Well, let’s not be so swift to condemn. A look back at where three of Boris Johnson’s Tory PM predecessors stood a year after they too had trounced Labour at a general election gives the lie to the idea that only Boris could have blown things so badly. Sure, he’s had a difficult year. But we somehow seem to have forgotten that they had too!

So Christmas tidings of comfort and joy all round, right? Well, not quite. For two of the three Tory leaders in question, remember, it would never be glad confident morning again. Still, the whole point of history is to learn from it. So what lessons are there for Boris from their successes and their failings? Let’s start with the one whose time in No 10 was about to come to a very abrupt and unexpected end.

David Cameron, May 2016

Pride, they say, comes before a fall. And in David Cameron’s case, that fall was pretty damn spectacular. It would be unfair to say that as he went about his business at the beginning of May 2016, he was serenely confident, let alone chillaxed, that Remain would triumph in June’s EU referendum. By that stage of the game, after all, no one in No 10 imagined they would be coasting to victory. But Cameron still had every hope of victory, mainly because the economic case he was majoring on so overwhelmingly favoured the Remain cause – just as it had in Scotland a couple of years earlier and at the general election a year before.

That it didn’t go his way could be blamed partly on the fact that he was fighting the referendum campaign with one hand tied behind his back, so determined was he not to indulge in ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks. He wanted room to put the party back together afterwards, even when sorely provoked by (guess who?) Boris Johnson.

Perhaps if Cameron had displayed the same killer instinct that had helped him see off Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown when dealing with the enemy within, then Prime Minister George Osborne would now be dealing with the Coronovirus crisis – and without having to worry about ‘getting Brexit done’ at the very same time.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) A track-record of winning referendums doesn’t mean you’ll win the next one, especially if your argument is economic and the other side’s is emotional. Denying the Scots another vote is going to be very difficult, so start thinking now about how to win hearts not just heads;

(2) when dealing with your internal opponents, attack is often the best form of defence, particularly if the alternative is appeasement. The lockdown sceptics and the Eurosceptics will never be satisfied – so stop trying, put on your proverbial big boy pants, and take them on instead; and

(3) in politics, there really, really is no such thing as a friend. Beware Rishi Sunak – and, as ever, Michael Gove

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This is no time for austerity

By Peter Franklin

John Major, April 1993

The fact that John Major, who had taken over a divided and demoralised Tory party after a hard-fought leadership contest 18 months earlier, won the general election of April 1992 came as a genuine shock. The polls had pointed consistently to a Labour victory or, at the very least, a hung parliament.

In the event, the Conservatives thrashed Labour in terms of vote share by 42 to 34 percentage points, winning what is still the highest number of votes for any party at a UK general election: 14.1 million. In politics, however, every silver lining has a cloud. Britain’s first past the post electoral system, which so often helps the Tories, this time rescued Labour, leaving Major with an overall majority of 21 seats, down from 102.

If Major had ever hoped that such tight arithmetic might concentrate the minds of his mightily relieved colleagues, then a year into his second term, that illusion was well and truly shattered. The reason? Not sleaze – although David Mellor’s resignation in September 1992 proved a harbinger of what was to come on that front – but the UK’s costly forced exit from the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on Black Wednesday that same month.

That external shock not only cratered the Conservatives in the opinion polls and provided proof (if proof were needed) to an as yet small but increasingly determined band of Tory MPs, that UK participation in European integration must not be allowed to go any further and, if possible, should even be wound back. As a result, ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which had originally been greeted as a triumph for Major’s diplomacy, had turned into a parliamentary and personal nightmare. It really only ended four years later when a new, convincingly centrist Labour leader finally put the Conservatives out of their misery, The rest, as they say, is history.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) Gratitude is the most perishable quantity in politics. The credit you get, both for pulling off a last-gasp diplomatic triumph and for pulling your party’s electoral chestnuts out of the fire doesn’t last very long. Winning big in 2019 and Brexit will mean nothing if you’ve not been able to prove the latter has indeed given you squillions to squirt on schools and hospitals, and shinier town centres, in those Red Wall seats;

(2) a parliamentary majority counts for little in the face of the formation of a party (or parties) within a party. ERG, CRG, NRG. These things are growing like topsy. Buying them off policy-wise is a bad idea. But frontbench roles for their most ambitious movers and shakers? They can work wonders; and

(3) a combination of events, dear boy, events and the election of a credible, moderate and clever opposition leader can rapidly erode your lead in the polls without the pendulum swinging back to you as the next election looms. Keir Starmer might not be a full-blown heir to Blair, but he really doesn’t need to be to win the next election. The threat he presents needs taking far more seriously than it has been so far.

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How patriotic Labour could crush Boris

By Tim Bale

Margaret Thatcher, May 1980

It is easy to forget, in the light of her second and third successive election victories in 1983 and 1987 that, a year after her first, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was by no means mistress of all she surveyed.

True, although her parliamentary majority was nothing compared to what it managed in those later contests, it was still – at 44 – far more comfortable than John Major’s. However, the economic outlook was, if anything, considerably worse than the one he faced after 1992. Unemployment was running at over 7% (nudging 2 million), British manufacturers were going bust all over the country, and inflation stood at (from today’s perspective a scarcely credible) 22%.

And while the Labour Party was too preoccupied with its own civil war to present much of a threat, a number of so-called ‘wets’ in the Cabinet were deeply (and none too privately) concerned about what they saw as Thatcher’s nonsensical determination to stick to the fiscal and monetary squeeze that she was messianically convinced would provide a long-term cure for Britain’s ills.

That said, the news wasn’t all bad. Progress was being made on a Housing Bill which would introduce one of Thatcherism’s flagship, and electorally popular, policies – Right to Buy. And in the meantime, the SAS’s daring raid on the Iranian Embassy proved an unalloyed triumph and one which announced to the world that Britain was back as a global player.

Lessons for Johnson:

(1) Even if some of your worried cabinet colleagues are urging you to u-turn on the big shift in economic policy you’ve been talking about for a year or more, keep calm and carry on. Levelling up is vital, both politically and economically; don’t let your fiscal hawks, especially your Chancellor, talk you out of it;

(2) focus, too, on pushing through policies that will help you retain all those working class voters you won over from Labour. You won in 2019, remember, not just because of Brexit but because you promised it would lower immigration, recruit more nurses and police, and build more houses; and, of course,

(3) keep banging that patriotic drum. Voters want the country talked up, not down, to feel it has a bright future not just a glorious past. This is your greatest strength. Never, ever stop playing to it.

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Boris Johnson could win a 'war on woke'

By Tim Bale

In the end, of course, different things work for different people – and different prime ministers — at different times. While it may have been a near-visionary sense of mission that helped Thatcher survive her very difficult first year and go on to win two more general elections, it could well be the protean pragmatism that enabled Johnson to climb to the top of Disraeli’s greasy pole in the first place that helps him stay there after his own annus horribilis. This is especially true if it means (as I suspect it does, given his penchant both for history and for breathtaking opportunism) that he is more inclined than most to learn the lessons that the past has to teach.

It’s hardly surprising then, that those hoping for a Labour government might be looking elsewhere — searching for an alternative route to power that runs not through former mining and industrial seats, but instead through the quote-unquote leafier suburbs of Britain’s big cities and some of its commuter belts. Think Guildford, not Gedling. Think also, for instance, Chingford, Uxbridge & South Ruislip, and Wycombe — places where Labour’s vote has increased substantially since 2005 and where it’s now over 25%.

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The last thing Labour needs is 'unity'

By Stephen Pollard

Are those doing the hoping right? Well sort of. Talk to some of the Tory-inclined analysts of the UK’s electoral dynamics and geography, including those whose work first alerted the Conservative Party to the potential gains on offer in the Midlands and the North, and they will freely acknowledge the flipside.

As values and culture become as important to British voters as valence and competence, then there are seats in southern (but not exclusively in southern) England full of well-heeled, increasingly well-educated voters which could eventually fall to the centre-Left. Canterbury as canary in the coalmine, if you like.

But ‘eventually’ is an awfully long time in politics — and, with a few exceptions, probably too long for any Labour supporters hoping to turn things around in just four years. The term ‘centre-Left’ points to an important caveat, too. Not all of what we might call the leafy liberal seats, if they do flip in the future, will flip to Labour. For instance, constituencies such as Wimbledon, Esher and Walton, and actually Guildford itself, are far more likely to turn orange than red.

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Can Dominic Raab cling on to Esher?

By Ian Birrell

That needn’t, of course, be a deal-breaker — indeed, it could turn out to be a deal-maker. The chances of Labour making it into office in 2024 on its own and without the support of other parties are, frankly, slim — since even a small overall majority would require a swing of the size last seen in 1945 and 1997, elections which back then delivered the kind of monster majorities that not even the most optimistic of optimists working for Keir Starmer can possibly hope for — especially now Scotland is all but lost.

If the best, then, that Labour can do in four years’ time is to become the largest party in parliament, it will (even if there are still Scottish seats in the Westminster parliament) have to depend on the Lib Dems capturing or recapturing at least the 13 seats that Ed Davey (presuming he’s still leader by then, too) stands to snatch from the Tories on, say, a 5% swing.

On the upside — for both of England’s ‘progressive’ parties — there is now next to no electoral competition between them. There are now just nine seats in the entire country where the Lib Dems are the key challengers to Labour, down from 76 in 2010. And none of the 11 Lib Dem MPs currently sitting in Westminster faces a credible threat from a Labour challenger.

In fact, a division of labour between Labour and the Lib Dems may, some might argue, be no bad thing since it would theoretically allow Starmer to leave the socially-liberal, pro-European stuff to Davey, while he beats a more patriotic, even authoritarian drum in order to win back the seats the party has lost since 2005.

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Boris Johnson could win a 'war on woke'

By Tim Bale

But there’s a problem with that horses-for-courses, red-orange strategy. Not all the leafy liberal seats that might swing away from the Tories — especially if they really do decide to wage the kind of ‘culture war’ that some Conservative MPs clearly see as their best bet — are winnable by the Lib Dems.

The hard truth is that Labour will have to try to win a whole bunch of seats outside the Red Wall by itself, whether they be leafy liberal or, perhaps more promisingly, some of the socially-heterogeneous seats in home counties towns that it managed to win in 1997. And doing so almost certainly rules out a transparently desperate (and as such probably ultimately unconvincing and internally divisive) attempt to embrace cultural conservatism in order to close the yawning ‘values gap’ between Labour and the voters who switched from it to the Tories in 2019.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Labour need give up on most, all or even any of the seats in which those switchers live.

In part, that’s because those more culturally conservative, provincially-minded voters are not the be-all-and-end-all of those seats. Some of those constituencies contain significant proportions of ethnic minority voters still inclined to vote Labour. And even those that don’t are not, believe it or not, like those small towns in a sci-fi movie where all the kids, the teenagers, and the young adults have mysteriously disappeared. Moreover, you wouldn’t know it to read some media commentary, but some people living in them — yes really — have even been to university. And even some of those that haven’t share the broadly ‘progressive’ views of the majority who have.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

In any case it’s a common misconception that, when it comes to elections (and referendums) demography is somehow destiny. Of course it matters that many of those seats have (or can certainly be caricatured as having) large number of older, less educated, white working class voters who were repelled by Labour’s London-Left-liberalism — especially when it appeared to accelerate under Corbyn. But that doesn’t mean that at least some of them can’t be brought back into the fold by a palpable change of direction or at least an emphasis under a Labour leader savvy enough to steer clear of the supposed excesses of identity politics and away from any suggestion that Brexit can be unwound.

It’s an equally common misconception that all or nearly all of the northern seats that switched had never before elected a Tory MP — many of them (Barrow-in-Furness, Bury North and Bury South and Bolton North to name but the ‘b’s) did so in the 1980s before going back to Labour again in the late nineties and early noughties. In other words, a fair few of the seats that Labour needs to win back are seats that the party has lost (and often lost quite badly) in before but won back, sometimes with seemingly stonking majorities.

Nor should we discount the economic shocks resulting from both Covid and Brexit, deal or no deal. By the time the next election rolls around, the UK might not be firing on all cylinders, let alone have been ‘levelled-up’. As a result, there is really no earthly reason why Labour — decently led and with a little bit of luck — can’t snatch back many of the seats Boris Johnson captured back in 2019, in addition to winning a bunch of home counties and leafy-liberal constituencies further (but not always: think Rushcliffe and Altringham and Sale) south.

Keir Starmer would doubtless deny being a Blairite. But he is going to have to pull off basically the same trick as the man who only a small minority of his grassroots membership still regard with much, if any, residual fondness and respect.

For all the inevitable calls for him to define himself this week, in the months and weeks to come, Labour’s new leader would be far better off becoming, like Blair, a protean politician onto whom a bewildering variety of voters can project their own aspirations and concerns — and so see in him both the radicalism and reassurance they simultaneously crave.

Often these interlocutors will reveal an inner residual fondness for what they believe Labour to have once been – a communitarian, patriotic party espousing economic justice and rooted in the principles of family, work, belonging, vocation and reciprocity – and declare that they would support the party today if it still stood for these things. “I’d vote for the Labour party my grandparents voted for,” is a common refrain.

I tell them that I am under no illusion about the extent of the chasm that has emerged between Labour and the working class. Labour has historically been the vehicle that has advanced the interests of the working-class through its willingness to challenge the domination of capital, confront vested interests and diffuse power and wealth more widely throughout society. And for all its current and deep-seated faults, it still has the capacity to play that particular role.

And notwithstanding its oversteer towards the urban middle-classes and the attendant self-destructive slide into hyper-liberalism and identity politics, there continues to exist within the party a few lingering threads on a fraying rope that are just about preventing it being wrenched irretrievably from its old ideological moorings. These can be seen in the work of a small number of groups and individuals who understand that, to win power again, Labour must begin lavishing love and attention on the very people – the traditional working-class – whom it has spent so long alienating.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

So while it cannot be denied that much of today’s Labour party is wedded to the precepts of liberal wokedom and obsessed with fringe political causes, it also remains the party of the Durham Miners’ Gala, the co-operative movement, trade unionism and the singing of Jerusalem at the end of each annual conference. These sorts of things represent a vestigial working-class spirit within Labour that the Tories will always struggle to emulate.

Nonetheless, it is hard to pinpoint a time since the 1930s when Labour was so disconnected from its working-class base and far from power. Even in the calamitous general election of 1983, the party largely held on to its strongholds. But today, seven months on from the latest electoral catastrophe and on the anniversary of Boris Johnson’s first year in office, Labour arguably remains at its weakest in almost a century, its poll ratings flagging (in spite of the party being under new management) and many of its so-called Red Wall seats under Tory management. That this should be happening after a decade of grinding Tory austerity remains a mystery to some. But it really oughtn’t be.

After a year of Boris Johnson in No 10, the Tories are still dominant for a simple reason: they have captured the mood of the bulk of the working class. It is that simple. They understood that there existed in British politics a gap in the market that no party had for a long time seemed willing to fill. And they saw that by exploiting that gap they would attract the support of millions of working-class voters whose anger and resentment had been festering for years.

These were voters residing in the grittier, hard-pressed parts of the nation who had witnessed their communities altering before their eyes as a consequence of unrelenting globalisation, deindustrialisation and shifting demographics. They didn’t take kindly to the toxic mix of social and economic liberalism that had been foisted on them. They had suffered the effects of low wages and a lack of decent housing. They lived in the type of places – post-industrial, small-town and coastal Britain – which hadn’t exactly embraced all aspects of the cultural revolution and where traditional values were often still in common currency. They wanted not only economic security, but also a bit of cultural security. They had voted for Brexit in large numbers and were bitter at the establishment’s refusal to implement it.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

The Tories saw that these millions felt unrepresented and, in the lead-up to December’s poll, got their messaging spot on. They would get Brexit done. They would end free movement. Austerity would be replaced by investment in housing, jobs, skills and infrastructure projects, bringing new opportunities and restoring a sense of pride to our industrial wastelands. This wasn’t so much the Tories parking their tanks on Labour’s lawn as barging through the front door, plonking themselves on the sofa and grabbing hold of the remote control.

Whether the reality will match the rhetoric is another thing. Boris Johnson is almost certainly no Keynesian interventionist by instinct – and neither are most of his MPs – so it’s hard to believe that the new direction adopted by the Tories is motivated by anything more than a cold electoral calculation about what it will take for them to hang on to their new supporters. They must surely know that any return to economic retrenchment in response to the Covid-19 fall-out will certainly do nothing to cement that support.

If, therefore, the Tories spend the coming years delivering on their promises, Labour has got a serious problem on its hands. Having taken the leap of voting Tory for the first time, many working-class voters will feel that the taboo of supporting their traditional enemy is for ever broken. It’s unlikely they will hesitate to vote the same way again if they feel their trust has been sufficiently repaid.

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I don't miss the nastiness of the Left

By Paul Embery

What, in these circumstances, would be Labour’s message to its old supporters? Would it cede the communitarian, patriotic, interventionist ground to the Tories and seek to outflank them on other issues? Trans equality? Freedom for Palestine? Defend migrants’ rights? All themes that are well-meaning, no doubt, but ultimately not the defining factor in whether the party will ever win back its old strongholds.

No, instead Labour must get back on to that territory usurped by the Tories. Start talking about the issues that matter most to working-class people. Demonstrate that it really means business by ditching the obsession with identity politics and wokedom. Show that it can again be the vehicle to advance the cause of the working class against the resistance of vested interests.

It will be a mammoth task. And it needs to start happening soon. Otherwise that fraying rope still tenuously linking the party to its traditional base will become severed for good, and no amount of appeals to history or sentiment will reattach it.

It was echoed by others. Writing in the Observer, Andrew Rawnsley contended that the Cummings episode ticked all three boxes that determine whether or not scandals evolve into a ‘consequential episode’: it cut through in a big way; it changed how people see the government; and it redefined public opinion in a way that is “enduringly bad”.

There is no doubt that the scandal met some of Rawnsley’s criteria. Lots of people did notice the story and when they were asked whether or not they thought Cummings should have been sacked, most said yes. The general violation of our collective sense of ‘fair play’, long seen as a key ingredient of British culture, has also impacted the polls.

In the week before the story broke, Johnson’s party averaged 48% of the vote and a 15-point lead; in the polls since they have averaged 43% of the vote and a 6-point lead. If you want to put a figure on the cost of Cummings, then it is around 5 percentage points.

But even so, is this really the game-changer that many think? I’m not convinced. For one thing, we often award scandals a level of importance that is wholly disproportionate to their actual significance. We forget this now, but the Conservatives were re-elected after the Suez crisis, Labour were re-elected after David Kelly and Iraq, and Donald Trump was elected after boasting about groping women.

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Boris Johnson and the ravages of office

By Ian Birrell

Even far-reaching scandals like the expenses fiasco, which would presumably also meet Rawnsley’s criteria, turned out to have only a fleeting impact; one study found ‘no evidence of any lasting effect’.

Then there is the way the Cummings scandal is already being diluted by our media’s very different treatment of the George Floyd protests. Even if you support the protestors who demonstrate purpose, as I do, the difference in the coverage is striking.

Just a week after its spluttering outrage over the Cummings affair, BBC’s News at Ten moved to covering mass protests in London while not even mentioning social distancing at all. “Ah but that is false equivalence,” said one person on Twitter.

Why is it false equivalence? Are we incapable of protesting while distancing? Are we allowed to do as we please so long as the cause is considered virtuous? One by-product of the British cherishing fair play is that they loathe hypocrisy.

But there are also other, more important reasons to be sceptical about the duration of the Cummings effect. In today’s more polarised political age, in which our values and identities keep us glued to our party of choice and provide a filter through which we interpret events, the idea that scandals will have such far-reaching effects feels increasingly implausible.

You can already see it in the polls. Perhaps what is so striking is not that the Conservatives have lost a few points, but rather how stable their support has been. Throughout the entire Covid crisis, and the Cummings episode, the incumbent party has not once dropped below 40%, a threshold that many past Conservative leaders would have given an arm for.

As I write, the party is averaging exactly the same level of support that it won at the election six months ago. The ‘rally effect’ that saw voters unite around the Government in the early phase of the crisis has worn off. But a disaster for Johnson? I don’t think so.

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All the lies about Leavers

By Matthew Goodwin

Nor is there much evidence that the ‘Johnson coalition’ — that curious alliance between blue-collar workers and southern conservatives — has been disrupted. In the latest post-scandal polls ,the Conservatives not only hold a solid-lead over Labour but a 63-point lead among Leavers, a 12-point lead among the working-class, and a 26-point lead in non-London, southern England.

If Johnson can hold these kinds of leads after the generally poor management of the coronavirus crisis, and the scandal over Cummings, then this suggests that his appeal runs deep.

It also speaks to a more important point that has largely been ignored amid all the hysteria and hype. Labour’s position in the polls has improved but there remains little evidence that it has done so among the key groups that will decide the next election.

The party is currently picking off low-hanging fruit; younger voters, ex-Liberal Democrats, disillusioned Remainers and Londoners. Their support is generally up across the board, but we have yet to see anything like the gains that will be needed to turn this ship around. Many people who have spent the past week talking about the ‘game changer’ already live in Labour seats. Many have yet to grasp the true scale of the challenge before them in order to bring about a return to majority government. I have yet to see a single serious proposal for winning back the working-class.

