Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

Basildon Man wants to go it alone

This article is more than 23 years old

Basildon Man, otherwise known as the average Briton, is optimistic about his own prospects but pessimistic about the country's future - and increasingly isolated from society at large and all political parties, a report claimed yesterday.

Two academics who visited Basildon, the electorally sensitive "swing seat" in Essex, in 1992 have returned to find out how the impact of Margaret Thatcher's years in office have affected skilled working class voters over the longer term.

Dennis Hayes and Alan Hudson found that people in Basildon saw their own prospects for self-improvement as good, but not so the future of society as a whole.

The Thatcher years fostered an existing "strong sense of individualism and self-improvement" and a mistrust of collective action of the kind New Labour sought, said the authors in a pamphlet, Basildon: the Mood of the Nation, produced for the Demos think tank.

"Traditional Labour voters are disappearing, and there is no new active support for New Labour. Leisure time revolves around visits to the pub or solitary activities such as going to the gym. Over half of respondents [55%] are not members of any club or society."

That is an echo of the American Robert Putnam's influential book, Bowling Alone, which highlighted the decline of bowling leagues in the US as people went bowling by themselves. Only 2% of Basildonians list bowling as their favourite activity. Basildon Man "drinks alone" or goes to the gym alone.

Hayes and Hudson interviewed 500 Basildon voters after Tony Blair's landslide win in 1997. They then interviewed residents and council officials in 1998 and last year to examine shifting attitudes throughout the 1990s.

They described Basildon Man as someone who would reach £64, 000 on ITV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, gamble on winning £125,000, then find himself in trickier territory since he lacked the higher education he wanted for his own children.

Family is important to Basildon, a post-war satellite town of 163,000 recaptured by Labour in 1997, where 26% of men still work in craft-based industries and 32% of women do secretarial work - both higher than average figures. One in five identifies with the town, 38% identify with Essex, while 73% call themselves working class.

The findings will confirm the fears of Blairite strategists that civic society has been severely corroded in the free market era, though Tories will complain that Labour collectivism before 1979 first undermined it.

"Thatcherism enjoyed negative success as the corrosive agent which broke down the certainties of old forms of social life," the authors said.

"Even at the height of Labour's post-election popularity we were discerning signs that political parties were failing to capture the hearts and minds of Basildon's voters."

Most viewed

Most viewed