Stevenage Woman: A trip down memory lane that highlights what little progress we’ve made

What to do with a politics blog while Parliament is in recess? When reviewing the news this morning I stumbled upon a wonderful line by Georgi Gospodinov (writing in the Guardian): “A deficit of future always unlocks huge reserves of nostalgia for the past”.

With local elections upon us, the current national mood chimes with this statement: there is a desire to return to a time of greater economic security while the future appears glum.

The erosion of living standards faced by so many has married with wider structural problems that successive governments have made little progress addressing; regional inequality and unaffordable housing to name two. The result is that too many have too little room for optimism, and it feels like tomorrow will be poorer than today. 

This theme runs through a new piece of analysis by Labour Together that looks at voter groups that could decide the next election. This has identified ‘Stevenage Woman’ as a priority target group alongside ‘Workington Man’, the abstraction of a Red Wall voter that switched to the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election.

So, who is Stevenage Woman, and what’s new about her? Well, it turns out that she’s not very new at all. Think of her as the daughter of 1997’s Worcester Woman who has moved south. For those unfamiliar with British voter cliches, this is the archetypal voter in a traditional bellwether seat or a ‘Disillusioned Suburban Voter’. Working with YouGov, Labour Together has recast this voter for 2023. They claim that the voter has the following characteristics:

• They are young and economically insecure.
• They are unlikely to own their own home and are worried about their finances.
• They are mostly female and white British with a significant ethnic minority presence.
• They take a balanced position on most issues, lean left on the economy and right on societal issues.

Stevenage, like Worcester, Loughborough and Dartford forms a group of constituencies that have backed the party that formed a government at elections running back to 1983 and beyond.

The abstraction of Stevenage Woman is not only about these seats, however; Labour Together’s analysis indicates that voters with the characteristics of Stevenage Woman form the largest voter group in 430 of the 573 constituencies in England and Wales.

Labour’s huge poll lead seems to rest on these voters as much as it does with the Red Wall voters that are increasingly turning away from the Conservative Party. Both are dissatisfied and unhappy with the status quo.

The very fact that voters in places that have traditionally been seen as relatively prosperous (and who bought into the optimism of the New Labour years) are in such a precarious position speaks volumes of the quality of recent governments.  While Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are evenly matched in polling on who would be the best Prime Minister, their two parties couldn’t be further apart. The Conservatives’ baggage of the last 13 years very much counts against them.

If this blog hasn’t touched enough on nostalgia, our politicians are also harking back to the past in their own way. Moving away from the circus of the Johnson and Truss eras, and from the division caused by Brexit has clearly been a priority for Rishi Sunak during his early time in office. Economic stability and migration are grounds on which he feels surer of himself. Sir Keir Starmer meanwhile has tried to use his platform to ‘speak for the nation’ and has adopted stances from the New Labour playbook.

The local elections next month will provide indications of how much work each of them and their parties need to do before the next general election. The volume of work that a future government needs to do couldn’t be clearer: today’s target voters are more worried than yesterday’s, and too many people have too many reasons not to be cheerful.

The Advocacy Local team will be providing weekly coverage of the local elections through our Politics and Planning Newsletter. We’ll be looking at the latest election headlines from across the country and providing in-depth reporting on key races around Brighton and Hove, Essex, Greater Manchester and the South West, and in local authorities with recent planning controversies. You can sign up to the newsletter here.