The British Voter-II Sex, Age and Education

...As David Daiches (who taught English at Cornell University for many years before returning to Cambridge) pointed out some years ago in an article in the Manchester Guardian, by the time an American student of English has finished a good graduate school he has at least the equivalent of a British training in the subject...

...Presumably, the wives are influenced by their Labor voting husbands, while single women are much less likely to reflect the convinced judgments of the men in their class...

...The Parliamentary leadership hopes to solve this problem establishing its clear-cut right to be the party by claiming to represent the Labor electorate and general party membership...

...There are a number of explanations for the conservative voting patterns of women...

...France and West Germany, with populations approximating England's, have university enrollments of 240.000 and 200,000, respectively...

...In most countries, including Britain, those who reached political maturity during the Depression or during World War II tended to be more leftist than those who acquired a political identification in the 1920s or earlier...

...It may be old-fashioned to raise the issue in 1960, but to an outsider the institutions of monarchy, titled aristocracy and the House of Lords also seem important props to political and social conservatism in Britain...

...But given the lesser hold of Anglican belief in England as compared with Catholic faith on the continent, the differences in religious concerns of men and women are not as significant in accounting for their differences in voting patterns...

...As long as access to such positions is a monopoly of a small educated elite, composed of those born to high status and those who have been admitted by virtue of passing a rigid ability test, Britain will remain a caste-like society...

...MORE IMPORTANT, Labor is in danger of being torn between the Scylla and Charybdis of the left-wing traditionalists who think that they can popularize the Socialist doctrines developed in the Victorian era of emerging industrial capitalism by describing them as the program of a New Left, and those who would limit Labor's policy considerations to issues which the opinion polls suggest would appeal in the next election...

...It should be noted, however, that an even later Gallup survey indicated that the party has lost heavily as a result of its internal conflicts...

...With prolonged full employment, however, this pattern began to shift...

...However, since some of my fellow citizens who are also sociologists have not hesitated to urge strongly some of the traditionalist economic and isolationist foreign policies of the New Left, I feel somewhat less hesitant about pressing my own views than perhaps I should...

...In this survey Gallup also asked respondents: "Should the Trades Union Congress have a direct say in shaping Labor party policies or should the Trades Union Congress leave Labor policies entirely to the individual members of the Labor party...

...The basic predisposition of women to vote Conservative in Britain shows up even more in the difference between the votes of married and single working-class women, The latter are much more prone to vote Tory than are the workers' wives...

...As far as I know, in fact, a newly created Socialist peer or even knight would be unthinkable outside of the United Kingdom...

...The American educational system frequently has been criticized because elementary and high school students cover much less work than do students in English public or grammar schools, French lycees, or German gymnasia...

...One of the real ironies of modern European electoral democracies is that the left parties were the strongest supporters of female suffrage, but once given the vote women have proved a major obstacle in the way of a left majority...

...As Anthony Crosland puts it in his Fabian pamphlet, Can Labour Win?, the newly rising lower classes "may resent, more than in the old days of material poverty, the differences in educational opportunity, the growing non-pecuniary privileges of management, the persistence of an aristocratic upper class, differences in accent, and so on...

...Presumably, since a variety of evidence indicates that there is general recognition of the relationship between education and national achievement, as well as real concern for securing the best possible education, a detailed campaign to acquaint the public not only with Britain's backwardness in the area of economic growth, but also with respect to education, should pay off in electoral support for the party that proposes education reform...

...This Conservative appeal to female voters is found in every survey of the British electorate that I have seen...

...Even fewer, 9 per cent of both groups, felt that Britain and America should give up such armaments if Russia kept them...

...The young postwar generations, to whom the depressions and the war were only history, and for whom full employment and prosperity is an enduring reality, have increasingly showed up in the conservative ranks, while many of the older generations, who had experienced unemployment and economic insecurity, have remained committed to a more left-wing interpretation of politics...

...for a serious attack on problems of urban redevelopment and slum clearance...

...The right-wing Republicans, like the left-wing Laborites, argued that the party should remain true to its ancient doctrines...

...In the United States, a number of left-wing Democratic intellectuals, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...Currently, only one-fifth of the Labor voters think that Labor has a chance to win in the next election...