One reason why Boris Johnson has more breathing space than his critics would have you believe is because Labour has lost not one but two Red Walls. The first fell in Scotland; the second in northern England. In 2010, the election before Keir Starmer was selected to represent his north London constituents, Labour won 42% of the vote in Scotland and 41 seats. By 2019, it was down to less than 19% of the vote and just one seat.

This week, in the polls, there is absolutely no evidence of a recovery in Scotland. The party is in a distant third place, languishing on 13% of the vote; it is 5-points adrift of where Labour was in December, 9-points adrift of the Tories and 41-points adrift of the SNP.

This brings us to the second massive problem that has haunted the Labour Party for nearly two decades and will ultimately decide whether or not Starmer will become Prime Minister: England.

Take away seats in London, university towns and in highly diverse areas of the country, most of which Labour already controls, and the party is left with a rather barren landscape. Labour has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. Let me say that again. Labour has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. By the next election, Labour will not won have won the vote among the English for nearly a quarter-century.

And why is this? Most of these voters are conflicted or, in academic jargon, ‘cross-pressured’. They lean Left on the economy but lean Right on culture. So far, Labour has shown zero interest in speaking to them on the culture dimension because in the world of the Labour Party, to do so is tantamount to pandering to racism.

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Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffrey

And so when these socially conservative English voters who don’t live in London looked at Labour’s general wokery — David Lammy’s endless virtue-signalling on Twitter, the Corbynistas praising ‘Luxury Communism’ and with Emily Thornberry’s dismissal still ringing in their ear — they walked into the polling station and said ‘no thanks’ to Labour. The party’s vote in England crashed by 8-points in 2019.

In the latest YouGov, Labour still trails Boris Johnson and his party by a sobering 26-points across southern England. With Scotland gone, and the SNP’s social liberalism a formidable barrier to any recovery, Keir Starmer and Labour somehow have to find a way of staging a rather miraculous advance in England and Wales.

This means building a Red Bridge to the Red Wall. But that means talking to those English who exhibit everything that makes Labour’s London-centric MPs and activists so uncomfortable: a strong attachment to an English rather than a British identity; a desire to slow (not end) immigration; a strong emphasis on the nation; a firm desire to uphold national traditions, myths and symbols; and a quiet yet deep patriotism that is qualitatively distinct from the ‘ethnic nationalism’ and ‘racism’ that Labour associate with England. It is a world that puts flag and family first and which has almost no interest in joining The Great Awokening. And it would most likely give Cummings a free pass rather than open the door to a replay of the New Labour years.

Will Keir Starmer, who pushed so hard for a second referendum, be able to recapture this territory? Does Labour have the vocabulary that is required to speak to the English who have spent the past decade putting their cultural concerns ahead of their economic concerns? And how can Labour build a solid and sustainable bridge between Remainia and Leave Land? These are the questions that will decide the next election, not the antics of individual advisors.

The Party’s offer of a cocktail of liberal globalism mixed with a generous dash of revolutionary student activism — an unappealing blend of Lennon and Lenin, if you will — had alienated its once-loyal working-class base. Millions of its former supporters voted, instead, for an old Etonian in charge of a party which had spent the past decade imposing austerity on them and their communities.

Working-class voters — particularly in England — emphatically rejected the destructive creeds of identity politics and class war into which Labour had become so immersed, throwing their lot in with a party that many had hitherto regarded as their traditional enemy. Labour’s values were no longer their values.

Yet, five months on, there is little sign that Labour has learned any real lessons from the rout. The post-mortem, such as it was, largely sought to pin the blame for the party’s worst general election result since 1935 on Brexit, or Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity, or on a hostile media. All these things unquestionably had an impact — but none tells the whole story.

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Why I won't be celebrating Brexit

By Paul Embery

And the refusal to examine the wider causes — principally that the Party’s ideology, priorities and shifting demographic have increasingly taken it away from its working-class roots — means there is little chance in the near future of the organisation undergoing the radical transformation necessary to regain electoral credibility. In the eyes of many activists, it was the electorate that failed Labour — not the other way round.

Thus, these foot soldiers continue to obsess about fringe issues, in which most voters have little more than a passing interest, while relegating to a sideshow the everyday concerns they see as relevant to their lives.

A telling example of the party’s misplaced priorities can be seen in the reaction (or, more pertinently, the lack of it) to the release last week of a report, Manufacturing a recovery from Coronavirus, on the dire state of British manufacturing and the measures necessary to revive it — and the wider economy — once the impending crash has done its worst.

The report, published by the Institute for Prosperity, a new think-tank headed up by veteran Labour economist, donor and businessman John Mills — one of the finest economic minds on the Left — charts the decline of our manufacturing base (in 1970, it accounted for nearly a third of our GDP; today less than 10%), pinpoints the reasons for it (chiefly a lack of competitiveness caused through a perennially over-valued pound), and provides a road map for reinvigorating it. By anyone’s standards, it is a thoughtful and analytical piece of work deserving of the widest debate.

In the report’s foreword, Caroline Flint — who lost her ‘Red Wall’ seat of Don Valley at the election — rightly articulates the case for tackling regional inequalities through a ‘muscular economic nationalism’. As we emerge from the straitjacket of the EU, and as the downsides of globalisation — not least our over-reliance on global supply chains — are laid bare by the pandemic, people are looking again to the protective state for economic security. The report could not, therefore, be more timely.

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How will the Tories fix the Covid fracture?

By Paul Embery

There was a time, of course, when this type of debate would be meat and drink to the Labour party, for it goes to the heart of what the party ought to be about, namely shielding working-class communities from economic turbulence, setting the conditions that allow for the creation of thousands of solid blue-collar jobs in thriving and sustainable industries, and rebalancing economic priorities away from finance capital and towards the real economy where goods are produced and wealth created.

What better way to show lost Labour voters in post-industrial and small-town England — who are, after all, among those most afflicted by the phenomenon of deindustrialisation — that Labour gets the message and is now on their side than to place issues like those raised in the Institute for Prosperity report at the centre of the party’s agenda and messaging?

Yet, on the day the report was released, just two Labour MPs — so far as I could see, at least — showed any public interest in it (bravo Stephen Kinnock and Stephanie Peacock). The rest of the wider labour movement — including trade union leaders — appeared indifferent, or oblivious, to it.

That such a vital report seemed to pique the interest of so few inside the Labour Party is profoundly depressing — though it should really come as no surprise. It has over recent years become blindingly apparent that only a handful in the party ever venture to discuss these sorts of macroeconomic questions. Matters of employment, growth and prosperity can jolly well take their place behind the campaign for trans rights and Palestine in the queue of priorities.

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It can't be 'big business as usual' after coronavirus

By Mary Harrington

As it happens, the publication of the report coincided with the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. You can guess which took precedence on the Twitter feeds of Labour MPs during those 24 hours.

For all the responsibility he bears for December’s crushing defeat — he was, let us not forget, the architect of the disastrous second referendum policy — Sir Keir Starmer has at least offered some encouraging early indications that he understands what needs to be done to recover lost working-class Labour votes. The appointment of Claire Ainsley — a pro-family campaigner who has written positively of Brexit — as director of policy, and his own video call with voters in Bury, during which he emphasised the importance of patriotism, suggests Sir Keir recognises that there is no path back to power for Labour that does not pass through its old heartlands and win back the hearts and minds of the voters residing there

But if that is the mountain to be climbed — and it most certainly is — then the party itself remains stuck in the foothills. And until it throws itself wholeheartedly and full-throatedly into discussing the issues that matter to working-class England, it will stay there.

But, so far at least, the reverse is true. Indeed, some of the landmarks of this new ideological architecture are so familiar, it feels like something of a homecoming.

Among the most familiar and welcome of these landmarks is the presence of the Christian notion of original sin. Theorists of Conservativism don’t always use this language; they are more likely to speak of a suspicion of human perfectibility. But it amounts to pretty much the same thing. The Left believes itself to be participating in some grand project of human improvement, an ambitious endeavour that points towards a comprehensive moral transformation of society. Conservatives don’t believe in this because they have a much more heightened sense of human fallibility.

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How I became 'Tory scum'

By Giles Fraser

Original sin has developed a bad reputation. It sounds, to secular ears, like a disparagement of the human — overly associated with the church’s tedious obsession with sex. It is certainly true that St Augustine, the great theorist of original sin, was sex obsessed, and so he saw human brokenness through that particular lens. “God grant me continence – but not yet”, has to be one of the wittier intercessions to have been offered up to the divine by a saint of the church.

But properly understood, original sin was simply a very particular way of speaking about human brokenness, and an understanding that this brokenness was deep in the marrow of human life.

Perhaps the best way of recognising original sin as a kind and generous doctrine is to examine the views of those who opposed it, and in particular those of the British monk Pelagius. Like the liberal Left of today, Pelagius believed in human perfectibility. “Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” was his big sermon idea. God has given us the moral rules, and he wouldn’t expect from us something we are unable to achieve, so there can be no excuses. Moral improvement is the only way to heaven.

Pelagius hated the permissiveness and moral laxity that original sin made possible. No, he insisted, those who fail must be condemned. In many ways, Pelagius is the patron saint of woke, that unforgiving doctrine of moral excellence that cancels all those who cannot live up to its stringent demands. In a recent piece for UnHerd, Gavin Haynes wrote about how this moral bidding war is corroding communities.

The historian Tom Holland commented: “Purity spirals are what happen when societies saturated in Christian assumptions abandon that most democratic of Christian doctrines: original sin. If perfection on earth is possible, then boo to those who are less than perfect.”

Augustine’s idea of original sin is that human beings are constitutionally incapable of the sort of moral perfectionism asked of them by Pelagius. The Adam and Eve story is a way of introducing the idea that our lives are shot through with moral failure like a stick of seaside rock. This is why Christianity is absolutely not a story about human beings being good and then going off to heaven, but is a story about the need for us to recognise our constitutive brokenness and our need to be fixed of it by nothing less than outside help i.e. God.

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What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Even leaving these big theological narratives on one side, it is surely obvious that a political philosophy that recognises human weakness is going to be a good deal nicer a political environment than one that whips people on to ever greater demands of moral stringency and then condemns them for failing to live up to what is expected.

It is this Pelagianism of the Left that makes it so nasty a place to be, with its constant monitoring of micro-aggressions, and denunciations of those whose shade of socialism differs, one from another.

A kinder, gentler politics it is not.

Of course, the Left does have something that, superficially at least, looks a little bit like original sin: being white, being male, being straight. There are things that some of us cannot do anything about, things we were born with, and yet they locate us on a map of oppression as the transgressors. But this isn’t how original sin works, because, on the Christian version, sin is something common to all human beings and is, therefore, the reason for existential solidarity among ourselves, not a source of division.

That’s probably why people on the Right often feel like they are a good deal kinder to each other than people on the Left. The search for total innocence becomes persecutory to those who do not achieve it. The acceptance of fallenness, though, is properly inclusive, a recognition that we are all in the same boat, all stumbling about getting it wrong, all children of Adam helping each other along in the dark.

The thing I never understood about the Right, when I was on the Left, was how this pessimism about human nature could be so much more the compassionate option. Like Pelagius, what I recognised in it was moral laxity, indifference even — a refusal to do anything about the great moral ills of society. What I saw in Conservativism was a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders as people slept on the streets or queued up at the food bank. But I wasn’t looking carefully enough.

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The insidious racism of the Left

By Giles Fraser

For whereas the Left generally prefers to discharge its moral obligation to others through the transformation of society, the Right — sceptical of the grand plan — prefers to discharge it through particular acts of individual kindness and practical generosity.  Though not ever believing that such acts will totally change the world, the Right fights back against the darkness nonetheless, little by little and at local level. Without the showy drama of the revolutionary, the Conservative responds on the human scale, organically.

Conservatism, then, is the politics of human imperfection. For years I have been an enthusiastic proponent of human fallenness from the pulpit, but have never recognised the connections of all those sermons on Augustine to the political realm. I will never sit comfortably alongside all those free-market liberals who, since Thatcher, have made us confuse proper Conservatism with an ideological commitment to capitalism. That was a temporary alliance needed to defeat Communism.

Boris’s full throttle defence of global capitalism, meanwhile, in his recent speech at Greenwich — salvation by free trade — represented a form of business-minded utopianism in which genuine conservatives ought to detect the dangerous odour of ideology. Conservatives don’t believe in grand plans, whether capitalism or socialism. They see the world as inherently messed up; our job is to get on and try and make the best of it.

The leadership campaign has, so far, been thoroughly uninspiring. The only candidate who has demonstrated any sign of comprehending the scale of the mountain to be climbed, and what it might take to reach the summit, is Lisa Nandy — but, even then, one suspects it doesn’t come from gut. On the issue that, beyond all others, caused the meltdown in the Labour heartlands — Brexit — none of the contenders could claim with sincerity to have placed themselves unequivocally on the side of the 52%.

The most pressing question now is whether the party wishes ever to govern again. I genuinely fear that some activists — particularly those on the dogmatic, infantile far-Left — would be willing to see Labour relegated to being a party of permanent protest. That is, after all, where many of them have spent their lives and is the type of politics with which they are most comfortable.

If, however, it is serious about winning power in the future, Labour must elevate above everything the task of reconnecting with the millions of working-class voters who have abandoned it. These people are the party’s very reason for existing; without them it is nothing.

An attitude of “No compromise with the electorate” would consign Labour to irrelevance. So would attempts to pass off December’s annihilation with excuses about the hostility of the media or the “false consciousness” of workers. We were hammered. And we were hammered because our appeal was far too narrow. We were seen, justifiably, as a party for students, social activists and middle-class liberals in the cities. We had too little to say to everyday folk in post-industrial, small-town and suburban Britain. We ceased to be the “people’s party” and became instead the party of Twitter.

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By Tom Chivers

The first step to recovery is accepting this painful reality. Then we need to embark on a journey of transformation. The working-class in the provinces will listen to us again only when we start speaking their language. That’s why a “one more heave” strategy would be fatal. It would make Labour that arrogant English tourist who, when faced with a foreign shop assistant who doesn’t understand him, thinks the solution is to shout a bit louder.

Corbynism was right to demand the end of austerity and articulate an economic alternative to neoliberalism — one built around government intervention, redistribution, investment, public ownership of key industries and services, and tackling regional inequality and boardroom excesses. That approach remains popular, and there is no need for Labour to shift off that ground. But, as the election showed, it isn’t just “the economy, stupid”. Voters want a bit of cultural security, too, and here they saw that Labour had nothing to offer them.

That’s why there needs to be a sharp recalibration of emphasis in Labour priorities. There is, of course, a place for debate about climate change, homelessness, gender identity, universal credit, multiculturalism, and LGBT and migrant rights. But Labour’s disproportionate focus on these things has given voters the impression they are all the party cares about.

For the next five years, Labour must dedicate itself to talking incessantly about issues that hit working-class voters in the solar plexus: certainly the economy, but also work, family, community, law and order, immigration, the nation and suchlike. These are not ‘Tory issues’. These are issues important to voters across the political spectrum, and Labour cannot afford to absent itself from the debate any longer.

But simply to talk about these things wouldn’t be enough. The message needs to be right. And, once again, that would mean a seismic shift in thinking.

The party must start to focus on the value of vocation — rooted in the philosophical concept of the dignity of labour — and not measure success only by how many kids it can ram through university.

It must begin to view the family unit as the bedrock of a civilised society, recognise the overwhelming evidence showing that children brought up in stable homes with two parents have far better outcomes than those who aren’t, and argue that government policy should be geared towards facilitating that end for as many as possible.

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Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

It should acknowledge the misery that crime and anti-social behaviour bring to working-class communities, stop pretending that the solution lies in a determinist view that sees all wrongdoers as victims, and develop policing and justice systems – including much earlier intervention – around the principle that individuals must take ultimate responsibility for their own actions. Law-abiding citizens living on housing estates blighted by high crime are sick and tired of hearing politicians – especially Labour politicians – attribute the destructive activities of a minority to a lack of youth services.

It must end support for open borders — a crackpot idea once supported only by Trotskyists, anarchists and radical liberals — and understand that rapid and large-scale movements of people have, as with those of capital, the capacity to cause social and economic disruption in hard-pressed working-class communities.

It should promote the nation state as the best form of democratic government at its highest level and, particularly, as a bulwark against the agents of globalisation for whom national borders represent an obstacle to neoliberal priorities. On that theme, it must see patriotism for what it is: a genuine love of country, and not something motivated by xenophobia or a hankering for empire – a misconception that causes Labour politicians and activists to look down at their shoes in embarrassment at any mention of the ‘p’ word or to redefine it in a way so banal as to render it meaningless.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

On matters of defence and national security, it must leave voters in no doubt that, while operating an ethical foreign policy, a Labour government would keep them safe.

Some of this stuff will be anathema to many inside Labour, but if they want the party to remain relevant, they had better start understanding it. In fact, those activists doubtful that such a programme would be in keeping with the Labour tradition would do well to read up on the history of their own party. For much of its existence, Labour was a deeply patriotic, socially-conservative party, entirely in step with the values of working-class Britain – values that chunks of today’s party, chiefly the soixante-huitards and their political descendants, would dismiss as ‘nativist’ and ‘reactionary’.

Labour must become that patriotic, communitarian, proudly working-class, one-nation party once more. The woke liberals and toytown revolutionaries responsible for leading us to electoral oblivion — and ushering in potentially a decade of Tory rule — must be brave enough to admit they got it spectacularly wrong. If their hearts and minds cannot be won, they must be vanquished. They cannot be allowed to drive a once-great party into the abyss.

The Tory wave began as soon as Blyth Valley turned blue, gathering pace through the West Midlands with both West Bromwich seats going Tory for the first time, and then perhaps most symbolically it engulfed Tony Blair’s old constituency of Sedgefield.

But if this was the story of 2019, there is a risk for the Conservatives that 2024 will be very different: if Brexit is done, and Labour select a more capable leader, a more volatile electorate might swing back to Labour after 14 years of Conservative leadership. How can the new candidates avoid this fate?

Firstly, Get. Brexit. Done. New MPs won these Red Wall seats on the simple pledge to deliver Brexit. The fate of MPs in the previous Parliament should be a reminder that very few politicians are bigger than their party — even the ones who the media like to talk up. If new MPs get cold feet and decide to oppose the Government on any Brexit legislation, the voters will know about it, and they will find themselves in the illustrious company of Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke.

Secondly, spurn the trappings of Westminster and spend time in your constituency. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, MPs need a local profile. From my experience campaigning, when presented with the name of the Conservative candidate voters were much more likely to ask “is that Boris’s man?” than actually know who the candidate was. Building up name recognition will make your vote slightly stickier and help boost your incumbency bonus.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

Similarly, spending more time in your consistency will help you keep track of the key issues in the constituency. Brexit seems to be the all-encompassing issue of our time, but let’s not forget how the NHS surged up the agenda during the election. Social care, transport infrastructure, skills and reviving depressed high streets will also be important, local, battlegrounds over the course of the next parliament.

With more cash floating around nowadays — for example, Johnson promising £100bn to keep the Red Wall blue – MPs need to keep their ears close to the ground to identify opportunities to push for more money for their areas. Even more important, they need to let the voters know that lending their vote to the Conservatives is paying off.

The third aspect of any new MPs’ five-year plan should be to get more data. In modern elections, data is power. MPs should be canvassing regularly in order to identify where these voters are and if their vote is holding up. Many of these red wall wins came as a shock not only to the national media but also to campaigners on the ground, especially since many constituencies have been unworked for years. In one consistency I was in, we were working off data from 2007, when I was still doing my GCSEs. The election in 2024 will be a closely fought one and the more up-to-date data the party has, the better it can campaign.

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Why did a rundown mining town become a safe Tory seat?

By James Bloodworth

Data is doubly important given the upcoming metro mayoral elections in 2020. In places like the West Midlands, where Conservative metro mayor Andy Street scraped in on 50.4% of the vote in the second round, the Conservatives will need to rely on their new voters to help them hold on — and there is plenty of potential.

For example, in the 2017 West Midlands mayoral election the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell went 54% for Labour and 27% for the Conservatives — but in the 2019 General Election the four constituencies which make up the borough averaged 54% Conservative, and 35% Labour. The party needs up-to-date data to find their voters, and make sure they turn out in these second-order metro mayor elections, which voters see as less important than general elections.

MPs should try to build the local party up in other ways. The most obvious is to use canvas data to target potential new members and volunteers (and remember that they are not necessarily the same thing). Campaigning, raising money, and recruiting people to stand in elections is much easier with members than without. Don’t expect too much from those who join, but provide a welcoming environment (and make sure you reply to emails). Most people never meet their MP, and politicos can forget that for some people it’s actually quite a big deal to see their elected representative.

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By Tom Chivers

A second way is to establish a base of local councillors. In the case of Sandwell, the local council has no Conservative representation in the council chamber — despite winning over half the popular vote in the General Election. This is low hanging fruit for the party and for new MPs. Despite the decline in power of local councils since the 1930s, councils still make a difference to people’s lives — potholes being a good example. It also gives MPs a friendly voice inside the council chamber.

