In the first episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a new podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we explore when the relationship between class and voting broke down and why.

In 1967, legendary political scientist Peter Pulzer wrote: "Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail."

His assertion reflected a long period in political history in which class identity mapped fairly neatly onto our voting habits. There were of course exceptions but, in short, if you were working class, you voted Labour and if you were middle or upper class, you voted Conservative.

John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, says the working class were more concerned about inequality, and the middle class were more concerned with growing the economy.

The Labour party has continued to grapple with this question into the 21st century too, but for the most part, that underlying pattern stood: working class people voted Labour, and middle class people voted Conservative. Until the 2019 election.

By 2019 class voting seems to have "completely disappeared", says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, and it was hard to see class as a driving factor in the way people vote.

This was the year in which many working class voters turned away from Labour and towards the Conservatives. But the divide was more about Brexit than class. The Conservatives' unusual electoral coalition of that year was united by Boris Johnson's slogan "get Brexit done".

If you look closely, however, class had not entirely left the political arena that year, as Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol explains. After the 2019 election, she conducted focus groups in red wall Labour seats that had shifted Conservative.

So what happened in 2024? While the full analysis of the vote is still ongoing, we already know the turnout was one of the lowest in history at 60%. From the early analysis he's seen, Curtice says:

And yet, Labour's next election success could depend on these voters - so much could change in the next five years. The new government would be wise to pay attention to the needs of the working class communities that feel left behind. As Geoffrey Evans, professor in the sociology of politics at the University of Oxford puts it:

For more analysis, listen to the full episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics on The Conversation Documentaries.

A transcript is available on Apple Podcasts.

Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics is produced and mixed by Anouk Millet for The Conversation. It's supported by the National Centre for Social Research.

Newsclips in the episode from ITV News, The Telegraph, Guardian News, Elections UK, Sky News, TRT World and CNN-News18.

Listen to The Conversation Documentaries via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.