...Thus a Gallup survey made in 1959, Schools and Teachers, reports that 63 per cent of those in the middle, upper-middle, and well-to-do classes favor the preservation of segregation, in the form of grammar schools (public schools were not mentioned in the inquiry...

...I HAVE deliberately used the terminology of the dispute about race relations and schooling in the United States, because I believe that the issues are similar...

...On the other hand, there is growing recognition among a significant section of the working class that segregated schooling in the form of public-schools and grammar schools, as contrasted with integrated comprehensive schools, disadvantages children from poorer and necessarily somewhat culturally deprived homes...

...And accompanying these rising expectations will be new views about the legitimacy of some existing institutions...

...On the other hand, Abrams also demonstrated a simultaneous shift in reverse among younger workers, particularly among the more highly skilled, some of whom were turning Tory in congruence with their increasing aspirations and new middle-class tastes, which had followed their increased incomes and economic security...

...In Britain, monarchical institutions are closely interwoven not only with hereditary privilege, but also with the consensus over basic rights and tolerance for differences, a consensus which is admired everywhere in the free world...

...The issue of who formally holds title to British industry may have less relevance to the preservation of existing privilege and of Establishment values than the extent to which there is real opportunity for those of diverse origins to take part in the top echelons of key social institutions...

...In many ways this internal controversy between the extreme ideologues and the moderates within an "out" party that has suffered a number of electoral defeats resembles the situation within the Republican party during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt's domination of the American political scene...

...The fact that ability qualifies some of lowly origins to enter the elite does not change the class consequences...

...Today, American left-wing Democrats and the tiny Socialist party have focused attention on various negative aspects of a competitive society, some of which are aggravated by continuous prosperity and secular inflation...

...Clearly, there is abundant room for similar concerns and programs in Britain...

...The over 65s, who had divided 40 per cent for the Conservatives to 33 per cent for Labor in 1955, were 35 per cent for the Conservatives to 40 per cent for Labor in 1959...

...for real awareness that state medicine is necessary to handle the problems of the underprivileged, particularly the aged (even the Republicans have agreed to Government financial support for the doctor bills of old people) ; and for a growing though still relatively ineffective interest in the role of public agencies in improving leisure and cultural activities...

...but among the remaining three-quarters, slightly over half favored integration, in the form of the comprehensive school...

...This subjective index necessarily varies somewhat—it had fallen to 21, still quite high, by the middle of 1960—but all evidence would suggest that it will remain high...

...AS AN AMERICAN, I hesitate to go into too much detail concerning the policies which should be followed by the British people and by a British political party...

...Lest it be argued that this difference only reflects differences in national wealth, it may be pointed out that the Philippines, America's former colony which has 23 million inhabitants, has over 350,000 college students working for a degree...

...Here he discusses several other important characteristics behind Britain's voting patterns and examines the effect they may have on the current split inside the Labor party...

...committed or involved a person is in the Catholic Church, the less likely he is to support an anti-clerical party (Liberal, Socialist, or Communist...

...SOME OF THE basic trends in the British social structure and in the attitudes of the British electorate, as brought out by many public opinion studies, have obvious pessimistic indications for the Labor party...

...Similarly, when specifically asked their opinion toward various British institutions, women were more likely than men to report a good opinion of the Royal Family and the House of Lords, while a small but significant minority of men had a "poor opinion of both," especially of Lords...

...The role of women requires them to be more concerned with the status position of the family (what kind of neighborhood they live in, whom their children associate with, what others think of their family, whom their children marry, what image is conveyed by their home furnishings, etc...

...the majority of the union members (60 per cent) and of party supporters (56 per cent) took the position that party policies should be completely in the hands of the individual party members...

...As compared with 1955, the polls reported that those "under 30 moved from a 5–4 majority for Labor to an almost even division...

...For those who doubt the value of a relatively good mass education, I urge a comparison of the popular London daily papers with those of New York...

...Then, the Gallup Index of Affluence stood at 29...

...In 1953, Mark Abrams explained the increase in the vote which Labor had been securing in various by-elections during the preceding years by showing that many older working-class Tories were breaking with their traditional party on the welfare state issue...

...for a greater concern with the need to improve the public educational system...

...This is, I suspect, what the "angry young men" are angry about...

