Indeed, the grandeur of both buildings stands as a testament to the political weight these communities once carried — reaching the highest levels of national decision-making. As Herbert Morrison famously declared when rejecting the European Coal and Steel Community, “the Durham miners won’t wear it”.

Durham and Barnsley symbolize what the academic and parliamentarian David Marquand described as “labourism”, a class-based politics rooted in the institutions of the organized working class. It was a politics embedded in place, still visible in traditions like pit banners, or the Miners’ Gala — or the 297 numbered seats of Redhills’ debating chamber, each corresponding to a Durham colliery. All the while, labourism was focused on the material improvement of local communities: patriotic, often culturally conservative, and practical rather than abstract, so unlike the bourgeois socialism of the Webbs and others.

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Can Burnham banish Maggie's ghost?

By Jonny Ball

Labourism is now dead, and the Labour Party has lost its grip on its former industrial heartlands. In Barnsley this month, Labour were reduced from 48 seats to 11, while Reform rose from zero to 42 and took control of the council. This follows similar gains in Durham a year earlier, where Reform surged and Labour was reduced to only four seats. This same pattern is being repeated across the English coalfields, from Sunderland to Durham to Barnsley, and together is starting to look like a more durable realignment of working-class England. The push for Andy Burnham to succeed Keir Starmer is also symbolic of a romantic desire within Labour to revive labourism.

This is understandable. At its peak, after all, labourism was not merely a political identity but a complete social world. The pit or the steelworks provided the work, but the union, the cooperative and the chapel provided so much more. Miners’ institutes housed libraries stocked with improving literature. Choral societies and cricket clubs gave leisure its shape. The workplace was not just where you earned your living — but the hub around which an entire network of community institutions revolved. To be working class in Durham or Barnsley was not simply an economic condition, but an identity, a set of loyalties. Together, it encompassed, in David Marquand’s memorable phrase, a civilization as much as a politics.

Labourism suffered a gradual decay, followed by a more sudden collapse. The decline of the industries on which it depended made that erosion almost inevitable. When the pits closed, the institutional network and the communal loyalties that had sustained labourism began to unravel with them. Without the workplace as its organizing core, the dense web of community life began to thin. The Labour Party remained, of course, but as a weakening electoral habit rather than an expression of a living culture.

The cultural transformation of the Labour Party accelerated this decline. As the Party became more closely associated with metropolitan, progressive values, it lost touch with its voters. Labour’s approach to immigration distanced it from supporters who saw it as undercutting working-class wages. Its emphasis on welfare created further distance from those who felt the system was being misused. Its approach to Net Zero compounded a deindustrialization that had already hollowed out these communities. The energy costs that accompanied the transition fell disproportionately on the kind of energy-intensive manufacturing that remained in these areas.

Whereas labourism emerged from and represented the industrial working class, modern Labour does neither. Rather, Labour has come to resemble what Thomas Piketty describes as the “Brahmin Left”, a party of “high-status city dwellers”.

As memories of deindustrialization and the Miners’ Strike faded, meanwhile, the cultural ties between Labour and post-industrial towns weakened. Labourism became, at first, nostalgic and then moribund. Old tropes were repeated, but without the cultural rhythms that defined labourism at its peak. The Miners’ Gala continued, but what had once been a living demonstration of collective identity has become, for many Labour activists, something closer to heritage tourism.

Nor have these economic wounds truly been healed. I grew up in Consett, where the steelworks closed overnight in 1980, and what it left behind was still visible a generation later. Brexit crystallized the frustration of working-class voters, but the economic model that had failed these places remained intact, and the political class that had ignored them continued to do so.

Much of the Red Wall voted for Brexit in 2016, then Conservative in 2019 on the promise of Leveling Up. But the Tories proved too tied to economic orthodoxy, and too weakly embedded in their new constituencies to deliver it. Too many treated these places as a temporary electoral asset to be managed, rather than a new heartland to be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, net migration reached record levels, a fact that sat particularly badly in communities where the relationship between immigration and wages had long been a source of grievance. Studies by the Bank of England and the City of London Corporation confirmed what many in these communities felt directly: that mass immigration placed significant downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the labor market. The communities that felt that most acutely were precisely those that had already lost the most to deindustrialization.

The 2024 election appeared to mark a revival of the old alignment, with Labour recapturing much of its former industrial heartland. Yet as the local-election results so vividly showed, that realignment has proved hollow. All this provides an opportunity to fill the void left by the collapse of labourism: for a doctrine that is both distinctive and rooted in the communities it now represents.

Call it reformism. Labourism endured because it was embedded in the institutions and daily life of the communities it represented, and because it offered a coherent account of those communities’ place in the national story. A modern equivalent would need to do the same, starting from the question of how to rebuild economic life in the towns and regions where it has drained away.

Just as Durham and Barnsley were once the emotional heartlands of labourism, giving the movement its identity, its imagery, its sense of moral purpose, these same towns could perform the same function for a new politics of place. But that cannot be conjured through rhetoric alone. Instead, it requires the patient rebuilding of local economies that generate rooted, dignified work, and the institutions that give people a genuine stake in the places where they live. The emotional heartland has to be built, not proclaimed.

In the first place, this is true aesthetically. The Miners’ Halls of Durham and Barnsley were not merely functional buildings: but beautifully deliberate statements of permanence, soaring visions of dignity in stone. The labourist movement understood instinctively that elegant buildings generate civic pride, and that the quality of the built environment tells a community something about how much it is valued. Most of what has been built in these towns since says something very different. The default architecture of post-industrial regeneration — the retail parks, the bland civic centers — has compounded rather than reversed the demoralization of deindustrialization. A new politics of place would need to take beauty seriously, understanding that handsome architecture is not an aesthetic indulgence but an act of civic respect.

All this naturally requires thoroughgoing economic transformation. Without that, Reform risks becoming another chapter in the long quest of post-industrial England for a coherent political identity. In practice, that means seeing places like Durham and Barnsley as vigorous economies for the future of Britain. These would be places defined not by what they used to be, but what they do now.

At its core, then, reformism would need to shift the economic focus from redistribution to production. For much of the past generation, policy has been concerned with how to allocate the proceeds of growth rather than where that growth takes place, even as growth itself has weakened since the financial crisis. A durable alternative would emphasize reindustrialization and a stronger private sector in the parts of the country where both have declined. That means rebuilding productive capacity, supporting firms that sustain local employment, and encouraging risk-bearing capital to invest in the places it has historically avoided, rather than relying on centralized redistribution to fill the gap.

In practice, this is already visible in varying forms. In South Yorkshire, for instance, advanced manufacturing has grown out of surviving metalworking skills. In Sunderland, the Nissan plant has anchored a wider supply chain. In Preston, procurement and cooperative business have kept value circulating locally. And, further afield, in Germany’s Ruhr valley, a former industrial heartland has been reshaped through sustained investment in skills and infrastructure. These examples could provide the outline of a serious place-based economic doctrine, one that starts from the assets of particular towns rather than assuming national growth will eventually reach the places it has bypassed for generations.

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Can Labour restore our pride in place?

By David Littlefair

The case for reindustrialization is reinforced by strategic necessity. The pandemic exposed what it means to hollow out a productive base, while the war in Ukraine underlined the risks of dependence on fragile supply chains. The need to increase defense spending offers one potential demand anchor for domestic manufacturing, though only if procurement is designed to build industrial capacity at home. Either way, rebuilding productive capacity is not just an economic argument for left-behind towns. It is a national security argument too.

All this would also require a more demanding approach to the labor market, placing greater emphasis on domestic skills, training and productivity rather than imported lower-cost labor. Power would also need to shift away from the center, giving local economies greater control over skills, investment and planning. That points toward genuine experimentation with the conditions for growth in specific places, including the kind of lower tax, lower regulation zones that have driven renewal elsewhere. Poland rebuilt industrial employment through targeted economic zones, while South Korea anchored entire industrial ecosystems around specific sectors in specific places. The freedom for post-industrial towns to set their own conditions for growth, rather than waiting for solutions designed in Whitehall, may be the most radical and necessary element of a genuinely place-based economic doctrine.

There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this. Herbert Morrison’s anxiety about what the Durham miners might wear was not just a colorful anecdote. It reflected a real sense of power located outside London. Thriving post-industrial communities with strong local institutions and tight labor markets would not be passive recipients of central government policy. They would be politically potent in ways Westminster has not had to confront for decades.

The economic case for reindustrialization, then, is clear —  but whether the political class actually wants the world it would create is another question. Yet the communities of post-industrial England can’t wait for the political class to overcome its ambivalence. The need for a new doctrine of place, rooted in economic renewal and genuine civic power, is too urgent and too important to be left to those who may fear its consequences.

To stand any chance of survival, they will need to win over three groups of voters. In the South, they lost a whole swathe of seats to the Liberal Democrats. In the Midlands and North, huge numbers defected to Labour and there is stiff competition from Reform which lies second in nearly a hundred seats. And the third group, first-time voters, were never particularly interested in the first place; but if they don’t appeal to the young, demography will doom them. So any new leader must come up with an agenda sufficiently innovative to appeal to young voters, while also attracting back the two groups of defectors.

They’re not going to do this by promising tax cuts, which was the party’s message this summer. Those who defected to the Lib Dems were mostly on decent, middle-class incomes and were morally disgusted by the presumption that appealing to their greed would keep them onboard. They jumped. Conversely, the promise of tax cuts merely confirmed among Red Wall voters tempted by Labour, that although the Tories had talked about restoring jobs, skills and pride to their towns, they had been duped: what the Tories cared about all along, was the rich. As for first-time voters, when Corbyn offered to skin the rich, they attempted to sweep him into power. Few first-time voters pay much tax.

What, then, if not tax cuts? Certainly, the new leader shouldn’t ape Farage and talk about reducing immigration. Voters are unlikely to have forgotten that the party promised this as the main motif of “getting Brexit done”, whereupon immigration sky-rocketed. Hence, there would be what we might politely call a credibility problem. Equally, those defectors to the Lib Dems who were repelled by the base morality of tax cuts are overwhelmingly likely to react similarly to a message that scapegoats immigrants for Britain’s fiscal straight-jacket and associated difficulties. Besides, the killer reason not to copy Farage is because to do so would play directly into his agenda of absorbing the Tory party into his movement. He could not have expressed this any more clearly than he already has: “Kill the Tories.”

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The Tory contender Labour fears

By Tom McTague

Of course, the contenders could do what Labour did in opposition: say as little as possible and watch while the Government stumbles from one fiasco to another. Labour has not had the greatest start to its time in office, and so watching and sniping will indeed be tempting. But it should be resisted. For one thing, all the other opposition parties will be playing that game, and each has a different but highly focused audience more receptive to a fine-tuned message. Youth irritated by some new government decision will be drawn to the Greens who will have pounced on it. Scottish Labour voters angered by factory closures, will be inclined to drift back to the newly led SNP. Those Labour voters whose identity is bound up in the traditional priorities of care and compassion, already irritated by the cancelation of the winter fuel allowance, will be hoovered up by the Lib Dems positioning themselves as Labour’s conscience. Those Labour voters in Red Wall constituencies, already despondent that Keir Starmer has only noticed them in respect of their proclivity to riot, will be prime targets for Reform. In any case, hugely tempting as it is to join the chorus of derision at ministerial acceptance of smart clothing from Labour donors, this risks reviving memories of lavish wallpaper, duck ponds and Covid parties. Better not.

Fortunately, there is an obvious, tried and tested agenda which, astonishingly, the new Government has yet to embrace. Britain is being torn apart by regional inequalities far wider than anywhere else in Europe. We are no longer One Nation, as Wales, Northern Ireland, most of provincial England, and much of Scotland have diverged further and further from London and a few proximate gilded cities. We know it is an attractive policy since it is what Johnson was elected to do alongside Brexit: “levelling up”. The trouble is, he did nothing about it until 2022, when he delegated it to Michael Gove. Aided by Andy Haldane, Gove devised a detailed strategy which sat unimplemented because it was blocked by the Treasury. Like Andy Street, Gove bore the cost of Treasury dogmatism, but loyally refrained from resigning in frustration. Obviously, the new leader will need to apologise for some failure of the past government, but none of the candidates is personally tainted by this one.

This is an agenda which will be most attractive for the Red Wall. It competes with Farage, but will defeat him because, unlike his approach, it is strongly credible. The Farage solution to the woes of broken towns and cities is the wrong-headed scapegoating of immigrants. But what these places need is new futures, triggered by new jobs and new infrastructure. Currently, their future is so bleak that few immigrants other than a handful living on welfare are attracted there. And so the Tories should respond to Farage not by aping him but killing him.

Such a move would also appeal to the compassionate defectors to Lib Dems because it can be presented as morally uplifting. It would heal the rifts between those places which are thriving and those which have been left behind. The moral vote would be reinforced by a newly acquired empathy: many of the Southern Lib Dems who defected from the Tories are in towns such as Barnstaple and Portsmouth North that have themselves started to fall behind.

Doubtless it would outrage the imperturbably selfish activist cohort at conference — the Truss fan club who adored the package of tax-cuts for the rich and welfare-cuts for the poor. Luckily, though, it is a small minority: Truss provoked a record level of voter defection in her constituency, proving there just isn’t enough greed around for this sort of party to survive even one further election.

For the many Tories of integrity, the One Nation agenda would be appealing because it calls people to recognise the obligations of fellow-citizenship. Helmut Kohl successfully invoked that concept in his Solidarity Tax on West Germans to finance the reunification of Germany in 1992. At the time, East Germany was pitifully poor and unproductive in comparison with any British region. Today, East Germany has now overtaken many of those same regions. Recognising our fellow-citizenship is a morally compelling cri-de-coeur, long overdue.

Which brings me to that final, most essential and most difficult constituency, the young. We know that British teenagers are anxious: but ours are more anxious than teenagers anywhere else in Europe. They expect their futures to be worse than that of their parents. How, then, can we reawaken that sense of tingling exhilaration at being on the threshold of independent life?

Every cohort since the Fifties has been worse-off, age-for-age, than its predecessor. Those now retired have captured too large a share of past growth, and a new leader must acknowledge that. As the party of enterprise, the Tories could surely craft some scheme for start-ups explicitly aimed at ambitious youngsters who aren’t able to rely on the bank-of-mum-and-dad. Obviously this would require an act of supreme self-sacrifice by the retired — and something similar from the Conservative leader who might not want to risk losing the stalwart support of the elderly. But precisely because the Tories are currently seen as the party of the rich boomer, it might force first-time voters to completely reevaluate their understanding of what they know to be the “nasty party”.

Whether the candidate selected by the loyalist rump of Tories who remain voting members will have the wisdom to transform the party from its recent path to irrelevance, will not be revealed by what they say at this conference. That will merely be pitched to get chosen. The serious business will be to win back the three groups who have abandoned them. And wisdom has not been much in evidence in the party these past few years.

Worksop is the largest town in Bassetlaw — the constituency that saw the greatest Labour-to-Conservative migration at the last general election. It’s the heart of Borisland. And now, exactly one year on from his ignominious resignation, many people here remain steadfastly loyal to their populist tribune. This was where the Boris majority was won: where miners, pensioners, Brexiteers and lifelong Labour voters united to stick it to their old party. Other than the brief blip of Malcolm MacDonald (son of the first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald) defecting to National Labour in 1929, Labour had held the town since 1929. Brendan Clarke-Smith is the MP who, in 2019, smashed that red record with a stonking 18.4% swing, the greatest, he later assures me, at any general election since the Second World War. (“I think it’s on Wikipedia.”)

When Johnson took the seat, it heralded a new era of Tory politics. A new coalition, forged from the fires of Brexit, stretched from Hampshire to Hartlepool. Like Columbus, he seemed to have landed upon virgin territory ripe for the taking. Labour — cosmopolitan, effete and out of touch — looked sunk. But four years on, the shaggy conqueror is gone, and a string of by-elections threatens to chip away at his majority he built. In Selby, Uxbridge, Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and now Chris Pincher’s seat of Tamworth, the prognosis is gloomy. So far, the bookies believe every single one will be lost. And Bassetlaw itself, the clearest expression of that much-heralded post-Brexit realignment, is now a harbinger of doom. In March, one poll suggested it, and all the other 44 Red Wall seats won from Labour, will be lost at next year’s general election. What went wrong?

“He’s still hugely popular,” Clarke-Smith tells me. “A lot of people voted for Boris. It wasn’t the only thing — it had been trending our way anyway — but those Brexit Party voters and so on came across, and he was a big part of that.” The big man, he says, has an “aura” about him that helped draw in converts. “You still get voters saying: ‘Oh, I voted for Boris…’”

When I meet the MP, he is wearing a checked suit and has a small ketchup stain at the corner of his mouth. A self-described “libertarian Thatcherite”, he was raised on a Nottingham council estate, trained as a teacher, and worked at a school in Romania before entering politics. He is also, on the day I visit, on the cover of the Worksop Guardian, delivering a sly grin alongside the headline: “MP slammed for ‘vile’ Twitter attack.” It is the outcome of Clarke-Smith’s engagement in the culture wars — he is at the fore of a group of working-class Tories keen to give as good as they get online. A member of the New Conservatives, a collective currently lobbying for tougher action on immigration, he is also part of the Common Sense Group, which has attacked “the woke agenda”.

He says this posture is what the Red Wall wants. “Apart from the obvious stuff about the economy and NHS, what would you guess the main issue is here?” he asks me. “The number one thing I get emailed about, more than Dominic Cummings, more than anything, is small boats. There is very little immigration here — but it’s the number one issue because they linked it to taking back control.”

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The Red Wall firebrand is a myth

By John Oxley

If true, this harks back to the political energy Boris personified, and which this squad of Red Wall MPs were elected to enact. The highest-profile member of the Nottinghamshire Tory contingent is Lee Anderson, the spiky-haired former miner and ex-Labour councillor who now serves as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In a recent segment on his GB News show, which captured much of the banal absurdity of politics in 2023, Anderson fed Clarke-Smith baked beans in a blind taste test to prove that bargain hunting is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. “Here comes the aeroplane,” he said as he raised the spoon, firmly back in single-dad mode.

It’s perhaps not the most traditionalist-Tory publicity stunt. But, “we’re not in London — there’s no liberal elite here”, his campaign manager assures me. In Bassetlaw now, “the bigger the house and the bigger the gravel driveway, the less chance there is they’ll vote for us”, Clarke-Smith boasts. They claim the realignment is still working.

Worse-off voters were crucial to the Tory success in 2019. In that election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Labour lost nearly one in three low-income voters who had turned out to vote for them in 2017, while the Conservatives retained 90%. In the Red Wall now, however, the picture is shifting. The same March polling that foresees the Tories losing 45 seats in the North and Midlands shows the party behind in all social groups, from managers to unskilled manual labourers. That 19th-century notion of “working-class Toryism” has proven more elusive than first claimed.

And, away from the bustling high street, signs of discontent lurk. The cabbie who drove me from Retford, the handsome market town that makes up Bassetlaw’s other major population centre, tells me Boris was popular among his clientele in 2019. Now passengers young and old tell him they want a change of government. “My grandad was a well-known cab driver around Retford — he died during Covid. My gran couldn’t get out of her care home to attend the funeral.” It was, he adds dryly, “a bit crap”. He now works part time at Rampton Hospital, on a secure ward, where he helps transport imprisoned psychopaths. “There are cutbacks just like the rest of the NHS,” he says. “It’s much harder to transport patients now we have less staff.”

In Worksop itself, Wallace’s gleaming pate is plastered across town to advertise the food festival. I watch him deliver his own populist punchlines while cooking, laying into “clickbait” news and telling his audience not to trust headlines in the papers. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures the distrustful mood. Lindsay Martin, a Retford resident manning a friend’s market stall nearby, tells me she never fell for Johnson’s charm offensive. “Boris made a lot of false promises that were never delivered on. The country got worse under his leadership.” Asked about levelling-up, that chimera of social transformation, she merely laughs.

