It is an old cliché that Anglicans are more likely to vote Tory than for other parties. In 2013, Anglicans were overall more likely to say they would vote Conservative if an election occurred the next day – 43% compared to the 36% who would have voted Labour.
Senior clergy, on the other hand, have made recent political interventions that have been interpreted by some commentators as taking notably left-wing stances.
For example, in the Archbishop of York’s edited volume On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future (2015), Justin Welby draws attention to the plight of cities outside the southeast, which he suggests are “trapped in apparently inevitable decline”. Tim Montgomerie, writing in The Times, argued that the book would have done better to focus on the failures of the state rather than on “disparaging the consumerism that has powered the unprecedented reductions in poverty that we are seeing all over the world".
Anglicans overall tend to be more sceptical of the welfare state than other religious / non-religious categories, as we show in our report Voting and Values in Britain: Does religion count? But northern Anglicans may be particularly sympathetic to the bishops’ message.
As the graph shows, in 2010 the Tories received far less support from Anglicans in the north than in the south. 28% of Anglicans in the northeast, and 36% in the northwest, voted Conservative compared to 58% in the east of England. In fact, in the northeast Anglicans were slightly more likely to vote Labour than was the general population – 42% to 39%.
But overall, in each region the proportion of Anglicans voting Conservative was higher than the proportion of Tory voters in the regional population as a whole. The cliché is too simplistic, but it does contain some truth.
This snippet is taken from our report Voting and Values in Britain: Does religion count? (pp. 50-52).
See the full report here and an Executive Summary here for further analysis of voting behaviour and religious identity.
Data source: BES CIPS 2010. The survey consisted of 13,356 respondents. Weighted data