Similarly, new Conservative councillors can help to expose waste and corruption arising from years of opposition rule in a borough, which looks great on a leaflet, and gives the party deeper roots in the community should the MP lose their seat.

The Conservatives have a once in a generation chance to build up the party organisation in these former Red Wall seats. The 2024 general election will probably be a much more difficult battle, and those new Red Wall MPs will need to do everything in their power to boost their chances.

Those who spent time with Boris Johnson at the end of his premiership all reported that, whatever else was true of the man, he could always see the funny side. He might be watching a decade in office come to an end, but he still took a certain mordant pleasure in the fact that his undoing sprang from the victory that put him in power in the first place.

Some close aides even thought that the departing PM took real pleasure in his final days, settling down in his study — Dilyn wheezing away in the basket at his feet — to write two versions of the last speech he would give in the job. Someone else would lead his party into the 2029 election.

The first text set out the familiar argument, the one he’d made many times before, for accepting the new EW[1.  England/Wales]-US trade partnership. The other argued for rejecting the deal and the restrictions it would put on the nation’s ability to expand its trading relationship with China. “This great nation must always be free to chart its own course — even if some fresh Odysseus will now be steering the vessel,” that speech went.

Having finished both drafts, Johnson hauled himself to his feet, whistled Dilyn up for a last stroll around the garden and stepped out into the roasting sunshine of the summer of 2029 — yet again, the hottest on record. “Been a good run, eh boy?” he asked the dog as they went. “Now, which one of these should I give them?”

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By James Kirkup

The dog, as usual, said nothing, but everyone else seemed to have an opinion. The question, it was said over and over, was dividing the nation over its place in the world. But it would now fall to someone else to answer it.

Historians, of course, were divided on how good a run it really was. Politically, the Johnson Decade had been close to triumphant: two thumping election victories and something approaching a genuine realignment of the political system; the Conservative Party he left behind bore very little resemblance to the one he’d first joined in the Commons in 2001. It had even acquired a new name, albeit an informal one: the National Party.

On the debit side of Johnson’s historical record was the small matter of which nation that referred to. Since the referendum vote for Scottish independence in 2022, the name “United Kingdom” had been in question, even though the Scots hadn’t entirely left. Equally unfinished was the story of Northern Ireland, since 2026 part of the Irish Federation and subject to the “joint sovereignty” of London and Dublin.

Yet the voters of England had proved remarkably relaxed about the fragmentation of the UK, some reasoning that this was, after all, how democracy was supposed to work: they wanted to leave so they left. A few old-school Conservatives grieved their loss, but rather more of the party saw the departure of the Scots in particular as an electoral gift of epochal proportions.

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And indeed, it had looked for most of the Parliament that began in 2024 as if the Conservatives would canter to a third solid win; Johnson’s party had actually lost a few seats to Emily Thornberry’s Democratic Labour Party, though some of those gains were down to her deft absorption of the Liberal Democrats. As a result, Guildford, Esher and even the disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells had gone red.

Yet more than enough of the Tory gains of 2019 had stayed blue in 2024, even though — or perhaps because — the reasons they voted Conservative in 2019 had faded. “Get Brexit Done!” Johnson had said in 2019 and in a sense, he delivered handily. Less than two months later, the UK’s membership of the EU ended.

The policy wonks and a few independent-minded Conservatives at Westminster pointed out that “leaving” on January 31st was only the start of a new phase of EU wrangling, but not for the first time, they overlooked the retail politics.

Team Johnson managed Brexit Day with the same discipline they employed in 2016 and 2019. Across the country, EU flags were ceremonially hauled down from public buildings (many had only been flown there for the first time a few weeks before, but who notices such details?), Johnson’s face was everywhere under the slogan “Job Done”. The Red Arrows flew over Big Ben trailing red, white and blue smoke and no one was surprised when Downing Street issued instructions to all public buildings — schools, hospitals, council offices — to fly the Union flag for the rest of 2020. (Inevitably, some public bodies objected, generating the sort of attention-grabbing row that worked so well over that £350 million a week.)  And once Brexit was “done”, every poll showed the salience of the European issue dropping steadily. Of course, there remained a vast job to do on trade, but voters didn’t get excited about trade policy — for now, at least.

For the rest of the 2019-24 Parliament, Downing Street mercilessly hammered home the message that the PM was the man who had kept the political system’s promise to the electorate. In a world of spice and conmen, here was a reliable workman who delivered for “his” people and the places where they lived.

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By James Kirkup

Again, the wonks in the Westminster village said Johnson’s record on his primary challenge, narrowing the productivity gap between the south-east of England and the rest of the UK, was mixed. In his early days, he forced the Treasury to replace its “Green Book” rules that funneled public investment towards the south-east (because that’s where the biggest, quickest returns came) and cheerily borrowed billions to fund “quick win” transport upgrades (bypasses and bridges) that made driving around much of the Midlands and the North just a little more pleasant. Not transformative, perhaps, but was that surprising for a problem 50 years in the making?

Politically, Johnson surprised some by working well with Labour mayors in Manchester and Sheffield, inviting them to attend Cabinet committees as part of a strategy some likened to Gordon Brown’s “Government of All the Talents” schtick.

He even signaled he was prepared to talk about devolving more power to the English regions (“Every town should be a powerhouse”) but progress towards that goal was derailed by the Scots. They voted for independence by — what else? — 52% to 48%. For a time, the vote looked like capsizing the Johnson premiership, but his quick move to argue strongly that Scotland should not return MPs at the next general election framed the debate and captured the imagination of many of “his” voters.

At that election, the flag of St George was displayed at every Johnson rally. The man himself said he was “sad to see our Scottish friends go” but “determined to seize the opportunity to let England be heard properly at last”.

And, in an election that became a fight about who was best attuned to the English, Johnson vs Thornberry wasn’t really much of a contest. Newspaper columnists talking about “English nationalism” couldn’t dent the appeal of Johnson’s New Conservatives. The party won a higher share of the BAME vote than ever before, vindication for Johnson’s insistence that the election and the end of the Union were a chance to build a new idea of “England for all”.

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By James Kirkup

Having survived and even mastered such events, what could possibly bring down England’s champion?

The downfall, of course, had its roots in Brexit, and the trade freedom it delivered. Getting a really significant trade deal with the US became the prime focus of British trade and even foreign policy, but it did not come quickly. The re-elected President Trump, to the surprise of precisely no-one, proved less generous in negotiation than he had sounded before formal talks began. When Congress got involved, the talks got all the more painful.

And then, the real trouble started. The 2024 general election was followed by a more surprising outcome: the election of President Donald Trump — Jnr. And his running mate, Donald J Trump. Having failed to strike out the 22nd Amendment limiting a president to two terms, the Trumps decided to go around it, having noted that the amendment was, to say the least, ambiguous about what happens if a two-term president is then elected VP.

And the third act of the Trump drama shook the world, escalating the simmering trade war with China to boiling point. And that meant some harsh choices for US allies. As the younger Trump put to Johnson at a meeting in early 2028: “We’re in a fight and you’re either with us or against us.”

In practical terms, that eventually boiled down to a simple choice for Johnson and what remained of the UK: impose “punitive” tariffs on China, or accept that there would be no US trade deal and quite possibly no trade of any sort, since the US would apply tariffs to English goods and services.

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Given the scale of Chinese trade and investment with the UK by the later days of the 2020s, this was no small choice. A leaked UK Joint Intelligence Committee assessment that Chinese “non-state actors” acting at the direction of Beijing could “cripple” the UK’s communications network and wider economy “within 24 hours” sharpened the choice to a razor’s edge.

And this is how we leave Boris Johnson, preparing to end a decade in power with a bit of valedictory oratory on the parched yellow grass of Downing Street. The leader of a nation that was smaller yet prouder than when he found it, and about to make a choice he made possible: between two global trade superpowers for whom most voters held little affection. It is also a nation consumed with a new debate over the next question that followed from that harsh choice: whether or not to seek to rejoin the European Union.

“Glad some other bugger has to sort that one out,” the departing PM muttered to his faithful dog as they stepped out into the gardens.

“False consciousness” gets a lot of bad press these days, and you can see why: it’s a foundational concept of Marxist-Leninist communism, originally formulated by Friedrich Engels, and it can easily be seen as a way of blaming the idiot proles for not knowing what’s best for them and voting for the wrong lot. There is something a bit grim about telling working-class people — or black people, or gay people, or women, et cetera — that the only reason they voted the way they did is because they are idiots who got duped.

It’s much easier, and probably more vote-winning, to go the other way, and declare that you “trust the British people”. Figures as diametrically opposed as Jacob Rees-Mogg and People’s Vote UK have both used that phrase in recent months: we trust the British people (and the answer they already gave us); we trust the British people (so let’s ask them again). The electorate is always right; in some formulations, they are guardians of a quasi-mystical knowledge and wisdom, and can see through the lies and machinations of duplicitous politicians to the deep truths beneath.

It’s probably a bit simplistic to boil this all down to “can the electorate be wrong?”, but that’s what I’m going to do. And I’d say of course they can — be wrong, and be deceived. They are not holy repositories of the ancient truths. It’s just that there’s another, equally important, sense, in which they are necessarily and tautologically right, and that fact needs to be acknowledged too.

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By Tom Chivers

There are two important ways in which the electorate could be “wrong”: they could vote against their own interests, and they could vote in ways that are morally faulty. It seems obvious that both of those things are possible. According to YouGov, 33% of all richer “ABC1” voters voted Labour, 43% Tory; 33% of poorer “C2DE” voters voted Labour, 48% Tory. Sure, not all C2DE voters or all ABC1 voters are alike, and there were divisions by age, ethnicity and sex as well. But for every Labour voter, there will almost certainly have been a Tory voter whose material and financial interests would have been near-identical. One of them must have been making the worse choice, from a purely selfish point of view.

The other way is if they can vote immorally. And again, of course they can, assuming that we agree that morality exists in some form. There was no referendum on slavery in 1800, but if there had been, most British voters might well have voted to maintain it. In that hypothetical referendum, most of us would say that the British electorate was unambiguously morally wrong.

And of course they can be deceived into being wrong, whether by the billionaire press or the lying politicians. For the record I think the actual impact of the media on voting habits is gigantically overstated. But it is still real.

But there is another sense in which the voters cannot be wrong, and that is an algorithmic one. The basic idea is that their votes are inputted into a big machine called British Democracy, they whirr around inside it, passing through little gates called “constituencies” and “first past the post” and “majority”, and they return an output of “Tory government” (usually).

By analogy: if you watch a game of football, one team can have lots of chances, all the possession, play the best football, generally be better. You could say they deserve to win, in one sense; “on the balance of play”, it would be the “wrong” outcome for them to lose. But if they fail to score and the other team nicks a grim own-goal at their only corner of the game in the 87th minute, then they will lose. The algorithm for determining the winning team is: Let A equal goals for Team A; let B equal goals for Team B; if A>B then Team A is the winner. That output can only be “wrong” if there is literal cheating; Calciopoli, that sort of thing.

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Similarly, the outcome of a democratic vote can only be “wrong” if there is literal vote-tampering or other illegal behaviour. There have been accusations of such — the Tories worry about vote-stuffing, Labour about Cambridge Analytica — but I think they’re largely silly, and certainly not enough to have significantly changed this month’s thrashing.

If the electoral system returns something that doesn’t look “fair”, such as Donald Trump or George W. Bush winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote, or the Tories getting one MP per 37,000 votes and the Lib Dems getting one seat per 350,000, then that’s just what the algorithm returns. It may be that you can convince people to rewrite the algorithm, but — under the system — it’s the correct output. It is tautologically true that what the electorate elects is elected.

Arguing over what is “fair” or “deserved” is a lot more fun than arguing over the outcome, obviously, because it’s subjective and thus can be argued about forever. That’s why football phone-ins are full of people saying that the better team lost or that VAR got it wrong, rather than arguing that in fact the score was 2-1 not 0-1 and everyone else has simply misread the numbers. Hence the great big row we’re having now, and articles like this one.

Where does all this get us? Well: obviously, voters can be “wrong”. There’s a whole subset of the electorate called “low-information voters”. God knows I don’t blame them; keeping up with political news is boring, is hard work, and does very limited good in the world. But still, I don’t imagine they do much better than chance at working out what the “right” vote would be. Once you throw in media misinformation — deliberate or otherwise — it would honestly surprise me if a large majority of voters got it “right” by any single metric you happen to choose. I would be totally unsurprised to learn that I got it “wrong”. And voters can be immoral, because, you know, people.

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By James Bloodworth

But they are still the inputs to the algorithm that you have to work with. This is the sense in which they cannot be wrong, and complaining that they have false consciousness or have voted against their interests or are all “entitled, embittered, sneering nasty selfish racist foul fuckwits” is missing the point. It’s like complaining that the goals are too small or the pitch is too wide. You have the electorate you have.

Again, imagine an 1800 referendum on slavery. If you had tried to win such a referendum by saying “we ought to impose laws mandating equal-opportunity hiring practices and push for black people to be proportionally represented”, you would have been laughed at. It might, though, have been possible to win by saying something that, to modern ears, is obviously and hideously racist — perhaps that black people and white people can never live “on terms of social and political equality”, as Abraham Lincoln would say a few decades later, but that they should not be enslaved.

That is not the best moral outcome, but it is better than the available alternative; the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. By comparison, I would personally vote for a party that offered 100% open borders and zero restrictions on immigration. I think that would be the best thing for humanity in general. But it is obviously unacceptable to the electorate, so I look for the party with the least draconian immigration stance and — all else being equal — I vote for that. I think the voters are wrong, but they’re the voters we have.

Labour may be right that large parts of the electorate voted against their interests; or that large parts of the electorate are racist or homophobic, howsoever defined. It may be that a perfectly moral electorate, or one that knew exactly what its interests were, would have voted Labour in a huge landslide, with only Arron Banks, Mike Ashley and the ghost of Bernard Manning voting for the Tories. Maybe they’re not out of touch; maybe it is, indeed, the voters who are wrong.

But at the moment those are the voters we have. Call it “false consciousness” or whatever you like, but arguing that you have the wrong sort of voter is precisely as silly as stopping mid-match to demand that you should be allowed to use your hands.

Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.

His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.

Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.

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How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.

During the election campaign, the Conservatives pledged state aid to small regional businesses while not pointing out that half of Labour’s manifesto would have been illegal under EU Law. They quietly renounced Thatcherism. Boris will be the heir to Keynes while Labour will uphold the rectitude of Hayek forever enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty and its sovereignty over the single market and customs union. While Boris will point out the distinction between free trade and free movement, Labour won’t know the difference between the two. The interregnum has been broken, and as in 1979 its broken to the right.

Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly.

Brexit is a sign of the times, a glimpse of the future but the progressive mind can only see it as reactionary, nostalgic and backward looking. The decisive role of the working class in asserting national sovereignty through its democratic vote in order to renew the ancient institutions of Parliament and the common law is incomprehensible to the left. The new era is a foreign country for those who thought the arc of history was with them.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

The scale of Labour’s defeat last Thursday is hard for the progressive mind to comprehend. Like the death of a loved one, who has survived terrible illness before, it is both shocking and predictable. The responses of blame, avoidance, denial, anger, displacement and depression from the Labour family are also shocking and predictable. Labour is like a family from hell. Full of hate and blame and unable to understand how it got here. Labour is no longer a tribe and has lost its homeland. It’s gonna be lonely this Christmas.

This is because Labour is out of relationship with its history, traditions and the communities that created and cherished it. So out of touch that it couldn’t see the rejection coming. It now shares the entropic fate of the French, Italian, German, Belgian and Dutch Labour Parties, who have shrunk progressively into irrelevance, replaced by nationalist and Green Parties on the whole. Drained of their national purpose by the constraints of the European Union, social democracy has no conception of the social, or of democracy. Labour now shares their fate which means irrelevance and endless meetings that go nowhere. Just a slow and inexorable decline. It marks the end of British exceptionalism on the Left, just as we leave the EU.

It could have been so different. In 2017, when Labour said it respected the result of the referendum, it surged through the final two weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives, running on the policy of ‘lose your mind, lose your home’, turned a Brexit election into a discussion of the financial consequences of dementia.

There were indications of disaffection as Mansfield and North Derby turned blue; but the heartlands believed that Corbyn was a faithful son of Tony Benn and he had spent a lifetime denouncing the EU as a capitalist club where no-one was accountable. Against the current of continental Europe, Labour alone was a vital and renewed social-democratic party committed to nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. Brexit was a source of socialist renewal and democracy was re-affirmed as the means of resisting the domination of the rich and their decades of relentless plundering. But, then, Corbyn’s Labour renounced Brexit.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

One of the reasons why the election result seemed so shocking was that the working class were supposed to be on the wrong side of history, to not really matter anymore. Despite the result of the Brexit referendum, it was assumed that the task for Labour was to build a coalition of ‘progressive’ voters around a second referendum which they called a ‘people’s vote’. The difference between 2017 and 2019 was that the working class noted that Labour was blocking Brexit and denying the legitimacy of their vote. Corbyn’s Labour sided with global capitalism. It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

The deep complicity between New Labour and the Corbyn Project was shown here. The progressive certainty that history was going in one direction, towards the free movement of people and things, that technology would dissolve place and borders in an undifferentiated swirl in which only the individual and Treaty law mattered.

That the future was based on globalisation was unquestioned between them, as was the idea that the nation state and democracy no longer really mattered. This Whig theory of history is as untrue now as it ever was. The working class, the Nation-State and democracy are key features of the new era. Far from being losers, the post-industrial working class has decided the two most significant votes of our time.

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Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

And the Left was the loser. The progressive illness has dissolved the ties that bind because it has no concept of society, of the social, of belonging and inheritance. Trapped in an endless now, it lost the future. The coalition of Peter Mandelson and John McDonnell that tied Labour to a second referendum is the key to understanding the catastrophic defeat because it finally ruptured the connection between the working class and Labour. It said, you didn’t know what you were doing. It said that democracy does not decide issues in our society. It said that it had no faith in our country to decide its future through democratic politics but that it had to be contracted out to an unaccountable system of directives and laws.

By embracing a second referendum, Labour crossed a line. It no longer supported workers who trusted democracy more than the European Court of Justice when it came to their rights. Labour thought that the consequences would be catastrophic and displayed no confidence that our country could flourish outside frictionless capitalism. The Left suddenly became experts in just-in-time supply chains as if capitalism, the most adaptable economic system ever devised, would not be able to cope. They were not faithful to the marriage and it is now over. There is no evidence that there will be a reconciliation.

At the last election, Labour lost Mansfield by a thousand votes. Now the majority is more than 16,000. The Scottish working-class have not returned to Labour, but moved to a nationalist party and show no sign of remorse. Once rejected, they move on and don’t look back. In Michael Lind’s recent book, the New Class War, he makes the connection between class and geography, between hubs and heartlands. Labour is the party of the hubs, but the Conservatives now lay claim to the heartlands.

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Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

And beyond the immediate devastation of defeat, is the existential horror of what it means. The severing of the long-term marriage with the working class that created the Labour Party in the first place. It opens the space for the emergence of a genuinely nasty right-wing populist Party as an alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. The Brexit Party is merely a mild taster of what the future portends. The Conservative vote only rose a few percent overall, many former Labour voters went for the Brexit Party. What was clear is that the Labour vote collapsed in the heartlands and the Brexit Party saved more Labour seats than it lost.

The glory of Labour was its ability to express the Labour interest within the framework of the inherited Parliamentary and legal institutions asserting democratic politics as an alternative to violence. While the rest of Europe did polarise and went Fascist or Communist, Labour retained the affections of the working-class and engaged in the politics of war and peace. Defeating the Nazis in the War Coalition and then creating the National Health Service, nationalising steel, coal and the railways, creating the National Trust and the Green Belt.

The virtues of civility, generosity, and kindness in the public square are easily dismissed and hard to retain. Labour was the source of that politics and with its departure from the working-class communities it used to represent, a sullen resentful politics looms. Something closer to the Front National or the Afd in Germany.

The new Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects; it needs to build on the politics of earning and belonging, of contribution and civic renewal. Over the past 40 years, the counties and towns of our country have been denuded of its assets and inheritance. None of the building societies that were demutualised in the last 40 years exist any longer as local institutions. The endowment of regional banks so that there is access to capital once more is an essential part of that. The recognition of vocation is also essential and the establishment of vocational colleges for building, maintenance, social care and taxi driving with apprenticeship laws that regulate labour market entry would address the skills required for building homes, caring for the elderly and the 85% of the economy that functions outside globalisation.

The dignity of labour is the foundation of this. It should be the basis of Labour’s alternative. The central question for the next ten years is whether the Conservatives can recognise that their future now lies with labour.

All hail Good King Boris

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Much of the focus so far has been on the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall in the North and Midlands. The people’s party has been losing ground to the Tories among the working class for decades but it has ramped up under Corbyn who, ironically, was touted back in 2015 as the candidate who, by swerving to the Left, could win back the party’s disenfranchised “core” vote.

