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We show that there is clear evidence of class Lib-Con voting in the late Victorian era, but the Liberals were rapidly supplanted and surpassed by the emergence of Labour in the first decades of the 20th century.

Once established, the Lab-Con class relationship was remarkably stable from the 1920s into the 1990s, at which point the class-Lab association begins to decline, and then the class-Con association shifts more abruptly in 2017-19.

19/6/26, 12:21 pm1 repost3 likes

Using a Bayesian changepoint model, we try and pin down when the class-vote association changed: the stabilisation of class voting in the 1920s; a brief drop for Labour after the Second World War; and then a more significant turn for Labour in the Blair era, and the Conservative around Brexit.

visionofbritain.org.ukA Vision of Britain through Time | Your national on-line library for local history | Maps, Statistics, Travel Writing and moreA vision of Britain through time...

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between Olli, me, and Humphrey and Paula, who are the historical geographers behind www.visionofbritain.org.uk. It's the first peer-reviewed paper to come out of the project, but we've got a lot more data, so hopefully it will be the first of many!

Marios Richards

@mariosrichards.bsky.social