This region has always been sceptical of received opinion. The local council’s website grandly claims that “many regard Bassetlaw as the birthplace of the United States of America”. And, while that “many” is doing some heavy lifting, a sizeable chunk of the separatist-nonconformists who could no longer stand the Church of England did hail from the flat fields around here. At the local museum, a study resembling that of Plymouth Colony leader William Brewster is now preserved in aspic. And political dissidence, including to the benefit of the Right, is part of its history, too. During the miners’ strike, Nottinghamshire stuck out when the majority of its miners kept working and thus helped Margaret Thatcher’s government survive the winter of 1984.

Today, though, like much of the rest of the country, dissent has sublimated into a kind of jaded desolation. Others walking up and down the high street are less cynical. Janet, a pensioner in a purple windbreaker, tells me she voted Conservative for the first time in her life because of Boris. “It was his principles,” she says. “He got stuff done. Then he was brought down by other people.” What about the parties? Didn’t he break Covid rules? “It wasn’t his fault,” she tells me, without elaborating. “Rishi turned on him.” She will vote Tory again at the next election.

A middle-aged couple tell me that they, too, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. “I liked Boris at the time,” says the wife. “The slur against him now smells a little of a smear campaign.” Her husband agrees: “I think I’d vote for the Tories again if Boris returned as leader.” “Cameron” will “sell us out” with Europe, he claims, before his wife hurriedly reminds him that the Labour leader is called Keir.

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Will Starmer recapture Nuneaton?

By Felix Pope

As the food festival winds down, the high street becomes deserted. I walk past Clarke-Smith’s high street office where one window has taken a hit but remains just about intact, bearing a spiralling network of cracks. Retford is similarly quiet. People aren’t interested in talking: a densely bearded man bringing down the shutters on his vape shop tells me he “doesn’t do politics”. I pass the empty headquarters of Jo White, Labour’s chosen candidate and the wife of John Mann, the constituency’s former MP. A sign proclaims that she supports “Traditional Values in a Modern Bassetlaw”. I do not quite understand what this means, but when I email her campaign to ask I do not receive a response.

Johnson, meanwhile, has got his trotters up in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career, the former PM cultivated a set of allies before discarding them and Clark-Smith now faces a potential suspension from Parliament after falling foul of the privileges committee — was it worth it to defend Johnson? “Part of me thinks I owe my position as a member of parliament to Boris,” he says. “Winning that election, and getting Brexit done and everything else. I thought he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances. It wasn’t just loyalty — I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do.”

His words are laced with unwitting irony. Four years ago, victory here seemed to herald the start of a new age. Levelling-up money might reverse economic decline; an end to Brexit psychodrama might let old wounds heal. Perhaps it was hope more than expectation when Bassetlaw, the Red Wall and Brendan Clarke-Smith all tied their fortunes to a New-York-born columnist with a history of disappointing those who trusted him. While some still keep the faith, that realignment seems to have delivered little change to their lives in return. And, beyond tribal loyalties, that was the promise of 2019, broken utterly when Boris resigned last year.

I asked Boris-loyalist Janet if the town had got any better since the election, and I received a simple answer: “No.”

This didn’t happen when I was growing up. One of those men would probably have been welding in a shipyard and the other passing his father through the cage doors at the pithead of the village colliery as they changed shifts.

The ex-coalfield communities of Durham are ghost towns today, their once vibrant high streets boarded up and dead. I don’t believe there is a shop or business in my village or the surrounding towns and villages that has not been burgled at least three or four times. I have a letting office in the high street that was hit three times last year. The factory unit I run my building business from has its doors pulled off at least once a year: the last time, only two weeks ago. My brother owns the last pub standing and has a list of 46 crimes committed on his premises — from serious assault to car crime — none of which have ended in prosecution. Why? Because there was no investigation. Even the undertaker’s shop has had its doors kicked off in the middle of the night, for the sake of a Help the Heroes charity box. He had buried a veteran that day. The thieves took his hearse and ram-raided the local café and made off with the till before parking the hearse in the North Sea. The dentist’s surgery, smashed up, the only remaining butcher cleaned out of meat in the dead of the night, a sandwich shop robbed and burned out, the hairdresser’s shop ransacked, the hardware shop constantly hit despite its owner taking most of his stock home every night in his van.

The last time my shop was robbed, I rang the police. I was put on hold for over one hour before being told, if I wanted an attendance, I would have to apply by email and at the present time it was taking them about three or four weeks to get an officer out. My friend and neighbour had his house burgled just before Christmas. The criminals took his children’s Christmas presents he’d hidden in his wardrobe, put them in his wife’s car and drove off. A few weeks later his wife spotted her car while doing the school run and followed it to the house of a known criminal. She rang the police and was informed after a three day wait that the case was now closed. My friend made an official complaint, which resulted in the police eventually visiting the address weeks later, only to report that the known criminal had proved it was his car despite my friend still having the original documents for the vehicle in his possession. Case closed.

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Why pit villages turned to rave

By Tom Newlands

Few around here contact the police anymore. That stopped years ago. Looking at my village and the surrounding towns and villages today reminds me of the film Shaun of the Dead. The untidy queues of dehumanised zombies shuffling into the steel-shuttered shopfronts of the only thriving businesses left, the chemists, have the place I grew up in looking more like a Forties death camp than modern day Britain. This new “underclass” go there twice a day, some three, to take their supervised dose of the taxpayer-funded legal high, methadone; a heroin substitute.

The ex-mining villages and towns of East Durham have the highest rate of people on sickness benefit in the UK, the highest rate of people on invalidity benefit and by far the highest rate of people who have been on invalidity for the longest period of time. The people around here have the lowest percentage of car ownership in Britain. The highest rate of unemployment. The lowest home ownership and believe it, if you can, over the last decade, while life expectancy for men around here has not gone up or down, for women it has dropped. This is the only place in Britain where the life expectancy for women is dropping. Another friend of mine is an undertaker in Hartlepool and told me that he now has just as many clients under 35 than elderly. My brother’s daughter was one. She was kicked to death for a drug debt of £50. She was 32, witty and highly intelligent.

I’ve heard many so-called experts over the years say it is difficult to link the social depravation and high levels of crime directly to Thatcher’s deliberate policies of deindustrialisation. All I can conclude from this is that there is no such thing as an expert.

A little over 100 years ago there was nothing here; just fields. Once coal was discovered, the villages were built immediately. My forefather’s bred for cutting coal. Then came Thatcher.

I left school in 1982, just as Thatcher was riding high on a popularity wave after single-handedly taking back the Falkland Islands despite never pulling on a pair of boots or leaving London. I was not taught anything at my comprehensive school that might have prevented me from going down the pit, on the contrary, I was only ever given the skills required for when I inevitably found myself at the bottom of that 1,500-foot shaft. As coal could not be cut by pen, it had been decided I and many around me should remain illiterate. I clearly remember a whole bunch of us going to our village colliery to sign up for a miner’s life. We were told to fill in application forms. The few writers helped the many non-writers and we were asked to return in exactly one month. We did but the gates were chained. The mine closed. The dole queue I joined the back of was four and a half million souls long.

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Can you read in Scottish?

By Tom Newlands

The ship building industry was put to death soon after. British steel fell. British rail disappeared, British Gas gone, British telecom, still there, but belonging to someone else. The national Grid, chopped up and sold for a song. Even the very waterways, pipes, and drainage systems laid by our forefathers, snatched away. British aerospace with its airports, sold off. And last-but-not-least, our Royal Mail, snapped up for a fraction of its worth by wealth investors. Ours one day, gone the next.

Thatcher had been busy slipping through new legislation while the wider British public were glued to images of burned-out ships from her South Atlantic war. The miners could no longer be supported by any other group of workers. “Coming out in sympathy,” was banned by legislation so radical that even some Tories had the decency to abstain. The new laws ran rough-shod over hundreds of years of hard-earned worker’s rights.

I don’t believe any beast, person or group of people has ever survived having their heart ripped out and my community and surrounding communities are no exception.

It was like a political bomb went off on that day as we gathered, shocked and bewildered, at our pit’s locked gates, killing some, blasting some of us to the four corners of the world whilst leaving some poor souls blackened, lame and smouldering in the ashes. As for me, I left, travelling the world in search of a better life. “Deserting a sinking ship,” you might say. However, after coming back, years later, literate and witnessing not just a lack of progression but a shocking regression, I wrote a book that hopefully might create, at least some awareness, of what the poor souls here suffered, and the survivors are still suffering today.

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Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

We have seen a string of inert careerist politicians come and go since Maggie, each one as inept and bland as the last. The working people here have nowhere to aim their vote, their will unrepresented. It seems the trapdoor under the old likeminded and relatable working-class politician has snapped opened, leaving not only an empty stage but a gapping vacuum where no one new would dare stand. The majority here, who on-the-whole still consider themselves of the Left, feel neglected. They admire straightforwardness, bravery even, yet their beloved Labour party was and still is a coward.

So, as for now, the tsunami of poverty, deprivation, alcoholism, divorce, depression, and addiction to illegal and prescription drugs is still gathering momentum. “Bad life syndrome,” the local health workers are chastised for calling it here. Thousands of lives, lacking aim, opportunity, or fulfilment, treated with pills and powders.

Recently, NHS nurses have been striking over pay, but it doesn’t appear to me that they have any real public support. It seems the tortoise head of pan-bashers who made their trendy din of appreciation during the pandemic have retracted into the safe shell of their homes; their silence, deafening. The rail workers, the teachers, the university staff, doctors, ambulance drivers, healthcare workers, airport workers, civil servants, the post office workers and more have all been involved in industrial action this year — separately. Despite them all belonging to one much larger group. The working classes.

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It is hard to believe one person in the top job could change the personality of a nation. From a once caring and united community-driven society to the fractured and divided, “I’m alright Jack, ‘loads ov money,” dog-eat-dog existence we are enduring today, but it happened. And it happened in my lifetime.

There is a new breed of politician today, claiming that British industries were put to death on grounds of the environment. This is completely untrue.

The way worker’s rights along with British industries were irradicated and the conscious effort it took to achieve this should never be forgotten. For a so-called developed nation to have treated and still treat its subjects with such contempt was, and still is, a disgrace and deserves no forgiveness. Margaret Hilda Thatcher died in the luxury of the Ritz Hotel, London, of a stroke in 2013. On the day she died and on the day of her funeral, nobody I know worked. We put up flags and bunting, flocked to our few surviving pubs, drank lots and danced into the night. You probably have difficulty understanding this depth of hatred and that I can understand. But if you had walked under my skies on the same pothole-laden paths as I, then believe me, you too would have drunk beer and danced with me long into those nights. And just to be clear, we did not celebrate because we were naïve enough to imagine that because of her death, things might now get better. It was spite.

A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.

Like Blair, Sunak has become party leader relatively young. Like Blair, he is still fairly new to the political frontline, and seeks to distinguish himself from his predecessors. But the rest of the political context is dramatically different. Whereas Labour at that time were in opposition and hungry for power, the current Tory Prime Minister fronts a party which has held office for 13 years. His focus on law and order, polling would suggest, is more a case of holding a line than of ploughing new terrain. So, what was it that made “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” such a compelling turn of phrase for New Labour? And can “tough” rhetoric boost the prospects of Rishi Sunak in the same way?

The work of US psychologist George Lakoff is useful here. An interdisciplinary academic, originally specialising in linguistics, Lakoff sought to understand why Left-wing and Right-wing thinking often falls along clear and predictable lines — even in policy fields that ostensibly have little in common. “Why,” as Lakoff put it, “does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty?… What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming?”

One of Lakoff’s conclusions, in answer to these questions, related to cause and effect. He set out two ways of thinking. “Direct” causation, he argued, emphasises immediate actions and consequences: A + B = C. This approach is favoured by conservatives; Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico, for example, is “direct” reasoning on steroids. In the other corner, preferred by progressives and the liberal Left, is “systemic” reasoning. This looks upwards, to an ecosystem of structural and societal factors; it concludes that these are the true catalyst for the social ills we face.

Apply this to law and order, and you get a clear overlay. Is the “scourge of anti-social behaviour”, as Rishi Sunak calls it, a “direct” problem, best solved by stronger policing and harsher punishments? Or is it a “systemic” one, created by the lack of opportunities which an economically unequal society creates? Should we be tough on crime or tough on its causes? Most of us will have at least some “direct” instincts when it comes to crime. Getting pick-pocketed or happy-slapped might leave even a diehard “society’s fault” liberal wanting to see some form of comeuppance. Indeed, if we think about why criminal justice is so emotive for people — and why it remains a political football in a comparatively safe country like Britain — it’s partly because it presents such an instinctive call to action for “direct” reasoning.

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If a person has killed someone else with a knife, for instance, an intuitive response is to believe both that we need to be protected from them and that they need to pay. The “systemic” argument — which would instead look at the wider contextual factors that led them to offend — will often seem beside the point. It may only be possible to make it from a safe distance away, once the immediate threat has been addressed. Indeed, George Lakoff describes how automatic “direct” causation can be:

From infanthood on we experience direct, simple causation: if we push a toy, it topples over; if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation… Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation… When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

“Systemic” thinking, by contrast, “is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language”. As Lakoff puts it: “It just has to be learned.” This partly explains why the Left so often feels it is playing away from home. Progressive tonics may be correct, in a technical or philosophical sense. But they come to human beings less naturally.

This brings us back to Blair’s Nineties strapline. “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was so effective because it told voters you did not need to choose between “direct” and “systemic” causation. The police can get on with stopping crime while somewhere, in a classroom on the other side of town, a teacher equips their pupils to avoid it in the first place. Blair’s “tough on crime” rhetoric was an attempt to rid Labour of its reputation as a party built on “systemic” reasoning alone. The soundbite thus bridged the blank-slate logic of the liberal Left with the more common-sense approach of Labour’s traditional support and of swing voters. In the run up to 1997, this formula provided the reassurance which both groups needed.

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What is the relevance of all this, when it comes to Sunak’s current electoral predicament? In a report for Progressive Britain last year, I argued that Boris Johnson’s success in the Red Wall came down to his bish-bosh-wallop mastery of “direct” logic. The Tories had historically accepted elements of “systemic” reasoning and attempted to straddle the two. But, from foreign policy to immigration to the economy, they slowly re-styled themselves over the course of the 2010s as a “no-nonsense” party, whose purpose was to provide “direct” answers to every policy question you could care to mention. According to Sebastian Payne’s book, Broken Heartlands, Dominic Cummings told 2019 Tory strategists to frame their pitch to the Red Wall as “Blairism without caring about the causes of crime”.

By doubling down on one side of Lakoff’s equation, the Tories won the 80-seat majority which Sunak now presides over (against a candidate, in Jeremy Corbyn, who appeared to embody woolly “systemic” thinking at its worst). But they also left themselves badly exposed — especially following Boris Johnson’s very “direct” and obvious breaches of his own rules. They now find themselves adrift from any voter of a vaguely “systemic” bent, reliant on an electoral pool whose geographical spread makes them efficient in terms of winning seats, but whose age profile makes them increasingly rare. To have any hope, the Conservatives now find themselves in a position where they need to continually stimulate this group’s fear that wishy-washy, “systemic” thinking has taken over. And they need to present themselves as the guardians of “direct” solutions to every problem — from small boats to laughing gas.

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Social mores have also changed significantly since Blair’s early days as Labour leader — partly due to the expansion of higher education which his governments subsequently presided over. Support for the death penalty, for example — as good a proxy for toughness as you’ll find — fell from over 70% in 1993 to under 50% today. Third Way politics did not have to contend with such a broad values spectrum as now exists. Conservative strategists may regard the small but growing cohort of ultra-“systemic” reasoners on the Left as a gift, allowing them to galvanise their “direct”-thinking base against a phrase such as “defund the police”. But they perhaps miss, in the course of this, that the mean average of public opinion has moved too. The typical voter, I suspect, is readier to blame an issue such as anti-social behaviour on social conditions than they were in the Eighties and Nineties. In this context, policy announcements based on “direct” reasoning may bring diminishing returns as time passes.

Ultimately, Sunak’s focus on crime derives from a fundamentally different place from the young Blair’s. Whereas the latter was trying to marry two electorates and retain both, the former is seeking to hold onto one — at the expense, very likely, of further haemorrhaging votes within the other. If the Tories lose the next election, then some greater reckoning with these questions will surely be required, by Sunak or his successor. In a curious reversal of New Labour’s dilemma, the UK’s growing tribe of “systemic” reasoners will at some point need to somehow be won back — through a public demonstration that the Tories are serious about the “causes of crime”. Who knows? They may even wind up resuscitating Blair’s full slogan.

Much like Leave voters after the Brexit revolt, he’s been derided as “thick as mince”, a “northern neanderthal”, an “utterly awful type”, “stupid”, “moronic”, and an apologist for far-Right politics. Ironically, much of this class snobbery has come from the very people who claim to be the most open of all, who would never allow such prejudice were it directed toward any other group in society.

The reaction should not surprise us. As I argue in my new book, the blunt reality is that if, like Lee Anderson, you come from the working class, did not go to university, spent much of your adult life working outside politics, and do not share the liberal if not radically progressive consensus which now pervades our politics and culture, then your voice has been excluded and stigmatised.

The reason Lee Anderson is turning heads is because he stands in such sharp contrast to political institutions which are now overwhelmingly dominated by an elite group, the members of which routinely come from the same social backgrounds, went to the same universities, subscribe to the same cultural values, and increasingly look down the working-class and non-graduate majority with suspicion, if not open contempt.

Just look at our major parties. In recent years, both have been hijacked by this new graduate elite and reshaped around its interests, priorities, tastes, and outlook. As this class has taken control, the share of MPs on the Left and Right who, like Anderson, had a working-class job before entering politics has crashed to just 1%, leaving much of the country without proper representation. Likewise, while roughly 25% of British adults belong to this group (1% of whom are fortunate enough to have gone to Oxbridge), the share of MPs who went to university now stands at 90%, while almost 25% went to Oxbridge.

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The transformation of Britain’s political class has been especially visible in the Labour Party, the one institution which through strong trade unions, cooperative societies, working men’s clubs, and mass memberships used to ensure that people from very different backgrounds were given a voice. But today this is no longer true. Back when Neil Kinnock led Labour into battle against Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties, 64 Labour MPs, like Anderson, had previously held working-class jobs. But since then, the number has collapsed. When Tony Blair won his second landslide, in 2001, there were 49. When Ed Miliband was defeated by David Cameron, in 2015, there were 20. When Jeremy Corbyn took over, promising to “restore the voice of the working class”, there were 12. And when Keir Starmer replaced him, after trying to block Brexit, there were just seven. Today, the blue-collar Labour MP is almost extinct. At the last election, in 2019, Labour candidates were the most likely to have postgraduate degrees and were just as likely as Conservatives to have attended Oxbridge.

Across the board, very few of the MPs who are in Westminster, like Anderson, have any meaningful life experience outside our increasingly insular politics. By the time of Brexit, exactly half of all Labour MPs and almost one-third of Conservative MPs were political careerists, having spent much of their adult lives working in and around politics. Today, this grouping is the largest tribe in Westminster, reflecting a politics that has simply become far more homogeneous, technocratic, insular, and removed from the rest of the country. Like many other Western democracies, in other words, Britain has increasingly morphed into what academics Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille call a “diploma democracy” — a political system that is now completely dominated by graduates, which has been rewired to reflect only their values and interests and actively seeks to actively exclude other voices from discussion.

