Labour MP Caroline Flint has suggested that the previous key demographic constructs that electoral strategists used to dream about wooing at night – namely “Mondeo Man” and “Worcester Woman” – have been consigned to the political dustbin as they no longer reflect the new realities of 21st century Britain and it’s crushing, punitive climate of economic hardship.
Mondeo Man (formerly also known as Essex Man) and Worcester Woman were the bread and butter of the New Labour project. Flint’s peice for the Progress group alludes to their mythic status during those years and the shining, affluent and aspirational characteristics these memes exuded, which ran deep to the core of New Labour thinking and played a huge part in the policies advanced by Blair et al in the mid 1990s.
Worcester woman was the archetypal middle-class, middle England voter, synonymous with suburban prosperity […] Worcester woman was seen as fiercely aspirational for her children, spending a large chunk of her time ferrying them from one after-school activity to another, concerned about education and opportunity.
Mondeo man, by contrast, was a bit rougher round the edges. The term was coined after Tony Blair’s conference speech 1996 when he recalled an encounter with a former Labour voter he canvassed in Sedgefield. The man was proudly polishing his new Ford Sierra car. His father was a Labour voter. In the past he had voted for us too. But then he had bought his council house. He had set up his own business. And he had bought a Ford Sierra. He felt like he had done all right for himself. And he did not see what Labour had to offer to people like him. So he became a Tory.
17 years later Mondeo Man’s vehicle perhaps isn’t quite in as good nick as it used to be, with 250,000 miles on the clock, rusting sills and a deep fear in the pit of Mondeo Man’s stomach every time it goes in for an MOT. Worcester Woman’s meme isn’t looking so chirpy either. The children she worked so hard to raise and provide every advantage for have been released into a world which has experienced an economic meltdown. In 1996 it was as simple as finding a good local school by looking at league tables, maybe moving into the right catchment area – not any more.
Worcester Woman’s children are now in their late 20s, still living at home and carry a copious quantity of student loan debt. The kids have jobs, but they’re insecure and poorly paid – Worcester Woman herself has taken early retirement because her employer thought she was knocking on a bit and becoming a wet blanket in the face of the young upstarts who’ll do a better job for half the money. Worcester Woman’s cashflow is in a perilous state, as the vast majority of her net wealth is tied up in the ex-council house in which they all live.
The early 90’s Mondeo on the driveway is fit for the scrapyard, the kids can’t move out unless they want to house-share with a bunch of strangers and Mondeo Man’s job is looking a bit shakey – all those years he spent cocking his nose and shooting his mouth off at the office have snowballed into a full-blown reputation for being a crotchety old git that nobody likes. His colleagues are counting the years until he can piss off down the golf course permanently.
So – in summary, the creations that underpinned the New Labour project have somewhat lost their sparking appeal. In their place, Flint introduces us to the new target voters central to Labours 2015 electoral strategy – Aldi Mum and Crawley Man.
Here’s Flint’s description of an Aldi Mum;
Her husband probably has not had a pay rise for years or has seen his hours cut. She has gone back to work or increased her hours to keep pace with the rising cost of living, and has to keep a more careful eye on the family budget. The house has not been redecorated in a little while and the services of the gardener have been dispensed with. Trips to the cinema have probably become a little less frequent. And even though she still buys most things at the supermarket, she probably tops this up with a trip to the local Aldi, which opened on the retail park in 2007. […] Price-conscious, financially insecure, struggling with rising food costs and soaring energy bills, Aldi mum is an unashamed bargain hunter who stocks up on the basics at the supermarket but opts for Aldi for the Parma ham and prosecco wine.
Her description of Crawley Man however is a lot more scant in detail;
he probably does not even own a Mondeo any more. Once the car of choice for Britain’s aspirational families, with three-quarters of a million vehicles sold in the 1990s, last year the Mondeo did not even feature in the top 10 best selling cars in Britain, with barely 50,000 sold this decade. But he does still live in the south.
Glad to see that you’ve recognised our chap no longer has a Mondeo and is more likely to be driving around in a third-hand hatchback. Nevertheless, I believe I can be of assistance in fleshing out the description of “Crawley Man” into a fully three dimensional character in the unfolding drama of 2015, rather than leave him lingering there as a vague, wooden character fit to be portrayed on screen by Ben Affleck (assuming he put the work in to get the accent right…). I think I can help describe Crawley Man because I am one – or at least I was one until quite recently. Having lived in the town for over a quarter of a century I can shed a light or two on the hows and whys of the conurbation’s male inhabitants.