...This English figure somewhat underestimates the number enrolled in the equivalent of American institutions of higher learning, since some professional courses which are taught in American universities are not university subjects in Britain...

...This means that the process of gradual democratization and equalitarianism which has developed in the past half century, particularly in Scandinavia, has included a sharp reduction in the public ostentation and show associated with monarchy, and even more significantly in the position of the titled aristocracy...

...Similarly, almost half of the total population sample (45 per cent) believed that the Royal Family still plays a major role, that it has "great influence" on the country's future, a statement agreed to by only 26 per cent of the special university sample, Or looked at another way, only 23 per cent of those under 30 agreed that the Royal Family has little or no influence, while almost half of the students see them as having small importance...

...There can be no doubt that all the evidence, as gathered by a variety of survey studies, is on the side of the MPs...

...Surely the Labor party can use these facts for effective propaganda and for an effective planned investment and economic growth program...

...A Gallup survey conducted in October, right after the Scarborough conference at which Gaitskell was defeated on foreign policy issues, indicated that a large majority of Labor party supporters still back him personally...

...In his pamphlet, The Chipped White Cups of Dover, Michael Young cogently demonstrates how the British have fallen behind Western Europe with respect to "their public amenities—their town planning, their architecture, their roads, the scope which they offer for the enjoyment of leisure...

...On the other hand, the activists who turn out to party and union branch meetings are disproportionately composed of ideologues...

...Yet the present elitist school system is only one of the institutions which sustains deferential attitudes and values among the British working classes...

...It is true, of course, as I noted in my previous article, that efforts to enlarge the educational system must face the fact that the lower strata are not particularly interested in paying for more education, either personally or through higher taxes...

...In Catholic Europe, religious behavior seems to explain much of it...

...A Gallup poll dealing with the same topic but using a somewhat different question wording, taken a week earlier, indicated that 24 per cent of those who had voted for Labor in 1959 favored giving up nuclear weapons...

...And the Gallup 1959 Youth Survey suggests there is actually less respect for the House of Lords among youthful prospective members of the elite, that is, university students, than there is in the general population under 30, Only one-fifth of the total youth group reported a "poor opinion" of the aristocratic chamber, as compared with one-third of the university student population...

...On the purely economic side has come increasing public awareness that a high rate of economic growth may require much more economic planning and deliberate Government intervention than now exists...

...The Gallup poll reports that the British had never felt so affluent as they felt in October 1959, just before the election...

...It should be evident that a left-wing party in Britain, with its history of Tory legitimacy and perennial electoral domination, must self-consciously examine how it can undercut the roots of that domination...

...What is forgotten is that these European schools are designed to educate a small ruling elite, and that the rest of the population has traditionally secured a poor education or, more frequently, no education at all on the high school level...

...that Puerto Rico, with two million people, has over 30.000 university students...

...It is understandable, therefore, that a disproportionate share of the Tory working-class voters are women...

...et al, How People Vote...

...One cannot say that old people are conservative and young people radical, because the opposite has also been true at certain times and in certain places...

...The Socialist parties of the three Scandinavian nations and of the low countries accept their monarchies, but at the same time they remain formally republican...

...Thirty-one per cent did not know, but of the remainder more (29 per cent) thought that Britain led in this field than the U.S...

...He stressed that "the essential characteristic of all of these journals, secular and religious, is that they are written by university men for university men...

...The key fact about these judgments is that among those who recognized that Britain did not lead, the majority reported that they did not think Britain was doing enough for education...

...Yet there is some reason to suspect that it could be, that it would give Labor a talking point both with a significant section of the working class, particularly with those concerned for the future of their children, and also with the large progressive minority within the middle class who believe in equality of education...

...The place where the American system catches up to the European is in the college, or if necessary in the graduate school...

...Only 28 per cent of trade union members and of Labor voters felt that the TUC should directly affect party affairs...

...IN RECOMMENDING that the Labor party strongly advocate a policy of radical education reform, I cannot honestly say that it will be expedient from an electoral point of view...

...Among the lower three classes in Gallup terminology (lower-middle, working class and very poor), 25 per cent did not know enough about the issue to express an opinion...

...Even more important, the common school system of America has eliminated the caste-like "color bar" of class and ethnic accents...