Aside from leaving millions of people with a palpable sense they are no longer in the political conversation, this is also having other corrosive effects, contributing to what scholars call an “exclusion bias” in the system, constantly skewing the policy agenda to benefit the liberal graduate minority. The widespread dismissal of Lee Anderson’s views regarding the need to stop the small boats in the Channel, push back against radical progressivism or reintroduce capital punishment for some crimes reflects a political system that has been wholly repurposed to serve Westminster’s interests. When it comes to immigration, the prioritisation of globalisation over the national economy, the sheer pace of social and demographic change, the imposition of gender identity theory in schools, and the repudiation of a distinctive British history and culture, the deck is routinely stacked in favour of this minority. Neither Left nor Right have offered a genuine alternative.

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But this isn’t just about politics. The hostility that has met the likes of Anderson across much of the country’s media reflects how this new elite has also taken control of almost all of Britain’s most important and influential institutions — the think-tanks, creative industries, cultural institutions, universities, and the media — leaving millions of others with a palpable sense they are no longer part of the national conversation.

And as the graduate class continues to drift further to the Left on cultural issues, they are taking the graduate-heavy institutions with them, pushing them further and further away from the values of the average voter. As this has happened, Britain, like many other Western democracies, has entered a depressing new era of what Michael Lind calls “technocratic liberalism”, a grim new reality in which those organisations that used to provide other social groups with a meaningful pathway into politics, a meaningful voice and serious bargaining power, have either been hollowed out or removed altogether.

This loss of voice for millions of people in our politics and prevailing culture has already had profound effects. As I show in my book, between the Eighties and the early 2020s, voters from the working-class and non-graduate majority have consistently been the most likely to think “people like me have no say in government”, a disillusionment which partly found its expression through the rise of Nigel Farage, then Brexit, and then Boris Johnson, who despite belonging to this new elite grasped the sheer scale of public exasperation with it.

And as many of these voters now look on, watching the likes of Lee Anderson be ridiculed by an identikit political, media, and cultural class, more than a few will almost certainly look for new ways to rebel against a system which, they feel, routinely prioritises the voice of a new graduate elite over everybody else — and which stopped listening to people like them years ago.

The Tory Tribune of the Plebs is there to talk “common sense”; to say those things which connect with a section of the electorate most politicians would like to ignore. Teddy Taylor was one. An MP first in Glasgow and then Southend, he would use his prominence in parliament to call for the return of the birch. Geoffrey Dickens was another, a former boxer who campaigned to ban teddy bears and suggested homosexuality be criminalised to stop the spread of Aids. Both also, naturally, tried to bring back hanging. Theirs is a blokey, nuance-free politics, whereby villains get what they deserve, the sick filth is banned, and honest people live in peace. Lee Anderson has established himself as their heir.

Anderson is never short of things to say. He calls himself “30p Lee” for his pronouncements on how easy it should be for poorer households to live on a budget. He’s hawkish on crime and immigration, and an advanced fighter in every aspect of the culture war — even boycotting England for “taking the knee”. Perhaps inevitably, an interview emerged last week where he endorsed the death penalty. Since his election in 2019, the MP for Ashfield has established himself as the most well-known of the Red Wall MPs. Across social media, he is loathed by his opponents as well as the more liberal, cosmopolitan wing of the Conservatives. He probably doesn’t care that much, buoyed by the supporters who seem to adore him. Some call him the most controversial man in parliament, others a genuine voice of the people. Either way, he’s made his mark.

Anderson, like Taylor, Dickens and others before him, is pugnacious and uncaring for niceties. Unlike them, however, he has been able to harness social media to boost his profile even further. Whereas the firebrands of the Seventies and Eighties had to wait for a journalist to call them, Anderson has shown he can make himself the party’s main character in just a tweet. Twitter has boosted his profile and advanced his political career — crowned last week by his promotion to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Not bad, for someone who was a Labour councillor until 2018.

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There is, of course, a a cynical edge to all this. Once, MPs commanded attention on the streets and in the broadsheets, either as a fighter in their constituency or an intellectual, policy-minded-grandee. Today, however, it’s all in the retweets and social media. The most well-known MPs, certainly beyond the front benches, have a carefully curated online presence. Dehenna Davison TikToks herself into being the “cool” Tory MP. Stella Creasy lip-syncs on Instagram after voting to ban protests around abortion clinics. Anderson’s a social media star in the same vein — curating a larger-than-life version of himself to stand out among his colleagues. It’s not that he doesn’t believe what he says, but he chooses to express it in the most performative way possible.

This does have its uses: Anderson occupies a useful niche, both for himself and the party. Tory MPs generally sit to the Left of their voters on most social issues, including crime. Many of the party’s rank and file support the death penalty. Around a third of voters do too, with that number increasing with more specific questions, such as when it comes to terrorists or murderous paedophiles. It’s a faction the Tories are never actually going to yield to, but that they want to keep inside the political tent. These are older, poorer voters — exactly the demographics the Tories are increasingly reliant on. Figures such as Anderson give them some red meat without really changing anything.

But is this useful to the party in the long term? On current predictions, Anderson will struggle to save his seat at the next election. It probably won’t even be close, and he may well slump to third behind the local Ashfield Independents. The picture is so bleak for the Tories, his defeat will be just a footnote as more famous faces fall and far bigger majorities are overturned. A reversion to the meanness of hang’em and flog’em policies won’t do much to stem this.

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Serving him up as antidote to Sunak’s gloss is far from guaranteed to work either. As much as the party wants to appeal to an authoritarian base, its electoral coalition is much broader than many assume, and it’s hard to embrace it without pushing others out the other side. Many Tory voters see the death penalty as abhorrent and are largely conciliatory about immigration and poverty. About a quarter of Conservative voters oppose the Rwanda scheme, for example, while about half think it is “difficult” for the poor to raise their incomes.

Rather than win them over, Anderson’s approach could alienate these voters, especially in his more outlandish moments. He was previously suspended from Labour when his action to block Travellers from a field led to a charge of fly-tipping, and his parliamentary comments on Gypsies have also drawn strong criticism. Elsewhere, Private Eye has reported on his links to those who flirt with the far-Right, and his tussles with journalists are far from edifying. The praise he garners from “common-sense” Tories will be matched by dislike from The Sensibles. In the southeast, where the Tories are struggling to hold on to the professional classes, Anderson is unlikely to shore up anything.

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Even in the Red Wall, it’s wrong to assume that everyone is a budding “30p Lee”. These areas were originally defined as being demographically Tory when it came to wealth and age profiles but alienated from the party culturally, largely because of Thatcherism. They are more varied in their outlook than most would admit. You might be able to pick up a street house for £70,000, but many of Lee’s voters will sit in comfortable detached houses with mid-six-figure asking prices. They’ve probably paid them off and are receiving generous pensions. The Tory success in these northern seats is linked to Brexit, but is driven by many of their traditional political factors.

Yet even if the Tories are wiped out, the party will always have its Andersons — just as Labour will always be a home for the hard Left. Where else are they to go? But this is where the Conservatives should take care. When the Conservatives have been successful, it’s been because they have been able to knit together the shy Tories, the quiet Tories and the wet Tories, along with the broad-chested, pugilistic tribune archetype. Taylor and Dickens, after all, were always on the outside of the party establishment, more tolerated than loved. As Labour learnt with Corbyn, giving too much prominence to the outliers alienates far more voters than it brings in — and, after their inevitable electoral failure, they tend to leave chaos in their wake.

And yet it is in Birmingham that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership will face each other tomorrow, and it is there again that the winner will address the party at its annual conference in October. So, what makes the current Conservative Party so keen to court the city?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the very incongruity of the association between Birmingham and the party. At a time when the competition for Tory leadership pits a woman who began her career at Shell against a man who began his at Goldman Sachs, Conservative spin doctors want to create some distance from the global capitalist elite. Birmingham is a good place to start. Shell had a small back-office there once but most of its back-office work is now done out of Chennai or Manila. As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham — though some of the more erudite ones may recall that there was once a Birmingham stock exchange, which closed in 1986, just as the London exchange took off.

More generally, in the aftermath of Brexit, Conservatives like to see themselves as representatives of “deep England”. Birmingham, an unglamorous city in the centre of the nation, looks like the capital of this fantasyland from the Home Counties. When people, Tories especially, imagine the “real England”, it is almost invariably rural and, to a surprising extent, rural imagery often comes from Birmingham. Think of Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”, a place that seems to derive from the — then semi-rural — suburb of Birmingham in which the author grew up. Radio 4, keen to demonstrate its non-metropolitan credentials, sometimes ships its presenters to Birmingham for a few hours of Today or Start the Week, but practically the only BBC programme that is still produced in the city is The Archers. It was in here that Theresa May delivered her speech of 2016 in which she remarked that “citizens of the world” were “citizens of nowhere”.

Birmingham is also a perfect case study for the current Conservative fascination with “levelling up” the provinces. Joseph Chamberlain, much admired by May’s advisor Nick Timothy, is often presented as having been the incarnation of municipal activism when he was mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s. Later, after he moved to national politics and left the Gladstonian Liberals to join forces with the Tories, he became the incarnation of Right-wing populism.

There are, however, some odd things about Birmingham’s current place in the Tory imagination. The notion that its population is deeply rooted would not survive the briefest glance at the census. If anything characterises the city, it is migration. Work has always drawn people there — from surrounding counties in the 19th century, from Wales in the Thirties (3% of the entire employed population of the principality moved to the Midlands) and from overseas in the period since 1945. Go back a generation or two and the “somewhere” from which Birmingham people come is likely to be Galway, St Kitts or the Punjab. Birmingham Conservatives, by the way, did not always have easy relations with the city’s immigrant population — though were more discreet in the expression of their opinions than their counterparts in neighbouring Smethwick, who became notorious for using a racist slogan in the 1964 general election.

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As for “levelling up”, the city’s history shows how vacuous the concept is. Joseph Chamberlain was a powerful local figure who had great resources at his disposal. Birmingham’s rise was engineered by its own local elites, particularly the network of intermarried Unitarian families who gathered around Chamberlain. He did not depend on favours from national government. The current Conservative mayor of the West Midlands — Andy Street — is an amiable and well-meaning man but hardly in the Chamberlain mould. He won his position by a narrow majority: the proportion who voted against having a regional mayor at all, in a 2012 referendum, was larger than the proportion who voted in favour of having a Tory one in the 2017 election. He also has little money to spend: Conservatives in the Eighties stripped local government of much of its financial power. And while Chamberlain ran a small empire of municipal enterprises, the initiatives that come from Andy Street are less tangible — I suspect that most people living in the band that extends from the university to the site of the old Longbridge factory (my mother among them) would be surprised to hear that they inhabit the “Central Technology Corridor”.

In any case, Birmingham people with long memories may suspect that central government attempts to level up are more likely to be a source of problems than a solution. Many of the city’s economic problems in the Eighties sprang from the fact that the Board of Trade, keen to move industry to the “Development Areas” of the North, refused to grant permission for the establishment of new factories in Birmingham. As a result, the city was frozen into an economy that revolved around motor manufacture.

The relations between Conservatism and Birmingham are, in fact, so odd that it is worth dwelling on their history — a history that might raise awkward questions. In political terms, Birmingham was born in opposition to Toryism. It first attained parliamentary representation as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill, but not as a passive beneficiary of largesse from London. The Birmingham Political Union had been one of the most important instruments in bringing the Reform Bill about, and it had done so in opposition to the most famous Tory of the early 19th century: the Duke of Wellington. For slightly more than the first half-century of its parliamentary representation, Birmingham only once, and briefly, returned a Tory MP.

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In some ways, the city was an anti-Conservative place even before there was much in the way of formal political activity there. The ancien régime institutions that Toryism existed to defend were all weak in Birmingham. There was no real aristocracy in the town. It is true that the aristocratic Calthorpes owned the Edgbaston estate — which became the suburb in which much of the local bourgeoisie lived. But the Calthorpes were not really great figures in the city, and a member of the family was trounced when he was foolish enough to stand as a Conservative in opposition to the Chamberlainite Liberal machine.

Meanwhile, in statistical terms, Birmingham was an Anglican town (unlike the industrial towns of the North). Still, it had no Cathedral until the 20th century. The only real centre of Anglican and Tory power, until the City council managed to bring it to heel, was King Edward’s grammar school, which had been run since the 16th century by a self-selecting oligarchy of governors. King Edward’s has indeed produced some significant Tories but the intellectual self-confidence that the school imparts does not always fit easily with the party. One sees this in David Willetts, so intelligent that he sometimes doubts that he is really a Tory, and Enoch Powell, so intelligent that he made the rest of his party doubt that they were really Tories.

No one incarnated Birmingham’s natural anti-Tory bent better than Joseph Chamberlain. At a time when the Conservatives stood for Church and crown, he began his career as a republican and ended it as an atheist. He regarded the aristocracy with open contempt. However, he broke with Gladstone over Home Rule in 1886 and, thereafter, worked in alliance with the Conservatives. Birmingham became a Conservative, or, strictly speaking, a Unionist city, and this was seen most strikingly after Joseph’s death. Between the wars, there were times when Conservative cabinets contained three Birmingham MPs, including Joseph’s sons, Austen and Neville.

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Neville, though, was both the epitome of Conservative success in Birmingham and the instrument of its downfall. When he became prime minister in 1937, every single Birmingham MP was a Conservative. In 1945, five years after his death, the Labour Party won ten out of the 13 Birmingham seats. This was partly because appeasement so discredited the Chamberlain tradition (though several Birmingham Conservative MPs had, in fact, opposed it) and partly because the war economy had created a more self-conscious and unionised working class. Factories associated with the motor industry had been centres of Tory power between the wars. Herbert Austin, owner of the Longbridge car factory, was a Conservative MP who often sacked trade unionists and kept his men working late to stop them voting in municipal elections. Austin, like Chamberlain, died early in the war; by its end, Longbridge was heavily unionised.

Birmingham was a boom town after 1945. School leavers could find jobs in days. Conservatives were not always comfortable with full employment. Walter Higgs, a motor manufacturer who had been Conservative MP for West Birmingham, remarked, just after the 1945 election, that “the only way to get Birmingham people to work is have ten men after every nine jobs and empty bellies”. Another notable wrote in a private report that Conservatism in Birmingham was suffering from “over full employment”. But, though prosperity broke the Conservative monopoly of the Thirties, it did not create a new monopoly for Labour. Birmingham voters were what sociologists labelled “affluent workers”. Their support for Labour was an instrumental one based on what they took to be their interests rather than a product of ancestral loyalties. It may be because loyalty to Labour was never particularly deep that the city never turned against the party with the bitterness seen in some Northern constituencies in recent years.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the turning point for Birmingham came in 1979. “Thatcherism” was made in Birmingham — in the sense that Stuart Hall’s article on “The Great Moving Right Show” (published in Marxism Today in January 1979), which first used the term “Thatcherism” in a systematic way, was written while he was at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was made in Birmingham too in that Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to define itself against two displays of working-class power — that seen in 1972 when striking miners and their allies from Birmingham blockaded the Saltley coke depot and that seen in strikes at the Longridge car factory, which was, by now, part-nationalised.

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There was, though, something strange in all this. Significant numbers of Birmingham people voted Conservative in 1979. It was no surprise that Sutton Coldfield (a leafy suburb that had only been annexed to the city in 1974) should have the largest Conservative majority in the country. It was odder that Northfield and Selly Oak — the two constituencies closest to the Longbridge car plant — both went Tory in 1979. Partly, this was the last hurrah of the post-war “affluent worker” — a vote against the pay restraint of the Callaghan government. Sections of the white working class perhaps expected the Thatcher government to be more radical on social and cultural issues (particularly immigration) than it turned out to be. Birmingham people certainly did not expect the Tories to be so radical on economic issues and the city’s economy dived in the early Eighties — this was the era when UB40 were in the charts and when the Kenrick and Jefferson stationery company were said to be almost the only thriving local business because they had the contract to print UB40 forms.

Birmingham has regained much of its prosperity in recent years but the vestiges of the Thatcher years are still visible. The city includes areas with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The Longbridge factory finally closed in the early part of this century and the area around it is the one area that resembles the “Red Wall” Tory seats of the North — it voted for Brexit and voted Conservative in 2019. However, the prosperous commuters of Sutton Coldfield and the white ex-car workers (or their widows) of Northfield are now the only people in Birmingham to vote Conservative. All the other eight Birmingham constituencies returned Labour MPs at the last election.

The oddest thing about Tory evocations of Birmingham is the very idea that the city ought to stand for something. It is a big, heterogeneous place and, partly because of its catastrophic development around busy roads in the Sixties and Seventies, different parts of the city can feel utterly separate from each other. The notion that this is “deep England” is a myth — but then, so is the notion that there is a “deep England”. The Tory fantasy implies something permanent and natural — rural, even (one thinks of Churchill addressing the population “in your cottages”). Yet Birmingham is above all a man-made place. It manufactured an image of rural England as much as it once manufactured the Spitfire. Any local asked to identify a landmark would talk about Spaghetti Junction or the Sentinel towers, rather than a hill or river. Joseph Chamberlain, meanwhile, would have despised all the talk of “heritage”, “ancestry” and “roots” that goes with deep England; he knew that the Tory party he helped create was no more “natural” than the orchids he grew in his hothouse. For him and his associates, Birmingham went, above all, with the phrase “self-made”.

Our exclusive poll provides an answer. For UnHerd, I surveyed three key groups in British politics — a sample of Conservative Party members who will determine the outcome of the leadership race, voters in the Red Wall who will ascertain whether the Conservatives can hold together the coalition who swept Boris Johnson into power in 2019, and a representative sample of all voters.

Our survey showed that the leadership race remains wide open. Among Conservative Party members, the slight favourite is Rishi Sunak on 18%, followed by Liz Truss on 15%, Penny Mordaunt on 13%, and Kemi Badenoch on 7%. This picture is to some extent mirrored in the Red Wall and among all voters, though the real winner among all these groups is “none of the above”.

Perhaps because the contest is so short, perhaps because so many people are running, the blunt reality is that nobody yet holds a clear and commanding lead. This race could yet go in one of several directions, which underlines how precarious this moment is for the party.

What, then, do voters want the next leader to focus on? The priority, as you might expect, is the cost-of-living crisis. Britain is heading into its most difficult winter for decades, with energy prices, inflation, low growth, and sluggish productivity all combining to undermine the nation’s finances. Even though very few of the candidates are speaking to these longer-term, structural difficulties — hardly anybody has set out a convincing case for tackling our productivity problem — our data shows that many voters are keenly aware of them. And they are deeply worried.

We also find a clear and present danger for the party —one that is a leftover from the Brexit revolt. While the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls have focused almost exclusively on pressing the case for tax cuts, thought to be popular among the rank-and-file, we find a far more nuanced story.

When asked whether the next leader should increase taxes and spend more on public services, keep taxes and spending on services at the same level as they are now, or reduce taxes and spending on public services, the story is not what you might think. Many Conservative Party MPs and their supporters are far apart.

Only a minority of Conservative Party members — 33% — say we should reduce taxes and spend less on public services while a plurality — 39% — want to keep the status-quo (the rest say we should increase taxes or are unsure). Yet Red Wallers are even less supportive of slashing taxes; only 15% of them want to cut them and spend less on public services while almost half, 34%, want to keep the status quo and a further quarter want to raise taxes so we can spend more on things like health, education, and benefits.

This is consistent with the longer-term trend in Britain — and one that every Conservative must note. As the National Centre for Social Research points out, support for slashing taxes and spending less on public services is actually a very fringe position, supported by around only 5% of the country. Over the past decade, against the backdrop of austerity, public support for increasing taxes to spend more on public services rocketed, peaking at 60% in 2017 and staying above 50% in the most recent data, from 2019.

