THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION

David Cameron’s net gain of 600,000 votes in 2015 therefore
depended on his winning the support of around 2.5 to 3 million voters who
didn’t choose the Conservatives in 2010. Some will have been older voters,
some returning to the Conservatives for the first time since John Major’s
surprise victory in 1992, while many will have been voting Conservative
for the first time ever.
Cameron’s biggest source of new support was from people who
had voted Liberal Democrat in 2010. The Conservatives succeeded in
persuading significant numbers of pro-Coalition Lib Dems that, in the
particular conditions of May 2015, it was more important to re-elect David
Cameron than it was to ensure another coalition.
He also achieved his party’s best ever share with ethnic minority
voters, with perhaps as many as half a million or more non-white Britons
voting Conservative for the first time. Ipsos MORI’s How Britain Voted
analysis suggests that David Cameron more or less broke even with the
gains and losses he made among white British voters: a significant share of
the net gain in the Conservative vote will therefore have come from new
ethnic minority support.
Finally, the Conservatives won some new support from new
entrants to the electorate. The Conservatives do less well with younger
voters than older voters, but picking up a share of the first time vote is
obviously crucial to the long-term health of the party.
These are not mutually exclusive categories. The Lib Dems appear
to have lost about two-thirds of their ethnic minority voters, who will
have defected both to Labour in inner city seats and to the Conservatives,
especially across southern England. A fifth of those eligible to vote for
the first time were not white. And these will not be the only Conservative
‘joiner’ votes: the party did even better with voters over 65, for example,
and will have picked up some older voters from Labour and the Lib Dems.
How Tory ‘joiners’ are shifting the balance of the
Conservatives
These three significant groups of Conservative ‘joiners’ all have
two significant things in common. Firstly, they tend to represent growing
rather than shrinking sections of the future electorate, in contrast with
the long-term profile of the anti-migration ‘left behind’ vote, which is
strongest among older voters who left school at 16. Secondly, they all see
the world very differently from the Conservative “deserters” who left the
party for UKIP – and they will all tend to shift the party’s support in a
more liberal direction.
These voters backed David Cameron on the themes of the 2015
Conservative campaign – the economic recovery and the leadership of a
stable government – and could well have found it easier to come across to
the Conservatives because the party was not pursuing a vocal strategy to
win back UKIP voters over immigration.
The combined ‘joiner’ effect is to offer a gradual but significant
recasting of the Conservative electorate, which now has a different
balance on questions of immigration and identity. Over time, this is being
reinforced by a long-term generational shift: first time Conservative
voters born in the mid-199s will take a more liberal attitude to social
10 British Future / The Politics of Immigration