Farage considered ‘more working class’ than Starmer, polling finds
Reform leader Nigel Farage is seen by voters to have more solid working class credentials than Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, fresh polling by More in Common has found.
19 per cent see the Reform leader as a member of the working class. For Starmer, the number is 17 per cent.
This follows Farage’s claim to have replaced Labour as the “party of the working class.” He then unveiled a litany of welfare policy proposals, paired with plans to slash taxes.
While those polled did not consider either of the leaders to be particularly working class, they see Starmer as having had a more privileged upbringing, and that Farage better represents the UK’s working class population.
According to polling by YouGov, 39 per cent of the UK’s working class would vote Reform UK, followed by 17 percent which would vote Labour.
Band for band
Farage’s critics have pointed out that the son of a stockbroker, who attended a top London private school, and then became a trader himself, might not have had a traditional working class experience.
However, only a quarter of those polled were aware that Farage worked as an investment trader before entering a career in politics. 59 per cent knew Starmer was a lawyer – a past that has entered the cultural zeitgeist as well.
A majority of Britons do not think the party leaders’ CVs affect their ability to represent ordinary people. However, 25 per cent say Starmer’s past as a lawyer makes him less trustworthy on economic matters.
Farage did not attend university, and Starmer only completed his postgraduate degree at the University of Oxford, compared to a long list of Oxbridge graduate-PMs that preceded him.
Politics is considered to be a particularly difficult field to enter without an elite private school education. In the 1920s, Ramsay MacDonald was the first, and in the 1990s, John Major was the second (and last) Prime Minister to be able to lay claim to being “authentically” working class, according to the Museum of the Prime Minister, and to Exeter Professor of Social Mobility, Lee Elliot Major.
How groups vote
Around half of Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters say neither Starmer or Farage speaks for the working class.
As for Kemi Badenoch; only 12 per cent see the Tory leader as being a part of the working class.
Class is one of the UK’s most prominent social divides, meaning that voters will often support parties along those lines, and will often be appealed to through class-specific language and imagery.
According to research by Oxford politics professors James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans, this has historically been the case, even though the salience of class has been on the wane in the past few decades.
In terms of gender, Farage is also the only politician to have a net approval rating of zero among men, meaning those who view him negatively cancel out those who view him positively.
In comparison, Starmer’s approval ratings are at -34 for men, and -40 for women.
Reform’s branding as a party for the people might be working, as ‘publicans’ in Blackpool launched a ‘Reform UK pub’ earlier this year.