I am not saying this is the right position, just that many Conservative candidates are firmly disconnected from the position of many voters — which may yet come back to haunt them, especially in those important Red Wall seats. As much research since the 2019 general election has shown, many of these voters have always sat further to the Left on the economy and further to the Right on culture than most Conservative MPs in Westminster.

This points to the major tension now at the heart of the Conservative Party in the age of realignment: a party that is torn between its tax-cutting leadership candidates and True-Blue Tories in the shires, and its new Red Wall voters who are either comfortable with the status-quo or would even like to pay a bit more to get better public services in return.

Given the current slate of candidates it is hard, if not impossible, to see how the party resolves this tension. Many voters, it appears, want a leadership candidate who is not on the ballot sheet; one who is willing to intervene a little more to fix what they see as a rigged economic system, while also maintaining a tough line on Brexit, crime, and reducing immigration. A Blue Labour or Red Tory candidate would go down very well in a poll among these voters.

Another myth that is blown apart by our polling is the idea, fashionable after Brexit, that British politics would soon swing back to focus heavily and exclusively on the economy. But this is not supported by our polling.

Conservative Party members do not only want to talk about the economy but also, in descending order, immigration and asylum, health, tax, Brexit, and free speech/cancel culture. For Red Wallers, too, while the cost of living tops the agenda, it is followed by health, immigration, taxes, and levelling-up, while among all voters their priorities after the cost-of-living crisis are healthcare, immigration, taxes, climate change, and Brexit.

In short, many people want to talk about issues that are glaringly absent in the campaign so far. Do candidates want to retain mass immigration? How will they reform the NHS and social care? How can levelling up become a serious and sustained strategy for driving growth and productivity? All have been conspicuously quiet so far.

The relative prominence of Brexit, immigration and, to a lesser extent, free speech and cancel culture really matters; these concerns all point to the continuing power of the “cultural dimension” in British politics which, increasingly, is cutting across the old tribal loyalties.

So, too, does growing public anxiety about the rising prominence of “woke” ideology. Several candidates — most notably Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman — are actively campaigning against it, however, with Badenoch warning against “identity politics” and taking aim at what she argues are supposedly impartial, yet woke civil servants, and Braverman pitching herself as the “anti-woke” candidate.

While the issue of identity politics is often dismissed among the Twitterati as a fringe culture war issue, and some don’t have a clear idea of what exactly “woke” pertains to, it is still important not to dismiss it. After all, we frequently poll voters about things such as the economy, productivity, levelling-up, knowing they tend to have very different views about what these things are.

When we told Conservative party members and voters that some leadership candidates were “promising to oppose woke ideology, on the basis that they argue it undermines free speech”, we found widespread support for this position. Our findings suggest that the free speech campaigns do cut through.

Nearly three-quarters of Conservative Party members, 69%, said they strongly or somewhat agreed with “the need to oppose woke ideology”, as did 40% of Red Wallers (versus 16% who disagreed), and 36% of all voters (versus 22% who disagreed). The perceived need to oppose wokeness is especially strong among pensioners (52%). This, to me, points to the beginning, not the end, of a growing debate about what this ideology means for British schools, universities, how we make sense of our history, and, ultimately, who we are.

This was all brought home to me at an event held by the Centre for Policy Studies, in the heart of Westminster, this week, where many of the party’s current and former advisors were agonising over the future of the party and conservatism more generally.

There appeared a broad consensus in the room that while the Conservative Party might still be holding the largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher it has nonetheless become clearly disconnected from many of the key groups that made this possible to begin with — whether on tax, the lack of attention to the big challenges facing Britain, or a growing public appetite to debate the ongoing effects of immigration, Net Zero policies, and culture.

This is certainly supported by our polling which suggests, clearly, that unless the next leader can repair and reboot the party’s relationship with the people who put it into power less than three years ago then it may not remain in power for very long at all.

The contest had already started before Pinchergate and Partygate. It was apparent in the disputes about the ending of pandemic lockdowns. Back then, the paternalism of some was at odds with the libertarianism of others. The policy differences reflected even deeper philosophical divisions, not least over how to approach the economy. These ultimately surfaced in different approaches to inflation, with rival positions staked out by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Given the nature of the conflicts within the party what does it mean for the future of Conservatism? Johnson marked a new direction of travel, marrying a brand of patriotism boosted by Brexit with a redistributive economic policy. His rhetoric of “levelling up” indicated the way forward, implicitly abandoning Tory principles that had been in place since Margaret Thatcher. A party of low tax, low inflation, a small state and fiscal rectitude yielded to a programme of enhanced equality, public spending, and government investment in infrastructure.

These commitments, however, did seem to be nominal rather than substantial. Yes, taxation levels in the UK are headed for an all-time high since the Forties, but much of this reflects the costs incurred by the pandemic and anticipated damage from the stand-off with Russia. The same applies, in general, to levels of borrowing and spending. Under Johnson, though, there was no clear plan for future investment in public services, and little coherent thinking about the means of levelling up. Instead, there were promises, gestures and a plethora of slogans.

Slogans do matter, though. A fresh slogan licenses a new agenda, even if substantial change is endlessly deferred. And the reality of regional inequality in the United Kingdom is such that it will continue to fuel demands for targeted redistribution. Such calls generate wider pleas for social equality. In turn, this marks a potential long-term shift in the posture of Conservative politics. The idea that low tax will deliver growth, and with that an expansion of economic opportunities, is being challenged by complaints about persistent disadvantage. The old ideal of a rising tide of prosperity for all will have to respond to ongoing appeals for a baseline of equality.

As a result, Conservatism has changed tack. But this is not only because a new slogan has gained traction: the composition of the Conservative vote has also altered. Most obviously, going into future electoral campaigns, the Party cannot ignore the importance of the Red Wall. At least in the short term, Bolsover, Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland will be a factor in Conservative policy calculations if they want to win the next election. Having passed to the Conservatives in 2019, the Party will have to work to keep them from Labour the next time around.

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Johnson, then, while not representing seismic transformation, does offer lessons in understanding non-revolutionary change. Modern parties are institutional as well as ideological entities. Their persistence over time suggests an element of durability. But the longevity of the Conservative Party is also a product of its adaptability. However, its constant flexibility is masked by appeals to the past, especially to ideas associated with classic thinkers.

There is nothing exceptional about Johnson’s deviation from Tory orthodoxy; the history of conservatism is a succession of deviations. The Conservative Party is not an enduring institutional edifice. Behind the image of a timeless corporate identity lies the reality of endless incremental adjustments. Equally, there are no conservative principles which have retained their integrity through the ages. Instead, apparently similar doctrines changed their meanings as circumstances evolved.

Even the origins of conservative principles are contested. The etymology of the word Tory stretches deep into the 17th century. It originally referred to Irish miscreants and was later associated with Papist rebels more generally. Given this miscellaneous background, a significant number of historians trace the beginnings of the Conservative Party to English monarchists who defended the rights of James II when his title to rule was challenged by the Whigs in the 1680s. Yet for many, since the Tories made their peace with the Glorious Revolution, the roots of the Conservative Party are better traced to the era of Viscount Bolingbroke in the early 18th century.

However, when Bolingbroke’s campaign against Walpole’s Whigs was flourishing in the 1720s and 1730s, Toryism was more a set of ideals than an organised party structure. The Tories attracted a following, but they lacked the means of enforcing discipline. Moreover, their main advocate was associated with bottomless hypocrisy. Having supported the Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, Bolingbroke came to seek reforms under the Hanoverian regime by mobilising one-time Whiggish ideas. Equally, he rallied in public to the defence of High Church Anglicanism while circulating in private his freethinking opinions.

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Given Bolingbroke’s wayward character, and his apparently boundless opportunism, the sources of conservative principles are more often traced to Edmund Burke. There is no shortage of Tory publicists since the final decades of the 19th century keen to point to Burke as their primordial inspiration. In fact, by the Fifties, in the United States no less than the United Kingdom, the Irish statesman became a staple of Cold War conservatism in general.

Yet there has always been something odd about this deliberate appropriation. To begin with, throughout his political life, Burke was affiliated with the Whigs and not the Tories. Specifically, he was a partisan of the Rockingham Whigs from 1765 to 1782, and from then until the French Revolution he was closely allied with Charles James Fox.

Despite this, it seems that Burke, of all people, is most easily identified with modern conservatism because of his avowed hostility to the French Revolution. In the popular imagination, the events of 1789 mark the start of Left-wing politics. Burke, as a dogged critic of the new regime in France, is habitually branded as an adversary of all reform. Accordingly, he is painted as an opponent of the forces of progress and categorised as the high priest of tradition.

But given the erratic course of the Revolution, adopting it as a benchmark for right thinking is surely misguided.

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In any case, it is inevitably distorting to view Burke’s career exclusively through the lens of the French Revolution. To begin with, his years as a Member of Parliament were largely spent in opposition and devoted to a vast array of reform measures. He was an avid defender of religious toleration, an opponent of increases in ministerial power under the crown, the foe of profiteering by the East India Company in South Asia, and a proponent of the rights of the American colonists against parliament. This last included support for their resort to arms against the British government. In fact, down to the last, Burke endorsed the general right of revolution against the state.

It is hard, then, to find in Burkean principles the origins of conservatism. Nonetheless, decontextualised precepts extracted from his writings are frequently deployed to guide conservative thinking. There is nothing peculiarly problematic about this procedure. It is a standard means of conferring an appearance of antiquity on new ideas. By these means, notably different undertakings can be absorbed into the semblance of a tradition. This is an inevitable part of the process of political change. Parties are most securely renewed by girding themselves with reassuring antecedents. Sober analysts, however, do not have to fall for the trick.

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The current contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party is already being conducted in the language of Thatcherism, with candidates campaigning for a low-tax economy and advertising the virtues of a patriotic Brexit. This is because, most immediately, they need to appeal to the Party membership. But the new leader will then have to reanimate the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli since success at a general election will need an injection of one-nation Toryism. Disraeli’s “Tory Democracy” won new constituencies for the Conservatives, and Johnson’s successor will likewise have to appeal beyond the dependable cohort of southern middle class voters.  For this reason, the north midlands and northern England cannot be taken for granted. Once again, the Johnsonian ability to expand the Tory electorate will continue to impose a challenge on his successors.

In examining this process, the student of politics ought not to conduct themselves like political contenders or party managers, concerned with pedigree instead of the actual course of history. We should not be captivated by the mantras of Left and Right, or the slogans of Conservatism and Labourism. Parties try to orient their followers by brandishing jingles. Every healthy democracy will inevitably draw upon such stratagems. But there also needs to be space for sober reflection in which we are able to call the prevailing trademarks into doubt. Political pundits too often pander to the rallying cries of politicians. Serious commentary should stand back from this daily froth and aim for a subtler appreciation of the real forces in play.

They would have recognised that the rhetoric of levelling up can all too easily be conscripted as a clever alibi for the maintenance of the status quo. It implies that those of us who are wealthy do not need to change our ways, that others can aspire to our level, that levelling up for some will not mean levelling down for others. Levelling up doesn’t frighten the rich. It implies that no one is going to take their precious cake away.

Of course, cake is the very last thing that the Prime Minister wants us to be thinking about now. Not only because it has become a symbol of the “one rule for us, another for them” thinking that has come to characterise his premiership. But also because he has ostentatiously broken the golden rule of class camouflage. As Keynes put it: “the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice.” Boris, meanwhile, has his cheeks stuffed full and has crumbs all down his shirt.

So, desperate to avoid all mention of cake, Boris is off to Scotland for the half-term break to promote his levelling up agenda. It’s the great Boris rebranding exercise, a tour of less-well-off places that will benefit from his big plan. That is what we are supposed to think, anyway. It turns out that many of the places that have been awarded early levelling up funds are Tory-run areas that are relatively prosperous. Savid Javid’s constituency of Bromsgrove is set to receive £14.5 million and Nadine Dorries’s neck of the woods of Bedfordshire £26.7 million. Both of these areas are in the least deprived fifth of local authorities in the UK.

Economists like cake too, of course. Some think the important thing is that it is divided up equally. Others that it needs to be grown, with everyone getting a bigger piece even if that means some still get more than others. The Prime Minister — like pretty much all-mainstream political parties, with the possible exception of the Greens — is of this latter view. If the size of the cake remains the same, more for the poor will mean less for the rich. But if we grow the cake, we can support the poor without bothering the rich. One of these options is electoral kryptonite, the other is electoral gold.

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There is a reason the Greens are the most sceptical about growth. As David Attenborough put it in his latest book: “Our first lesson from nature concerns growth. We have arrived at this moment of desperation as a result of our desire for perpetual growth in the world economy. But in a finite world, nothing can increase forever.” In other words, at some point the cake doesn’t get any bigger. Or rather, it gets bigger at the expense of the health of the planet. We all watch his lovely TV programmes, we ooh and aah at the cute images, we have a bit of a cry, we think of him as a national treasure. But we totally ignore the punchline.

The trouble with the growth is that is has been historically very bad at pricing in all the consequences of our comfortable lifestyles — things like carbon emission and nuclear waste. And if those, like Attenborough, who predict disaster are even half right, then the challenge for the foreseeable future will not be how to level up but how most of us can learn to level down. Levelling up is a luxury we can no longer afford.

No doubt the Tories will point to the fact that the levelling up agenda includes “£26 billion of public capital investment for the green industrial revolution and a transition to New Zero”. Which is another way of saying that the best way to get to less carbon is more and better capitalism, appropriately directed, supported by more and better technology. More gives us less. Of course we should be suspicious.

Tories will also say that Attenborough’s thought is dangerously watermelon-like: green on the outside, red in the middle. Some years ago, the philosopher Derek Parfit gave what is often said to be the decisive argument against egalitarianism: “Suppose that those who are better off suffer some misfortune, so that they become as badly off as everyone else. Since these events would remove the inequality, they must be in one way welcome… even though they would be worse off for some people, and better for no one. This implication seems to many to be quite absurd. I call this the Levelling Down Objection.” Equality, of the sort loved by the Left, makes no sense if it addresses the question of blindness by putting out everyone else’s eyes — so goes the Parfit objection to the levelling down agenda.

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But this only works if we are sure that levelling up genuinely means aspiring to something better. Parfit’s levelling down criticism is an objection to equality as an end in itself. But the argument being put forward by radical Greens isn’t about equality; it’s that some version of levelling down — of the wealthy, even the moderately wealthy, having less, producing less, consuming less — is what we need to achieve in order for us to save the planet from catastrophe.

If Boris’s levelling up agenda is little more than a pork-barrel electoral ploy targeted at floating voters, and one that leaves a dangerous economic complacency intact, then “up” isn’t better, but just another meaningless metaphor — like growth itself — that reinforces our refusal to face what we are doing to the planet. If Attenborough is right, growth is killing us. So “up” isn’t always good. And we need more politicians brave enough to say it: we need to be talking more about levelling down as an aim, not as something to avoid.

Yes, there are very many people who do require a lot more economic support — some of whom live in this country, but most of whom don’t. The reduction of that tiny sliver of cake that this country used to give to the poorest in the world in foreign aid — from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% — is an indication that Johnson doesn’t really give two hoots about levelling up the poorest in the world. So don’t be deceived: his levelling up agenda is just a smidgeon of Left-leaning cosplay to tickle up a few Red Wall voters. We should learn to despise this grinning cynicism.

Yet the proponents of levelling down still feel like grumpy Old Testament prophets, mad Green voices of doom crying in the wilderness. They are telling us something we do not want to hear. Something no one would ever vote for. I suppose Christianity has had a hand in associating “up” with something good and better and “down” with something bad. Up is towards heaven, down is towards the fiery pit and everlasting damnation. But these days, we are being led into fire by the language of more and of up.

And yet despite this growing resentment, despite the fact that a majority of voters want him to resign, there’s every chance that Johnson will cling on. Yes, if the Met Police’s soon-to-be-published report on his alleged Covid breaches reveals that he misled parliament or lied to his own backbenchers, he is probably toast. But if it gives him enough wriggle room to survive, it will take the wind out of his rivals’ sails — and the PM will live to fight another day, and another election.

On that score, things aren’t quite as a bad as they first seem for Johnson — especially when you compare his position in the polls to Keir Starmer’s: 46% of people trust neither Johnson nor Starmer to tell the truth; 26% trust Starmer more than Johnson; and 14% trust Johnson more than Starmer. Of course, there is still a gap. But even immediately after the 2019 general election, Johnson had a net-negative trustworthy rating. Nobody voted for Johnson because they thought he was an honest politician. His dishonesty is priced in.

Similarly, voters are not overwhelmingly convinced that ditching Johnson would help the Tories: 34% think the Tories would be better off without him, compared to 48% who believe they would be doing the same or worse. Among Conservative voters in 2019, those figures are 23% and 66% respectively. Nor are voters warming to Starmer — just one poll this year has given him a net-positive approval rating. IpsosMORI, who remove the “neither” option in their satisfied/dissatisfied question, find a -15% satisfied rating for Starmer.

What about the latest YouGov poll, which gives Labour a six-point lead and finds that Starmer’s party is keeping 65% of its 2019 vote, versus just 52% for the Tories? Well, it’s worth noting that 25% of 2019 Tory voters say they “don’t know” who they’d vote for, compared to just 11% of Labour voters. This is important — “don’t knows” are excluded from headline voting intention figures, so the Conservatives could be in a stronger position than we think. One pollster which does not do this is Kantar; since the North Shropshire by-election they have, on average, found the Conservatives to be 2 points higher than other pollsters (and Labour nearly 1.7 points lower).

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

So, if Boris is in a stronger position than we think, how should he use it to his advantage?

Since 2019, political scientists have largely responded to this question by wheeling out hackneyed truisms about mystical Red Wall voters. These voters, we’re told, are a unique fighting force, chomping at the bit to fight Johnson’s culture war. But that’s a myth; they are not more anti-woke than Tory voters in general, nor do they differ significantly on economics.

Indeed, the original purpose of the ‘Red Wall’ moniker was that it represented seats which, given their socio-demographic make up, should have voted Tory anyway. The question was not why these seats turned Conservative in 2019 — it was why they were not Conservative long before 2019.

If he’s to succeed, Johnson needs to remember what this Conservative voting coalition cares about. At the last election, Brexit was the most important issue for voters, leave and remain. Now, only 15% of leave voters think it is one of the top three most important issues; for Remainers, that figure is 32%. Brexit will not deliver the next election for Boris — but playing on traditional Tory strengths might.

Nowhere, for instance, is the divide between Tory and Labour voters starker than in the issue of immigration and asylum. For Tory voters it is the third most important issue (at 46%), whereas for Labour it is ninth (at 8%). You would struggle to find any voter who thinks the government is doing a good job on asylum seekers crossing the Channel — even 77% of Conservative voters thinking the government has handled it badly. So if Johnson wants to shore up his Tory base, a good place to start would be putting Home Secretary Priti Patel on notice: stop the boats or lose your job.

Then there’s the economy, which is rated one of the top three issues by 55% of Tory voters, compared to 45% of Labour voters. Johnson’s coalition is sceptical of how the economic system is structured: while they do not necessarily believe in income redistribution, they do think the system is rigged in favour of the rich, and that ordinary working people do not get their fair share. Generally speaking, Conservative voters are much more Left-wing than Conservative MPs.

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Boris is our sin-eater

By Mary Harrington

So perhaps more than anything, the most pressing concern for Johnson should be levelling up. After “getting Brexit done”, levelling up formed the core of the Conservatives’ offer to the electorate. Yet it took more than two years for the government to get around to defining exactly what it means, let alone release a white paper on the subject.

It’s hardly surprising that voters are not convinced: 44% think levelling up will lead to no change in spending in their area, while 18% think it will lead to lower levels. Just 7% think more money will flow as a result. The figures are broadly the same among Tory and Labour voters.