Four years later and nothing remotely like this has transpired. In seats where Labour once commanded majorities exceeding 20,000, the Tories are triumphant. Talk of blue-collar conservatism is in the air. Brexit is one of the causes but there is a deeper malaise in the Labour camp. The party is increasingly dominant among students and liberal voters in the big cities but the working classes are turning their backs on them.

Things are more complicated than that, of course. Labour is still doing well in northern cities such as Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield; yet it is flailing in towns. This is as true in parts of the South as it is in the North and Midlands.

Back in 2016 I spent some time in Rugeley in the West Midlands. And I returned there last year to make an audio-documentary for UnHerd. The former mining town is situated in the constituency of Cannock Chase, which, in the years from 1997 to 2010, saw a Labour majority of 14,000 gradually wittered down to nothing; today the constituency boasts a Conservative majority of 20,000.

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The Left's shameful silence over the degradation of work

By Jon Cruddas

Rugeley’s town centre has a ghostly air. Blackened brick dwellings, dwellings which once housed the town’s miners and their families have — since the shuttering of the pits — been partitioned and turned into buy-to-let properties. It was in one of these houses that I lived during my stay here, lodging with two young Romanians and an older English man in a house that reeked of cheap paint. All the inhabitants of the house worked in the Amazon warehouse — or “fulfilment centre” as it was called by management — situated about a mile down the road.

Amazon set up shop in Rugeley in 2011, 20 years after the Lea Hall Colliery shut its gates. The colliery, which opened in 1960, was the first modern coal mine opened by the National Coal Board, and the Cannock Chase coalfields at one point supported 48 mines. The last of these, in Littleton, closed in 1993.

The Amazon warehouse itself — the pale-blue colour of a swimming pool — looks incongruous amid a landscape of sodden green fields. At a café on the high street a local woman had told me that Amazon’s arrival had been a “massive thing for the community”, recalling that “There was gonna be all these jobs, but no one ended up getting one, did they? There’s a hell of a lot of anger round here about it now”.

She was referring to the army of Eastern Europeans who were brought in each day on coaches to work the shifts that locals were unwilling to do. “They don’t employ local people, do they?” the woman said accusingly, jabbing a finger at me as I left the café.

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

“Well, they never seem to take any locals on, that’s all I’m saying.”

When I revisited the town last year, that café had shut.

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Why I'm going to spoil my ballot

By James Bloodworth

Amazon — or more accurately, the agencies Amazon tasked with employing people — did in fact take on locals. I met some while working at the company. But most didn’t stick around. The work was too gruelling and the regime too authoritarian; we used to walk around 10 miles a day and were forbidden from talking with co-workers during shift time.

Taking a day off sick — even with a note from the doctor’s — landed you with a disciplinary “point”. Spend too long on a toilet break and you received another point. Six of these and you lost your job. Amazon was the largest employer in Rugeley and like other big employers in the towns employed its staff on zero-hours contracts.

On the surface Rugeley was a success story, a model pupil of the “regeneration” agenda promoted by various governments. Identikit out-of-town retail parks sprang up all over the place during the nineties and noughties. Like the rise of companies such as Amazon, this may have helped to strangle our high streets, but the payoff was job creation.

Amazon’s arrival in areas such as Rugeley, Swansea, Doncaster and South Yorkshire — all former coal mining areas — brought the tantalising prospect of restored pride. “Online bookseller Amazon has been swamped with jobhunters for its new depot in Staffordshire — leading to delays in the recruiting process,” announced the local paper, the Express & Star, shortly before the fulfilment centre — which was set to employ over 2,000 people — opened its doors.

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Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

It’s a pity no one bothered to ask whether the jobs being created were any good or not. By the time I arrived in Rugeley it was only Romanians and Bulgarians willing to do the gruelling entry-level jobs at the warehouse. This ought to have been a warning sign, yet the reluctance of indigenous workers to do work like this at the rates being offered was put down to the cosseted nature of the British working class.

When a group of Right-wing Tory MPs claimed that British workers were among the “worst idlers in the world”, I suspect many liberals quietly nodded along. That was certainly the response I got when I broached the subject with liberal friends and family members.

Amazon is a convenient whipping boy in Rugeley; but there is a broader challenge around the sorts of jobs being created in Britain’s towns, towns that were once thriving centres of industry. A 2015 report by the Centre for Cities described a reality in which jobs in declining industries were being replaced by “lower-skilled, more routinised jobs, swapping cotton mills for call centres and dock yards for distribution sheds”.

Moreover, there were a particular set of institutional affiliations that were lost when industry was wound down. When the old jobs went people were thrown out of work, but a culture was destroyed with them, too. Jobs that offered security have been replaced by part-time non-union work. Pubs and social clubs have closed while the pews in local churches continue to empty out. The Labour Party is less and less rooted in towns like Rugeley.

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Is patriotism racism in disguise?

By Mary Harrington

Back in 1997 the late Tony Judt, too nuanced a thinker to hold much sway with the faction that controls the contemporary Labour Party, wrote the following about towns in western Europe:

“In post-industrial France or Britain and elsewhere, the economy has moved on while the state — so far — has stayed behind to pick up the tab. But the community has collapsed, and with it a century-long political culture that combined pride in work, local social interdependence and inter-generational continuity.”

People in the communities Judt was writing about were “looking for someone to blame and someone to follow”, as he phrased it nearly 20 years before the Brexit vote.

Identity is a neglected aspect of the debate around deindustrialisation. Working people nowadays are encouraged to derive their identity from what they consume rather than what they do for work. Yet as Alex Smith, a former pit mechanic and member of the rescue service at Rugeley’s Lea Hall Colliery, told me, “People actually say, ‘I’m only at Amazon,’ and in the past they would’ve never said, ‘I’m only at the pit. You’d have said, ‘I’m a collier,’ because that’s what you were and you were proud of it.”

Rugeley’s experience will differ from that of many other former Labour-voting constituencies, but its lessons are certainly applicable elsewhere. As I wrote in April 2016, in a diary that would later turn into a book:

“Most of the men I spoke to that evening [in the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Club] planned to vote Leave in the forthcoming European Referendum, though almost all of them had voted Labour all their adult lives. It was the noticeable decline of Rugeley that seemed to bother them more than the presence of eastern European immigrants however.”

I don’t know how the individuals I met in Rugeley voted last week. Collectively, though, Cannock Chase gave the Tories an increased majority — despite its local MP, Amanda Milling, voting in 2015 for the Trade Union Bill, which will make it more difficult to bring dignity back to the working-class jobs in towns like Rugeley.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

Survey the town properly, however — delve behind the stereotypes about unreconstructed white folk nostalgic for a vanished era — and it’s no surprise that many residents long to “take back control” and to “get Brexit done”. Brexit may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, but the people badly want change and they’ve been led to believe — hoodwinked some Remainers would say — into voting for the only change that is currently on offer.

Does this mean that Labour is correct to blame its humiliating election defeat on Brexit and Brexit alone? Hardly. Promising radical change is easy; persuading people that you are capable of delivering it is the hard part. And that’s where Labour floundered. You can promise what you like, however if only 16% of people trust you with the economy then it may as well be hot air.

To some extent, Labour’s dilemma is about economics. As Lisa Nandy has pointed out, our towns need investment (the fact that the usual types started mocking her for this on social media demonstrates just how much trouble Labour is in).

But it’s also about community: how do we reinvigorate the sense of community that towns like Rugeley once had in an era of Amazon, Netflix and a more generalised contempt for the folk who choose not to leave the towns they grew up in? Moreover, how do we ensure that migrants are not exploited, as they seemed to be in Rugeley, to undermine the rights of indigenous workers? And how does the Left reconcile its instinctive hostility to nationalism with the ordinary, inoffensive patriotism that is a fact of life in any English town?

As the infighting begins over what went wrong in Labour’s election campaign, I fear that these questions will get buried under a tide of invective and vitriol. Yet they are more important to the future of the Labour Party — more I think than most members realise — than another round of bloodletting over whether the Blairites or the Corbynistas are the true and authentic inheritors of the Labour mantle.

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Audiocast: How dead-end jobs killed small-town pride

By Charlotte Pickles

We weren’t going to be suckered into the tiresome gradualism of the Labour party. Things needed to change faster than that. There needed to be a revolution. And the way to bring this about was to make things worse before they could get better. Capitalism, if allowed free reign, would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. We were living in the end times, and with just one more little shove the whole evil edifice would fall in on itself and a new socialist utopia would dawn. Oh, how clever we thought we were.

But this time was different. This time, I meant it. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it, though. Even on the way to the polling station, I was uncertain. The days of my flirtation with the SWP were long past, but there was something particularly sticky about the moral pull of socialism. And, I suspect, there always will be. The “hope” that Labour activists kept on talking about. Yes, I want wealth redistributed. Yes, I am perfectly happy to pay more tax. And yes, Labour’s manifesto – if a little overblown – was the sort of thing I had in mind, particularly when it came to economics. But in the end, my cross went in the Conservative box.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Back in early 2017, I was still cheerleading for Corbyn. I made a short film for the BBC’s This Week programme about why Corbyn was the right way to go. Later that evening, Andrew Neil would destroy me as I struggled to fend off his questions about Hamas and the IRA. I may have looked like an idiot, but I felt as though I had taken one for the team.

A few days later I suffered a major heart attack. As I awoke from surgery, still groggy with anaesthetic, my wife told me the news. Corbyn had done much better than expected. Even Kensington has been taken from the Tories. Hope springs eternal.

But in the weeks and months that followed, something began to shift. The EU referendum had been the crack in the dam, and it was getting bigger. I got my Euroscepticism from Tony Benn, a great man and friend, who had long been alert to the way in which our membership of the European Union was diluting national sovereignty, and thus slowly undermining the one power that the poor shared equally with the rich: the power of their vote. Without this, capitalism would run unchecked.

I was genuinely shocked at how many on the Left lent instinctively towards Remain, preferring to cede their precious rights over to some distant authority whose main aim was to allow capital to move around unhindered between hitherto sovereign nations. Like Esau in the book of Genesis, we had sold our democratic birthright for a measly pot of capitalist pottage.

It wasn’t the referendum debate that changed me. It was the establishment’s reaction upon losing it. Slowly at first, then increasingly as the campaign against the referendum result began to pick up momentum throughout 2018 and 2019, as the opposition took to the courts, my indignation burned. 17.4 million people were being denigrated as racists. Democracy was being deliberately sabotaged because it didn’t square with world view of liberal metropolitans who had become all too used to getting their own way. On Twitter, I was discovering what it was like to be on the receiving end of the Left’s unquenchable self-righteousness. I had become “Tory scum”. It felt like my default allegiance to the Left had turned into something like an abusive relationship. Perhaps it had been like that for longer than I realised.

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By Paul Embery

Being religious had long made me a suspect on the Left, a potential traitor within. So, too, my sense that patriotism wasn’t a dog whistle for racism but a basic instinct for national solidarity and togetherness. So, too, my love of Israel as a place of salvation for the Jewish people — it was something I had learnt to keep quiet about for too long. Mea maxima culpa. Now, all that was released. The cognitive dissonance had reached impossible levels. And the more the Left piled in, the more space it opened up for me to re-think my political commitments.

So by the time I came to place my little X before the name of the Conservative candidate it wasn’t with any sort of shame – it was with relief. I was no longer a prisoner of my past allegiances. The Left didn’t get it. The more they abused Boris Johnson, the more we leavers recognised the same abuse that we, too, were experiencing. It made many of us naturally sympathetic to him personally— despite his several and obvious faults.

Being cast out of the club now feels like a liberating experience. If Labour believes that people like me are so much the enemy that they don’t even want our support, then they can hardly be surprised when they don’t receive it. If “good riddance” is their attitude towards people as naturally sympathetic as me, then Labour should expect not just years of opposition, but annihilation. For once tribal loyalties have been broken, even just the once, the weight of the past allegiances can no longer exert the same emotional pull they once did. And now this has happened across great swathes of former Labour heartlands, Labour will no longer be able to take any votes for granted.

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Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

The fallout from Brexit is far from over for Labour. Their dark night of the soul is just beginning. For the reason Brexit presented – and still does — an existential threat to the Left is that it exposed how much one side of the party loathes another. It is the sort of hatred the People’s Front of Judea has for the Judean People’s Front. For like some sort of religious purity cult, parts of the Labour party have been far too invested in the idea that the kingdom would only be ushered in when their own ranks had been sufficiently purged of heretics and unbelievers.

Protestantism is littered with thousands of inward looking churches with dwindling congregations all at the throats of another little church down the road whose divergence on some obscure matter of doctrine has become all consuming. The ridiculous thing is that I still have much in common with the hard Left. Like them, I still believe that there is a deep moral flaw within capitalism. Even so, unless the Labour party can learn to accommodate a far greater bandwith of political commitment it should not be surprised that some of us will be content to remain as ‘Tory scum’.

Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford argued recently that national solidarity is a cornerstone of public support for a welfare state, and the nation-state a critical defence for ordinary people against the forces of globalisation. It appears the public agrees: Dominic Lawson argues that it was Corbyn’s rejection of common basic gestures of patriotic feeling that caused the British working class to reject him.

But Blue Labour’s call to respond with a return to “patriotic, communitarian, one-nation” Labour politics was countered with accusations that patriotism is just racism in disguise.

Part of what makes this unfair caricature funny is the nagging worry that it might contain a grain of truth. What if patriotism is a bit racist? After all, it is possible to conflate membership of an ethnic group with belonging to a nation-state. And history is not short of examples of national or ethnic antipathies being used to justify violence and hate.

But what if many of our fellow-countrymen have decided they don’t care? That retaining a democratic nation-state and a sense of national pride is worth being accused by members of the identity Left of stupidity or racism? If this is the case, our high-minded betters have two choices.

The first is to try even harder to “educate” the stubborn proles out of their love of Queen and country in favour of (one presumes) intersectional identity politics and socialist internationalism. To which I say: good luck with that.

The second is to make a positive case for patriotism. Racial prejudice is still, sadly, a feature of British life, but there are many more non-racist Britons than there are racist ones. A look at the 2019 General Election results for actual racist parties such as the BNP (total votes: 510) supports the contention that racism does not have mass electoral appeal.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

What would an inclusive patriotism look like, though? The last serious effort anyone made at articulating such a thing was Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia back in the 1990s. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that he was the last Labour leader to be, however fleetingly, popular with the working class.)

But Cool Britannia was fatally wounded by Blair’s decision to drag the country into a disastrous war in order to shore up our post-imperial “standing” on the “world stage”. And if Cool Britannia’s geopolitical fantasies were punctured by the Iraq debacle, its cultural and economic vision imploded with the Great Crash of 2008.

We seem to have run out of iterations of Great Britain. Colonial empires are frowned upon and the EU’s opt-in reprise of imperialism has been resoundingly rejected by the British public. “Soft power” is an elite preoccupation and ours is waning anyway. Financialisation has hollowed out our economy. So what remains for us to be patriotic about? It is perhaps understandable that many decent people on the centre-Right and centre-Left fear that the answer is “just racism, sorry”.

I think they are wrong. If Great Britannia has run out of road, I would like to wave a (suitably small) Union Jack to celebrate a new, bijou British patriotic vision: Small Britannia.

For starters, our island home is small but nonetheless beautiful and precious. Small Britannia should make stewardship of this small home a patriotic duty — our ancient landscapes are struggling, as they are relentlessly strip-mined of natural health and resources by super-sized agribusiness. Subsidised by that one-size-fits-all policy of anti-smallness, the Common Agricultural Policy, this kind of industrial agriculture rips up hedgerows and decimates wild plant, animal and insect species (especially the smallest) with crop spraying, habitat destruction and topsoil erosion.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Post-Brexit, freed of the strictures and perverse incentives of the CAP, a patriotic vision of Small Britannia might help us also resist pressure to import US-style agribusiness methods. Instead we could go large (or small) on environmental protections and seek to promote a rural economy that celebrates everything small, from small multi-crop farms to small fields with rich hedgerows to fertile topsoil teeming with the small organisms that keep the land healthy. 

Small Britannia could continue, in the same spirit, with policies oriented toward supporting smallness in businesses. Thickets of regulation automatically benefit big business, as they have the resources to meet them, while smaller organisations flounder or are simply put off starting because of regulatory obstacles. As suggested in this 2014 report on EU over-regulation, Small Britannia could encourage a flourishing raft of small businesses by exempting them from a thicket of rules (written risk assessments, GDPR etc) they neither need nor have time to obey.

While we’re at it, let’s celebrate smallness in architecture and urban development. Let Small Britannia encourage human-scale building, self-build projects, small-scale development, and architecture in keeping with local settings. A patriotism of smallness would embrace not enormous bland housing estates, gigantic modernist skyscrapers or even the grand imperial-era architecture of cornices, porticoes and Great Men but small architecture: vernacular styles using local materials and adapted over centuries to work harmoniously with local climates.

Boris Johnson is already embracing Small Britannia in turning his development focus toward towns and smaller places. We must demand more of this, and ensure a post-Brexit Johnson government responds to the despair of “left behind” parts of the country not with handouts or pressure to turn everywhere into an underwhelming simulacrum of London, but a vision of smallness flourishing on its own terms.

Let Small Britannia oversee a wave of investment in towns, in rural transport, in encouraging new, small businesses in small places. And let us have policies that help the young to stay on in small communities or come back there to raise their own families, rather than draining youth and talent away to enormous urban hubs. 

Smallness also supports integration. Letting go of empire and the grandiose visions of the past means embracing the country we are today, not just an imagined “original” (white) population. Here, again, Small Britannia could do worse than start with a celebration of small communities. It is far harder to segregate by religion or ethnicity if you live in a village where everyone knows everyone else by name. (I live in a small town and this is one of the best things about it: though our population is multi-ethnic, civic life is far more tolerant and inclusive than anything I ever saw living in London.)

Stable, friendly small communities need not mean suspicious and exclusionary ones if we all share a love of Small Britannia. Far more than balkanisation by the resentful categories of the identity left, a patriotism of human-scale communities and buildings and landscapes has the potential to offer a genuinely inclusive sense of belonging.

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And as Small Britannia oversees a flourishing of smaller, more stable and more inclusive communities, let us also celebrate a new geopolitical smallness. Small Britannia does not have to either possess or join an empire. Let power-bloc politics grind on; small nations have survived unscathed in other great-power eras. And within Small Britannia, let us see a real devolution of power; as Tom Clougherty argued in CapX earlier this year, fiscal devolution to the regions could hold the key to economic rebalancing away from London.

Small Britannia can close the book on all the dreams of ‘reach’ and ‘influence’ that are really codes for one empire or another. Let us turn our backs on the grandiose vision of the hyper-liberals, with their dreams of technocratic global government. Let us be free of Cool Britannia and its Hyacinth Bucket-like fretting about how Britain appears “on the world stage”. Let us above all spurn the ethno-nationalist frothing of those few racists who believe, mistakenly and perniciously, that Britain’s worth was ever tied to its ethnic makeup.

Let Small Britannia instead be a beacon to a world still in thrall to a narrative that says globalisation is inexorable, that small cannot survive,  that nation-states are doomed and governance must inescapably globalise in order to keep a lid on capital. Let us prove that the hollowing-out of small communities can be reversed and national democracies can return accountability to electorates.

Let us not abandon patriotism to actual racists but reclaim it for the decent majority. Small Britannia can set aside cold, homogenising utopias and empires, and embrace the local, the particular, the emergent and the organic. Let us turn away both from nostalgia but also from abstract victim identities and embrace all the citizens we have, with their multiplicity of origin stories. Out of this we can forge a new national synthesis in which everyone in our great small country can feel proud to wave a (small) Union Jack.

Yet Labour won just 47% of the Remain vote, while the Conservatives captured 73% of Leavers. The Tories retained two-thirds of their 2017 Remain voters while Labour kept only half their Leavers. This is the story of the 2019 election, and it speaks to Labour’s deep misalignment with the cultural mood of the country.

And a deep dive into British public opinion shows that Labour Remainers, the group which dominates among party activists, sit well to the Left of LibDem Remainers on economics and are far too Left-liberal on culture for Tory Remainers and ex-Labour Leavers. This means the party either has to shift to the Blairite Right on the economy or tack in a conservative direction to woo Labour Leavers — much like the Danish Social Democrats.

To understand why, let’s focus on the relatively understudied Remainers, who tend to be typecast as one-dimensional metropolitan liberals. Yet Remainers are not all liberals. In fact, Tory Remainers are more similar to Labour Leavers on cultural issues than Remainers who voted Labour or Lib Dem.

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Using 2017 data (which won’t differ much from today), Figure 1 shows that when it comes to beliefs about black, gay and female equality, Tory Remainers are closer to Tory Leavers than Labour Remainers.

 Scale runs from 1 — not far enough — to 5 — gone too far

Figure 2 shows a similar story on immigration attitudes, with Tory Remainers twice as restrictionist as Labour Remainers (based on 2019 attitudes and 2017 vote). In a survey I conducted with Simon Hix and Thomas Leeper of the London School of Economics in 2017, we found that the average Tory Remainer was willing to admit 61,000 people from the EU per year compared with 78,000 for Labour Remainers. For Asian, African and Middle Eastern immigration, the numbers were just 47,000 for Tory Remainers versus 65,000 for Labour Remainers.

