginal on the edge of a small post-industrial town in an otherwise rural area. He works in a supermarket on a zero-hour contract and rents a house with his girlfriend, who is currently on unemployment benefit. Rising heating and rent bills have pushed him deep into debt. Mark worries about his children not having enough to do after school; and about the prospects for his eldest, who will soon take her GCSEs. He is uncomfortable about the Polish supermarket that has opened at the end of his road and thinks most politicians ineffective and (Labour especially) wasteful.

Conservative-Labour switchers (1%)

Tom, a Sikh voter, lives with his family in an inner suburb of London (a Lib Dem marginal) and works in IT. He voted for the Conservatives in 2010 as he felt Labour had managed the economy badly and was worried about his pension. He also liked David Cameron's messages about the NHS and childcare. But rising prices (rail fares on his cramped commute are a particular gripe) mean he has had to take out a second credit card and cut back on non-essentials like an annual foreign holiday; he feels like he is struggling. His parents were born in India and moved to Britain before he was born, so the harsh tone of some Tory policies on immigration concerns him.

Understanding these groups (and the proportions in which Labour can aim to win them over) does much to explain Mr Miliband’s politics, and dispel claims that he is retreating to the party’s rump electorate. True, he is not pursuing the sort of voters that Tony Blair wooed. But what some commentators miss is that he is pursuing a different sort of voter in their place. Understanding “Miliband’s people” makes it easier to understand the politics of the man himself. The archetypes above—Sue, Ken, Lucy, Mark and Tom—show the hurdles Labour is attempting to clear: • It must build a cross-class coalition of blue-collar voters and middle-class liberals (reconciling Ken’s politics with that of Mary, for example, or Mark’s politics with that of Lucy).





• Some in this coalition (public sector workers and welfare claimants in particular) would prefer higher taxes and a lighter austerity programme; others, concerned by the deficit, would not. • On a range of social issues—crime, immigration, welfare, cultural politics—different components of the coalition hold diametrically opposed views. Obtaining more than about 35% of the vote (possibly enough for a small majority, but not for a convincing election win) means mobilising the new-voter and non-voter segments of the coalition. These people can be hard to reach: they are often footloose and, having not voted before, are not on get-out-the-vote lists. They lack the habit of voting and many, for cultural or economic reasons, are disengaged from politics.









In practice, these imperatives mean:





• The party must focus its efforts on door-knocking, recruiting more members and involving non-voters in campaigns on local issues. Hence the high hopes Labour’s leaders have of Arnie Graf, a community organiser from Baltimore (

see here for a good explanation

), and of Mr Miliband’s knack for pavement politics (taking questions from voters in town squares and high streets, as he did during the 2013 local election campaign).





• Labour does not need to worry too much about cultivating right-wing parts of the media. This calculation makes it easier for Mr Miliband to attack what he identifies as vested interests, such as the Murdoch media businesses.





• It must find popular leftish policies that bridge its coalition of potential voters (or at least, forge an accommodation between different components). In particular, cost-of-living issues fulfil this role. • Ideally, these should unite Mr Miliband’s coalition while driving a wedge between parts of the Conservative coalition. Consider the policies in Mr Miliband’s speech in this context. Freezing energy bills unites Sue and Tom and but divides free-market Tories from blue-collar conservatives. Building houses unites Mark and Lucy but drives a wedge between Tory NIMBYs and those who are (or whose children are) struggling to get on the housing ladder. Extending the school day unites Tom and Mark but splits modernising “One Nation” Tories from more libertarian or socially conservative ones.









The roots of this coalition lie in the living standards crisis. In the wake of the crash of 2008 middle class voters find themselves facing the same sorts of insecurities as working class voters. The issues of housing, utility bills, transport costs, unemployment and declining wages means that previously divided groups are now responsive to the same messages. These will likely focus on work, family and place as Labour seeks to offer the specific and tangible changes to the problems they face everyday. [...] Quite simply, the same problems that working class 'small-c' conservative voters (be they Conservative 2010 voters, working class non-voters or recent UKIP converts) face are also faced by middle-class 'liberal leftish' voters. Hence the need and opportunity for a politics that appeals to both.

As Mr Roberts writes:

The Conservatives pooh-pooh this strategy, and have locked on to its weaknesses: it is no coincidence that they plan to campaign on precisely those issues that drive a wedge between parts of the Miliband coalition—welfare and what one might call "culture wars" issues (immigration, social and educational liberalism, Europe and the like). But some Tories quietly fret that Mr Miliband’s policies and politics enable him to fish in a larger pool of voters than they would like to admit; one potentially large enough to give him a solid majority and a mandate to do the things he wants to do.



That should give Mr Miliband’s critics pause for reflection, too. Many, protagonists of the Blair era in particular, want the party’s new leader to ape the old king (“the cult of Tony,” some call it)—as if the politics and electorate of 1997 were as apt today as they were 16 years ago. As Mr Roberts notes, some of those who will vote in 2015 were not even alive when the 1997 election took place. The country has changed—so Labour should too, say the Milibandites, quoting Mr Blair himself (speaking in 1994): "Parties that do not change, die, and this party is a living movement not an historical monument. If the world changes and we don’t then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles and ossify into dogma."