One reason for New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 was that the public wanted more money spent on public services — 18 years of Thatcherism had left them in a perilous state. Cameronite austerity has done the same today: all the signs suggest that voters want to see a difference by the end of this parliament, otherwise they will lose faith in the government’s promises.

Despite this, the Government is caught up in arguments over funding between the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, who wants more money, and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who is saying no. But levelling up — undoing decades’ worth of inequality — cannot be done on the cheap.

For Johnson, there is an obvious solution to this. If levelling up is to be his legacy, it is currently under threat from Sunak’s penny-pinching instincts. So a true government reset — one that would send a clear signal to voters about his commitment to ending the North/South divide — would see Johnson sack Sunak and replace him with a true believer in levelling up: someone like Michael Gove.

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Covid could still save Boris

By Freddie Sayers

Sunak’s much-touted popularity may make Johnson think twice about this, but support for the chancellor is overstated. It is, after all, difficult to be anything but popular when you’re paying people to stay at home, or subsidising their dinners out in the middle of summer. But since the rush of cash has disappeared, his approval rating has begun to fall — from a net 43% positive in April 2020 to just 2% in December 2021.

If Johnson survives the consequences of the Met’s report, he will probably live to fight the next election. By then Partygate will have faded and the PM will need to point to a series of policy wins that his voter coalition wants: most of which involve spending more money. Now is not the time for a self-declared fiscal conservative to sit in Number 11. If Johnson wants to win in 2024, he needs to put voters’ money where his mouth is.

The sheer scale of the disillusionment with Johnson’s premiership struck me last week as I gave various talks in Westminster and listened to MPs voicing their frustration with the direction of travel. On the surface, their demands are clear and specific. Those among the new intake — the 2019ers and Red Wallers — want Johnson’s advisors gone and No. 10 shaken up. They want the volume on Net Zero turned down and the volume on illegal migration turned up. They want Levelling-Up transformed from a narrow, hollow slogan into a serious, unifying and coherent project. And they want it done yesterday.

They also want Boris Johnson to govern as he campaigned; to spend more time outside of London, speaking on behalf of working people, taking on The Blob and offering policies that will resonate among the new Conservative voters, who not only gave him the Red Wall but lie at the heart of the realignment sweeping through the country. They complain about a Prime Minister whose talents as a campaigner and communicator are being squandered by advisors who neither understand this new conservatism nor the realignment on which it stands. This is compounded, they continue, by a Prime Minister who is simply too worried about being liked by the chattering classes and too reluctant to embrace the messaging and policies which would reinforce and retain his new electorate.

This disillusionment is reinforced by what many see as a deep generational and ideological rift inside the Conservative parliamentary party, a rift symbolised this week by one minister deriding Red Wallers as “a load of fucking nobodies”. One obvious question after the 2019 general election was how traditional True Blue free-traders would sit alongside a more blue-collar, one-nation conservatism. Fast forward to today and this rift is now on full display, reflected in the more than a few 2019ers who simply do not believe their southern, affluent and typically Oxbridge-educated colleagues are seriously invested in levelling-up the Red Wall, who they say resent the new focus on the north, who look at their party’s new blue-collar voters with a combination of bemusement and snobbery and who, they say, remain much too wedded to the old conservatism of the Eighties, failing to grasp that the rules of engagement amid the new, post-2016 politics are very different.

There are certainly Thatcherites among the Red Wallers, who look back rather than forward. But there are just as many who complain that the new, post-2016 conservatism cannot answer the questions thrown up by the realignment by turning the clock back 40 years. Thatcherism, one MP points out, represented a genuine, radical and counter-cultural pushback to the dominant zeitgeist at the time. Anchored in a specific philosophy, it offered one answer to a set of questions thrown up by the chaos, gridlock and failure of the Seventies. Today, both the questions and the answers are very different and require a different approach. We have transitioned into a politics where providing people with cultural freedom has become just as important as providing them with economic freedom — only the Conservative Party has failed to keep up.

This also finds its expression in an instinctive suspicion of whether Johnson’s leadership rivals really could maintain and continue the realignment. You do not have to travel far in Conservative circles to find people who will tell you that anybody can lead a realignment. Just put a Sunak or a Truss on top and throw the working-class northerners a bit of Red Meat. But this is a fundamental misread.

Realignments are both bottom-up and top-down. They depend on underlying demographic trends which are pushing non-graduates and workers Right-wards and graduates and professionals Left-wards; but they also depend on the leaders who pull them into politics and turn them into votes. The realignment in Scotland would simply not have been possible without Nicola Sturgeon, in the same way that the realignment in America would not have been possible without Trump.

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Will Boris survive a revolt on the Right?

By Matthew Goodwin

Boris Johnson is a greatly weakened figure but he has at least demonstrated proof of concept, driving the realignment by campaigning for Brexit (liking Johnson was a significant driver of public support for leaving the EU) and then tearing through the Red Wall (liking Johnson was a significant driver of Labour to Conservative defectors). While many of the new intake loathe what has become of Johnson’s premiership, they can still sense his lingering appeal in parts of the country where, they say, other Conservatives would simply struggle if not fail to reach.

Some fear that a Prime Minister Sunak or Prime Minister Truss — neither of whom are really known outside of the Westminster village — would be unable to hold the coalition together, a coalition which Johnson himself did not simply mobilise in 2019 but over much of the last decade. While this relationship is damaged, it is also one which, like a long and difficult marriage, still has deep roots. It was shaped by Johnson’s decision to campaign for Brexit, then against Theresa May’s Soft Brexit, and then to Get Brexit Done in 2019. In many respects, in the eyes of many voters, Boris Johnson is the realignment: he is the one politician who had the courage to go against the grain and offer the country a break from the dreary, narrow orthodoxy which had dominated their lives for decades.

People have swiftly forgotten that only eight months ago, Johnson won the Labour heartland of Hartlepool for the first time in decades. He has also enjoyed major gains at local elections across Labour strongholds; it’s all strong evidence that the realignment continues and is by no means in reverse. Twelve weeks ago, the party was averaging 40% in the polls.

Could Sunak, Truss or anyone else manage to hold and extend this coalition in the two years before the next general election? Some MPs describe Sunak as George Osborne 2.0: metropolitan, slick, London, competent — but also disconnected from the blue-collar conservatives, the previously apathetic, cultural conservatives who now represent a major flank of the party’s electorate. Sunak, they worry, seems more a relic from the Osborne days, than a counter-cultural general who can rally the masses. There is a counter argument to this, of course, which is that in recent polls Sunak performs strongly across northern England, even eclipsing Johnson’s own ratings. But Sunak’s critics reply that it is easy to be popular when you have given people £70 billion of furlough and much of the country still does not know who you are or what you really believe.

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How Boris can still win

By Matthew Goodwin

The questions are obvious and difficult to answer. How would Sunak, the partner of a billionaire, a graduate of Oxford and Stanford who wears £1,300 suits and starts his days spinning on a £2,000 bicycle while eating blueberries hold the Red Wall? We hear much about his support for traditional fiscal conservatism and the picture of Nigel Lawson which hangs over his desk, but is this really what the new conservative voters want? Is politics not in a state of realignment precisely because the managerial, technocratic and polished fiscal conservatism of the Cameroon and Osborne era, along with an acceptance of progressive politics, alienated so many? And given that friends of Sunak say he routinely prioritises avoiding disagreement over pinning his own political stripes to the mast, would such an approach really work in a politics that is far more polarised, cross-cutting and rooted more strongly in values than appeals to economic competence?

These doubts, these questions, are what have so far prevented more MPs from rebelling against Johnson. But how long will that hold? So weak is the Prime Minister, that he is now only one error, one leak, one policy blunder away from losing his grip on power altogether. Furthermore, MPs worry that even a Johnson reboot — a Boris Johnson 2.0 — is pointless unless it is anchored in a guiding philosophy which can reconnect him with his new voters.

“One week it’s Net Zero and animal sentience”, complained one MP, “the next it’s tax rises.” A political project which began life by promising the British people that it would be genuinely revolutionary — that it would springboard from Brexit into far-reaching reforms which would overturn the orthodoxy and push the country in a completely new course — has instead become glaringly conventional.

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Sleaze won't bring down Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

Boris Johnson was never going to be an ism. But in the early days of his counter-cultural premiership there was at least a small hope that he might at least surround himself with thinkers who genuinely grasp the realignment and can feed it with a radical new offer which cuts across Left and Right in the same way Brexit disrupted the old loyalties five years earlier. Today, though, they see a Prime Minister who is bobbing on the surface, trying to be all things to all voters with no clear sense of direction or underlying purpose.

And now his core voters, the ones who really matter, have noticed too. It is the Leavers, the workers, the Greggs Guys who are abandoning him in droves, running not to Labour, but into apathy, giving up on the one person who, in 2019, like Mrs Thatcher 40 years earlier, promised them that he would shatter the consensus and radically reshape the country. The difference between Thatcher and Johnson is that only one of them followed through. “Where is that Boris?”, asked one MP.

They have a point.

Disillusioned with Boris Johnson’s premiership and what he sees as the Government’s failure to make the most out of Brexit, Farage has made clear his intention to get more involved with Reform, the party which replaced the Brexit Party. Should Boris be worried?

It is easy to laugh at Farage, but one key lesson of the last decade is to never underestimate him. Were it not for him and his political crusade, the UK would almost certainly still be in the European Union and Labour would still have its Red Wall.

Currently averaging 5% in the polls, Reform, under the stewardship of former Brexit Party MEP Richard Tice, is making no secret of its political strategy: it plans to exploit the rapidly growing rift between Boris Johnson and his conservative voters who are today just as likely to come from the Labour heartlands as the Tory shires.

Therein lies a crucial point. Many of the voters on whom Boris Johnson depends are more blue-collar, non-graduate and culturally conservative than those who supported David Cameron just a few years ago. They are more purple than blue, more Faragist than Cameroon.

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Test article

By Giles Fraser

And they too have learned an important lesson: they can use revolts on the Right to bend the Tories to their will. Many of these voters have gone on a long political journey, from choosing New Labour in the 2000s, David Cameron in 2010, Ukip at the European elections, the Brexit Party in 2019 and finally Boris Johnson. Will they defect again? It’s now in their DNA.

So what is Reform’s pitch to them? Whereas Farage used to campaign relentlessly against the European Union, mass immigration and what he saw as a homogeneous political class in Westminster, Reform has kept much of the latter while reforming the former.

With Brexit now delivered, Farage has changed gear, talking more about Net Zero than needing to leave the EU. His plan is to remind voters across the Red Wall that one quarter of their electricity bills is now spent on green subsidies, that Channel crossings are out of control, that immigration has not yet been brought back under control and that under Boris Johnson the country is now ruled by “a metropolitan Tory chumocracy totally detached from the rest of the country”.

Scroll through Reform’s policies and you’ll find an offer tailored for the very people who are now abandoning Johnson in the polls. A call to return to low taxes. To push back against ‘woke nonsense’. To reform the BBC. And to restore freedom of speech.

One person who would approve is Lord Frost, who this week used his first intervention since resigning from government to urge Johnson to become a ‘true Tory’ or risk imminent defeat. He pointed to many of the same issues that are being targeted by Reform: sharp tax rises, an obsession with Net Zero, the failure to make the most out of Brexit, the policing of other people’s opinions by those who Frost calls “woke warriors” — people who appear determined to revise if not repudiate British history, identity and culture.

To what extent is there room for such a revolt? Almost a decade ago, in Revolt on the Right, Robert Ford and I warned that the Conservative Party was vulnerable to a rebellion on its Right flank among specific groups of voters who both main parties had lost sight of: working-class, non-graduate, culturally conservative, older Britons. Shortly afterwards, Farage and Ukip won the 2014 European Parliament elections before a majority of voters then opted for Brexit. The revolt went mainstream.

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The Tories can learn from the American Right

By Aris Roussinos

Yet far from resolving this underlying tension, in many ways Brexit and Boris Johnson now appear to be breathing new life into it. There was always an open question as to whether Johnson would be able to hold support from the cultural conservatives who flocked to Farage and Brexit. And now, at the halfway point of his premiership, we are getting the answer.

Johnson is increasingly adrift from his core supporters on not just one but many issues, so much so that it is not hard to see how Reform, which is already attracting around 11% of the Leave vote, could soon morph into a far more formidable force in British politics. While they might not have any upcoming European elections, which Farage used to demonstrate his electoral credibility, they do have the fact that Boris Johnson is currently haemorrhaging Leave voters.

In the polls, the picture facing the Conservative Party today is even worse than it was before Christmas, when it first became clear that Leavers were starting to abandon the party in droves. While Labour have cemented their lead, the Conservatives have now not held a lead outside the margin of error since the first week of November. And at the heart of this are the very voters who Reform and Farage now have within their sights.

The share of Leave voters who plan to vote Conservative at the next election is continuing to slide, from 72% last June to 62% in October, 60% in November and 58% this month. Today, remarkably, fewer than half of Leavers think that Johnson, who actually delivered Brexit, would make the best Prime Minister.

Nor are these the only signs which point to potential inroads for Reform. Amid an escalating cost of living crisis, higher inflation and looming tax rises, a tide of disillusionment is now sweeping through an already fragmenting Conservative electorate.

One survey last week put the Conservatives sixteen points behind Labour across more than fifty seats which Johnson won in 2019. Another suggests almost 80%  of Red Wallers say Johnson ‘does not understand their pain’. And another finds that while only 26% of British voters have heard of ‘levelling-up’, almost three-quarters of people across the north do not know what it means or have never heard of it at all.

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The year we gave up on reality

By Suzanne Moore

It will take more than a delayed levelling-up white paper to solve this. Johnson has simply failed to sell his core policies to his core voters. Pollsters might point to the fact that large numbers of voters say we should tackle climate change as evidence for the suggestion they will put up with costly climate change policies. But they miss a key point. For many conservatives this is simply not a salient issue. They just do not see it as a pressing priority in the way fighting crime or curbing immigration are.

Meanwhile, when it comes to Brexit, only half of Johnson’s core voters think it is going well. When it comes to immigrants crossing the English Channel, not even one in ten think the government is doing a good job. And when it comes to levelling-up, only 8% think it will lead to more money being spent on their local area.

It is a similar story for other areas which are attracting the wrath of prominent Eurosceptics such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, including tax. For the first time since Boris Johnson took power, today the share of Conservatives who think the Government is taxing too much and spending too much on public services has eclipsed the share who think it has got the balance right.And when it comes to cancel culture, while most conservatives think the Government should prioritise the protection of free speech, nearly two-thirds also feel they are now living in a country where they have to stop themselves from expressing their real views because of their fears about what will happen if they do.

These things matter. Many people in Britain do feel, strongly, that ancient and hard-won freedoms are under threat from an alliance of Big Tech, radical progressives and cancel culture. The Left might dismiss all this as ‘culture war politics’, but it could easily become as potent for the radical Right today as Brexit was to an earlier generation.

We simply now live in a country where voters have become far more used to switching their political loyalties from one election to the next, where the Conservative Party’s leadership is no longer aligned with its new electorate, where the vote for Brexit has shown voters the kind of change they can bring about and where culture remains just as important as economics. It might be tempting to argue that the revolt on the Right is over — but only a fool would believe it.

Governing parties have suffered even heavier defeats and have still gone on to win a majority at the next election (as David Cameron can testify after losing Clacton to the UK Independence Party before going on to win his surprise majority in 2015). But this defeat has already become symbolic of a much deeper crisis engulfing Johnson.

Beyond the leafy lanes of Shropshire, the symptoms of this crisis are not hard to find. Amid chaos in Downing Street and rebellions in parliament, Johnson and his party are now consistently trailing the Labour Party in the polls. Labour has surpassed 40% of the vote, a barrier it has not breached since the start of the year. And the Conservatives have just slumped to 32%, a low they have not encountered since the very depths of the Brexit crisis in October 2019, since before Johnson’s election victory.

Even without the polls, we can all see and sense that Johnson is on the ropes; that what began with the largest majority for any Conservative for more than 30 years now looks bizarrely, perilously fragile. This was further reflected this week when a visibly exhausted Johnson suddenly found himself confronted with one of the most significant parliamentary rebellions in history, when almost 100 of his own MPs revolted against his decision to introduce yet more Covid restrictions.

This revolt was bigger than the one David Cameron faced in 2011, when his MPs rebelled to push a referendum on Britain’s EU membership; it was bigger than the one John Major faced in 1997, when his MPs rebelled over gun control measures in the aftermath of Dunblane. It was almost as big as the rebellion Theresa May faced over Brexit, in 2019, which with the notable exception of Labour’s rebellion over the war in Iraq was the biggest since the revolt over Corn Laws in the 19th century. This, in short, does not bode well.

In just 24 months, Johnson has gone from appearing as the political equivalent of Logan Roy in Succession, fully in command of his Conservative family while surveying the landscape with a clear sense of purpose, to appearing more like Connor Roy, the hapless, politically naïve eldest son who is not entirely sure where he sits within his family or what his purpose is.

And so Mr Johnson finds himself under fire from all sides. On the Right, they say he is not the Prime Minister they hoped he could become; on the Left, they say he is everything they predicted. Either way, amid all the frustration his leadership ratings have crashed to the lowest level on record: this week, Survation put Johnson’s net favourability on minus 29, a new low.

Remarkably, ask the British people today who would make the best prime minister and for the first time for more than a year, Starmer leads the pack. Were an election held tomorrow, Labour would emerge as the largest party, albeit one short of an overall majority. Starmer would be PM. Rachel Reeves would be in charge of the economy. David Lammy, Angela Rayner and perhaps Nicola Sturgeon would be sitting alongside them around the Cabinet table. Johnson would go down in history as a busted flush.

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The battle for North Shropshire

By Tanya Gold

What lies at the root of the crisis? It is impossible to answer this without considering how Johnson won power in the first place. The reason he won the largest Conservative victory since Margaret Thatcher’s final majority in 1987 is because he grasped what so few others did: the unfolding realignment of British politics, a structural correction that has made available an entirely new and formidable coalition of voters.

Forget what people say. The realignment was never just about Brexit or the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn, even if these elements helped it along. It was always rooted for far more strongly in a deep and profound disillusionment with the political consensus that has dominated Britain for half a century. EU membership. Mass immigration. Hyper-globalisation. Radical cultural liberalism. And a politics built by middle-class graduates for middle-class graduates.

Johnson’s electoral dynamite always came from the fact that he was the first mainstream politician to offer a genuine break from that consensus: to leave the EU, strengthen the country’s borders and level-up a forgotten blue-collar Britain. And this is why he was able to completely transform the Conservative Party’s electorate along the way.

It is why he won three-quarters of the Leave vote. It is why he demolished one flank of the Red Wall and left another vulnerable. It is why he mobilised a new coalition of voters who are spread across the country far more efficiently than Labour’s voters who are concentrated too heavily in big cities and university towns. And it is why he had an almost 20-point lead over Labour among the Greggs Guys — Britain’s plumbers, mechanics and factory workers who, like the True-Blue Tories in the south, rallied behind Johnson because they believed he offered a genuine alternative to our dreary politics.

But what Shropshire and the polls tell us, clearly, is that today, though, many of these voters are reaching a very different conclusion: their gamble on Johnson simply has not paid off. Between all the talk about net zero, tax rises and trying to be all things to all voters, he is adrift from the coalition that propelled him to power. Since the aftermath of his victory in 2019, the share of Johnson’s voters who plan to vote for him again has crashed from 95% to 73%.

