Abstainers: the coiled spring?

It’s not apathy keeping them at home: it’s anger.

At the last election, 40 per cent did not vote. It’s sometimes called apathy, but during filming, I spoke to Dame Margaret Hodge, who told me it’s something else: raw anger. Fury not just at what the Tories had done, but a lack of faith that voting in the election would make anything better. The 2016 Brexit referendum was such a surprise because pollsters had just sampled active voters, but on the day, abstainers came out in force.

Sophie, one of the youngest and quietest in our Solihull focus group, was a case in point, saying she did not vote last time. “I think I was losing trust over the years,” she said. “Whatever they want to do, they'll do. They've proven that. We've lost trust just completely now.” But Farage was changing her mind. “I think if I was to (vote), I'd probably vote Reform, it's a chance of hope.”

This is a blind spot because abstainers are typically ignored by pollsters. In the Blair era, Margaret Hodge sought to persuade her party that they needed to listen more to abstainers, and she tried. Here’s what she told me:-

“It wasn't apathy that had kept people at home. It was anger. They were angry because we weren't really confronting the issues that mattered to them. We weren’t talking about immigration. We weren’t building council homes. As a result, in a community where they had been used to their children getting a council house when they grew up, that was no longer the case. It was that anger that concerned me, which, in 2006, found a home in that people voted for the BNP.”

It’s also worth sharing her proposed remedy for abstainers: don’t attack the challengers. Take the harder route: work hard to win them over.

“Our job was really to regain trust. That's how I approached it. I wasn't going to regain their trust if I was starting to attack them for voting BNP. So I spent all my energy, I completely changed the way I did my politics. My political activity in the borough, everything, was about reconnecting with voters. I stopped going to town hall shindigs, I stopped cutting ribbons, I stopped so many party meetings or trade union meetings. Everything I did had to pass what I call my ‘reconnection test’. Would it help me connect with people?"