We find something similar on both English and British national identity in the 2017 British Election Study, with Tory Remainers considerably closer to the nationalistic Labour Leavers than the more cosmopolitan Labour Remainers. There is also an important difference between Tory and Labour Remainers in their affection toward the European institutions, as figure 3 reveals. In other words, for Conservative Remainers, a Remain vote was a pragmatic rather than expressive choice.

In effect, there are three groups of Remainers: conservative, liberal and Left. Whereas working-class Leavers are cross-pressured by economic factors, inclining some toward Labour, many Remainers are cross-pressured by both economic and social conservatism toward the Tories. This gives the Conservatives an advantage, which showed up in their 2019 result, where they won two-thirds of 2017 Tory Remainers.

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A good barometer of how well each party is doing against its pool of ideologically-aligned voters is to examine the share of the progressive vote won by Labour and compare it with the proportion of the Right-wing vote won by the Tories. Whereas the Tories consolidated the vast majority of Right votes, losing little to the Brexit Party, Labour bled a considerable share of progressive voters to the Lib Dems and Greens, often in battleground constituencies.

Figure 4 shows that in Leave seats (at top left of chart), Labour won most of the progressive vote. The problem is that Leave seats are slanted against Labour, making them difficult to win. In more Remain constituencies, the vote was bifurcated into a Left-Remain and liberal-Remain zones, dissipating Labour’s advantage.

Figure 4.

Essentially, Labour needs to appeal to voters in two or three of the zones. The comfort zone of the party is zone 1, populated by culturally and economically Left voters, concentrated in inner cities and university towns, with their young, highly-educated and ethnically diverse populations. I call this “Left Remania” in figure 5.

Figure 5.

In order to expand, the party first must make inroads into zone 3, Liberal Remania. This is depicted in figure 6: a Remain-voting region where the Labour share of the progressive vote is below 50%. On the British Election Study, 2015, Lib Dem voters were a full scale point to the right on economic redistribution from Labour voters. Labour averaged 2 out of 10, the Lib Dems 3 and Tories 4.5. Thus moving into zone 3 will require a softening of Corbyn-McDonell economic redistributionism and a corresponding effort to instil greater confidence in Labour’s stewardship of the economy. While this wouldn’t get Labour all the way to 325, it would be an important start.

Figure 6.

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In order to move closer to 325, Labour also has to moderate on culture, stepping back from overreach on questions of immigration and the race-gender-sexuality agenda. They must find a way to either recapture the culturally-conservative working-class Leavers in figure 7 or appeal to successful suburban and provincial Tory Remainers in figure 8.

Figure 7.

Both present formidable obstacles. Working-class Leavers are further from Labour culturally, but, as we saw, Tory Remainers are both economically and culturally estranged from the median Labour Remainer.

Figure 8.

The notion that Labour can remain wedded to its Momentum agenda, combining a far-left economic and cultural progressivism, and simultaneously win a majority, is a pipe dream. Assuming Labour sticks to its economic programme due to its allergy to Blairism, it will need to take on its cultural radicals and rediscover national protection. As I note elsewhere, this is not going to change after Brexit. Post-Brexit, issues such as immigration, national identity and identity politics will, if anything, gain in salience.

Labour is on the wrong side of where it needs to be to win crucial voting blocs outside its comfort zone. In order to succeed, it must become more like the Danish Social Democrats, engaging in a cultural revolution akin to the economic one Tony Blair pioneered in the mid-90s.

It is a pity because Lord Heseltine could have offered uniquely useful advice to the re-branded One Nation Conservative Prime Minister as he seeks to embrace his new MPs from constituencies, many in northern England, that traditionally voted Labour.

Dispatched to Liverpool after the 1981 Toxteth riots in his role as Environment Secretary, Heseltine became at his own insistence minister for Merseyside. As such, he persuaded Margaret Thatcher not to give up on the city — as some, including the then Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, were advocating — and became its champion.

He helped to drum up investment not just for a selection of high-profile projects, including an international garden festival, Tate Liverpool and the regeneration of the Albert Docks, but for jobs and decent housing. He persuaded business from inside and outside the region that Liverpool had a future, while in London, he was grudgingly praised for managing to cut through Whitehall bureaucracy and get departments to work together on his Liverpool projects.

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Since then, Heseltine’s Liverpool phase has received only intermittent attention, not least perhaps because it does not sit well with the prevailing image of heartless Thatcherism. Yet Liverpool did not entirely forget and he received the freedom of the city in 2012 — regarded as a quite remarkable gesture from a staunchly Labour council to a Tory peer. But there was criticism at the time and since, in particular that after the initial 12 months London’s interest started to wane, that more junior ministers and civil servants were sent to meetings, and that the initiative lost steam.

The ups and downs are well charted in Batting for the Poor, the just-published biography of the then Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard. And there were plenty of misgivings and disputes along the way.

Without Heseltine, though, it is more than likely that the city would have been left to its decline and that any regeneration would have been much longer in coming, if it ever did. The point is that Margaret Thatcher was open to persuasion; the Government’s purse-strings were partially untied, and having a convinced, articulate and well-connected champion in central government made a difference. This is a precedent that Boris Johnson should heed, with or without direct counsel from Lord Heseltine.

If something similar is attempted with the “new blue” constituencies, it will be crucial to avoid any impression of neo-colonialism; any envoy has to be careful not to behave as any sort of viceroy. But the benefit of having named and recognisable champions taking responsibility for long-term regeneration, people with a sense of mission who can serve as champions of their designated town or area, identify the opportunities and unlock the funds, cannot be contested.

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As Lord Heseltine looks at it now — and said at a conference in London earlier this year — he sees his work in Liverpool as some of the most important of his career, not only in its own right, but in the example it set for renaissances elsewhere.

Nonetheless, that initial intervention was crucial in making Liverpool what it is today. Its city centre and the regenerated docks area are flourishing. The waterfront is as sparkling and distinctive as that of any erstwhile port city in the world. If you fly in to Liverpool, you arrive at John Lennon airport; it has capitalised with huge success — though some might feel ad nauseam — on the Beatles and their global fame, adding £82m a year to the local economy.

When I visited Liverpool at the very end of November, the central streets thronged with shoppers (the proof of their seriousness in their bulging bags); there were tourists; hotels were full. The blight described by so many reporters on pre-election profiles of the places where they grew up — John Lichfield’s report on Stoke-on-Trent being a classic of its kind — and reinforced for me by a visit I paid last year to Nottingham, where I spent the first 12 years of my life, does not apply to the main areas of Liverpool.

Where so many cities have approved insensitive redevelopment that seems only to have made incipient decline worse, Liverpool managed a massive, largely low-rise and outdoor redevelopment of its central commercial area that has brought the downtown back to life.

Politically, Liverpool has also held somewhat aloof from the regional pack. Along with Manchester, it was one of few northern cities to vote Remain (58 to 42 per cent) in the 2016 EU referendum. And in last week’s general election there were no defections to the Conservatives; none at all. All of its 14 constituencies remained faithful to Labour. Greater Manchester, in contrast, saw five seats change hands from Labour to Tory.

A recent study, one that made a bit of a stir in journalistic circles at least (UnHerd critique here ), suggested that Liverpool’s political exceptionalism, and specifically its vote for Remain in 2016, might be explained in part by the city’s 30-year long boycott of The Sun newspaper that followed its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. The academics’ thesis was that the absence of the eurosceptic Sun, and the shift of many of its readers to the pro-EU Mirror, might have helped to convert what had been a euro-sceptic city.

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Among the flaws in their argument would be that Manchester voted even more strongly for Remain (60-40), that as a strong Labour-supporting city, Liverpool may have followed the party in its shift from being eurosceptic at the first, 1975 EU referendum to becoming pro-EU from the Kinnock and Blair years.

More to the point it’s possible that as a major port city, which has now graduated from cargo to cruises, Liverpool looks outward in a way that many cities elsewhere in the country might not. At least as significant may be the Irish dimension, which not only gives the city some of its distinctive character, but also a special relationship with the island of Ireland, both through direct ferry connectiions and continuing family links.

What is more, its successful regeneration, along with Liverpudlians’ fierce sense of their own identity, may have encouraged its voters to take a more positive view of the present than their fellow-countrymen in the Brexit-voting towns left behind.

This is another reason why Liverpool should perhaps be recognised as the current exception that could prove a future rule. If Boris Johnson is serious about his One Nation ambitions, and if he wants all those new votes he won last week to be more than just “lent” for the short-term purpose of “getting Brexit done”, then he could do worse than mobilise a team of special envoys to fan out across the country with the task of adapting the Liverpool model for elsewhere.

Of course, that could present something of a personal challenge for Johnson, whose history of relations with Liverpool has not been plain sailing. Most famously, when editor of The Spectator, he was dispatched there on the orders of Tory leader Michael Howard to apologise for an article in the magazine that said Liverpudlians liked to wallow in self-pity.

Then again, how better to start mending fences not just with Liverpool — presenting it as a template for successful regeneration — but with the erstwhile minister, now Tory grandee, who staked his personal and political reputation on the possibility that it could be done.

On 22 May, he emerged from his house, not having noticeably ascended to heaven, and described himself as “flabbergasted”. On the 23rd he reinterpreted his prophecy, deciding that it meant that a “spiritual” judgment day had taken place; the physical Rapture would happen at the same time as the apocalypse, in October. 

In March 2012, he admitted that he may have been wrong about the timing.

The Camping prophecies attracted much interest from scientists, because they gave an opportunity to study in real time what happens when prophecies fail to come true. There’s a good Slate write-up by the psychologist Vaughan Bell from 2011, just before the scheduled end of the world, and the neuroscientist Kris de Meyer made a documentary, Right Between Your Ears. 

Camping died in 2013, and, to be fair, had said he wasn’t going to make any more predictions and that he had been “sinful” to do so. But some Camping followers — many of whom had sold their worldly possessions to ready themselves for the world to come — were less willing to give up. They predicted 7 October 2015 as the next date. When that, too, didn’t come, they retreated to a more defensible position, and said that it was like a warning of terminal disease; you might pass the six months or year you were told, but “the prognosis hasn’t changed”.

This is a well-trodden path for members of those doomsday cults whose predictions of apocalypse were admirably, but perhaps unwisely, date-specific. Perhaps the most famous were the Seekers, a Californian group led by a woman called Dorothy Martin. Martin believed that aliens from the planet Clarion had told her, via automatic writing, that a great flood was coming, on the morning of 21 December 1954, but that the Clarionians would arrive in a flying saucer at midnight the night before, to rescue the believers.

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The Seekers, too, left their jobs and their partners, and sold their possessions, and sat up on the night of the foretold apocalypse. Midnight came and went. Then, after hours of shocked silence, Martin declared that she had received a new message. The Seekers, she was told, by “sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction”.

Martin and the Seekers had been observed in all this by another psychologist, Leon Festinger, and his colleagues, who wrote up the events in a famous book, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger said that the cultists’ post-hoc reanalysis of their failed prophecies were not dishonest grifting, but a psychologically necessary piece of self-deception.

He was the first psychologist to describe “cognitive dissonance”, the idea that we find it stressful to hold contradictory beliefs or values, or to do things that go against our beliefs. When we have some deeply held, publicly professed belief, such as that an alien spaceship will come and rescue us from an apocalypse, and that belief is very publicly shown to be untrue, then our minds have to find some way of aligning the two; it may look obvious and forced to outsiders, but from the inside it feels natural.

What was especially interesting, said Festinger, was that before the failed prophecy the Seekers shunned publicity. But after 21 December came and went, they became proselytisers. They went out and spread the word of how close the world had come to destruction. Festinger thought that they were driven by the need to surround themselves by other believers, to give them social support for their beliefs: “If more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly, it must, after all, be correct.”

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Entirely unrelatedly, I’d like to talk about Jeremy Corbyn.

We had an election in Britain recently; you may have noticed. Labour, as the polls predicted, were emphatically beaten. The Conservatives very slightly outperformed their 2017 vote share; all the other parties raised their vote too; but Labour were absolutely pummelled, losing 7.8 percentage points, or about 20% of their overall support.

Polling has consistently found that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was by some distance the reason why voters left the party, significantly more than its Brexit stance or its economic policies. He is one of the least popular party leaders of all time, with YouGov saying that he has a net -40% approval rating (21% had a positive opinion, 61% had a negative one). Labour canvassers say that on the doorstep, voters consistently said that Corbyn was why they would not vote for the party.

But his supporters online have, generally, avoided reaching what seems (to me at least) the obvious conclusion: that, in large part, the scale if not the fact of Labour’s thrashing was down to its leader being widely despised. Instead, they blamed, among many other things (see this entertaining Twitter thread): Tory disinformation; the “Brexit culture war”; a divided nation; supporting a second referendum; anti-Semitism “smears”; centrists; the BBC; tactical voting; and, interestingly, the voters.

I don’t want to say that Corbynism is a cult. It has some features of cultishness, sure, but so does almost anything, and whether it is or not doesn’t tell you about whether it is actually a good thing. Lots of movements have revered central figures (I was going to say “charismatic”, but, you know). Lots of movements have passionate supporters. Whether you call them a cult or not is just a question of how you define the word. 

Having said that, I am pretty sure that the psychological mechanism of cognitive dissonance is what drives Corbyn’s more passionate supporters to avoid looking at the (again, to me) very obvious real problem. They may not have sold their houses or left their spouses, like the Seekers or Harold Camping’s followers, but some of them have very publicly committed to him, and having to now publicly accept that that was a mistake would be extremely psychologically painful.

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It’s easy to point out cognitive dissonance, and confirmation bias, and all those other psychological failings we all have, in other people. It’s especially easy to do it in our outgroup, and I should admit that the Corbynite Left is probably my outgroup in a way that the Tories aren’t — for the same reason that Northern Irish Catholics used to hate Northern Irish Protestants, but not care very much about, say, Bengali Hindus, even though the latter’s beliefs are technically much more heretical or alien. Proximity and small differences make an outgroup. So I am aware that I may be too quick to see their failings, and — of course — I am just as blind to my own cognitive dissonance as they are to theirs.

But I have a prediction. Just as Camping’s followers, and the Seekers, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so many other groups, continued long after the prophecies they made were disproved, so the Corbynite Left will continue, without admitting that the election loss was, in very large part, Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. They are already, as Camping and others did, moving the promised land further into the future (“a 30+ year project”, “it took 18 years last time”). Some will slowly drift away, as the cognitive dissonance becomes too hard to bear even with the comforting delusions, forming an evaporative cooling of group beliefs — the least committed will leave, and only the most hardcore will remain, meaning that the group’s beliefs will become more extreme.

According to de Meyer, Camping accepted, at the end, that he was “completely wrong”. So did “several” of the Seekers. For even the most ardent believer there comes a breaking point, when the weight of reality overwhelms the cognitive dissonance. But before then, paradoxically, the evidence that we are wrong can strengthen our conviction that we are right. For many members of the Corbyn project, the breaking point seems to be some way off.

I don’t mean to be gratuitously contrarian here — Boris’s big victory will change a lot of things. But in one very fundamental respect, British politics is the same today as it was before 10pm, 12 December 2019.

In every election since 1922, the Conservative and Labour Parties have either come first and second — or second and first. Furthermore, some incarnation of the Liberal Party has always come third in terms of vote share (with the sole exception of 2015, when it was UKIP). So assuming a full parliament this time round, that’ll mean more than a hundred years of the same party system.

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This year did not break the pattern. Nor did other era-defining elections like 1945, 1979 and 1997.

Ever since Labour became a major party, a century ago, many other parties have tried to fight their way into the system. Only one has succeeded in achieving significant representation (i.e. 20 or more MPs) across three or more elections, while maintaining its independence from other parties — and that is the SNP. However, as a Scotland-only party, it can’t challenge for 1st or 2nd place in Westminster (or even 3rd place by number of votes).

So, even when the Conservatives or Labour suffer a devastating defeat, they eventually bounce back, because there’s no one who can replace either party as the main opposition to the other.

Not many other nations can match Britain for the stability of its party system. (Not least because depressingly few countries have been democracies over the whole of the last hundred years.)

But is having the same electoral menu to choose from for so long actually good for us? In many contexts, institutional continuity is wonderful thing; but it can really mess up party politics. Here are three reasons why:

Firstly, ideological inertia. After the First World War, Labour ousted the Liberals as main ‘progressive’ party. In doing so, it served an emergent and necessary purpose — to represent the fully enfranchised working class and to champion an idea whose time had come (i.e. socialism). To put it in very unsocialist terms, there was a gap in the market — and Labour filled it. But are we really saying that this was the last gap that needed to be filled? That there hasn’t been a single one since?

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There have been several points at which the popular appetite for a new force in politics has been demonstrated — for instance, the brief surge in support for the SDP in the 1980s and more recently the growth of the environmental and Eurosceptic movements. However, they’ve never been able to take root in Westminster as independent election-fighting organisations. That’s not just because of our electoral system, but because of our stubborn attachments to the traditional first, second and third parties of British politics.

Ah, but do we really need dedicated parties to represent the rise and fall of important ideas and interests? Can’t this battle take place within the established parties? Indeed, if you look back over the decades, haven’t we’ve seen both the blues and the reds undergo dramatic changes in ideological orientation? Thatcherism in the Conservative Party, for instance. Or Blairism and then Corbynism in Labour. But that brings me to the second downside of our static party system, which is that ideological realignments only happen as accidents of history.

Thatcherism, Blairism, Corbynism: All named after unexpected leaders who happened to be in the right place at the right time — Margaret Thatcher because she alone had the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the Conservative Party leadership after he’d lost his third general election; Tony Blair because of his deal with Gordon Brown — and the tragic loss of John Smith; Jeremy Corbyn because of an ill-considered change to the membership rules and because he just squeaked onto the ballot thanks to well-meaning moderate Labour MPs. In each case, they were surrounded by a small band of supporters who, though pretty unrepresentative of their party, proceeded to seize control of it.

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It’s not that these new ideas shouldn’t have been heard. Take Corbynism, for instance. Following the global financial crisis of 2008 and its gruelling aftermath, it was entirely reasonable that voters had the opportunity to consider alternatives to the neoliberal order. In other countries, radical Left parties emerged like Syriza, Podemos and La France Insoumise. The voters of Greece, Spain and France were able to assess the anti-capitalist case — or to opt for a different kind of radicalism in the form of Europe’s various Green parties.

But in Britain, the radical option was put before the electorate by means of the institutional capture of a party meant to represent the whole of the democratic Left and centre-Left. A lot of people were rendered politically homeless as a result.

For exiled Remainers, the attempt to find a new home with Change UK collapsed in on itself. Meanwhile the obvious solution — to move-in with the Liberal Democrats — also went awry. All the unimpeachable logic of a centrist Remain alliance couldn’t overcome those stubborn attachments to the Labour name (nor the lack of forgiveness for the Lib Dem dalliance with the Tories). Again, this can’t all be blamed on the electoral system. In seats across the south and especially London, a true Remain alliance could have broken through.

What about the Leave alliance in the shape of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party? In this case, there was a breakthrough, which turned the ‘Red Wall’ blue. Isn’t this proof that we don’t need a fluid party system, in which major political parties can easily appear and disappear, to achieve political realignment? An experiment, like the Corbynite Labour Party, was given a chance and then given the heave-ho when found wanting. In other words, if the party system won’t realign, then the voters will do so instead. No matter how long the history, the established parties cannot take their traditional supporters for granted.

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But this reveals the third big problem with our indestructible parties: the only way that voters can dump an established party is to embrace another established party. Not only does this present psychological barriers that delay necessary voter realignments, it also results in strange situations like the fact that much of the ex-industrial North is now represented by a party whose heartland is the Tory shires.

It remains to be seen how well this new partnership develops, but at least the North had a choice, albeit a reluctant one. In much of the South West there’s now effectively no choice at all. It’s a region where Labour never replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories. That’s for deep historical reasons, but with the rise of Europe as a defining issue, the Europhile Lib Dems became the wrong alternative for one of the most Eurosceptic parts of the country. A look at the electoral map of the South West now reveals one small patch of yellow (Bath) and, in Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, a few small patches of red. The rest is an endless sea of blue.

How can we fix this? Proportional representation may seem to be the obvious answer, but electoral reform was heavily rejected in the AV referendum — especially by non-metropolitan Britain. Besides, the experience of other countries shows that it opens the door to national populist parties of the hard Right.

The real answer (as is so often the case) is the devolution of power from Westminster to every part of the United Kingdom. Scotland shows that this creates conditions under which challenger parties can grow in response to local needs without having to defer to London-based political establishments. Distinctive political cultures will only flourish in places far from London when they become masters of their own fate.

This, of course, presents Boris Johnson’s Conservative Government with major moral test. Having gained an unexpected degree of power last week, does he have the courage and foresight to give it away?

Will he trust the communities who placed their trust in him?

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Brexit did, of course, hasten this realignment. And spare a thought for the Theresa May/Nick Timothy strategy in the 2017 election which was widely ridiculed at the time, because it narrowly failed, but which can now take a bow as a necessary prelude to the breath-taking Tory advances made into historically hostile territory on Thursday.