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Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

The Leavers are leaving him: the disgruntled and the disillusioned— his core voters — are off. By failing to make the most out of Brexit, by failing to robustly defend British history and heritage, by failing to get his arms around illegal migration, by failing to take on the radical progressive Left, by failing to define and deliver a serious strategy for levelling-up, by transforming the Conservatives from an aspirational party of low-tax to a government that is introducing the highest tax burden since the Fifties and by putting the state on steroids, he has given the new Conservative voters more than a few good reasons to walk.

And walk they will. Over the past two years, the percentage of Leavers who say they are loyal to Johnson has collapsed from 76 to 55%. As a result, the big leads the Conservatives once enjoyed among the working-class are also dwindling, with the party’s support in blue-collar Britain sliding from 51 to 38%. His coalition is falling apart.

Yet they are certainly not going to Labour. These voters have little time for Keir Starmer and a Labour front bench which, with the help of Ed Miliband, David Lammy and Emily Thornberry, appears determined to remind voters why they rejected Labour at the last three general election and the Brexit referendum. On the economy and immigration, similarly, the Labour brand remains toxic in the eyes of so many. The fact that its vote declined by 12-points in Shropshire, while nationally is at the same level that it was a year ago speaks volumes.

Some of Johnson’s voters are certainly defecting to Reform, a new revolt on the Right which is attracting a far from insignificant 11% of Johnson’s 2019 voters. Put Nigel Farage on top of Reform for a month and in the current climate, that figure could quite easily double, not least because Johnson appears determined to reignite the radical Right bonfire his party spent years trying to put out. But much larger numbers are simply giving up on politics altogether, drifting into apathy. In recent weeks, the percentage of 2019 Conservative voters who say they will not vote at the next election, who do not know who they will vote for or who refuse to say either way has more than doubled, surging from 18 to 38%.

Johnson’s voters are giving up on politics because he is giving up on the realignment, no longer sure what he should say or who he should be saying it to. So many of his voters are returning to what they did in the 2010s: sitting it out, waiting, watching and looking for an alternative. They thought Johnson was that alternative. Now, they are not so sure.

It is the defection of these Leavers which poses the biggest problem to Johnson. He reshaped his entire premiership and political party around them. If his core voters go, then the realignment collapses and the Conservatives will be finished. The party will haemorrhage middle-class graduate votes to the Liberal Democrats in the south and pro-Brexit, working-class votes to apathy in the north. They will come under attack from all sides and no longer have a viable coalition.

The only way forward for Johnson now, for his increasingly rebellious party too, is to reconnect with the very people who put them in power to begin with, to double down on the realignment and forget about everybody else. It’s not popular but it is politics. Brexit may be fading into the distance but there are many other issues that could just as powerfully unite the new Conservative electorate particularly ahead of a general election at which a Labour-SNP coalition is a serious prospect. Immigration is one. Crime is another. Defining and delivering a serious levelling-up strategy is another. And so too is robustly defending British identity, history and culture from an increasingly radical progressive left (just ask Republicans in Virgina).

There simply is no alternative. If you think that after everything we have witnessed in the past two years — Brexit, Cummings, Covid, Johnson’s personal failings and the utter chaos in No. 10 — that the Conservative Party can win back the Londoners, Remainers and professional middle-classes in time for the next election, then I have a bridge to sell you. No, the only way forward for him now is to start ditching advisors and doubling down on where he began.

If Johnson reconnects with his core voters hie will extend his premiership until the end of this decade. If he loses them he will lose his premiership and party. This core vote strategy would not be popular in SW1 but it is now the only thing that will keep him, the Conservative Party and those Red Wall MPs in power. Two years ago, Johnson was swept into power because he challenged the consensus on Europe. Whether he is willing to keep challenging that consensus will now determine whether he stays there.

Remember Theresa May’s coughing fit in 2017? Unlike her time in office, it went on-and-on. And if that wasn’t enough she was also interrupted by a protester and by a piece of the set falling down. 

Yet while May’s mishaps weren’t her fault, the same can’t be said for Boris on Monday. His bizarre digression on the merits of Peppa Pig was the most unforced of unforced errors. So was his impression of a rumbling car engine (“arum arum araaaaaagh” — according to the official transcript). Judging the mood of an audience isn’t always easy, but a PM ought to know the difference between a gathering of business people and a kindergarten class. 

The first job of every speechwriter — and giver — is to rise to the occasion. Boris Johnson failed on this basic requirement. At a time of profound economic uncertainty, what business leaders need to hear is a message of reassurance — not a sequence of rambling asides and silly noises. 

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Will the Tories pay for their sins?

By Peter Franklin

But what should really worry the PM’s colleagues is that this isn’t the first time. Back in September, Johnson gave a speech to the UN General Assembly on climate change. As the curtain raiser for the COP26 conference an appropriately serious tone was required — plus a dash of inspiration. Instead, what we got was an exercise in glibness. The only bit that stood out — and garnered all the headlines — was a cheesy reference to Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.

Another sow’s ear of a speech was his keynote on levelling-up back in July. This had been billed as a major statement on the Government’s flagship economic policy. In the event, it sunk without trace. Not only was there no new content, the PM’s delivery was all over the place.

So no one should be shocked by Boris Johnson’s performance on Monday — it is consistent with a well-established pattern. And it doesn’t just apply to speeches. He governs the same way that he speaks: chaotically.

Dominic Cummings has likened his former boss to a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. Over-and-over again, we’ve seen this government veer-off on tangents that are every bit as unexpected as a Peppa Pig anecdote. This week it was the surprise social care amendment that caught so many Tory backbenchers off-guard. Before that, it was the screeching U-turn on parliamentary standards.

The Prime Minister wouldn’t have been in London to embark upon this disastrous course if he hadn’t flown back by private jet from the climate conference in Glasgow — where, surely, he might have made himself more useful. If ever there was an issue on which he ought to have maintained his focus for more than five seconds it is this one. But not even saving the world is enough to hold his attention.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think about the so-called Big Five personality traits known by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Some of these traits sound more positive than others, but there are positive and negative sides to getting a high (or low) score on any of them. For instance, someone who scores highly on conscientiousness might be an inflexible bore while someone who gets a low score might be brilliant improviser. 

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How Britain betrayed Macron

By John Lichfield

There’s no doubt that Boris Johnson is a brilliant improviser. He has navigated through troubled political waters in which his more conventional rivals have capsized. But the increasingly urgent question now facing the Government and the Conservative Party is how to deal with the downside of his upside. 

Sorting out the speech-giving is the easy bit. Give him a script and tell him to stick to it. If he won’t use an autocue, then at least staple the copy of the speech he reads from. Clearly, he can’t be trusted to keep unbound pages in their proper order.

The much bigger challenge, though, is the man not the message. 

Boris is at his best when some kind of external order is imposed upon him. As Mayor of London he was subject to the control of Downing Street. As a columnist, his talents shone most brightly when patient editors were on hand to polish his literary gems. But as Prime Minister, he’s been set free to follow his worst instincts.

Ever since he won the the biggest Conservative majority since the Eighties his position has been unassailable. The only government figure who tried to exert any discipline over him was Dominic Cummings — and look how that turned out. 

This time, though, may be different. Cummings was acting alone, more or less, while the current challenge to Johnson’s authority extends much further. If those most concerned about the Prime Minister’s performance — from Red Wall backbenchers to party grandees — act in concert, they might stand a chance. 

But what, specifically, could such an intervention hope to achieve? It’s true that people rarely change. However, within organisations, other people can offset their eccentricities.

The Downing Street operation desperately needs a chief executive figure to Boris Johnson’s chairman of the board. The PM would still set the overall direction of policy, but someone without wonky wheels would be responsible for implementation. 

So are we looking for a new Dominic Cummings? No, because the confrontational approach clearly doesn’t work with someone as headstrong as Johnson. For a more appropriate model we need to go back to the Eighties.

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Test article

By Will Lloyd

Though Margaret Thatcher was a more conscientious Prime Minister than the current occupant of Number 10, she too had her hare-brained side. Eventually, in the form of the Poll Tax, it would get the better of her. Nevertheless, her eleven years in the job have yet to be matched by any of her successors. In part, her political survival can be credited to the moderating influence of William Whitelaw — a cabinet minister very much not in the Thatcherite mould, but completely loyal to her. Famously, she proclaimed that “every Prime Minister needs a Willie” — and, sniggers aside, she was right. Boris needs a Willie, too — and his critics in the party should insist that he gets one. 

But who? Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Sajid Javid are threats as heirs apparent, so they won’t do. Michael Gove is an important source of counsel, but his relationship with the PM is complicated. As for Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, I wouldn’t describe their influence as “moderating”. 

Rather, I’d look to Alok Sharma. The former Business Secretary is widely respected. His role as President of the COP26 conference has demonstrated his grasp of detail and his diplomatic finesse. He is trusted by his colleagues, including the Prime Minister, and has no obvious leadership ambitions. And now that COP26 is over, he’s in need of a new job.

The Prime Minister who for much of the past two years has been used to cruising at 40% in the polls, has this week crashed into the mid-thirties. One poll over the weekend put the Conservatives on 34%, their lowest share since before the 2019 general election.

Contrary to widespread predictions of a second Johnson term and, in turn, the longest period of Conservative dominance since the early 1800s, Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have led in three of the last four polls. Labour is back to 40% and only this week scored their first (6-point) lead outside the margin of error since January.

To put this in context, if the polls remain unchanged, then Labour will emerge from the next election as the largest party, albeit short of an overall majority. The “crackpot coalition” between Labour and the Scottish National Party which Johnson warned his conference delegates about only last month now looks not only possible but likely.

What is driving this? The dominant narrative is that much of it reflects a growing public backlash against the return of what has long been the Conservative Party’s Achilles’ heel: sleaze. Amid the Owen Paterson debacle and continuing cronyism both in and around Boris Johnson’s No 10 operation, the British voters have finally woken up to the fact that while their Prime Minister Got Brexit Done, he also suffers from a glaring lack of character and integrity. It is only a matter of time until this realisation collides with an election and, once and for all, purges the body politic of Johnsonism.

Only, I’m not convinced. There is certainly no doubt that sleaze and corruption can have profound effects at the ballot box. One only needs to think about the tangentopoli scandal which engulfed Italy in the Nineties, paving the way for a total reconfiguration of the political system or, around the same time, the House banking scandal in America which saw nearly 80 politicians lose support or resign in shame. There is also no doubt that the British are, once again, utterly fed up with Westminster. Only this week, 80% of the entire country said there is “a lot” or “a fair amount” of corruption in British politics.

But there are also good reasons why the anticipated impact of the current scandal in Westminster will be much greater than its actual impact at the next election. For a start, consider what we actually know about the impact of past scandals, such as the parliamentary expenses scandal which erupted in 2009, dominated the headlines for months and was a far more serious crisis than the one facing Johnson today.

Contrary to widespread expectations at the time, namely that the scandal would pave the way for wholesale political change, studies since have found that its actual impact at the ballot box was minimal. While the scandal did lead to an unusually large number of MPs retiring at the following election, in 2010, with almost half of the worst offending MPs leaving office, there is also little evidence it changed people’s vote.

According to the most comprehensive study, by political scientists Andrew Eggers and Alexander Fischer, while MPs who were implicated in the scandal performed slightly worse at the ballot box than those who were not, the overall impact was limited. They estimate that the cost to MPs who were linked to the crisis was only 1.5 percentage points, which is certainly noteworthy but not exactly earth shattering.

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Some politicians deserve to be mocked

By Giles Fraser

Similarly, another study, by academics Ron Johnson and Charles Pattie, found that Labour candidates in seats where the Labour MP had been implicated and in some cases, such as Denis MacShane, had even been sent to prison, only lost 1.25 points while Conservatives lost only 1 point. Like others, they concluded that while the British were hacked off about the crisis, they also cared even more deeply about other issues, meaning that “the consequences — over and above some MPs’ premature retirement — though real were relatively muted”.

The key point I take from this research is that given the sheer size of Boris Johnson’s majority and the geographical problems that confront today’s Labour Party — the loss of Scotland, the fractured Red Wall and how the party is increasingly piling up votes in urban areas where it does not need votes, while losing votes in the small and industrial towns where it needs votes — then Johnson can, probably, ride out the storm.

He is also helped by leadership. We tend to forget this now but while the impact of past scandals was limited the few opportunities they generated were met by leaders of the Opposition who were strong, appealing and well placed to capitalise. In both the Nineties, when John Major’s Conservative government was beset by sleaze, and then again in the 2000s when New Labour and much of Westminster was implicated in the expenses scandal, the leader of the Opposition was credible and compelling.

On the cusp of the 1997 election and against the backdrop of sleaze, more than half the country, 51%, felt satisfied with how Tony Blair was doing his job as leader of the Labour Party. And on the cusp of the 2010 election, in the shadow of the expenses scandal, 53% felt this way about David Cameron. Today, just 25% feel the same way about Keir Starmer, whose ratings still trail Johnson’s.

Blair had a net approval rating of +22. David Cameron had one of +32. Keir Starmer is currently on -25 (read that again, minus 25). This is why Labour’s current poll lead, to me at least, looks far from convincing. Today, it is fashionable to point out oppositions do not win elections — governments lose them. But at no recent election has a leader of the Opposition with ratings as weak as Starmer’s gone on to win power. His weakness is simply making Johnson’s life much easier than it ought to be.

The much bigger threat to Johnson, is not so much the stench of sleaze which he can probably navigate but other dark clouds gathering on the horizon. What ultimately swayed voters at the first election after the expenses scandal was not their outrage about the revelations in Westminster, but their utter exasperation with 13 years of New Labour rule, confusion over what Gordon Brown actually wanted to do with power, intensifying concern over immigration, crime and security and, amid the global financial crisis, the highest level of concern over the economy ever recorded.

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Who's behind Marcus Rashford?

By Will Lloyd

Today, similarly, what will ultimately sway voters at the next election will not be their concern over Owen Paterson or which MPs do or do not have second jobs, but rather their growing concern an array of other issues: the cost of living, dissatisfaction with how the government is managing a spiraling healthcare crisis, frustration at its inability to define and articulate how the country is being levelled-up and a general sense of confusion over what Johnson actually wants to do with the power he now has. We are nearly two years into this premiership and still it remains unanchored from any guiding philosophy or framework, drifting around with no real sense of purpose or mission.

This is especially visible on his right-wing flank, among his most ardent supporters, where there are once again resurgent concerns about legal and illegal immigration as well as new worries over the government’s failure to push back against the excesses of wokeism and how it is managing core conservative issues, such as the economy and taxation. While the Right still leads the Left on the economy, since early 2020 the percentage of voters who back the Conservatives to manage the economy has crashed by 10-points (and this is before any squeeze on living standards). Meanwhile, some polls suggest the Conservatives have now lost their image as a party of low tax.

The effect of these wider problems is already visible. Drill into the data this week and you will find that only a little over half of the Conservative’s 2019 voters would vote again for the party at an election tomorrow. While one in 20 has jumped ship to Reform a much larger number, nearly one in three, now say they would not vote or do not know who to vote for. Since the start of 2020, the percentage of Leavers backing Johnson has crashed from 76% to 58%. At the end of the day, all Johnson needs to do to retain power is keep hold of the Leavers who pushed through the realignment. The fact their support is now waning should be ringing loud alarm bells in No 10 — assuming there are people who have an interest in ringing these bells, of course.

These issues, rather than sleaze, are the far more pressing problems facing Johnson. Unless he gets to grips with them it is not hard to see how, much like John Major in the Nineties and Gordon Brown in the late 2000s, his premiership will go down in the history books for not only being stained by sleaze but for being a rather brief affair.

This is the land of plenty at the end of the Metropolitan Line. The charity shop has a wedding hat section. There is a bespoke gentleman’s tailor and a town museum, so you can investigate Amersham’s plenty of yore. The Britain in Bloom awards are stacked vertically on a post by the Old Market. These golden discs, and the pride in the physical perfection of Old Amersham that they convey, are an indication that Boris Johnson’s luck might sag there this year. Is the Prime Minister conservative enough for Amersham Old Town? They doubt his dedication to their bloom. These are visual lands: you see it in the costumes, the cars, the homes, and the rage against HS2, currently being hewn into the hill beyond their paradise. They hate HS2 with the fervour of children because they usually have their way in everything, and in that is the possibility of rebellion.

If Amersham Old Town is in denial about it being 2021 — it is largely medieval with fiercely repointed Georgian frontage — so are most of its voters. I wonder if the residents consider the Chiltern Hills to be an extension of their gardens; they are enraged about HS2 because it will benefit the Midlands and the North and leave them and their excellent transport connections with a glut they did not seek.  Benjamin Disraeli similarly courted the working classes from nearby Hughenden Manor, but perhaps the descendants of his voters have forgotten this happy coalition of manor and slum. HS2 is the only teardrop spilling onto their plate, and this, not pandemic, is the story here. Pandemic was unfortunate, but they are vaccinated now, and the shops are open.

There is jeopardy for the Prime Minister, then: when Dame Cheryl Gillan, Conservative MP for Chesham and Amersham, died in April, a by-election was called, scheduled for Thursday. Gillan’s majority was immense, a blue hill in a land of hills: 16,223 in 2019, or 55.4% of the vote. If you listen to constituents the result was barely conscious. As a pub landlord says from behind his tidy bar: “I vote Conservative. If you ask me why I vote Conservative I couldn’t give you an answer.” He makes it sound like an existential question singular to Tory Buckinghamshire: “Why do I vote Conservative? I think the majority of people don’t really look into that much – of why they vote.” He tells me he was born to a working-class family in Wales — his Welsh-based family have “nothing” — lives in a £1 million house in Chesham Bois, drives a new Range Rover and educated his children at private schools. Then two elderly ladies come in for lunch, and we must stop talking, because he is busy spoiling them with a professionalism that looks like rapture. He has been working since 5am — he works hard — and he is almost the most analytical voter I meet, but this election is about flowers and potholes.

The Tory majority is vast, but the Liberal Democrats sense an opportunity to beat the new Conservative candidate, one Peter Fleet, formerly of the Ford motor company. His centre of operations is a flat above an award-winning iron mongery in Amersham; from here he rides out to promise mitigation of the impact of HS2, a national park in the Chiltern Hills and a crack-down on anti-social behaviour (he is against it).

To combat him, there are 500 Liberal Democrat activists in Chesham and Amersham, placing banks of posters near notorious potholes. It is uncanny, and I wonder if they are consulting psychologists. Hit a pothole and you see a Liberal Democrat poster or, more likely, four Liberal Democrat posts. “The roads,” I am told by an upper-middle-class woman, “are shit”. I fantasise their slogan changed to: “Potholes winning here.”

Opposition parties do well in by-elections, and there is rage with the liberalisation of the planning laws, which I think is the equivalent of Total War in Nimby-land.

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How the Left lost Hartlepool

By Tanya Gold

There is a theory that for each brick he removes from the Red Wall, Boris Johnson loses a third of a brick, or maybe more, from the Blue Wall, as businessmen voters fantasise about which lie they would fire him for, and liberal-leaning voters flee London for the Home Counties, taking their Remain politics and rustic fantasies with them. These fantasies are helpful to Liberal Democrats, if irritating: what is the point of living in a village where everyone looks like Philip Green? Where be the cows?

I hear that after a bad poll the previous week, Johnson made a surprise visit to the constituency. The Liberal Democrats were second in 91 seats in 2019 and took Amersham Town Council in May. They wonder if this by-election is the beginning of a recovery; of a Conservative rebellion against itself. Amersham Old Town is quite the place to stick it to the man, his optics — last week he was gambolling in the Cornish surf  and toasting Peter Fleet with a pint — and his national polling average of 44%.

I meet the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Green in a coffee shop in Amersham. Amersham is not Amersham Old Town. It does not have a bespoke gentleman’s tailor, or a personal museum. I watch an attempted burglary of a post office, just opposite the Conservative campaign office. The postmaster chases the villain with a baseball bat. No one is injured.

