Aviva Total Politics 2010 Election Map

Total Politics - because knowledge is power

 

Is the Church of England still the Tory Party at prayer?

 

Andrew Hawkins

 

When Lord Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, passed away in 2000, The Guardian described him as "the primate who discarded the Anglican image as the Tory Party at prayer".

 

But has that image really disappeared? The two key indicators are the party's representatives in Parliament, and their supporters.

 

As far as MPs are concerned, one of the last surveys on religious belief was back in the early 90s, when there was a clear divide between the mainly Anglican Tories and Catholic Labour MPs. It is most probably the case that the proportion of both of these has fallen over the past 20 years, although it is impossible to know the extent to which this is genuine or simply a function of how unfashionable it has become in some quarters of politics to admit to 'doing God'.

 

A party's supporters are a different matter, untrammelled by such constraints, and reveal far more about a party's soul. ComRes recently polled more than 2000 UK adults as part of a major study by the Theos think tank into attitudes towards evolution, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. This necessitated asking respondents about both their religious affiliations and belief, as well as which party they most closely identified with. The results, printed below, shed a fascinating light onto each of the main parties' support base.

 

There are three principle conclusions we can draw from the study in terms of party supporters and their religious affiliations.

 

First, the Church of England really can be described as the Tory Party at prayer in that among the 35 per cent of the population who claim to be Anglican, almost a third of these are Conservative identifiers while fewer than a quarter (23 per cent) are natural Labour supporters. Concomitantly, there are fewer Roman Catholics among Conservative identifiers - 23 per cent - compared to 29 per cent of Labour identifiers. So the historical stereotype is still, it seems, borne out.

 

Second, Conservative supporters are the least likely to claim no religion, but the secularists are evenly spread among both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Among Tory identifiers, fewer than one in five, 18 per cent, say they have no religion compared to 26 per cent of Labour identifiers and 28 per cent of Liberal Democrats.

Third, while the Tories have got the lion's share of the Christian market in voters, they do much less well among other religious groups. The upshot of this is a reduced support base among Asians. Where the party allegiance divides fairly evenly between Conservative and Labour for those who describe themselves broadly as Christian (28 per cent to 25 per cent respectively), among Muslims the division is very stark - just 11 per cent describe themselves as Conservatives (which is fewer thanthe Liberal Democrats attract), yet 41 per cent are Labour identifiers.

 

The Conservatives do badly not just among Asians but also among black Britons, the majority of whom (54 per cent) identify most with the Labour Party and just 16 per cent with the Conservatives. However, a paltry 3 per cent say they identify most with the Liberal Democrats - which may well give cause for concern at their Cowley Street HQ.

 

Surveys of this type always throw up the entertainingly counterintuitive, and this is no exception - such as the two Muslims who said that, generally speaking, they think of themselves as BNP voters.

 

The other big surprise was on the big issue of the survey itself; that of evolution. We never expected more 'young earth creationists' to be Labour identifiers than Conservative identifiers, and we were surprised to find that the Conservative support base contains more 'atheistic evolutionists' than can be said of Labour's support base.

 

The limitation of basing our analysis on the party identification question is that it is not quite the same as voting intention; party loyalty tends to deflate Conservative support to the benefit of Labour. But, then again, voting intention is arguably a shorter-term indicator and can fluctuate relatively quicker than party identification will.

 

Does any of this matter politically? Yes, because political parties want voters to feel they identify with them. There is of course the correlation between ethnicity and religion, which is apparent at least up to a point. But the fact that 27 per cent of UK adults say they are of no religion, while 60 per cent are either practising or non-practising Christians, is of importance in an age when parties vie for the centre ground because they know that's where most voters are. 

 

 

Andrew Hawkins is chief executive of ComRes