Pro-Corbyn commentators often claim that Jewish alienation from Labour can be put down to a right-wing or middle-class bias in the community. A new academic study finds that this is false
September 13, 2019 15:10
Since 2015 there has been an unprecedented degree of interest in the relationship between Britain’s Jews and its two main political parties. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and the ongoing crisis of antisemitism has placed Anglo-Jewry at the forefront of the national political conversation in a way that until recently would have been scarcely imaginable.
However, little hard evidence actually exists on the political preferences of British Jews.
Some opinion polls, including those published in these pages, have indicated that the Tories are the preferred choice for a large majority of Jewish voters, but the extent to which this can be attributed to Labour’s current travails has not been robustly addressed.
Moreover, this has not stopped commentators sympathetic to Labour suggesting that other factors, such as the number of Jews found in the middle classes, mean a majority of Jewish voters are more inclined to support the Tories irrespective of Mr Corbyn or antisemitism within Labour.
Equally, there have been suggestions that a strong inclination towards the Conservatives existed before the current crisis, during Ed Miliband’s leadership.
Our academic study sought to clarify these two points. This was the most in-depth study of its kind, enabling us to see the diversity of views on the parties and their leaders within the community, as well as investigate with more certainty whether there is something particular about the Labour party post 2015 which is off-putting to British Jews.
Firstly, our study corroborates what has been observed elsewhere; that Jewish voters overwhelmingly prefer the Tories to Labour.
When given the choice, only 15 per cent of respondents declared a preference for Labour, less than a quarter of the number intending to vote Conservative.
Our survey also asked respondents to our study to rank the two main parties on a 0-10 scale by their likelihood to vote for them in future. Once again, the difference between the parties was dramatic. Almost two thirds of those surveyed reported being unlikely to vote Labour (46 per cent saying that they would never do so under any circumstances) whereas a similar figure told us that they would be likely to opt for the Tories. When compared to the UK average, this equates to UK Jews being over 20 per cent more likely to vote Tory, and over 20 per cent more likely to reject Labour.
Arguments that this may be more to do with other social characteristics prevalent among Jews appear to be wide of the mark.
We controlled for several factors which are typically associated with supporting one party over another; age, gender, region, holding a degree and social class identity.
We did not find any evidence that Jewish voters who are younger, female or who live in London were any less likely to vote Tory, despite these groups being significantly associated with supporting Labour in the wider electorate.
Even a majority of respondents who hold a degree or who identify as working class are more likely to support the Tories, albeit to a lesser extent than other respondents.
In other words, our findings completely contradict the notion that other social characteristics which are associated with supporting the Tories are the key driver of the Conservative leanings of British Jews.
Rather, we show that, if anything, the opposite is closer to the truth: the Tories are the party of choice even for those sections of Anglo-Jewry which would otherwise be anticipated to support Labour, and that in fact there appears to be less diversity of opinion on the basis of demography than there is in the wider electorate.
The antisemitism crisis of recent years, and particularly role of Mr Corbyn as leader, are obvious lines of enquiry in explaining the gulf between the two parties.
We asked respondents to our survey to evaluate both Mr Corbyn and Theresa May, once again on a 0-10 scale. As bad as assessments of the Labour party are, the situation is even worse for its leader. An enormous majority, some 80 per cent of those asked, gave the Labour leader a negative score, with more than half rating him as zero. When compared to the UK as a whole, Mr Corbyn has a “net” approval of minus 70 per cent amongst Jewish voters, compared to just minus 3 per cent in the wider electorate. These startlingly poor evaluations even carry into the small proportion of Jewish voters who still intend to vote Labour, who score Mr Corbyn significantly lower than non-Jewish Labour supporters.
This poor perception of the Labour Party and Mr Corbyn is not necessarily a recent development. It is plausible that strong anti-Labour sentiment may have existed in the community prior to 2015, and more evidence was required.
To this end, we analysed areas with significant populations of Jewish voters, before looking at the change in the share of the vote achieved by both parties for the three election cycles spanning the period before and after Corbyn’s leadership; the 2017 General Election and the local elections in 2016 and 2018.
The results show a consistent pattern. The higher the proportion of Jewish voters in any constituency or ward, the worse Labour candidates perform in each of the three elections. As such — irrespective of how Labour was viewed prior to 2015 — there have significant penalties at the ballot box for Labour under Corbyn in areas with substantial numbers of Jewish voters in a way that was not the case during Ed Miliband’s tenure as leader. Our results tally with the accounts of Labour activists in areas such as Barnet, where Labour’s inability to capture a target council from the Tories was blamed squarely at their failure to deal with anti-Jewish prejudice.
In one sense, finding very low levels of support for Labour and its leader amongst Jewish voters should not come as a surprise for any observer of British politics — yet our findings make it much more difficult for supporters of the Corbyn project to deflect criticism of how they have handled antisemitism in two key ways.
Firstly, any claims that levels of Tory support are largely a product of other socio-economic characteristics are emphatically false — the Conservatives lead even among voters who in the wider electorate possess the social characteristics which are typically associated with voting Labour.
Moreover, that Corbyn personally is viewed so poorly compared to the UK average (including by Jews still open to voting Labour) suggests that he also represents a particular barrier to Jewish voters.
Just as importantly, we can say with confidence that the scale of the difference in support for the two parties is a recent development.
Labour’s consistent electoral underperformance in areas with large numbers of Jewish voters since 2015 suggests that their relationship with Britain’s Jews has significantly deteriorated since this point, regardless of whether a majority of Britain’s Jews opted for the Tories before this juncture.
These findings not only show the Tories to be the party of choice among an overwhelming majority of Jews, but also show the era of Corbyn as a clear nadir in their relationship with Labour.
Andrew Barclay and Maria Sobolewska are politics researchers at the University of Manchester