Green is young, open, emphatic. “People feel ignored,” she says, “people feel taken for granted.” I heard that in Hartlepool, from Labour voters; here, I struggle not to laugh, which is slightly unfair because pain is pain. “It’s been true blue for decades – council, local, national. It’s like, ‘it’s always going to be blue so why should they listen to us?’ The idea that if you live in Tory area you get investment is manifestly not true. All the issues feed into that underlying theme of being taken for granted”. No one is exempt from self-pity nowadays; and so, a Liberal Democrat activist tells me, excited former Tories are stopping her to say, “I’m voting for Sarah!” Another says she heard a group of “dyed-in-the-wool Tories” were surprised, on meeting in the pub, to discover they are all Liberal Democrats now, from a combination of, “planning changes, the way you just have to ring Bojo, bung him some money and you’ve won the business”. I wonder if Chesham and Amersham will surprise itself with its audacity tomorrow. It’s a by-election. The stakes are low. Even if they do elect a Liberal Democrat MP, their taxes will not rise. It will be a murder without blood.

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Estate agents are too busy to talk — though one shouts over his shoulder that the Prime Minister wore the same tie to Amersham as he wore at the G7, and he has dandruff too, which matters in a village in bloom — but the man in the art gallery says: “There are an awful lot of people moving out [to here]. Every one of the flats here,” he points upwards “has gone on the market, with the exception of one. Every weekend I see people coming into the shop saying, ‘it’s fantastic round here, we want to move, we want a garden, we’ve been living in the city’”.

I meet such women in Chesham, which is a sadder Amersham Old Town; there is a foodbank with a request for sponge pudding and tinned chicken taped in the window. They are an NCT group; they sit by their babies’ prams, drinking large cocktails. They are from London, and vote Liberal Democrat here, though one voted Labour formerly — “I don’t think Labour know who they are [now]”. They are not angry about the Government’s response to pandemic: “I’m not sure how anyone would have handled it,” says one. But they are worried about child poverty, the future of the NHS, and the lack of affordable housing.

There is almost no Labour presence in this constituency, and the voters know it. Labour say they are campaigning, but the evidence is flimsy. (They are speaking to the press via email). Labour took 12.9% of the vote in 2019. I meet a Labour voter smoking on a bench. “They don’t bother round here,” she says, “it’s a shame. It’s [the political dialogue] all about Boris Johnson, and what he’s doing. It makes you laugh. It’s always about Boris”.

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The prostitution of Cornwall

By Tanya Gold

I don’t find the candidate Natasa Pantelic, a councillor in Slough, but I am sent a statement which includes the words: “This is an opportunity for change — a fresh start — for Chesham and Amersham. They [the Liberal Democrats] don’t care about progressive politics; they just care about power.” There is a Chilterns4ProgressiveAlliance group standing in the centre of Chesham “campaigning for opposition party cooperation in Chesham & Amersham, Batley & Spen and the next general election”. They are genial but they do not have the support of the opposition parties themselves, which is a maddening for them and pleasing to Boris Johnson.

Under these gentle currents is the possibility of future anguish. There is a Cassandra here: Brendan Donnelly, a former Conservative MEP who is standing for Rejoin EU. He sits outside a coffee shop in Chesham and tells me that Brexit will hit us like a thunderstorm soon enough; then the tarmac drives of the mighty Chalfonts will tremble. I watch a pro-Rejoin band perform with a toy cat (a “catidate” and member of Cats Against Brexit Mayhem) that stood in an election “and won more than 200 votes”. The vocalist sings: “Boris Johnson he said he swore he’d never leave me /and Boris Johnson said he swore he’d always love me.” Did he?

Donnelly and the ladies with cocktails aside, I meet few people who are prepared to voice anger about anything other than HS2 or potholes, and I am slightly stunned. So: the worst thing that might happen to Boris Johnson this summer is that he loses a by-election over potholes, and to the Liberal Democrats, with their 11 parliamentary seats and national polling average of 7%. Or that he nearly does. That does not sound like a crumbling blue wall. The political map is not that simple or beautiful.

As I prepare to leave Amersham Old Town, I go into a shop and look at a rack of clothes decorated with embroidered flowers. There is a live bee lurking at the hem of the dresses, disorientated by the flowers that are not real, and, I imagine, increasingly bereft and frightened. I wonder if the voters of Amersham Old Town will ever have a similar awakening.

1. The Red Wall hasn’t finished falling down

At the last election the Conservatives won fifty seats from Labour across Wales, the Midlands and the North of England. These make up the famous “Red Wall” — or at least that section of it that turned blue.

For what’s less appreciated is just how much of it is still standing. We’re not talking the odd fragment here and there — but a significant proportion of Labour’s remaining MPs.

Up until last week, Hartlepool was number 44 on a list of likely Tory targets for the next general election (i.e. those requiring the smallest swings to turn blue). So, in theory, 43 seats are more winnable than Hartlepool was. Of those, 36 are held by Labour, 28 of them in the North and Midlands.

For what it’s worth, number 43 on the list is Rotherham. In last week’s local elections, the Tories went from zero seats on Rotherham Borough Council to twenty in a single bound. If that’s anything to go by, the fall of the Red Wall is only half-way through.

2. Millennials might not ride to the rescue

Labour’s first priority shouldn’t be to win back the Red Wall, but to save what’s left of it. And yet unbelievably they’re being distracted from this most basic of tasks by the prospect of gains along the “Blue Wall”: Conservative-held seats in the South where younger, university-educated voters are trending Left.

As Ed West wrote on UnHerd this week, long-term generational shifts should certainly worry the Tories. But Labour ought to worry too. The party’s extreme dependence on younger voters is not a strength, but a vulnerability. Not only do young people have a habit of growing up and changing their minds, there’s a lot the Conservatives could do to win them over.

3. The Green Party 

Even if the Tories persist in abandoning the young to the Left, there’s no guarantee that the Left means Labour.

Last week, the Green Party demonstrated that it is capable of taking seats off all the main parties. Its biggest breakthrough though came in Bristol, where the Greens took an astonishing thirteen seats from Labour. Sheffield produced another astonishing result, in which the Greens gained five seats and Labour lost its majority.

In a general election, this could mean the Greens breaking out of their Brighton bastion to give Caroline Lucas some company in Parliament. A more dangerous scenario is one in which English Greens follow the lead of their German counterparts to become the middle-class Left-wing party”. This would deny Labour the new “Blue Wall” voters they need to offset their losses elsewhere. A Green surge could prove fatal.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

4. Non-white voters can’t be taken for granted

Labour still dominates the ethnic minority vote. It’s a key reason why the party keeps on piling up massive majorities in the most urban constituencies — especially in London.

But no one likes to be taken for granted; Starmer can’t assume that this will continue.

It is, for instance, going to be increasingly hard to sustain the image of the Tories as an exclusively white party. The Cabinet already includes Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng. By the next election they could be joined by Sajid Javid, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch (who would be the first black female MP to achieve Cabinet rank).

An ethnically-diverse Cabinet is not in itself a reason why non-white voters should vote Conservative. But it does explode an “argument” for why they should not — i.e. the insinuation that the Tories are irredeemably racist.

5. The boundary review

After years of delay, the much-delayed review of constituency boundaries should be finished by July 2023 — after which, in the subsequent general election, the Conservatives will almost certainly gain seats, while Labour and the other opposition parties lose them.

It’s hard to tell how many until we get the new map — but it’s not unreasonable to suppose a Tory gain of ten seats and an opposition loss of about the same number.

That, of course, would increase the government’s notional majority from eighty to a hundred. Good luck overturning that in one go.

6. A post-Covid boost

Getting the boundary review done by summer 2023 would allow an autumn election in the same year.

And it is highly likely the Government will want to go to the country during a Goldilocks period for the British economy: early enough for the post-Covid boom still to be felt, but late enough to get strategic investments in Red Wall constituencies underway. The Tories, in effect, will only look stronger. Boris Johnson would love to spend the campaign posing in a hard hat, new infrastructure rising up behind him.

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Labour isn't working

By Paul Embery

7. A Labour Party civil war

And yet Labour’s real problem might be in the foreground.

The first shots in Labour’s impending civil war were fired over the weekend, as the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle descended into chaos.

But worse could be to come. Compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s first year as leader — in which most of the shadow Cabinet resigned and there was a second leadership contest — Starmer has had an easy ride.

Now, do you suppose that’s because the Corbynites have meekly accepted their fate — or because they’ve been waiting for their moment?

I suspect Starmer is about to find out.

8. A Labour stalemate

There is an alternative to civil war, but it’s worse.

The Corbynites never makes their move; the Starmerites never hit back. So nothing is resolved, nothing decided. Nothing of interest happens at all — or is even said for fear of provoking the other side.

There was talk of appointing Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn to the shadow cabinet — not unbearably exciting, I’ll grant you — but Starmer couldn’t even make that happen. If nothing else, an Opposition should capture the imagination, but this lot just gather dust.

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Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

9. The threat of Scottish independence

Another nightmare scenario for the Labour Party lurks north of the border: a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The 2014 referendum was a catastrophe for Labour — wiping out its most reliable stronghold. A second referendum would cause further damage. It’s not that there are many Scottish Labour MPs left to lose (it has just one). Rather the danger this time is of an English backlash, which is overwhelmingly likely to benefit the Conservatives. And there’s always the possibility that the Nats will win. Without Scotland’s MPs, the Tories could strengthen their grip on Westminster.

10. Don’t bank on a two-party system

Britain’s two-party system has been in place for so long, we’ve come to see it as a feature of our constitution. But it isn’t.

Just because we’re accustomed to alternating spells of centre-left and centre-right government it doesn’t mean that things have to be that way. In other democracies, one party can hold power, barely interrupted, for decades upon end. Consider Sweden, for instance, or Japan. Britain too could end with a permanent party of government — and it won’t be Labour.

The idea that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” is a Right-wing sentiment that the Left has always resisted. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.

The Tories think they will take this seat from Labour in the by-election on Thursday called after the Labour MP Mike Hill quit, beset by allegations of sexual misconduct. They may well: another brick from the wall. (Hartlepool has been Labour since the seat was created in 1974.)

The first potential voters I meet wait for theocracy, which is a fair measure of alienation. Still, they are chirpy because they have given up on politics, and the weather is fine.

They are three elderly women, sunning themselves by the war memorial. “We don’t vote for any political party,” says one, “because we are a non-political organisation and the only one is Jehovah God. His kingdom is the kingdom that will rule the earth. We know by the things that are happening now. No government in the world can solve these problems. Only God. We need theocracy.” I try to imagine the logo on a leaflet and fail.

“There was a lot here once upon a time,” says the second, “It’s declining. It’s all Christmas cracker factories. Not real jobs. For men. All the mines have gone, everything substantial has gone.” “I don’t like Hartlepool at all,” says the third. “There is nothing in Hartlepool that interests me”. “Well, you’re here,” says the second. “Just the shopping,” says the third.

“I think the general air is one of despair really,” says the first. “Not despair, despair is a strong word. Helplessness.”

My notebook is full of such quotations; one man of 86 tells me, in all seriousness, that he is too old to vote. Hartlepool once made ships; it had 43 ship-owning companies in 1913. Now it makes ennui. It has some of the highest rates of male unemployment (9.7%) and child poverty (32% of children in workless households) in Britain. The A&E has gone, the police lock-up and magistrates court have gone, and maternity services have gone. No one is born in Hartlepool anymore, except in error.

A vacuum is also an opportunity: the Tories sent Johnson to Hartlepool United, to kick a ball in support of the candidate, “a farmer and businesswoman” from Yorkshire called Jill Mortimer, who is dogged by rumours that, prior to her candidacy, she never visited Hartlepool, or had a proper job. (That, here, is quite relatable.) She says not. She has raised cattle and run a B&B, cites a Hartlepool-born relative, and says she has visited the battery museum, which is apt.

If Hartlepool falls, it will not be a victory for Conservatism, unless you are cynical. “For 47 years, Hartlepool has had Labour MPs,” says Mortimer’s campaign literature, “it is why the town has been taken for granted and struggled. I’ve brought Boris to Hartlepool twice already during this campaign,” she adds, as if presenting a wrapped gift, a piece of human infrastructure. Its fall will, rather, be a fable about political failure: a story of disconnection, hubris and, of course, class.

There are two Hartlepools: the Headland (“The Heugh”), an ancient fishing village, and the newer West Hartlepool (Hartlepool means “stag pool”). I go to the Headland. There is a fabulous Norman church, St Hilda’s, built on the site of a 7^th century abbey, named for the patron saint of poetry. Its bells cannot be rung, due to weakness of the tower. What a metaphor! There are fine Georgian and Victorian houses on the sea, but they are crumbling, and in the gaps when others have fallen, modern housing: a history of English architecture, in mistakes. “It could have been another Whitby,” says a man fixing a burglar alarm. But the Labour council was careless of this treasure, and it wasn’t.

Further reading

The Blue Wall won't save Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

Many things have harmed Labour here: corruption, individualism and the desire to punish the villain they can touch. “Here Labour is the establishment,” says Rachel Featherstone, the Green Party candidate. But the most important is a failure of representation which Brexit exposed so gaudily it could not be ignored. Labour is two parties now, co-existing uneasily, which is why Keir Starmer is pale with fretting: pro-Remain London and the other affluent cities, and places like this. The two despise each other, but only one side will admit to it.

It is pitiful that no native pro-Brexit Labour candidate from a town with 100,000 residents could be found. Perhaps they were not sought. Labour’s man, Paul Williams, was born in Canterbury, educated in Cambridgeshire, worked in Stockton-on-Tees where he was an MP 2017-19, and was a Remainer, while 69.6% of this constituency voted to leave.

A former magistrate describes the main candidates: “One [Mortimer] is north Yorkshire and the other one [Williams] was the MP for Stockton. He didn’t represent the people of Stockton when they wanted to vote for Brexit [by 61.7%] so how can you trust him? He ignored the electorate so I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the only person standing. I’d tear my vote up. I really would”.

A workman on Scarborough Street, formerly Labour, now Tory, says: “A hell of a lot of red wall people voted Brexit and they [Labour] knew that. They went against them all, that’s why they lost the last election by a massive landslide: ‘we’re ignoring what you said, we’re going to stop in Europe no matter what’”. He says he misses Tony Blair, and I don’t blame him. Child poverty fell by 13% in the North East between 1999 and 2013. Between 2013 and 2019 it rose by 9%, three times faster than the national average, and it is still rising. Unfortunately, the most vocal local Socialists — the Northern Independence Party — want a referendum on secession from the United Kingdom, will call their state Northumbria, and are not granting interviews to me.

I eat roast beef in the Cosmopolitan pub — the name is a gag — on the Headland, and I meet the landlord, the independent councillor Tim Fleming. Fleming says: “We’ve had enough of people just getting dumped on us, ‘oh that’s a safe seat, put him there’. It’s the London Labour Party where it [the rot] started.”

For Fleming, some voters have passed beyond despair to cynicism. “If you have a Tory up as mayor in Teesside [Ben Houchen] and a Tory in Hartlepool — all the Tories in all the towns they’ve took over — they might do [something] because they might be looking to build a new power base that’s longer lasting than the one they’ve had. They’ve never had anything in the North so who knows? If he [Houchen] gets re-elected, there’ll be nothing if we have a Labour MP and a Labour council in Hartlepool. No money will come here, never has done”. The Green Party candidate Rachel Featherstone calls this “a protection racket”.

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Labour councillors, Fleming says, have voted against a council tax freeze, but didn’t vote against a 30.8% rise in their allowances. It was another tipping point; Hartlepool has the highest rate of council tax in the country proportionate to the value of property. Fleming, though, has a sense of humour. “If only Richard III had won the Wars of the Roses,” he says, “he was more northern-based”.

In the car park opposite David Bettney, a former Regimental Sergeant Major in the Light Dragoons, and the Social Democrat candidate, is talking to a smudge of supporters, after which he will be driven round the Headland in a tank. Bettney says Labour’s decline mirrored the decline of local industry: “Before you had a captive audience. Trade unions used to get them at election time, [they] were like, ‘here’s your MP’. They don’t have that hold anymore. Everyone is splintered now. They are working out of their white van.  They can come to their own opinions, not a herd opinion. I don’t know a single labourer that votes Labour.”

Bettney thinks an elite stole the Labour Party. “When is the last time you’ve got someone with a regional accent from Labour?” he asks. “They are all replaced by people who’ve gone to university and are from Wiltshire — or whatever. It wouldn’t matter if it was just now and again, but it’s happened everywhere. They are not representative of anybody in these areas.”

To redeem Labour, Bettney says, “All MPs would have to sack themselves.” They preach inclusivity, he says, but they will not allow their own former voters to be themselves; is that really emancipation? Bettney imagines a voter saying, ‘I’m proud to be from Hartlepool’ or ‘I’m proud to be from Yorkshire’. “You can’t say that [in Labour]: ‘it’s bigoted; it’s racist’. You are robbing them of any self-worth.” His conclusion is this: “Labour now is rich people telling poor people that other rich people are their problem.”

When I first meet the Labour candidate Paul Williams, he accuses me of door-stepping him at his campaign office in West Hartlepool. I say I didn’t even recognise him, as he is wearing a (very clean) mask, and he calms down. He is obviously decent, but he can’t be what they need him to be: a man who sounds like them and voted for Brexit. He offers the weary contradiction of a proud apology. He speaks like a heavily edited leaflet. Of Hartlepool’s Labour councillors who damaged the party’s reputation, he says: “there were some people [who] weren’t in it for the right reasons. They are no longer in the Labour Party. People are very disappointed that Labour didn’t deliver. Labour didn’t live up to what people hoped they would do locally in the council.” He is more honest than the Tory Party, whose campaign literature obliquely blames de-industrialisation and austerity on the Labour Party.

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How Game of Thrones saved the North

By Ed West

“People are willing to at least listen to us again [since Corbyn],” he says. “There were people who were just angry at Labour. Now people are no longer angry. It’s almost as though they want to be able to vote Labour but they’re just not quite sure”. He says the 2019 voters will stay with Labour, and there are new Labour voters too: “But what we don’t know is if it’s enough.”

He emphasises Tory cuts: tells me that after the A&E closed in 2011 there was for six years no overnight doctor in Hartlepool. He organised a consortium to open an urgent care facility: “I worked the first shifts there myself and I was leader of that organisation.” He sounds stung. “That’s the contrast between somebody who has a positive history of doing great things for people in Hartlepool versus a farmer from Thirsk [Jill Mortimer] who has almost no connection to this town.”

Ralph Ward-Jackson has an obvious connection: his great-great-great-uncle — another Ralph Ward-Jackson — was the founder of West Hartlepool. His statue is by the station, looking lonely and aggrieved. Ward-Jackson meets me in the park named for this ancestor, and we drive to the marina to look for the 30-foot inflatable Boris Johnson raised by The Wombles of Hartlepool, a sort of mood-lifting collective (it has been removed) and eat chips. Most candidates do this for authenticity, though only the Northern Independence Party has a graphic of a whippet: “Taking inspiration from our shared history of communal solidarity we, like the whippet, shall run to freedom”. (They are not yet registered with the Electoral Commission, so their candidate, Thelma Walker, is running as an independent, and she is polling at 6%. Splitters.)

Ward-Jackson wanted to represent Hartlepool at the General Election in 2019 for the Conservatives, and the local party, he says, agreed. They sent him to Conservative Central Office where, “I end up in front of this ice-queen in who clearly didn’t know where Hartlepool was. And then she said in a po-faced way: ‘Why would anyone want to go there?’”

