Much of this book is devoted to policies, defined as the plan of action set out by political parties in government or opposition, so the reader can correctly assume that the starting premise of the book is that policies do matter. The question is posed because conventional democratic theory and practice can misstate the role of policies in voter behaviour. There is no straightforward correlation between social and economic interests and how people vote: in fact, political parties are often at odds with the policy preferences of the people who vote for them.1 This chapter sets out the role and relative significance of policies in voter choice, and in the context of this new working class, argues that understanding people’s values, social identities, moral foundations and attitudes is just as important as policy formulation. The social world plays a huge role in determining how ideas are acquired. Policy devotees need to understand that no one construct means exactly the same thing to everyone, as we will see.

So why do policies matter? First and foremost, because they affect people’s lives. Good government policy can transform a society and save lives; bad government policy can have the opposite effect. Arguably, policies matter more to the new working class than they do to those who are better off: they are more likely to be reliant on state infrastructure and less likely to be able to move and compete in a globalised world than their better-off counterparts. However, due to political and economic imbalances of power, members of the new working class are less likely to have experienced policy decisions in their favour. The writer David Goodhart argues that the priorities of poorer Britons have been ignored compared to the dominant interests of the British elites,2 whom he describes as the ‘anywhere’ grouping, the winners of three decades of social and economic liberalism.

To an extent, voters do assess the policies of the political parties on offer from the perspective of their interests.