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement.

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The challenge for the Tory party now, as Mary Harrington lays out in her election night piece, is to represent aspects of this defensive, national reaction without turning its back on the attractive aspects of the economic and social openness of recent decades. There is no reason why this cannot be accommodated under the canopy of the “One Nation Conservative party” that Boris Johnson talked up last night and throughout the campaign.

On immigration, for example, Johnson has already been shaping policy to appeal to both wings of the new Tory coalition. While the overall stress is on control and a return to more moderate levels, there has been selective liberalisation — over post-student work opportunities, for example.

It is not even impossible that Johnson, pressured by the Spectator magazine’s enthusiasm for it, could announce an amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been here 10 years or more and who are never going to be deported anyway. Such a gesture to the liberal end of the coalition could be balanced with something for small-c conservatives such as the introduction of a citizen identity system (ID cards in the old language) which would, incidentally, make illegal immigration much harder.

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It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come.

Housing is another potential battleground. The interests of younger people and lower income renters not on the ladder are potentially in conflict with those who are already happily housed and worrying about the impact of a massive building programme both on the value of their home and its effect on the green belt.

Meanwhile, in post-school education, the over mighty universities, long institutions of the middle-class Left, may find themselves less favoured, as investment into the battered Further Education sector is prioritised. Yet universities should also be on the front line of a rejuvenated Tory industrial and regional strategy which tries to spread good jobs and economic success more evenly around the country.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

So new priorities need not always conflict with old ones. But one interesting thing to follow will be the changing tone and accent (literally) of the Tory party as the proportion of privately educated Tory MPs falls to an all-time low, possibly as low as one-third. The new generation of Tory MP, such as Eddie Hughes the working-class Birmingham man who won Walsall North for the Tories in 2017, do not have a noblesse oblige interest in decent public services for the masses because they have spent their lives depending on them.

People such as Eddie Hughes and the new generation of less middle-class Tories might also have an interesting impact on the party’s attitude to family, gender and race issues. In recent years, British Conservatives have not really offered any kind of alternative to liberal metropolitan thinking in these areas. This could be about to end. Fairness and opportunity for minorities and women need not take the often sectarian and hyper-liberal form of recent years and can better accommodate the priorities of small-c conservatives, in family policy for example.

The fact that Johnson has promoted ethnic minority Brits to leading positions in his cabinet and No 10 also bodes well for more balance in the area of race and minority rights and a willingness to challenge the assumption that any departure from perfectly proportional ethnic representation must always be down to white discrimination.

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Could the Tories ever win the black vote?

By Mutaz Ahmed

Is it possible that fresh thinking in these areas, thinking that is closer to what the decent average person thinks, rather than the average university administrator, might even filter through to younger people who are overwhelmingly under the sway of the Left? That is unlikely to change in the short term but if the Tories push back intelligently against ‘woke’ culture, they might find a surprisingly receptive audience among young people.

A significant section of educated Britain has been suffering from Brexit derangement syndrome in recent years. It might be seen as a less alarming version of the 1930s flirtation with communism. But, as in the 1930s, the sophistry and fundamentally undemocratic instinct of many of those wanting to overturn the Brexit vote has come up against the decent common sense of the new Tory voters.

As John Gray put it in a recent A Point of View talk on BBC Radio 4:

“Those who have studied to degree level and beyond have often embraced ideas and projects that many less educated folk instinctively recognise are dangerously absurd. Something like this happened in Britain in the 1930s — much of the intelligentsia was ready to junk democracy in Britain for a new order that they felt was coming into being somewhere else.”

The EU is not the Soviet Union but the quasi-religious embrace of the EU worldview does seem to have driven many people, some of them my best friends, slightly crazy!

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

We asked a representative sample of 2,000 voters on the day of the election how they had voted and why. Of those who said they voted Conservative, 85% put ‘to get Brexit done’ in their top three reasons. That was also the choice of almost nine in 10 of the people who voted Conservative for the first time yesterday.

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Accept it Remainers, you've lost

By Douglas Murray

How was this message so successful, when only two years ago, another three-word slogan, “strong and stable”, helped deprive Theresa May of her majority? The differentiating factor is that it was not a phrase cooked up by some grand strategist — but one that came straight from the public themselves. It was not an enthusiastic call to arms for Brexit, but instead a tired longing for closure. It was the refrain of people up and down the country, desperate for the EU infighting to stop and for proper issues to be given attention once more.

I have heard the phrase repeatedly in focus groups from as far back as January, when I was in Downing Street. But the unfortunate truth was that when Theresa May said “get Brexit done”, MPs thought she was trying to brush the detail under the carpet. An apparently true believer such as Boris Johnson could embrace the phrase with no problem at all.

More than a saying, though, it was also a quiet thought in the back of voters’ minds. The power of this latent thought is what most probably explains why the narrowing we saw in the polls in the final week did not come to fruition. People may have been talking about public services and the NHS in the last few days, but when it came to putting the cross in the box, they were thinking about putting an end to the Brexit process. And if public services were on their mind, it was in the context of the Conservative Party’s message: they can only be improved if you get Brexit out of the way first.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Of course, the election was not all about leaving the European Union. Focus groups throughout the campaign consistently showed Jeremy Corbyn to be toxic for the working-class voters who abandoned Labour in droves. He may have won them over in 2017, but he went into this contest as a much better known quantity. Crucially, anti-Semitism cut through in a way it hasn’t before: of direct switchers from Labour to the Conservatives in our poll, almost one in five cited Labour’s anti-Semitism problem as an important factor in deciding their vote.

Other past episodes hurt Corbyn. His obfuscation on Brexit is an obvious one, but when I ran the polling at No 10, we found his fudged response to the Salisbury attack fatally undermined him. Although little reported, his reversal on his pledge to abolish student debt in the summer of 2017 eroded his reputation for authenticity with many of his more enthusiastic supporters.

This time round, the Conservative strategy fit the leader. In 2017, pollsters on that campaign (read: not me) saw that Theresa May was popular and accordingly recommended her name went on the side of a bus and she run a presidential style campaign. This was an approach which did not suit her. It does suit Boris, and he has clearly had quite a fun time over the last few weeks.

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May's fatal flaw

By Various Contributors

The role of the economy was also more relevant in this campaign than in 2017. It was the third-most cited reason by those new Conservative voters. This is doubtless linked to concerns about Labour’s economic record and spending plans. Labour’s individual policies might be popular, but voters had very little faith they could ever be delivered — or, if they could, voters feared the economy and their own livelihoods would suffer. Eleven years on from the financial crisis, it is striking how often the phrase “it could be just like last time” comes up in focus groups. This is borne out by the data: if you stuck with Labour from 2017, then the manifesto was a big issue, but none of the other key groups cite the manifesto as a reason for their vote.

Finally, the electoral dynamics favoured the Conservatives more this time round. The Brexit Party was more popular than UKIP was in 2017, and though there were some seats where they did seem to curtail the Conservatives, they also seemed to take a significant number of votes from Labour — making the Tories even more competitive.

The Liberal Democrats had a truly woeful evening, with the British public delivering the ultimate punishment for chutzpah by depriving Jo Swinson of her seat. But their vote share was up on 2017, and the effect was to erode Labour’s support, and provide room for the Conservatives to not only hold seats such as Cities of London and Westminster, but also gain seats such as Kensington.

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The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

It all combined to create a big win for Boris. Big enough that he can define the Conservative Party — and the country — in his own image. A lot got him to this point. But those three words, Get Brexit Done, did more than anything else.

For full results of the UnHerd/J L Partners survey see HERE and for full tables see HERE

This, said Sarkar, was “fraff”: it wasn’t that Labour had lost the working classes, it was that the definitions of class being used by Curtice no longer applied. Actually, the majority of Britain’s young people (in her obviously superior analysis) were in such precarious employment that they qualified as working class. Those young voters, she claimed, would turn out for Labour and save those heartland seats.

By Friday morning, constituencies like Blyth Valley and Redcar had turned blue, and Sarkar’s thesis had gone from looking desperately hopeful to definitively embarrassing.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Political opinion journalism has an ungainly dual role. It exists to persuade, and it exists to explain. Everyone who writes it is part polemicist, part interpreter. So what kind of writing was Sarkar’s column? She wasn’t seeking to persuade — actually her whole argument was that the exodus of traditional Labour supporters could be ignored, because there was a new supply of Corbyn-enthused youth. She wasn’t offering an insight that could help readers make sense of the election — obviously, since her revised take on class and voting crumbled on first contact with the polls.

All the column did was offer cover and support to the Corbyn project in the last days of a campaign when anyone with an ear to the ground and an eye on the polls could have guessed that victory was not around the corner. But, with a few honourable exceptions, political writing on the Left gave up on the eye and ear approach in this electoral cycle, favouring instead a passionate solipsism that sought to reassure Labour voters that everything would be OK, and if it wasn’t OK then it would be someone else’s fault.

Over the last few weeks, Left-wing outlets have published multiple variants of the “I am voting Corbyn because of [emotive personal reason]” column. Individually compelling as every single one of them may be, all they are is the story of one person’s ballot. They don’t dig into what’s happening in the country, and they rarely explain why anyone who doesn’t share [emotive personal reason] should make the same choice. Nor is there much effort to understand why people would vote differently, beyond bad-faith accusations of privilege and racism that seem unlikely to sway the uncertain.

“The ‘politically homeless’ need to bite their lip and vote Labour, or condemn even more people to misery,” commanded Dawn Foster in an article for Jacobin, which defined the “politically homeless” as an indulgent sect of the bourgeoisie who “correspond exclusively with a small group of friends who also graduated from Oxford, and they fetishize the 2012 Olympics, believing Britain was a utopia then”. It’s unclear how well that description matches the voters of Don Valley, who, having been solidly red since 1922, rejected the admirable Labour MP Caroline Flint in favour of a Tory.

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The problem with political journalism

By Peter Franklin

Corbyn’s 2015 victory in the leadership election caused a problem for outlets on the Left that has never adequately been solved. How do you give an avidly Corbynite readership the avidly Corbynite writing they want, without losing the scepticism that is fundamental to journalism? The answer seemed to be to junk the scepticism, and take an increasing chunk of their commentary from the “outriders” who blurred the line between journalism and activism. (As Buzzfeed reported in November, many of these writers shared a WhatsApp group with Corbyn staffers explicitly intended to coordinate messages in order to secure a Labour victory.)

Commissioning Corbyn partisans to write about Corbyn results in myopic coverage, most grievously when it comes to the issue of Labour anti-Semitism. A poll for Survation found that 87% of British Jews consider Corbyn to be anti-Semitic, but these Jews weren’t given a voice on the subject. Instead, we got articles like: “Scared of Corbyn? As a black Jewish woman I’m terrified of Johnson”.

The writers of such pieces were undoubtedly sincere, but their predominance only served to obscure Labour’s problems.

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How Labour betrayed their supporters

By Tanya Gold

And this is why the failure of Labour is a failure of journalism. Too much of the material that gets published under Left-wing mastheads is written by the Left, to the Left, under the assumption that there is an imaginary public out there who will automatically agree with their politics if only they are presented with them. (Owen Jones, king of this tendency, offered this on the eve of the election: “Young people have been hit hard. Now they can rise up and reject Johnson.” The young people declined.)

The ideologically impure reality of voters, whether working class, Jewish, or women like me who have been repulsed by Labour’s inane embrace of gender self-ID, are unwelcome intrusions to this philosophy.

It’s a culture that has protected Labour from the scrutiny of its own failures, but couldn’t protect it from the electorate. Labour’s troubles run deep: it’s a party of the working-class floundering for a place in a post-industrial economy, trying to hold together a mutually uncomprehending coalition of the socially conservative in the North and the socially liberal in the South.

If Corbynism isn’t the thing that killed Labour, it’s the parasite that commandeered a weakened organism and ran its host into the ground. But if there is anything of Labour worth saving, its rescue begins with a Left-wing media that can tell the truth about the party it claims to support, and about the people that party claims to serve.

Johnson’s opponents were handily played. They failed to grasp that the most salient issue for ordinary British voters today is not any one specific policy, but the simple question of whether voting ever changes anything. In the unedifying spectacle of their efforts to block Brexit, culminating in the Benn Act, Parliament’s Remain Alliance set about demonstrating to an appalled public that if it were left to them? No: voting would change nothing, ever.

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Time for Boris Johnson to show his true colours

By Matthew Goodwin

This election was at root about a technocratic style of politics which has been the status quo for decades: an ever-growing range of issues is ring-fenced through mechanisms not easily subject to change via the democratic process. The worldview it enshrines can be summarised as ‘double liberalism’.

If Thatcher drove a greater degree of ‘openness’ in the economy, liberalising the financial sector and privatising monopoly utilities, Blair drove something equivalent in society. The new ‘openness’, first of the economy and then of society was entrenched via unaccountable quangos and EU treaties against which, in the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, “There can be no democratic choice”. The electoral fightback against this is the long narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s path to victory.

When, in 2015, David Cameron scored a surprise majority, his government concluded that this represented a mandate for double-liberal policies. He believed it possible to drive ‘openness’ on both social and economic fronts, and that rising freedom and prosperity would somehow magic away any costs and externalities.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

He was wrong. In fact it was Cameron’s offer of an in/out referendum on the EU that handed him a majority. What the electorate wanted, more than austerity or gay marriage, was a chance to vote democratically on Britain’s continued participation in the central elite mechanism for avoiding confrontations with democracy. His majority was not a victory for double liberalism but the first move in an electoral rebellion against it.

The ugly story of elite resistance to the Leave vote after the 2016 referendum has done nothing to reassure electorates that the status quo Cameron so quintessentially represented might be salvageable. Voters have been treated to salvo after salvo from well-funded, well-connected insiders hell-bent on retaining their prime means of evading democratic accountability on favoured policies.

This culminated in Boris’ unofficial election campaign. Over September and October this year, the nail-biting finale to season 3 (?) of the Brexit drama saw Boris’ team baiting Parliamentary Remainers into deploying every means at their disposal to ring-fence outside politics the very issue of pre-political ringfencing. That is, they tried to use the judicial system as well as every constitutional trick in the book to stop the EU referendum result being implemented. The brazenness of this effort cut through even to that majority of the electorate which is largely apolitical. It has, rightly, triggered outrage.

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Do manifestos make a difference?

By Tom Chivers

Most people in the UK have no avenues for political influence other than their vote. No seats on quangos, no friends in think tanks, no contacts in the media or in lobbying firms or Parliament. Is it any wonder ordinary voters, even in such obdurately Labour constituencies as Leigh and Bolsover, have handed a thumping majority to the only party that appears willing to do as voters ask?

Demonstrating the Tories’ apparently unique willingness to obey the electorate was Boris’ real pitch for election. His victory was in the bag before his opponents even realised he was campaigning.

Tom Chivers was spot on when he wrote that he expected the party manifestos to have zero impact. The Tory manifesto was thin, he said. Indeed. The real Tory manifesto was Johnson’s resistance to the Benn Act. The official manifesto document was mostly an exercise in trying not to distract from his martyrdom on 31 October, plus the use of ‘Get Brexit Done’ to hammer home Boris’ willingness to have another go, if elected, at obeying the electorate.

This tactic has seen Johnson smash through Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. Aided by Corbyn’s unappetising combination of elite wokeness and hard-left anti-Semitism, the Conservatives have taken working-class constituencies some of which have been Labour for decades. Many of these felt abandoned by a Labour Party that considers their small-c social conservative outlook retrograde and their votes as a given. These communities wanted their voice back, and were horrified by the prospect of an ostensibly left-wing alliance working in plain sight in Parliament to deny them this.

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Why Remainers are the imperialist nostalgics

By Mary Harrington

What form, then, will Boris’ policy platform take as he seeks to incorporate that voice in a new Conservative regime? Johnson himself strikes me as a largely unprincipled but astute political actor, who will do his best to find the new centre ground. He will be wise to listen to those in his party who recognise that his landslide is emphatically not a mandate for a return to ‘double liberalism’.

We must hope that when he does nail his colours to the mast, he heeds the growing body of commentary that shows this centre ground is less double liberalism than what Matt Singh at CapX  called “fund the NHS, hang the paedos”.

There is cautious ground for hope here: as David Goodhart has remarked, it is easier for the Tories to move left on the economy than Labour to move right on society. And all the talk this morning is of how the new Tory MPs in the post-industrial North will be driving the party Left on the economy.

If Johnson takes this route, there is good reason to think it will be popular (at least with ordinary voters). He will face some formidable resistance though. For if Johnson’s victory was forged by a new coalition of socially conservative working-class voters and Shire Tories left voiceless by Cameroon double liberalism, he will also have his party’s Thatcherite wing to please.

Not to mention the unfolding negotiations with the EU, in which the bargaining power of the entire EU27 and its institutionalised double-liberalism will be arrayed against him. Balancing these exigencies with the demands of his newly-minted electoral coalition (and the shrill fury of the domestic double-liberal ruling class) will be challenging to say the least.

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Could Boris save his party?

By Tanya Gold

One thing, though, is clear: Boris has been voted in, to all intents and purposes, on a promise to end the institutionalised hegemony of double-liberal managerial politics. He will have to deliver, or face a renewed wave of electoral fury.

Any sincere effort to achieve this will mean difficult confrontations. Behind Johnson’s victory today stands a mass of voices that have long been excluded from politics, first by a discourse that held them in contempt and then by the progressive removal of salient policies from democratic accountability.

The small-c social conservatism of many working-class voters has long been traduced as morally beyond the pale by the Left, just as the communitarian economic policies favoured by much of the same demographic have been treated as romantic foolishness by the right. Rehabilitating these voices will mean challenging heavyweight opinion on both Right and Left. It will also mean for Johnson the delicate task of rescuing some political priorities that are salient to this group — such as immigration, family and law and order — from the embrace of demagoguery, without himself falling prey to its clutches.

Will Boris succeed in defusing the electorate’s bubbling anger by bringing long-excluded voices and priorities back into mainstream political debate? That remains to be seen. We must hope he has the courage to try.

Well, me for a start. And plenty of others who had been loyal to the party over many years and desperately wanted to see a Labour government, only to be dismissed as ‘reactionaries’ who held a ‘nostalgic’ view of the working-class.

It barely needs saying that these election results are an utter catastrophe for Labour. For the party to have failed to dislodge the Tories after nearly a decade of austerity and three years of political chaos is bad enough. But for the so-called Red Wall to have crumbled so spectacularly underlines the sheer scale of the failure. Bolsover, Blyth Valley, Leigh, Redcar, Don Valley, Sedgefield, Burnley, Great Grimsby, Wrexham — just a few of the long-time Labour strongholds in traditional working-class areas which have fallen to the Tories.

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How Labour betrayed their supporters

By Tanya Gold

Labour’s meltdown in these places will come as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention and wasn’t blinded by ideology or fanaticism. Some of us had long warned that working-class voters across post-industrial and small-town Britain were becoming increasingly alienated from the party. But we were banging our heads against a brick wall. When many in the party were bathing in the afterglow of the 2017 general election, we tried to remind them that not only had Labour, in fact, lost that election, there had been a swing to the Tories in many of the party’s heartland seats.

We sounded the alarm bells again earlier this year when, in the local and European elections, Labour haemorrhaged support in several working-class communities across the north and Midlands.

But the woke liberals and Toytown revolutionaries who now dominate the party didn’t listen to us. They truly thought that ‘one more heave’ would bring victory. They believed that constantly hammering on about economic inequality would be enough to get Labour over the line. In doing so, they made a major miscalculation: they failed to grasp that working-class voters desire something more than just economic security; they want cultural security too.

They want politicians to respect their way of life, and their sense of place and belonging; to elevate real-world concepts such as work, family and community over nebulous constructs like ‘diversity’, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusivity’. By immersing itself in the destructive creed of identity politics and championing policies such as open borders, Labour placed itself on a completely different wavelength to millions across provincial Britain without whose support it simply could not win power. In the end, Labour was losing a cultural war that it didn’t even realise it was fighting.

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The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

The easy response in the wake of this calamity would be to pin the blame on Corbyn. But that would be a mistake. It’s certainly true that Corbyn was unpopular on the doorstep, but Labour’s estrangement from its core vote predates his leadership. Long before Corbyn took over, the party had started to prioritise the agenda of the urban, liberal middle-class over that of its old working-class heartlands. As it did so, support from the latter began to ebb slowly away.

Brexit provided an opportunity for the party to reconnect with its traditional base, to show working-class voters that it understood their priorities and was on their side. But it flunked the test, choosing to indulge its own membership rather than appeal to those whose votes it needed. Its decision to support a second referendum spelled electoral suicide. There could be no greater signal to the disaffected millions in the party’s old heartlands that it did not represent them or respect their democratic wishes. From that moment, the writing was on the wall.