...that is, "those who thought their standard of living was going up exceeded those who thought it was going down by a margin of 29 per cent...

...and John Kenneth Galbraith, responded to similar concerns by emphasizing that some of the most significant reformist eras before the New Deal occurred during periods of prosperity and economic growth...

...At least to me, this is a system based on the premise that a nation needs only a small highly educated elite, and that the vast majority need only that modicum of education which gives them elementary literacy and the skills necessary to operate industry and to occupy the lower rungs of white-collar employment...

...If the Gallup poll figures are accepted, Labor's pension plan must have been a vote winner in the section of the community most directly affected...

...Evidence that British women are more aspiring or more status-conscious than men comes from various studies which have asked people to report what social class they believe themselves to be members of, A larger proportion of men than women invariably report themselves in the "working class," while women tend to place themselves in one of the middle or upper classes...

...Allowing for their different sizes, which country would you say is spending most on education, Russia, America, Germany, or Britain...

...David Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959...

...This expanding and relatively prosperous period also witnessed the high point of American Socialism as an electoral force, And in Europe, and in Australia as well, reformist Liberal and Socialist movements made significant gains and were responsible for enacting important changes...

...The 1959 Youth Survey, a study of those under 30 made by Gallup, asked, "Of all the men and women living today in any part of the world whom do you admire the most...

...Since in these countries, as in most others, women are much more devoted to religion than are men, many Catholic women vote for a clerical or right-wing party while their more irreligious spouses vote for the more left-wing groups...

...or Russia (19 per cent), or Germany (2 per cent...

...To segregate students according to cultural background, which is in large measure what the British public and grammar school system does, is to reinforce strongly the cultural deprivations inherent in the class system...

...A recent comparison of Britain's rate of growth with that of other Western countries, made by the study organization, Political and Economic Planning (PEP), has pointed up the fact that Britain lags in this area, not only when compared with the Communist world but also when compared with most major Western industrial powers...

...The Republican moderates urged, both on the basis of principle and an analysis of the changes in the social situation and values of the electorate, that the Republican party should modernize its program, that it had to recognize that the days of William McKinley were gone forever...

...This pattern would explain some of the female conservatism in Britain as well, since practicing Anglicans, the large majority of whom are female, are much more likely to be Tories than are Anglicans who never go to church, irreligious people, or Catholics and non-conformists...

...There can be little doubt that the differences between England and other nations, especially the United States, reflect a basic difference in the value of extending the privileges of higher education...

...rather, they are angry because, once having entered the elite, they must be traitors to their own past...

...that the Argentine, with a similar size population, has 180,000 students...

...There is good evidence from studies of various American schools that lower-class children who are in the American equivalent of comprehensive schools—schools with a good mixture of middle and working-class youth, some of whom are preparing for college and some of whom are not—perform better academically than do children from the same class background and of the same intelligence levels who are in schools where most students have the same lower-class social background as themselves...

...And the widespread college education, with all of its limitations, has created an audience for rebroadcasts of Third Program materials on the scores of FM local radio stations that is much larger proportionate to population than the listenership of the Third Program in Britain itself...

...The 1959 Youth Survey reports that 49 per cent of the men as compared to 38 per cent of the women gave their class status as working class...

...An as yet unpublished study of the sources of working-class conservatism by Robert Mackenzie indicates general acceptance of monarchical institutions among British workers, both Tory and Socialist...

...The past few years have witnessed a renewed and successful thrust for improvement in the civil rights of Negroes...

...In a sense, the latter have been held back in order to permit the others to advance...

...C. P. Snow has expressed a similar judgment in his book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution...

...It is this aim which induces Americans to support the objective that two-thirds of the population be provided with a college education, an objective set by President Truman's Commission on Education in 1948, and one which Socialists should want to emulate...

...Among those who felt Britain led, over three-quarters stated that Britain was giving enough attention to education, and a large majority of those who did not know where Britain stood also felt the country did enough in this field (62 per cent...

...and that the over 65s and the very poor (substantially overlapping groups) shifted decisively in Labor's favor...

...And if there is objection to comparisons with states in the less developed parts of the world, it may be noted that England does not compare well with much of Western Europe...

