The Guardian 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.