So where now? If Labour is to again be the party of the working-class — and there must now be serious doubts that it ever will — it must undergo radical surgery. It must somehow rediscover the spirit of the early Labour tradition that spoke to workers’ patriotic and communitarian instincts, and offered them a natural home. It must exploit that sweet spot in British politics that marries demands for economic justice with those for cultural stability. It must move heaven and earth to reconnect with voters in Britain’s hard-pressed post-industrial and coastal towns who looked on bewildered as their communities were subjected to intense economic and cultural change, and felt that Labour was indifferent to their plight. It must rekindle a politics of belonging built around shared values and common cultural bonds. And, crucially, it must be unremittingly post-liberal in perspective and policy development.

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How Labour became the party of dreamers — not doers

By Robert Colvile

But, to achieve any of that, Labour must stop treating the traditional working-class as though they were some kind of embarrassing elderly relative. It must learn to respect those who, for example, voted for Brexit, oppose large-scale immigration, want to see a tough and effective justice system, feel proud to be British, support the reassertion of the role of the family at the centre of society, prefer a welfare system to be based around reciprocity – something for something – rather than universal entitlement, believe in the nation state, and do not obsess about multiculturalism or trans rights.

Such people were once welcomed by the Labour party and felt entirely comfortable voting for it; but now so many of the party’s activists look upon these voters as if they were a different species altogether. And the price has been paid in millions of lost votes.

There is a danger that some in the party will see the calamitous events of this election as some kind of mandate to return to Blairism. They could not be more wrong. It was the Blairite embrace of globalisation and liberal cosmopolitanism, with all their destructive consequences for working-class communities, that did so much to damage to the relationship between the party and its traditional base. And, as we saw with the abject failure of Change UK, very few in our country want a return to that kind of politics.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Cliché though it is, Labour stands today at a crossroads. Those whose strategy has led to the most ignominious defeat for the party since the 1930s can choose either to plough on in the delusional belief that working-class voters really would support their philosophy if only they could be shaken from their false consciousness, or instead engage in an honest and frank debate about why things went so disastrously wrong and what it might take to put them right.

We are witnessing the beginnings of a fundamental realignment in British politics. The old tribalisms are crashing down around us. How Labour responds to this will determine whether it remains a serious political force or is instead destined to become a party of permanent protest.

Of course there will be plenty of complaining and buck-passing. The devotees of the cult of Corbyn will spend the coming days blaming their loss on the media, on big business and — naturally — Brexit. Indeed they have already started.

But it is only the Brexit excuse which has even the slightest plausibility. Brexit was one of the things which did it for the Labour party in this election. But not for the reason that the Corbyn cult-ists would like to think.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Douglas Murray

The reality was that yesterday the country reasserted the answer it had given to the political class in 2016. That year the British public were asked a very straightforward question: did we want to ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ within the EU? The country voted that it would like to leave but here we are, three and a half years later, still in the EU. And there are a number of attitudes that parties putting themselves before the electorate in such an era can aspire to hold.

The Labour party probably didn’t have the worst policy in this election. That honour must be given to the Liberal Democrats, led by Jo Swinson, who lost her own seat in East Dumbartonshire last night.

Swinson’s idea was that not only would the Liberal Democrats continue to oppose the result of the 2016 referendum; but that they would hypothetically oppose the results of any future referendum. According to the Liberal Democrats it was a viable policy to campaign for a second EU referendum but to say that if the public asked to leave the EU again the Liberal Democrats would still not see through that policy.

It isn’t hard to see the problem in that stance. It is against the whole principle of democracy. If elected representatives not only refuse to do what the public ask, but also promise that they will ignore the public in perpetuity, then it is not surprising if the public take the view that the normal democratic process has effectively been suspended and that business as usual can no longer be pursued. The Liberal Democrats, and their leader, received the verdict they deserved from the British people last night.

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What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

But the Labour party had the next worst policy on the matter of Brexit. Corbyn — a life-long Eurosceptic leading a predominantly ‘Remain’ Parliamentary party — had attempted to straddle an impossible divide over the last three and a half years. He had tried to accept the 2016 referendum result and tried to ignore it. He had tried to be against a second referendum and then in favour of it. He had tried to pretend that he wanted to stay in the EU but could see the possibilities of leaving. Those Corbynites who are pounding the studios this morning trying to blame Brexit for their dear leader’s loss are not onto nothing.

Meanwhile, it might be noted that every single one of those MPs from the Conservative and Labour parties who joined ‘The Independent Group for Change’ without calling a by-election, and otherwise used their position to campaign to remain in the EU, lost their seats. From Chuka Umunna (who ended up jumping again, to the Lib Dems, and losing for them) to the vitriolic and unlamented Anna Soubry in Broxtowe. All were given the heave-ho by electorates who were sick of being taken advantage of .

But perhaps once the dust has settled, the bigger picture could once again be observed. The fact is that last night’s results — and in particular the sight of northern, working-class, historically Labour seats going Conservative — should be the biggest possible signal to the still resistant political class.

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The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

In the last three and half years it has become a commonplace to say that Britain’s politics have been divided and even toxic. But there is just one central cause for that. The 2016 referendum was the first democratic vote in these islands which looked as though it would not be acted upon by Parliament. We were thrown into three and half years of bitter, recriminative politics because a largely Remain-supporting Parliament decided that it knew better than the people and that on this, for the first time in the history of our democracy, the people needed to be ignored.

Of course that changes everything. It shifts the whole game. If some votes are upheld and others are not then you do not really live in a democracy. The realisation that this was the case was the reason why some of us always said that once the referendum vote of 2016 had been cast there was no form of Brexit that could be worse than having no Brexit at all.

The toxicity of recent years — the language in particular — has been much commented upon. But at its root was always and only this one fact: that there were people who had decided they would try to ignore, get around or otherwise trick the British public into not giving them what they had asked for. Looking back it is remarkable what wasted years these have been. And how many talented people have wasted their time.

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Has Brexit made enemies of us all?

By Giles Fraser

Those former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair might have helped this country out by assisting or even leading negotiations on our departure from the EU and future trade deals. Instead, they spent their time trying to conspire with Brussels to keep Britain in the EU. Politicians and former politicians from across the main parties did the same thing.

And one after another they demonstrated that they would do everything in their power to frustrate the 2016 vote and nothing whatsoever to help their country given the choice that that country had made. Former titans of politics such as Michael Heseltine reduced themselves to spittle-laden appearances on television where their aim appeared to be simply to be as nasty and vitriolic as possible. What exactly did that achieve?

In the past I have described the situation of some Remain-ers since 2016 as being akin to that of people trying to work their way through the stages of grief. And they have got stuck, unable to get to acceptance, on the stages of bargaining and denial. Perhaps the results of this election can finally put this whole sorry period to bed. The British public voted for Brexit in 2016. They voted for it again yesterday. There’s no way around it. Our future is outside of the EU. It is time that the Remainers finally joined the Leavers in making the best go we can of this.

The number of politicians with accounts has grown significantly in recent years; the most popular is Jeremy Corbyn’s at 400,000 followers, with Boris Johnson at 285,000. This campaign has also registered a far greater amount of user engagement with political posts compared with 2017. Among the most viewed content is the video of Corbyn’s speech at the rally against the war in Iraq on 15 February, 2003 in Hyde Park; and his “Mean Tweets” video, where the Labour leader comments on critical tweets about himself by the fireside. Johnson’s account features campaign events, selfies, motivational slogans, pictures of the him handing out cups of tea in an old people’s home. In one photo he appears at the fish market in Grimsby holding a big fish. Politicians such as the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, and the former Labour and current Lib Dem politician Chuka Umunna have also earned reputations as Instagram-savvy politicians. Williamson has posted images of himself making a pancake, and the Wickes coat hooks he hasn’t got round to putting up.

They’re also seeking celebrity endorsement on the platform. Corbyn has Ed Sheeran (32 million followers), Dua Lipa (37m followers) and Stormzy (2.7m followers). Johnson has not earned endorsements of the quite the same calibre: the most notable showbiz celebrity to come out in explicit support is the stand-up comedian Roy “Chubby” Brown.

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Drinking in the madness of social media

By Gareth Roberts

Politics is being transformed, with campaigns adopting many of the tropes that have emerged on Instagram, in particular the culture of “staged authenticity”. They show how supposedly things “really are” backstage, away from the limelight, to make political leaders appear more “relatable” and humane at a time when their approval ratings have reached rock bottom.

Common to many of the pictures is an attempt to convey the impression that the leader was not aware he was being photographed. This is the style most used by Instagram celebrities, to create a more emotional connection with their fan base, with the ultimate aim of strengthening their brand, and converting fans into customers. In the case of politicians, the style tries to overome the distrust of citizens, and in particular young people, towards a political class that is perceived to be distant from their everyday concerns, and turn their fans into proselytising opinion leaders in their own social networks.

Surveys indicate that we are at a nadir in terms of trust towards politicians. Approval rates are particularly low for Corbyn, but not excellent for Johnson either. The issue of trust was raised repeatedly during the campaign, including during the ITV leaders’ debate, when Johnson was jeered by members of the audience for saying that he cared about truth. What is at stake here is the “sentimental connection” between leaders and the electorate, which the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s argued was crucial to political consensus-building. The use of social media in general, and of Instagram in particular, is to a great extent geared precisely at rebuilding this connection.

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Voters don't need protecting from political ads

By Timandra Harkness

In adopting the trope of staged authenticity, political leaders in the digital era, or “hyperleaders” as they have become known, want to persuade us that there is nothing to fear from them, that they can be trusted, because they are just flesh and bones like us. This is a communication strategy that is not unique to the UK. In the US, politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke, and in Europe, Italy’s former deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, use Instagram in much the same way.

Politics is moving towards the Instagram model. But is this “reputation offensive” an effective remedy for the crisis of trust in politics? Embracing Instagram is a symptom of how worried politicians are about citizens “disliking” them, and the fact they are conscious they need to rebuild trust. But Instagramming alone won’t be enough. Ultimately this is because the “staged authenticity” that is performed there is manufactured. It is just the newest form of what the US historian Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-events”, tactics such as press conferences and photo opportunities that are there simply in order to be viewed and reported.

But if the glaring crisis of trust in UK politics has to be addressed, much more needs to be done. It is certainly not something that can be solved with social media wizardry.

Afterwards, my Mum would comment extensively on the message and how lovely the Queen looked. I would grumble about how ridiculous it was to have a monarchy. And the argument, mostly good-natured, would return with us to the table and to the Christmas pudding. Truculent teenage republicanism was all very well in theory, but, according to my Mother, certainly not sufficient reason to absent oneself from the Queen’s Speech. Everybody watched it. When we were younger and squabbling, she even mooted the idea that presents should wait until after 3pm. That shut us up.

Last year, viewing figures dropped by a million. Still 6.3 million people watched it, narrowly beating Michael McIntyre’s Big Christmas Show and Strictly to the top spot. But when I watched the Queen’s Speech as a child, I had the impression that the whole country was sitting around the television. And when she spoke, she was speaking to us all — even bolshie Republicans like me. And back then, she pretty much was. Around 28 million people watched the Queen’s speech in 1987.

So when Jeremy Corbyn failed to remember the time of the Queen’s Speech in a recent interview, bumbling on that his family watches it — “It’s on in the morning, usually we have it on” — it wasn’t his bullshitting (a useful word meaning somewhere between a lie and a mistake), that bothered me, nor even his Republicanism.

What bothered me was his casual disdain for one of those moments of tradition in which the country comes together and feels as one.

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Can Britain ever be united again?

By Polly Mackenzie

My Mum was wrong. Not everyone watches it. But insofar as a nation is an imagined community, her good-natured Royalist propaganda is one of those little building blocks of our imagined togetherness. On this way of looking at things, royalty is a point of reference around which we all might rally, despite our many differences. It reminds us of our place in the historical run of things. And gives us a symbolic — and non-executive — expression of our basic loyalty to each other. There are other institutions of the establishment that are supposed to buttress this sense of communal solidarity: the Church of England, the Judiciary, and supremely, of course, Parliament itself.

Yet was there ever a time when the act of going to the polling station felt less like an act of communal solidarity and more like some angry and tribal denunciation of the evils of the ‘other side’? Divided in so many ways — Remain/Leave, North/South, young/old, city/country, Left/Right, even the Union itself is threatened — never before has the sense that we are all in it together seemed so weak, never before has the bonds of our imagined community felt important yet so ineffectual.

This election campaign has been just plain nasty, grubby, personal. So much malice has informed the way each side looks at the other. Perhaps it was ever thus. But before we had a much stronger sense of an ‘us’ to fall back upon, a sense that the political other might also be a part of some shared something that is called being British.

But even this has now been problematised. Since the Brexit wars, the very idea of the nation has come under suspicion as never before. What was once the basis of our sense of togetherness has been besmirched by accusations of racism and prejudice. What used to be the background thing we all had in common, notwithstanding other differences, has now become yet another point of contestation, another opportunity for division.

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

What is at stake here is something that is captured by the long-standing association of the nation and the family. Those who advocate open borders often argue that there is a moral problem with this metaphor because it produces a kind of unwarranted favouritism towards members of one’s own nation, just as one might have towards members of one’s own family.

But I see what is denigrated here as ‘unwarranted’ favouritism as being one of the most important aspects of the nation as family metaphor. Within an ideal family — and I emphasise ideal — each member is loved and valued irrespective of their achievements. The old and the young, the successful and the not so successful, the good, the bad and the ugly are all embraced.

My love for my children is absolutely partial, and not based, for example, upon how clever or even how good they are. It is entirely “unwarranted” — as Biblical story of the prodigal son illustrates. And the basis of all “unwarranted” favouritism is being a part of somebody irrespective of one’s deserving it. Since Aristotle, the nation-as-family metaphor has been an argument within political philosophy for considering each member of the nation to have a fraternal relationship with the other, a connection deeper than politics or religion or even whether you like someone or not.

What one might call “warranted” favouritism, on the other hand — otherwise known as meritocracy — is a much more dangerous thing. A part of the moral construction of capitalism, it believes that person should somehow deserve the advantages they have in life, that esteem should be distributed on the basis of talent or hard word or something like that. These are good things to have. But just as within a family, they are insufficiently inclusive to form the basis for membership.

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Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

But it is precisely this idea of having something in common — something we do not deserve, but something family-like that links us together despite our differences — that has been threatened by the Brexit culture wars. No, it is not race or religion that achieves this — though within a religion like Christianity our common inheritance of faith is able to hold together extraordinary political differences. It is a loyalty to each other, expressed in and through our common institutions, shared history and so on.

In dismantling or discrediting the institutions that have embodied this sense of Britishness, and in challenging the very idea that the nation is a moral project of togetherness, we have eroded the very connections that allowed us to fight with each other but still recognise in each other something like the membership of a common family.

Christmas is a time for family rows. But the problem is never the row. Rows are often good, air-clearing exercises — just as long as there are well-established ways of making up, saying sorry, admitting foolishness and so on. All of which requires a sense of common life, of some basic emotional solidarity. And if we lose this then the row never really stops, it just simmers on, sapping the life out of everything. The same is true with elections. If we cannot get past ‘Tory racist scum’ and ‘Hamas sympathiser’ to some deeper sense of “us” then we are lost indeed.

The entire debate, like the rest of recorded history, is available to watch on YouTube and is instructive in all kinds of ways. Many regard it as the moment that TV became the final arbiter in politics. When, as Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we moved from the Typographical Age to the Age of Show Business.

Looking at it today it is hard to see it in that light. It seems hesitant and apologetic, and still rather bookish. Like most Sixties’ current affairs programming, from Firing Line to Blue Peter, one is struck by the simplicity of the sets, the static camera work, and the almost offensive levels of decorum shown by the participants. One might think the two would-be POTUSES (POTI? PsOTUS?) … one might think they were joint participants in a school prize giving, for all the acrimony visible.

Kennedy makes no jibes about Nixon’s conk. Not once does Nixon, for his part, take advantage of Kennedy’s tantalising middle initial. Neither man references the size of the other’s package, hints that the other is on the nursery slopes of dementia or accuses him of harbouring prejudice against any specific ethno-religious group (there was really only one that mattered, to be fair — Christian Americans — although JFK’s Catholicism would come under scrutiny in due course).

Nevertheless, the criteria on which their respective performances were judged in these debates notoriously set the tone for the coming decades. Kennedy wowed the electorate as much with his evident vigour and hamster-cheeked good looks as his grasp of the challenges facing America. Nixon, on the other hand, was only recently out of hospital. A knee injury sustained while campaigning had become infected — Nixon was a septic Sceptic. He looked wan, and Kennedy won — one nil.

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Could the Tories ever win the black vote?

By Mutaz Ahmed

There were four debates in all; but it remains the first that is legendary for the unfortunate Nixon, whose palour, sweatiness and even, it is said, poor choice of suit colour — it blended in with the background — all diminished him in the eyes of viewers. Remarkably, it is claimed that radio listeners, unable to see his furtive glances and glistening upper lip, believed that Nixon had won. Though that might easily reflect the demographic that chose to absorb the arguments through the more conservative medium to begin with.

Kennedy of course went on to win the race too, decisively in terms of the electoral college, which is what counts, though by a very narrow squeak in the popular vote — an interesting reverse of the divergence facing Republican and Democrat candidates today. Camelot lasted barely three years, before he was gunned down on November 22, 1963, leaving Lyndon B Johnson, who stepped up to steer the USA through its various mid-Sixties convulsions — from Civil Rights to the Vietnam War. Be careful what you wish for.

Nixon meanwhile became well aware of the power and the pitfalls of TV campaigning from then on, and swiftly mastered the art. He eventually won the election of 1968, and was re-elected in 1972, only to leave the office less than two years later under the most ignominious circumstances of any Presidential departure in History, though arguably preferable to those of Kennedy. One might say of both men, be careful what you wish for.

Ever since then, TV audiences have looked to TV to provide then with a short cut, a clue to the character of the candidate they are faced with that will enable them to confidently back or decisively reject them without having to do all that boring manifesto stuff. Like professional poker players, they know the real game is never where your gaze is being directed. They hope for a tell. A twitch, a guilty start, a darting eye. And human nature being what it is, whatever they are really hoping to see, they will.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

Reporting on the TV debates and interviews has focused almost entirely on what one might call the Nixonian details. Corbyn’s glasses, slightly askew on one occasion. Was Johnson more or less stammering than usual, when challenged over his lifetime record of mendacity and half-truth? Did the BBC really edit out derisive laughter from his interview? Did Channel 4 deliberately mishear Boris Johnson as saying that “immigrants of colour” were to be welcomed but only under democratic control?

I have seen perhaps two or three serious attempts by well-informed journalists to analyse and cost the manifesto promises of the parties, in language ordinary people might understand, for every hundred excited jabberings about who has got the wind in their sales, or looked exhausted, defeated, or fat.

For my money, however, the most telling interview was a BBC exclusive with a young woman who was asked what issues she would be considering before deciding how to vote. She said that she felt she had not been properly informed of the issues — passive voice — and had not been adequately educated, and that consequently she tended to just vote the way her friends did. Their collective vote was it seemed a sort of emergent phenomenon, of the kind familiar to anyone who has attended a séance.

Now, as I always emphasise when I am trying to establish a rapport with young people, perhaps to discover who left seven wet towels on the bathroom floor, the main thing I look for is openness and candour. We can make no progress without these.

And tempting though it is to roll our eyes, this woman is being admirably honest and self aware. To a greater or lesser extent this is how millions of people decide.

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Many develop a tribal loyalty to their first love and never re-examine the premises. They respond to peer-group consensus, however ill-informed, they think it is someone else’s fault that they are not better informed, and they wouldn’t read a manifesto in the loo while there are the backs of shampoo bottles to reach for. And it is perhaps worrying that many base these initial judgements on unexamined groupthink.

To the extent that they can be persuaded to switch tracks, they are strongly influenced by random but vivid visual stimuli of the kind that made 1960 famous. Unplanned, unscripted events that convince them they have accessed some fundamental, revealed truth about the character of the individuals they are being asked to vote for, an insight that will enable them to decide without having to grasp the implications of anyone’s fiscal or immigration policy. This is sometimes known as the availability heuristic.

Our would-be leaders are now trained to suppress all such revealing traits, of course. And while these things provide a brief flare in the darkness they rarely decide elections. The bacon sandwich may have done for Ed Miliband, but the young woman in the clip will not have found her prior beliefs challenged too hard by the past few week’s coverage. She will still trust her better informed friend, and will by now I suspect be familiar with that comfortable feeling of being able to fit anything that happens into her established world view, however second-hand and arbitrary she knows it to be.

“It’s been the hardest year of my life,” said Liam, 41, whose wife is from Chile. So you might presume it would be easy to predict how this struggling retailer would be voting? But no, not in this bizarre election. For, to my amazement — not least since we were standing in the constituency of one of the best-known Brexiteers and Liam believes Boris Johnson to be “a bit of a buffoon” — he told me he would be voting Tory on Thursday.

“It’s time to get Brexit sorted. I’m a Remainer but I run a business that relies on imports from abroad and we have got to get this done and dusted. I don’t want any more delay to this process that has made me suffer for so long.”

Our chat on a chilly December evening highlights the unpredictability of this political struggle as Brexit divides the country, reshapes parties and shakes the electoral kaleidoscope. Few constituencies show this better than Esher and Walton, where a recent poll suggested the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, holds just a 5% lead over the Liberal Democrats, despite winning a 23,298 majority two years ago.