...A nation-wide survey made between September 19 and 23 by the Research Division of Odham's Press for the Daily Herald reported that only 13 per cent of Labor supporters and 16 per cent of trade union members favored Britain giving up the H-bomb and nuclear weapons if both Russia and America retained them...

...The concern for relating political issues to broad cultural and moral issues which has emerged among many of the "right-wing" intellectuals of the party—which also was the major concern of many of the students and young intellectuals who sponsored Universities and Left Review before they allowed themselves to become intrigued with the hard-boiled politics and Marxism of various dissident Communists—seems to me to offer some hope that Labor will emerge out of this period of electoral weakness with a politics realistically adapted to its goals of a more equalitarian and culturally creative society...

...the more Two weeks ago, Seymour Martin Lipset, Professor of Sociology at the University of California and now Visiting Ford Research Professor of Political Science at Yale, analyzed the class feelings among British voters which have led to Labor's recent defeats at the polls...

...Quite obviously, no one who has any regard for the stability of British democracy, for its Parliamentary institutions, and for its safeguards of dissent and due process, would suggest any effort to abolish the monarchy...

...Surely, Britain can spend proportionately as much as the Philippines or Japan in educating its young...

...I think one can fairly say without being accused of chauvinism that the New York tabloids which sell in the millions are real newspapers as compared with their London equivalents...

...Those who have experienced the benefits of a good education are more likely to favor expanding the community's responsibilities in this area than those who have not...

...Also, one of the main continuing left-right issues, the extent of social welfare measures, concerns the interests of older people more than it does that of the younger generation...

...Similarly, in the English-speaking overseas monarchies of the Commonwealth (Australia, Canada and New Zealand) there has been a gradual elimination of the public role of a titled aristocracy...

...Gallup also reports that in mid-1960 personal savings were at a high point, having increased "fairly steadily over the past eight years," and that for the first time since the poll had dealt with such trends more people anticipated an increase in savings than anticipated a decrease...

...Other status characteristics, such as the interplay between sex roles, age, religion and stratification also have important influences on electoral trends...

...This is particularly true with respect to an area of personal activity, education...

...It is difficult to see, therefore, how the factional controversy can be settled on the level of party conferences...

...In large part, the voting pattern of a given age group is related to the social circumstances prevailing at the time that it came to political consciousness...

...The hope for the vitality of the two-party system in the next generation of British political life would seem to demand that Victorian Socialism go the way of McKinley Republicanism...

...It is clear from this data that the Parliamentary Labor party was more in tune with the wishes of the electorate, when it re-elected Gaitskell as party leader by a 2-1 majority, than were the delegates at Scarborough...

...and that Japan, with a 100 million population, has about 550,000 enrolled...

...This means that for the immediate future, the left wing begins any debate at a party conference with the automatic backing of 30–35 per cent of the votes...

...As I recently had occasion to point out in a talk at Cambridge, there are few institutions in British life which strike an American as more indicative of the continuing strength of elitist values in British culture than its educational system...

...Of course, no program or policy will mean much if there are to be two Labor parties, each more concerned with annihilating the other than with winning a Parliamentary majority...

...Thus 26 per cent of the men and 12 per cent of the women felt negatively about the aristocratic house...

...Yet acknowledging these facts does not mean that there cannot be any changes in the social role of the monarchy, or in the position which the Labor party takes toward the monarchy and the titled aristocracy...

...With a population of about 180 million people, the United States has over three-and-a-half million students registered in colleges and universities...

...While these basic trends are cause for Labor pessimism, they also constitute a powerful argument for a re-examination of Labor's program...

...When asked why, the overwhelming majority of those who gave reasons cited lack of unity within the party...

...The Communists control one major British union, the Electrical Workers Union, which votes at Labor party conferences, and have significant influence in another, the Amalgamated Engineering Union...

...The great market for quality "high-brow" paperbacks which has emerged in America since World War II also reflects the enormous upgrading of American cultural life derivative from the creation of millions of college-educated people, In a recent talk analyzing certain aspects of Canadian intellectual life, Professor Frank Underhill, the author of the Regina Manifesto, the founding document of Canada’s socialist party, pointed out to his fellow Canadian academics, with some envy, the considerable improvement in American cultural standards, particularly the great increase in quality journals...

...With rising incomes and economy security should come rising levels of expectation, not only in Asia and Africa, but in Britain and the United States as well...

