Last Word: The Politics of Britain’s Educational Divide

Abstract

E ducation has become one of the starkest dividing lines in British politics. Graduates not only tend to think differently to non-graduates but to vote differently, too. The striking magnitude of these education-based vote differentials was exposed by the 2016 referendum, in which the vast majority of graduates voted Remain while only a small minority of those with no qualifications elected to stay in the European Union. This divide has not subsided since, with stark ‘educational gaps’ also observed in 2017 and 2019 General Election voting. In the UK, 30 per cent of people reported having at least at undergraduate degree, according to the 2022 British Election Study (BES, Fieldhouse et al., 2022). But while an educational divide clearly exists at the objective level of British politics, we know little about how it manifests at the subjective level, in the minds of electors. The vast expansions of higher education provision which have taken place in recent decades have rendered education an ever-more important source of social stratification and segregation in advanced Western democracies. Those with university degrees now not only tend to dominate the professional and managerial occupations, to earn more and live in different kinds of places than their non-graduate counterparts, but also scarcely meet and mingle outside their cohorts. Unsurprisingly, this has driven an increasing sense that the graduate and non-graduate groups have different, and conflicting, political interests.