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By John Lichfield

This slice of suburban Surrey should be bedrock Britain for the Tories: the sort of place a donkey wearing a blue rosette would get elected. But as Johnson pivots his party towards disgruntled Labour voters in the Midlands and North, might they lose this seat stuffed with wealthy commuters in their southern heartland?

Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat candidate, is convinced she is set for victory. “I really, really think I will win,” she said when we met in The Wheatsheaf pub. “People are really cross about Brexit. Most accepted the referendum result and then backed the Tories in 2017, expecting them to deliver it neatly. Now they see it has been a complete shambles.” It seemed significant, also, that Raab is keeping his head down and his team not letting journalists join them out campaigning. The Foreign Secretary, however, is optimistic of retaining his seat. “I am not sitting here biting my finger nails,” he told one friend.

It was not hard to find people who have deserted the Tories in Esher and Walton, a seat that strongly backed Remain and is home to 10,000 businesses. Yet while the curse of Brexit clings to this constituency, just as in all 649 others in this wretched election called to break the deadlock at Westminster, other big issues are bubbling beneath the surface. And not just the obvious ones of crime, hospitals, and schools causing concerns across the country. Changes taking place in the spillover suburbs that surround London present longer-term challenges. And that is why this wealthy heart of Surrey presents a warning to the Conservatives.

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Why Glasgow deserves better

By Paul Embery

This is a place I used to knew well, having lived in Oxshott for the first 17 years of my life before my family moved to Sussex on the day Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. It was a firmly middle-class village set amid the prosperous Surrey commuter belt, an oasis of suburban middle-class dreams close to the capital filled with golf courses and tennis clubs. Men in pin-striped suits and bowler hats packed the trains to London in the morning, then teenagers filled them later to escape the embrace of cosy community and a stifling sense of conformity. There was an old-fashioned grocery store in the village, parties in the village hall — and I can still recall the excitement when the first Chinese and Indian restaurants arrived in the area.

The grocery store is still there, although now rebranded. Inside, I found Nish Patel, its 29-year-old boss who took over the shop with his brother earlier this year. This affable man, born in the Indian state of Gujarat, told me how he arrived in Britain 10 years ago, speaking no English and had already run another shop nearby. As he explained his plans to improve the store, I reflected how Patel embodied the energetic and entrepreneurial spirit of immigration. Yet, unexpectedly, he turned out to be a keen Brexiteer. “I am going to spend my life in this country so I want it to be safe,” he explained. “We need to know who is coming in and out. We have a lot of burglaries here.”

The streets remain tidy, the lawns clipped, the woods by the station full of friendly dog-walkers — but this is an area that has changed fast. There has been the usual suburban churn as old people move on and young families move in, seeking more space in homes and often a sanctuary from urban life in London. Many are from migrant backgrounds, like the Patels. I recall five years ago a Surrey councillor telling me there were 30 languages spoken in neighbouring Mole Valley, with ethnic minorities making up one in seven pupils in some primary schools. There is a mosque in Dorking, just down the road from the setting for that ultimate 70s suburban sitcom, The Good Life. What would Margot have said?

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Statistics show that, unlike Patel, most ethnic minorities do not support the Tories. Yet this slice of Surrey has also become spectacularly wealthy. It is now filled with foreign billionaires, hedge fund chiefs and famous sports stars — including Chelsea players and their Russian owner, since the club’s training ground is in nearby Cobham. It is little surprise to find a study revealed Elmbridge pays the highest income tax in Britain. When I located my former home, it seemed almost the only one on the road that had survived rather than being replaced by a massive post-modern palace. At one neighbouring property, an interior design company was hanging Christmas tree lights on a tree by the front door. A worker said they charge £198 for the service — more than one-third of median weekly disposable income for British households.

Many residents live behind big gates and banks of cameras, corroding any sense of real community. “I canvass sometimes speaking on the entry phone to someone I can see at a window,” said one Lib Dem activist. Yet there are homeless people living in nearby woods, former council houses sell for seven-figure sums and far too few new houses are being built in a constituency that is almost two-thirds protected by Green Belt restrictions. These kinds of issues trouble even Tory voters and are storing up problems, whatever happens on Brexit.

I met Gareth Hughes, an 84-year-old former civil servant and oil engineer who has lived in Oxshott for half a century, by the village shops. Once we would have been almost neighbours — but he said he has seen big changes since my time. “We had one house opposite us knocked down, a family lived there, and then it was knocked down again and made bigger,” he said, adding that his own two children had been forced by high prices to live in other parts of the south-east. “This area was always prosperous but it has become much more wealthy and now none of our children can afford to live here.”

As this thoughtful man who once worked under Michael Heseltine said, what is the point of creating ‘affordable’ housing when the definition – 80% of average local market rates — puts it out of most people’s range? One study found Elmbridge, where there has been a sharp fall in numbers of younger people owning their homes and average properties cost almost £600,000, to be the hardest place outside London to get a foot on the housing ladder. Hughes has seen the legacy of such change with a weakening of communal institutions such as clubs and charity events — and while backing both Brexit and the Tories, takes a dim view of modern politicians. “They don’t seem to get anything done. They have been squabbling over Brexit and everything else seems to have been sidelined.”

This is probably the single point that unites the country — and many people in Esher hold Raab responsible as a key player behind the parliamentary paralysis. “No, I’m not voting for him ever again,” said one well-spoken man, declining to be named. “They can stuff their Brexit and the lot of them, they fucked up our country.”

Another middle-aged woman refused at first to tell me how she voted on Brexit after almost losing one of her best friends over the issue. “I’ve known her since we were 10. We are in such a sorry state of affairs, so I pledged never again to tell anyone how I voted.” Eventually she whispered that she was a Leaver on the basis I would not identify her.

A few minutes later I met Hugh Monro, a firm Remainer from Cornwall, who was attending a local school governors’ meeting but expressed the widespread despair over Westminster with unusual eloquence. “It is a pantomime,” he said. “If it wasn’t so important it would all be very funny. Instead we have a farce, written by Kafka but performed by the Marx Brothers.”

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Metamorphosis meets Duck Soup? Certainly some prominent politicians have been transformed by the Brexit debacle — including Ian Taylor, former chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe and Raab’s predecessor in this seat for 23 years. “Sadly, I no longer recognise the Conservative Party as it is today,” he said recently.

Such is the perplexing state of political flux. His new political party, the Lib Dems, claim to be attracting many richer voters who were nervous about inadvertently letting a tax-grabbing Marxist into Downing Street but now feel emboldened to back them after Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal campaign. Almost all Lib Dem voters told me they disliked their party’s stance on revoking Brexit. The Tories meanwhile, said they were picking up support in poorer parts, reflecting their focus on struggling citizens in the Midlands and North. “Voters are very negative about Corbyn,” said one source. “And while this constituency voted 58% Remain, that does not mean they do not respect how the rest of the country voted and that Boris managed to get a deal.”

London’s sprawling suburbia takes in chunks from four counties. Yet it is Surrey that best symbolises the great Brexit divide. The county is home to 11 Tory MPs who include some of the most prominent figures on both sides, from Leavers such as Raab and Michael Gove, through to Remainers such as former chancellor Philip Hammond and Sam Gyimah, who defected to the Liberal Democrats shortly after standing for the leadership. Seven months ago, the Tories lost their grip on four councils after a drubbing in local elections.

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Will Boris lose his seat?

By Paul Embery

Brexit is not the only reason that southern seats could tilt from the Tories. As young families move in, Lib Dems surge after partially recovering from their post-coalition backlash, and Johnson shifts his party towards socially-conservative northern voters. “There is a general feeling that public services are not working for them and the Conservative brand has been tarnished,” said James Johnson, former Number Ten strategist who ran polling for Theresa May. “In future elections, this is going to be problematic. They are going for a short-term win that could have long-term repercussions.” He added that high-profile politicians such as Raab and Iain Duncan Smith in his suburban Essex seat were most at risk from tactical voting.

Even the most devout Corbynista would accept Esher and Walton is not their natural terrain — although I did find one possible Labour voter. “I’m fed up with the whole thing really,” said Katy Nursey, 35, an interior designer parking in Oxshott with her infant daughter Ava. “I work in London and see so many homeless people on the streets. It’s just awful.” She was worried also about the health service after hearing friends and family members complain about bad experiences. Later I met a Polish dental nurse who was selling her house to return home after 10 years living in Britain — one more sign of the intensifying staff crisis in health and social care.

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Jane Drown, 60, a former management consultant who is backing the Lib Dems, said many local voters like her would happily pay a bit more in tax to boost public services but they despair over the extremism of both main parties. “Look at all these Four-Wheel Drive cars on the roads when there are people sleeping rough,” she said. “The big issue is inequality. Many people want to redress the balance but will not vote for Corbyn, who seems so old-fashioned and scares the shit out of this affluent middle-class area.”

I met her in a Costa cafe, shortly after talking to an Esher shop worker who could no longer afford to visit the local cinema — the same one that I used to cycle to on my Raleigh sports bike to see films such as Jaws and Star Wars with friends — following its makeover by the upmarket Everyman chain. “This is a constituency with two halves,” said Drown. “There are all those wealthy people in their gated developments but there are also people really struggling to make ends meet on benefits or low incomes. You need a lot of money to live here.”

Who knows if this constituency will provide the “Portillo moment” of the 2019 election, when a high-profile politician loses their job before the cruel glare of cameras at their count? Yet for someone who grew up amid the comfortable certainties of this area, it seems incredible to even suggest the Tory tradition might be under threat in this slab of rock-solid Surrey. It is one more sign of our political fluidity as tectonic plates shift beneath Westminster — and the ramifications go far deeper than current tribal battles. As I talked over coffee with Drown, she spoke with passion about the area’s growing wealth, its glaring inequalities, its gated homes — and its hidden underbelly of grafting people and grinding poverty. “Esher,” she said, “is a metaphor for the country.”

Of all the grooves most crying out for identification, the foremost is what I have come to think of as “parallel-ism” or “equidistance-ism”. This is the tendency to construct a political position — or more commonly to justify an existing political position — by claiming that you stand precisely between two points.

Practitioners of equidistance-ism usually go on to declare that both the poles they have identified are manned by extremists or madmen, and that the author is therefore holding their own, all but alone, in the sane middle ground. Having reoriented the political galaxy in order to place themselves slap-bang in that sensible centre they ordinarily finish by pronouncing a curse on all extremist houses — before presumably beginning to dream about who will play themself in the movie version.

There are plenty of objections that can be made to this way of doing things. Among the most obvious is that it almost always relies on a diminution of one side’s iniquity and an exaggeration of another’s. As such the “I am standing between two equally obnoxious extremes” position which columnist after columnist has taken over the years (and which has become ubiquitous in the current UK election) commits three errors.

The first is that it at least partially defames one party. The second is that it lets another party slightly off the hook. The third error is that it attempts to repackage an act of astounding political cowardice as some kind of admirable moral stance. Consider one move that is being attempted at the current election. And I say this — as though it should need saying — as someone who has voted for all the major parties at some point.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may be leading the Labour Party now, and may have come to many people’s attention only in recent years, but those of us who have followed them for many years are aware of who and what they are.

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By Paul Embery

Both have shown throughout their careers a willingness to support any movement, however violent, so long as it appears “anti-imperialist”, which to them means anti-British in particular, but can be spread out to encompass America (next in line), Israel (occasionally at the top of their list, depending on events in the Middle East) and any other Western democracy, especially if it a member of NATO.

The support that both men gave for years to the IRA, and the backing that Jeremy Corbyn has given throughout his career to every variety of anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and anti-Jewish bigot is so clear that it requires a remarkable degree of ideological devotion of its own to pretend it away. Ordinarily, such figures being at the helm of a political party — let alone a party that used to count ‘anti-racism’ as a central principle — would cause a mass exodus.

Perhaps it will lead to an exodus at the polls. But among those whose job it is to opine in public, there is not so much opportunity for quietly ticking a box and keeping your judgement to yourself. The opinion-writing class have to justify why they are willing to still support the Labour party or otherwise — and more commonly — explain why they cannot vote for the only party capable of defeating Labour in next week’s election. It is these people who are paid to express their opinion who at this point find a way out in the weaselly practise of “parallel-ism”. Here is an example of how it runs:

“Sure Jeremy Corbyn appears to have allowed anti-Semitism to run rife through the Labour party. Sure he seems to have spent his career emboldening and supporting anti-Semites wherever he can find them. But then the Tories have their own problems — look at the Islamophobia of some members of the party.”

There is already plenty to dispute in such claims, not least the idea that “Islamophobia” is the same thing as anti-Semitism. But let us park that old dispute for a moment and focus on the bigger trick that is being played here. And the deeper dishonesty that it exposes.

To the extent that any anti-Muslim prejudice has been found in the Conservative Party it is limited to a handful of councillors sharing posts on social media which are to some degree or other deemed to be “Islamophobic”. Is this equivalent to what Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have done to the Labour Party in recent years?

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

Taking this idea at face value, what would the Conservative Party have to be guilty of in order to be the subject of this “one the one hand/on the other”–ism?

Boris Johnson would have had to have laid flowers at the grave of Baruch Goldstein (who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims in 1994), plausibly the equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn laying a wreath at the grave of the Munich Olympics murderers. Yet, to date, no photograph has been found showing the Conservative leader making a pilgrimage to the outskirts of Hebron in order to perform this act of homage.

In 2017, Darren Osborne drove a truck into a crowd of worshippers leaving prayers at a mosque in Finsbury Park. And yet, to date, Boris Johnson has not campaigned that Osborne should not have been charged, found guilty or sentenced for this appalling crime. So far as I am aware, no elected member of the Conservative Party has pretended that Osborne is some poor, misguided innocent.

And yet this is the sort of act that would have to be found in the ranks of the Conservative Party in order to find an equivalence to Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh — two men who were convicted for a car-bomb attack on a London Jewish charity’s headquarters in 1994. While Corbyn acted as a long-time defender and indeed character referee for the anti-Jewish bombers, no senior Conservative appears to have made Darren Osborne into some kind of sick campaigning cause.

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Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic

By Maajid Nawaz

I could go on and on. While the Shadow Chancellor has spent years defending the “bravery” of the IRA when they tortured and murdered hundreds of innocent people, there is no evidence that the present Chancellor, Sajid Javid, ever praised or gave supportive speeches for the Red Hand Defenders or Ulster Volunteer Force. Is such evidence likely to emerge? I suspect not.

So why this strange emphasis from members of the commentariat who like to pretend that they are independent-minded, that they cannot vote for either main party because they are in some way equally bad? Perhaps some of them think it. Perhaps some genuinely cannot tell any differences between the two parties.

But a far more likely explanation is that many of these ‘independent-minded’ columnists are simply far more tribal than they would like the rest of us to think. When the Labour Party is led by a man who has spent his life mainstreaming the vilest and most deadly prejudice of all, the lifelong members of the Labour tribe who recognise that fact still feel too much a part of that tribe to do the one thing that is more appalling than anything to them — which is to switch sides and vote Conservative.

That is the one thing they can never do. And so they come up with ways to reorient the political landscape; to present themselves as being the only people remaining stable while everyone else is disoriented. Whereas they — in their moment of pretended stability — may be the most lost and morally disoriented people of all.

The aims set out in this manifesto are Socialist aims, and we are proud of the word… It is our intention to:

Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families

Eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain

Make power in industry genuinely accountable to the workers and the community at large

Achieve far greater economic equality — in income, wealth and living standards

Increase social equality by giving far greater importance to full employment, housing, education and social benefits

—

It’s time to take on vested interests holding people back.

Labour will build a fairer Britain that cares for all, where wealth and power are shared.

Labour will rewrite the rules of the economy so that it works for everyone. We will rebuild our public services, by taxing those at the top to properly fund the services we all rely on.

The first section was taken from Labour’s manifesto in February 1974; the second from its manifesto of 2019. As Corbyn and McDonnell started their careers during the Seventies heyday of widespread nationalisation, empowered trades unions and high taxation why not go back to find solutions from that era?

There are, of course, some similarities. Like today, it was a febrile time with politicians facing challenges from all sides.

There was economic upheaval, terrorism (from the IRA) and the rise of the far right countered by anti-racist movements on the streets. There was the rise of the feminist and gay movements. A debate and then referendum on Europe. There was even extreme weather: 1976 had the second hottest summer recorded and a hapless Labour minister, Denis Howell, was named in annual succession the Minister for Drought, then Floods and finally Snow.

In the past decade we also have seen economic upheaval, terrorism (from Islamic religious extremists) and the rise of the Left and Right in mainstream politics. Feminism and gender identification with the rise of the #MeToo and LGBTQ movements. We have had a debate and a referendum on Europe. Climate change is now a mainstream issue.

So perhaps it is not surprising that today’s Labour leadership has gone back to find solutions that are no longer remembered by most of the electorate. Labour wants the renationalisation of water, energy, the railways and Royal Mail. It argues that private companies are making huge profits and failing consumers with high prices and incompetent management. “Public ownership will secure democratic control over nationally strategic infrastructure and provide public stewardship for key natural resources” as the manifesto says. And who can argue with that intention? The aspiration to have public control is an appealing one, according to the polls.

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How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

Anyone aged under 50 will struggle to recall nationalised industries. Between 1945 and 1970 coal, steel (twice), electricity, gas, water, air travel, the railways, roads and waterways and the Post Office (including what became BT) had all been nationalised. In the 1970s British Leyland and Rolls-Royce joined them. The level of bureaucracy had, by 1979, become a byword for incompetence; a metaphor for state overreach. From 1979 the industries began to be privatised, and only in 2008 did this trend reverse when the banking system became partially owned by the state as part of the bailout.

Nationalised industries had another effect — they entrenched the power of trades unions so that they became almost a tier of government in determining economic policy. Their power lay in the right to strike. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of strikes on everyday life in the Sixties and Seventies: from the three-day week and doing exam revision by candlelight in 1973 to the winter of discontent in 1979. That year, 29.5 million working days were lost to strikes.

The Left has never forgotten that a Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in 1969 first tried and failed to curtail the right to strike. It took Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to pass legislation, and when Labour eventually returned to power in 1997 Tony Blair refused to reverse it. Like Wilson he is still blamed by the Left, but the days of widespread strikes were over and 2018 saw the lowest level since the 19th century.

Today the Labour leadership has moved back to a much closer relationship with union leaders. Len McCluskey of Unite operates as an extension of the leadership. The manifesto pledges to work in partnership with “the workforce and their unions in every sector of the economy” and for unions to be handed the power to negotiate sector-wide agreements on wages and conditions that will re-empower the union movement. The first stirrings are being seen in railways where on 3 December the RMT began 27 days of strikes leading up to Christmas. Media reports of shivering commuters and shoppers can be expected any day now. For anyone from the Seventies it will be a familiar and depressing sight.

However, it was on direct taxation that the 1970s set some remarkable records, which even Labour’s current manifesto cannot get close to. The concept that high taxation stifled initiative and competitiveness was born in this era and led to much of the thinking on reducing direct taxation. Like nationalisation, high taxation was the policy of both major parties in the 1970s. In 1973, under the Conservatives, the highest rate of income tax was 75%.

When Labour came into power in 1974 Denis Healey as Chancellor faced an economic crisis that led to his creation of 10 bands of income tax. The basic rate of tax (which started at £4,500 a year) was 33%. Income above £20,000 per year was taxed at the staggering rate of 83%. That was nothing compared with the tax rate for investment income, which was set at 98%!

This had an effect on high earners. In what was regarded as a golden period of music two of the era’s greatest albums reflected the fury with tax. A few years earlier, George Harrison wrote “Taxman” on the Beatles’ album Revolver:

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
Cause I’m the taxman

Should 5% appear too small?
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cause I’m the taxman

Not to be beaten, in 1971 the Rolling Stones, each of whom owed more than £250,000 to the Inland Revenue, made themselves tax exiles and went off to the South of France, where they recorded Exile on Main Street — one of their greatest albums.

By these standards, the current Labour manifesto is quite modest. After 10 years of austerity the idea of taxing the rich at a top rate of 50% is by historic standards not too radical. In fact, as UnHerd Britain’s polling reveals, only 30% of the public agree with the statement that “Tax rates for high earners should be minimised to keep the UK competitive”, with 42% actively disagreeing. The top rate was 60% until 1989 — 10 years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. You can see why veterans from the Seventies are relaxed about it.

Indeed, they may be onto something: the younger generation is tired of austerity. Among the 18-30 demographic the aspiration to tax more, spend more and control more does not seem too radical. The idea that tax alone would have a negative impact on wealth creation does not make sense if you haven’t lived through the 1970s. Today’s impetus is more about fairness and repairing the creaking nature of public services. Such a policy may even work in the short term, as the public sector expands with higher tax receipts.

However, the final lesson of the Seventies is that once the political tools of nationalisation and higher taxes take hold they don’t easily go away. You cannot turn off such bold policies without the political cost of admitting you were wrong. The lesson for Labour is that sooner or later the public turns. Last time it led to Margaret Thatcher and 40 years of reversal. For Labour that would be a huge price to pay. History bites in both directions.