...Thus, 75 per cent of those who voted Labor in 1959 say they want Gaitskell to remain as leader of the party, and only 10 per cent are in favor of his resigning...

...Thirteen per cent of the women mentioned members of the Royal Family as compared to 7 per cent of the men...

...A change in the educational system in the form of spreading the virtues and the vices of a mass common school system will clearly reduce the elitist and deferential elements in English life...

...In the 1959 election, this tendency showed up in dramatic fashion...

...This was particularly true before World War I, when the Progressive movement operative in both parties pressed for important social changes during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson...

...Perhaps the most striking relationship is that between party voting and sex differences...

...The political effects of monarchy and aristocracy-were not eliminated when these institutions lost their legislative, administrative and executive prerogatives...

...The legitimacy of the British Establishment, and the existence of deferential voters who believe that those born and trained to lead should in fact lead, must in some part be explained by the widespread acceptance of hereditary privilege...

...Opinion surveys made in the late '30s and '40s, therefore, tended to find radical youngsters and conservative oldsters...

...and 52 per cent of the women as compared to only 36 per cent of the men believed that the Royal Family had "great influence" on the country's future...

...They are not angry, as some have suggested, because they are rejected as social equals after having risen occupationally...

...And the largest union in Britain, which casts over one million votes at Labor conferences, the Transport and General Workers Union, is completely controlled by a bitter personal enemy of Gaitskell, Frank Cousins...

...In Catholic Europe, the difference between male and female support for Socialist parties is much greater than it is in Britain or in other Protestant nations...

...Data concerning the attitudes of men and women on a variety of issues indicate that women show a greater tendency to reflect both deferential and aspiring values: and, as I indicated in my previous article, both sets of beliefs support Conservative politics among workers...

...The important expansion of English universities which has occurred since 1945 is just the beginning of what would be needed to democratize English intellectual and political life, to reduce the monopoly which those who have attended the ancient universities have on the key positions within the society...

...THE RELATIONSHIP of age to voting patterns is not as easily discerned as most other relationships...

...In England, on the other hand, about 100,000 students are working for a Bachelor's degree, or about the same proportion of the population as the United States has on the faculties of its colleges...

...The proportion of the college-age population which enters such schools has jumped from 4 per cent in 1900 to close to 40 per cent in 1960, and the most reliable predictions are that it will reach 50 per cent by 1970...

...Presumably a left party should be concerned with acknowledging these resentments and with suggesting solutions to them...

...Concern with status means largely concern with the values and practices of the social class or group immediately above one's own, a class which is likely to have more conservative values than one's own...

...There is, moreover, some evidence to sustain the belief that the issue may be used to electoral advantage: The Gallup organization asked...

...Mark Benney, in his study of the 1950 election, reported that the finding "that women are more conservative than men, not only in political affiliation and on specific political issues, but also in their views on a wide range of social customs, has become a commonplace among survey findings" (Mark Benney...

...A society is equalitarian only if it reduces the cultural differences between the classes to a minimum...

...As matters stand at the moment, it is clear that a large majority of Labor voters, and also of Labor party members, support the policies advocated by the overwhelming majority of the Labor Members of Parliament, that is, party leader Hugh Gaitskell's policies...

...These older conservative workers particularly resented Tory fiscal policies which were then curtailing medical and welfare benefits...

...Half of the Labor electorate declared that its opinion of the party had gone down since the last election...

...In both 1955 and 1959, the post-election British Gallup surveys indicated that Labor received a majority among male voters, but was defeated by the women...

...in the Republican case this meant free enterprise and laissez-faire...

...The experience of being in the same institution with students who have grown up in good cultural surroundings, in homes where reading, learning and other forms of higher culture are appreciated, transfers some of that culture and academic motivation to many of the students from culturally underprivileged homes...

...The continuing class differences in culture and accent prevent those who have risen from remaining in close relations with the background out of which they came...

...To really democratize the class structure it may be necessary to reduce the level of education which middle- and upper-class British youths receive before reaching the university, but is this too great a price to pay for an open and equalitarian society...

...The American high school system has been designed for many generations to socialize the barbarians, that is, to take into the larger social system children from immigrant or lower class backgrounds, and to give them the same educational background as those from the privileged classes...