Labour Together’s handy ‘Stevenage Woman’

A THINK TANK called Labour Together identified a key demographic of voters, termed the “Stevenage Woman,” that Labour needs to win. According to its report, titled Red Shift, this Stevenage Woman is against nationalisation: only 7 per cent of this group is in favour of public ownership.

These claims were all over the media, often reported as if they were definitely true. But scratch the surface and the claim is made on dubious polling by an organisation that got £1.5 million from investment multimillionaires to influence Labour policy.

According to Labour Together, “Stevenage Woman is a mum, in her early forties. She’s got two kids, she works hard, she plays by the rules and she pays the bills.”

She might vote Labour — if the party tacks right “on social and cultural issues,” and only leans very slightly left on economics.

Red Shift says there are millions of these Stevenage Women ready to vote for a right-ish Labour Party.

The actual population of Stevenage is only around 84,000, so she is clearly an imaginary construct — what Labour Together calls a “segmentation.”

So how accurate is this “segmentation?” How has it made up Stevenage Woman?

Cat Hobbs of the pro-public services campaign We Own It found a huge flaw in the Stevenage Woman thesis.

In a recent article for the website Labour List, she explains that years of polling show public ownership of public services is very popular, even with Tory voters.

Sixty-eight per cent of Tory voters want water in public ownership. Sixty-two per cent of Tory voters want energy nationalised.

Public ownership of the Royal Mail, rail, energy, water and buses has majority support across the board. So how could only 7 per cent of Stevenage Women support nationalisation?

Hobbs dug in, and found Labour Together’s “nationalisation” question was hilariously bent. It marked people as being “anti-nationalisation” by this question: “Using the 1 to 7 scale below, where the end marked 1 means that ‘government should nationalise as many major industries and services as possible, bringing them into public ownership,’ and the end marked 7 means that ‘government should privatise as many major industries and services as possible, letting private companies provide them,’ where would you place your own views on this matter?”

Labour has abandoned the renationalisation of Royal Mail, water and energy and is close to abandoning rail renationalisation, despite these policies being popular with all voters.

To persuade itself this is about chasing voters — not about chasing favour with the City — it has to use a question defining nationalisation as something closer to socialist revolution than a somewhat social democratic government.

It’s a crude fix, which makes you wonder who Labour Together are. What Labour group would want to make nationalisation look unpopular with a twisted question?

The newspapers call it “a think tank” that is “close to Starmer and was instrumental in his leadership campaign.”

That’s pretty vague, so here are some more numbers.

Fifty per cent of the four authors of the Red Shift report went to fee-paying schools; 25 per cent of them were formerly analysts for BlackRock, at the same time as the US billionaire investment firm hired Tory ex-chancellor George Osborne.

Who would hire this bunch to lecture on Labour politics? Some more numbers.

Since 2017, Labour Together has been given £1.5m by Labour-supporting multimillionaires, including £325,000 since 2022. Labour Together is very well funded.

The money mostly comes from two rich investors, Martin Taylor and Trevor Chinn. Both are big Labour donors. Taylor was a major donor when Ed Miliband was Labour leader, and Chinn is associated with supporting full-fat New Labour under Tony Blair. Both Taylor and Chinn have donated to individual MPs of the Labour right.

Taylor’s background is in hedge funds: they invest in “liquid” assets, meaning shares or financial instruments that can be bought and sold quickly. They make money from fast, complicated trades, including betting on companies doing badly.

Taylor launched a new fund called Crake Asset Management in 2019. Hedge funds are typically quite secretive, but US regulators make them publish their main shareholdings.

Crake’s latest US-registered shareholdings are a few hundred million dollars in firms including Amazon, Alibaba Group (a kind of Chinese version of Amazon), Google and US microchip-maker AMD.

In 2022 Taylor’s Crake Asset Management paid out £48m from profits to its 10 “members,” according to the accounts. It says the member with the “largest entitlement” — I assume Taylor himself — got £15m.

Chinn’s background is in private equity — these are investment funds that buy “illiquid” stocks — shares or “equity” of “private” companies that don’t trade on stock exchanges and can’t be bought and sold quickly. They buy companies for the longer term, trying to profit by running them, restructuring them and selling them.

Chinn is 87 so has stepped back to be just a “senior adviser” of CVC Capital, the private equity firm he was most associated with.

Chinn — I imagine to “keep his hand in” — is also chairman of British online car repair marketplace WhoCanFixMyCar.com and a car rental firm.

We have two things here. First, Labour-supporting multimillionaires putting a big money into a think tank that declares, on the basis of a skewed question, that voters “don’t like public ownership.”

Second, Labour Together, when it was set up in 2016, claimed it would “draw in ideas from the Corbynite left to the Blairite right of the party.”

It involved “soft left” MPs like Lisa Nandy and Jon Cruddas. It looked like — or posed as — an attempt by the soft left to try to reflect some of the leftward movement of Corbynism.

However, like the Starmer leadership it backed, now Corbynism has been beaten, it has also rejected the soft left. Nandy and Cruddas left Labour Together just before Red Shift was published.

Cruddas and Nandy had a sort of Blue Labour formula of social conservatism plus some economic redistribution.

Now the left has been isolated, they are also losing influence, leaving Labour Together with a very right-wing formula of social conservatism plus economic conservatism — and some dodgy talk about a Stevenage Woman.

Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter at @SolHughesWriter.