In fairness, as a dogged hardline socialist I am probably not the stereotypical Crawley Man that Flint is attempting to define – but I have friends and family members who are that man, and the old saying “you can take the boy out of X, but you can’t take the X out of the boy” is just as true for Crawley as anywhere else. I retain a lot of the traits I’m about to list. A Crawley Man is a Crawley Man by birth and while no town can typecast it’s inhabitants with lazy generalisations, a good number of the observations below are embodied by me to some extent.
So what’s our man like? Following on from the Mondeo theme, it’s fair to say that Crawley Man likes his motors. The younger Crawley Man will probably be seen driving around in a hot hatch, while the older more cash-concious Crawley Man aspires to a larger diesel saloon which he’ll pick up as a used car. As far as he’s concerned, buses are for weirdos who don’t have the hand-eye coordination to pass a driving test. Crawley Man’s religion is Top Gear.
Crawley Man likes his lager and doesn’t drink wine in public unless he’s at a wedding and that’s all there is to drink. He goes down the pub, but mainly to play pool with his mates – he’ll have a few tinnies before heading out because beer down the local is too pricey. He likes his football too. The bulk of Crawley Men will support one of the big London teams – probably Chelsea or Arsenal – but some of the more grounded lads may have switched recently to supporting the local boys, Crawley Town, after their rapid rise through the football league.
With the town being near a major international airport, Crawley Man is adamant that every asylumn seeker and illegal immigrant ever mentioned by the Daily Mail lives within three streets of them. And Crawley Man doesn’t like that. He thinks they’ve all been dumped on Crawley to spare the town’s uppity blue-rinsed neighbours (every Crawley Man hates Horsham with passion) from having to deal with the problem. He doesn’t like the fact that people get things from the government when he doesn’t – because that’s unfair. He doesn’t like the fact that his neighbour has 4 kids and no job while he has a job with a rotating shift pattern and can only see his own kids at weekends because he’s lost a custody battle with an ex-girlfriend. Oh and the courts are cunts too – along with the borough council, the traffic police and everyone who lives in Horsham – the did I mention that already?
Having said all that, Crawley Man is not a cunt himself, he treats people fairly and expects to be treated fairly in return. He doesn’t steal from people and he doesn’t screw people over for money or for kicks. If he says he’s going to do something, he’ll do it. He wants to earn the things he wants in life under his own steam – because taking the piss and expecting other people to do it for you or for the government to pay for it would make you a cunt. Crawley Man is the descendent of hardened and battle-tested Old Labour folk – the town itself is a new town, built after the second world war and commissioned in 1947 by the government of Clement Attlee to tackle the post-war housing crisis in London and other major cities.
When it comes to politics, Crawley Man hates everyone. He considers the Lib Dems to be a bunch of weak, spineless wankers and wonders if they have a testicle between them. He thinks the Tories are a band of inbred, guffawing posh-boys with a silver spoon wedged up their arses at birth who’ve never done a proper days work in their lives. And he hates Labour too. He thinks the Labour party are a sad sack of limp-wristed metrosexual cock-ends who like asylum seekers and immigrants more than normal English people.
You can’t “win” Crawley Man in a political sense, because he thinks – no, he believes – that all politicians are cunts. The only way you’ll get in his good books is to piss him off less than the other cunts. You may have noticed by now that Crawley Man doesn’t hold back when it comes to calling a cunt a cunt. The ability to invoke profanity in innovative and humerous ways is a backbone of Crawley Man’s upbringing and his daily life – it’s a cornerstone of his culture. When John Prescott punched that egg-throwing bloke, the men of Crawley cheered because it’s exactly what they would have done. Our guys also doesn’t care about offending other people – if people can’t deal with what Crawley Man thinks, that’s their problem. Crawley Man saw his parents make something of themselves in the post-war prosperity and he fully intends to live up to their example.
Can Labour win Crawley Man round? Yes, they can – but not using the same polished conventional media-relations methods and the same policies tailored to upwardly-mobile marketing executives in Berkshire that they’ve used at every election since 1992. That shit won’t work in Crawley – Crawley Man has a highly developed sense of bullshit, and that approach will set it off in an instant. Labour winning Crawley means doing things they’ve not done since the 70s – knocking on doors and talking about immigrants without breaking into a nervous terror-sweat for one. Having a genuine understanding of the community you’re trying to represent and the ability to go off-script on the doorstep if required for another. Crawley will be won by ancient political ideas – jobs, pay, making sure everyone does their bit instead of sitting at home on benefits watching Doctors. Fuel going up, gas and electric going up, food going up, beer going up – if you haven’t got answers to those then don’t bother coming knocking.