Earlier this week, Theos, a London-based think-tank, published a major study entitled Voting and Values in Britain: does religion count? As its authors, Theos’s research director Nick Spencer and Leicester University politics lecturer Dr Ben Clements, point out, while in the USA the “religious vote” is taken for granted, and has been the subject of extensive scholarly study, this is much less true of the UK.

Voting and Values is designed as a first attempt to fill this gap. On reading it, I was flattered to see that not only is my own research on the British-Jewish vote fully acknowledged, but that such research forms the basis of much, though not all, of what Clements and Spencer have to say on the subject of Anglo-Jewish voting habits.

Let me summarise their broad conclusions: self-identifying Anglicans have been more likely to vote Conservative than Labour; self-identifying Catholics have been generally inclined to vote Labour; self-identifying nonconformists have shown “greater voting fluidity than either Anglicans or Catholics”; at the time of the 2010 general election, Muslims tended to support Labour, while the Jewish and Hindu votes were more Conservative. The Sikh vote was split roughly 50-50 between the Socialists and the Tories, but Buddhists plumped heavily for the Lib-Dems.

It is often said that Britain has become a less religious country over the past half-century. But there is much more to religion than the mere formal act of worship. A religious upbringing can have a profound effect on what is termed “values voting,” by which is meant voting on the basis of a set of value-based beliefs in relation to issues such as abortion and sexuality. In this country, politicians across the spectrum tend to fight shy of such issues, certainly when they’re on the campaign trail. But that does not mean that these issues play no part whatsoever in determining voters’ intentions.

Geoffrey Alderman | Read the full story on thejc.com