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The writer is director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank
“I love the poorly educated.” Donald Trump may have put it in the crudest terms, but the former US president is not alone among politicians on the right to be heartened by growing support among voters without advanced qualifications. The mirror effect on the left has greeted the influx of graduates to its side with as much hand-wringing as celebration — consider Thomas Piketty’s alarm over the colonisation of progressive parties by the “Brahmin left”.
It’s a dynamic familiar across the democratic west. But what is so striking about the education divide in British politics, as Rob Ford demonstrated in his recent report for the Social Market Foundation, is the scale and speed with which it has grown. If a single question could deduce which party a voter supports, asking for their level of qualification would be an excellent proxy (perhaps bettered only by asking your age). Only 10 years ago this question would have proved no help at all.
In 2014, graduates and school-leavers in the UK were just as likely to support the Conservative party as Labour. But despite the latter’s current towering poll lead, it is still doing worse among school-leavers now. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on course for their worst performance with graduates since at least 1979.
Ford’s findings have obvious implications for political strategists. If the Conservatives are to hold power, they need to hold on to those seats still dominated by school-leavers, at the same time fending off the Liberal Democrat challenge in seats in the south of England which have large graduate populations. Conversely, for Labour the short-term task is winning back school-leaver-heavy seats, while recognising that in the long term they benefit from the growing number of graduate-heavy seats.
The societal consequences of the education divide run deeper and are more long-term, however. Underpinning it is a gap in identity and social values. Graduates see their education as core to their identity; they are less likely to see themselves as English or British and more likely to feel European. School-leavers are more authoritarian, more opposed to immigration and more sceptical of environmental policies.
To some extent it is healthy to bring such debates in to the open. But if these divides ossify, they can corrode trust and social cohesion. Finding a way to bring the two sides together, to unite around a shared social and political project, is one of the biggest challenges for Britain’s political leaders in the years ahead.
We must listen and learn from one another, and disagree constructively. On the right, that means resisting inflammatory rhetoric that demonises “elites”. On the left, graduates must learn that being better educated does not make them intrinsically superior.
Labour leader Keir Starmer’s emphasis on universal “respect” — mirroring the approach taken by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — suggests he understands what is at stake. Starmer says he wants to create a society where people like his father, a toolmaker, feel appropriately valued, no longer subject to shame and snobbery.
Yet the tensions in Starmer’s rhetoric highlight the difficulty of achieving that objective. His comments came in the middle of a speech on opportunity, laying out plans to shatter the “class ceiling” and give people a better chance to “get on” in life. But this framing risks reinforcing a meritocratic worldview that inadvertently separates the world into winners and losers. A better approach would be to present educational opportunities in terms of self-realisation — helping every person to be the best version of themselves.
Bridging the education divide is bound to be tricky, but recognising the problem — and avoiding making it worse — is the first step. Politicians must come to see that the education divide is there to be healed, not just exploited.