He wasn’t selected and he wouldn’t have stood as an independent, he says, if they had selected a decent candidate. Instead, “they produced this I’m sure very nice lady from north Yorkshire. This is how Central Office think. They’ll think, ‘oh let’s get a map, who have we approved within this area? Oh yes, there’s her, that’s great’”. I think Ward-Jackson is too kind. I think an algorithm chose her; even so, he was enraged at the insult to Hartlepool.

Further reading

Labour could lose Hartlepool

By Paul Embery

“It’s 35 miles away,” he says, “Hartlepool and Thirsk. One is a tough industrial slash post-industrial town and the other is a sleepy agricultural town with no real challenges or issues of a different sort anyway. They’ve got nothing in common” — unless you work in Central Office.

Ward-Jackson says it is a “non-doorstep issue” (I’m not sure I agree) but it obsesses him: “I hate the political class and I want to give them a bloody nose if only by frightening them a bit: [for choosing] another slick, packaged professional politician. They want biddable people.” Ward-Jackson, a former Tory, and Bettney, a Social Democrat, are of the same mind on this, and this is comforting: at least the anti-Tory contingent agree on something. Hilton Dawson, formerly a Labour MP, now standing for the pro-devolution North East Party, thinks so too.

“The only way of making progress in the local state and the regional state is to join the party,” he says, “and the party serves itself.” I believe him: he was a Labour member for 35 years and an MP for eight. “And the people within the party serve themselves and without opposition they lose completely all perspective on what they’re supposed to be doing. They don’t respond to criticism and complaint, they don’t respond to good ideas. They simply try to close down any debate”.

In this race to centralisation and control, people take what choice they have left: “I don’t see a vote for Brexit as being some great anti-European thing or something about UK independence particularly. I see it much more as people just saying, ‘We want to change, we want something different, we want to be in control of this agenda’”. That is an argument for devolution; he says it is the only route to accountability.

I sense in Hartlepool, under the ennui and the exhaustion, a dynamism trying to break free: 16 candidates, many of whom are competent, and have good ideas, is proof enough. Labour has, like Citizen Kane, talked about the people as if it owned them for too long.

Some voters look to the Conservatives as “fresh eyes” with “fresh air” and praise the vaccine roll-out. (Here, as ever, women take pleasure in Boris Johnson’s idiocies. Men do not.) They may be poor, but their lives were saved; and perhaps their cynicism is so acute Hartlepool will turn blue; perhaps the Tories will meet it with tribute. But they should not cackle too recklessly if Labour stumbles here: their own reckoning with the North will surely come.

Hartlepool, Labour since 1964, is one of the most significant by-elections for years. If Labour loses, the pressure on an already wobbly Sir Keir Starmer will be immense. It will give his Left-wing critics ammunition and his Right-wing critics yet more evidence that the broader realignment of British politics is only just getting started.

So, it’s no wonder that a new idea about Labour’s future has been embraced so keenly. Labour, it is argued, should turn to the ‘Blue Wall’; it is not a wall per se, more a sprinkling of liberalising, suburban hotspots across the country which the Conservatives have held for a while, and which are trending towards Labour.

In his insightful blog, political analyst Steve Akehurst identifies 41 seats which have been held by the Conservatives since at least 2010, where Labour or the Liberal Democrats have overperformed their national swing in 2017 and 2019 and where the Conservative majority is below 10,000. Seats causing particular excitement include those of big-name Tories like Steve Baker in Wycombe, Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Wood Green, and Graham Brady in Altrincham – and even Uxbridge, Boris Johnson’s seat.

“They largely lean Remain”, writes Akehurst, “and so have larger numbers of the demographics that have turned against the Tories since 2016: under 40s, university educated, more socially liberal. More likely to prioritise issues like climate or housing.”

On a good day, assuming a swing of between 3.75 and 5.75 points, and with Labour over-performing in these “Blue Wall” areas, Akehurst estimates that Labour could win anywhere between 15 and 26 of these seats. Assuming the Conservatives lost some other marginal seats, the collapse of the Blue Wall could demolish Boris Johnson’s majority, put Labour back in power and give journalists one hell of a revenge story.

It is an appealing thesis, not least for political analysts who desperately want it to happen. It is no secret that many of the people who write about politics also tend to be graduates who lean to the Left and want the pendulum to swing back in their direction. Many spent 2019 urging Labour to swing behind a second referendum, while downplaying the disastrous impact this would have in its heartlands and ignoring the fact that Johnson could easily offset losses to liberals by invading the Red Wall, where workers had been drifting away from Labour for 20 years.

Which is exactly what happened. Of the 57 seats the Conservatives gained in 2019, all but three came directly from Labour — and of those 54 seats, 50 voted Leave. While the Conservative vote increased by 1.2 points nationally, it surged by 10.2 points in the Red Wall. The Tories not only massively overperformed in these seats, they reshaped their party around a Leave vote that is more geographically efficient than the liberal vote: spread out enough to have more electoral impact.

And this is why I do not find the Blue Wall thesis convincing. The numbers. It is simply not big enough to bring down Boris Johnson’s majority. Even if Labour were to overperform here, it still needs to find significant gains elsewhere. This is what happens when you double down on liberals in a first-past-the-post system. While your analysts might tell you that you are putting a bet on the future, liberals are often too strongly concentrated in the big cities and university towns to deliver the broad support that you need for a stomping majority in an electoral system like Britain’s. Liberals are increasingly flocking to the big cities and university towns, where Labour is already dominant. This is why Sadiq Khan does not need to worry about his re-election next month.

The Blue Wall strategy also relies on Labour doing a far better job of unifying the liberal factions, which it failed to do in 2019, when only half of Remainers voted Labour and one in eight voted Green or Liberal Democrat. Even today, the latter still hold 12% of the vote while disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s leadership appears to be strengthening rather than weakening, especially among the young graduates who loved Jeremy Corbyn and whose strong turnout is a prerequisite to making any Blue Wall strategy effective. With the Brexit Party resting in peace, the risk of internecine rivalry is greater on the Left than the Right.

More fundamentally, the Blue Wall thesis ignores the fact that the Red Wall has only been partially dismantled. There are still many, many more seats that could easily fall to the Conservatives, so long as Boris Johnson stays committed to the deeper transformation of British politics that is underway — a transformation that is seeing his party rally a cross-class coalition of blue-collar and affluent cultural conservatives.

Here is just one statistic to keep in mind. Of the 44 most marginal Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the South. I call this the “Red Wall 2.0”. These are seats that have small majorities of 4,000 votes or less, are filled with pro-Brexit, cultural conservative workers who lean Left on the economy and Right on culture, and which have been trending Conservative.

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More than a dozen are scattered across the North West and North East while another 13 are in the once reliable People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. These are places that are filled with hard-working, patriotic Brits who want the Government to reform an economy rigged against them while preserving a culture they see as being under threat from increasingly illiberal “woke” activists.

One of those seats, Wentworth and Dearne, is currently represented by Labour MP John Healey, who grasps the fact that across a large swathe of the Midlands, Yorkshire and North the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall was only just starting in 2019. As recently as 2017, Healey’s majority was 15,000 votes. Today, it is 2,165.

It is just a small swing from joining neighbouring Don Valley, which was held by Labour from 1922 until 2019, in the Conservative camp. This is perhaps why Healey has just released a collection of essays by Labour MPs who, like him, have seen their once solid majorities crumble from over 10,000 votes to less than 4,000.

They represent the “new Labour marginals” — the seats that New Labour types once said had nowhere else to go but which ever since then have been trending Conservative. Healey points to people “who feel Labour left them before they left Labour”.

Suggested reading

Labour could lose Hartlepool

By Paul Embery

“Those who feel let down by Labour describe at best an unwillingness to listen, with no respect for their experience, and at worst a rejection of their views as ignorant or backward”, he goes on.

These areas exhibit all of the features that now define the new Conservative Party electorate; blue-collar, pro-Brexit, culturally conservative and hacked off. They are the people who Toby Perkins, Labour MP for Chesterfield, describes as being denied thousands of new factory jobs by Sports Direct which instead gave them to migrants from Eastern Europe, “while voters felt progressive opinion refused even to consider the problem, much less propose solutions”.

Labour MPs who represent newly marginal seats include Yvette Cooper, whose majority crashed from over 15,000 votes in 2015 to just 1,276 today, Dan Jarvis, whose majority has fallen from over 15,000 votes to just 3,571 and Jonathan Reynolds whose majority has been cut in half, falling to just 2,946 votes. Labour strongholds have become redoubts.

At the core of this is who Healey calls the “real middle”, which is “not the middle-class that became New Labour’s fixation”. The real middle, he argues, are the “ten million aspirational workers who live on ordinary incomes around the average of £24,908. They often live in one of the 14 English towns that cover 16 constituencies like Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow. In 1997, New Labour won all but one of them. By 2015, they represented none of them.”

If we take an even looser definition of “marginal” and look, like Akehurst, at seats with (Labour) majorities of less than 10,000 votes then there are 105 seats where the Brexit Party or Conservative Party are second, 82 of which lie outside of London and southeastern England. They include Doncaster Central, Doncaster North, Halifax, Kingston-upon Hull West and Hessle, Rotherham, Barnsley East, Batley and Spen and Barnsley Central. And they include Hartlepool, which is why the forthcoming by-election on May 6 is so important.

If the Conservatives take Hartlepool or come close to doing so, then the implication is not just that Johnson will defend his existing Red Wall at the next election but could easily add another 40 or so seats to it. That would tilt British politics into a much deeper realignment that sees the Tories sink even longer roots into northern, working-class heartlands and Labour increasingly retreat to liberal enclaves.

This is ultimately why the reshaping of British politics is so traumatic for Labour, especially in England. In Healey’s essays you can detect a real fear among some in Labour that the party could soon be breathing its last breath across a large swathe of its oldest and most cherished territory. We could well be on the cusp of an even greater shock. And this is why I for one shall not be holding my breath when it comes to tales about the imminent revenge of the Blue Wall.

Is that so obvious today? After 11 years of Tory rule, Labour is still behind in the polls. And Starmer’s personal ratings are on the slide. We’re all scratching our heads wondering what Labour is for exactly. Ominously, that’s a question we used to ask about the Liberal Democrats (before we stopped caring).

So where does Sir Keir turn in his quest for relevance?

He could turn Left. This means promising to spend more than the Tories — a lot more. But there’s a problem with that. When you’ve got a government that’s already borrowing and printing money to the maximum extent it can get away with, outbidding it isn’t credible. It didn’t work for Labour in 2019 and it’s not going to work now.

What does Starmer do instead? Well, he could use values and not money to make his case. It’s an approach that worked for Joe Biden against Donald Trump and for Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen. But who and what would Starmer be defining himself against? The lazy equivalence between Brexit and the blowhard populism of Trump and Le Pen does not bear scrutiny — and especially not now that Brexit is done.

So, what can Labour do? The answer is to ruthlessly, relentlessly target the ruling party’s self-inflicted impediments. Every government has its blindspots. Over time, bad habits become ingrained and the same mistakes made over-and-over again because change is riskier than the status quo.

After 11 years in power, the Conservative government is riddled with political arthritis.

Labour’s mission, therefore, is not to overthrow the post-Brexit settlement, but to make it clear that the Tories lack the strength and agility to carry it forward. And instead of complaining about what the government can’t do because there’s not enough money, it must condemn what the Conservatives could and should do, but won’t.

Okay, that’s the theory, what about some specifics? What are the policies on which Labour can exploit the stubborn stupidities of the enemy.

Here are 10 to be getting on with:

1. Land for the people

How do you provide beautiful homes for Generation Rent at an affordable price? Easy: you stop paying top dollar for the land they’re built on. That means that when the undeveloped site gets planning permission, the uplift in value should be used for the common good not private gain.

Freeing the land is not Leftwing, it’s what Winston Churchill called for back in 1909. But after 11 years of trying to solve the housing crisis, the Tories still don’t get it. Instead, they’re wasting taxpayers money by subsidising a fundamentally broken system.

Starmer should go to war for aspiring homeowners and leave Boris to defend the landed interest.

2. Tax landlords

It’s not just new development that enriches lucky landowners — they also extract wealth from the existing stock of housing and commercial property. As we struggle to recover from the pandemic, we simply can’t afford to let this continue.

Amazingly, the Government would rather whack up taxes on job-creating companies than tax land values. This should be an open goal for Labour, but Starmer missed because though he attacked the planned hike in Corporation Tax he didn’t put forward a clear alternative.

3. Tax the money men

Governments around the world are busy printing money right now — through a process called quantitative easing or QE. Both directly and indirectly this generates fat profits for the financial sector.

Ministers and central bankers would rather that the public looked the other way while all of this was going on — but the Opposition should shine a spotlight on the whole murky business. An effective Shadow Chancellor would make the government squirm: demanding to know exactly how much money is going into whose pockets and insisting that these windfalls be properly taxed.

4. Crackdown on cronyism

A public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic would take years to agree let alone complete. So instead of boring-on about that, Labour should focus on cronyism instead. There’s no reason why the dodgiest procurement contracts of the crisis shouldn’t be investigated in the course of this parliament.

Furthermore, Labour should draw-up anti-profiteering legislation to enable the recovery of public funds from opportunistic and incompetent contractors. It could be introduced as as a backbench bill and the government dared to strike it down.

5. Abolish the House of Lords

A Labour war against cronyism could be fought on multiple fronts. The House of Lords, for instance, is crawling with well-paid lobbyists. Lords reform is supposedly an impossible conundrum, but only if you take the ermined buggers seriously. Obviously, the Tories do — they won’t even get rid of the remaining hereditary peers — but Labour doesn’t have to.

If Starmer wants to throw the Left of his party some red meat, then why not start with the red benches? Yes, the Westminster village would erupt with cries of constitutional vandalism — but in the constituencies that Labour needs to win back the message would be “Look, fewer politicians!”(800 fewer, in fact).

6. Abolish (some) universities 

Abolishing a few universities would also go down well in the right places. A system of student finance that works at the top end of the higher education system is an expensive waste at the bottom. Reform is long overdue, but I don’t see the current government touching it — parties normally need a spell in opposition before undoing their own work. So, another opportunity for Starmer.

Instead of a cap on student numbers, he should announce a cap on the underwriting of student loans — and redirect the savings into state-of-the-art training centres aimed squarely at the needs of the non-graduate workforce. The Labour Party: the clue’s in the name.

7. Nationalise the trains, localise the buses

The Tories are pumping investment into infrastructure, but what they won’t do is change who owns and operates it.

While privatisation is a success in some industries, it’s been a failure for public transport. With the Covid crisis having forced an effective nationalisation of the train operating companies, this an ideal moment to reboot the entire system.

The same goes for the buses. Quite clearly the London model of public control works — with bus use going up while it has gone down everywhere else. Right now, Andy Burnham — the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester — is fighting to do the same.

This is municipal socialism as it should be — efficient, achievable and capable of making a positive difference to everyday life.

8. Share power around

The irony is that there wouldn’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester of it weren’t for the decentralising reforms of David Cameron and George Osborne. The whole ‘Northern Powerhouse’ push was one thing they got unambiguously right.

But, then, in a fit of absence of mind, the Tories gave up on decentralisation. It’s painfully clear that today’s levelling-up agenda is under central not local control. The Treasury has even gone so far as to establish its own colonial outpost in the North. What arrogance!

Still the Conservatives’ backward move is a chance for Labour to become the party of localism. If you want support for a bigger and more powerful state then share it around!

9. Reclaim the streets

Nothing feels closer to home then the safety of our streets.

However, with Priti Patel in the Home Office, can Labour compete on a ‘tough on crime’ agenda? Well, there may be one crimefighting approach where Tories fear to tread: CCTV.

As a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer ought to know that what really deters crime is not the fear of punishment, but the certainty of getting caught. With the tech getting cheaper and powerful all the time, electronic surveillance holds out the prospect of a future in which nothing goes unseen on our streets.

If it were smart, the Labour Party would become the champion of comprehensive CCTV coverage. Libertarian Tories would cry ‘Big Brother!’, but Red Wall voters would rejoice.

10. Defend our borders

Border control might seem to be another Tory issue. But in respect to the Covid virus, this government left us wide open to attack. Our ports and airports should have been our first line of defence, but we were much quicker to shutdown our schools than to secure our borders.

For once, Captain Hindsight has an opportunity to address a key failure of governance with something approaching foresight. What is at stake is defending the effectiveness of our vaccination programme against new variants of the disease. The return to normality at home is too precious to sacrifice for the sake of a foreign holiday — or a supply of cheap foreign workers.

Again, Labour can lay a trap for the Tories here: take a tough line on keeping out Covid — and let Tory libertarians scream blue murder.

There’s no doubt whose side the Red Wall would take.

Tony Soprano was a figure uncomfortable with the modern world. He used his shrink as a means to alleviate his guilt about his selfish and violent behaviour, but he was also sceptical of the radical ideas behind psychiatry. Conceived during a decade when public emotional behaviour changed a great deal, the Sopranos featured Tony frequently referring to his preference for the reticent “strong silent type” symbolised by Golden Age movie star Gary Cooper.

In between racketeering, extortion and the occasional murder, Tony longs for a simpler moral universe where social norms are clear-cut; a world which would make this anxious middle-aged man feel more at peace, less edgy. That moral hypocrisy, although in Tony’s case extreme, is characteristic of what Matthew Walther recently termed “barstool conservatism”.

Writing in The Week on life after Trump, Walther wrote:

“What Trump recognised was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and ‘SJWs,’ opposition to the popularisation of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military.”

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And while these barstool conservatives “accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalised gambling”, they dislike attacks on their country, the rapid cultural change brought about by immigration and an elite, urban caste who clearly despise them.

This appears to be true of Britain, too. The Tories were able to make huge gains in the last election because, when it came to values, the party aligned more closely with a lot of Labour voters. But those voters aren’t “social conservatives”. Like their Trump-voting counterparts, the new Tory voters are more likely to have kids outside of marriage than the liberal elite in California or London, who tend to “talk the 60s but walk the 50s”. They don’t oppose abortion or sex education, don’t have any particular issue with homosexuality, and they’ll probably come around on the transgender debate.

The real social conservatives are not generally found in former industrial towns that appear on TV vox pops; they tend to be middle or even upper-middle class, well-educated, married and religious, and in Britain are more common in shires and in parts of west and south London, at heavily upper-middle-class Catholic parishes and the high-performing schools attached to them. These are the people who talk the 50s and walk the 50s, too.

There is a big difference between cultural and social conservatism. The former could be said to be the default in almost all human cultures. The latter is learned and cultivated, and today is a counter-cultural movement popular with a relatively small number of well-educated people.

Cultural conservatism, however, is natural to human society. Researchers at Oxford University, studying 60 different cultures, found that they all share seven basic cultural codes, which involve bravery, helping your family, helping your group, returning favours, deferring to superiors, dividing resources fairly and respecting others’ property.

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By Ed West

These are the moral norms that all cultures naturally observe, but have been slightly adapted in what Joseph Henrich first called “WEIRD” cultures. Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic cultures have values suited towards very large-scale societies, where people are unusual in sharing resources with non-family members. There is far less emphasis on the group and the family as a result.

In almost all hunter-gatherer societies, 300 is about the maximum number of individuals that can live together before people start ripping each other’s heads off (and that is much better than our closest relative, the chimpanzee). Yet humans were able to scale up and enjoy the benefits of modernity with one simple trick — religion. Henrich cites the anthropologist Donald Tuzin, who investigated an unusual New Guinea tribe, the Arapesh, unusually living in a group of up to 2,500 without bloodshed; Tuzin found that they had developed beliefs about gods that allowed them, unlike their rivals, to nurture solidarity.

Religion allows humans to co-exist in much larger groups, but as Heinrich’s book argues, one particular religion was able to accelerate this on an unprecedented scale — Roman Catholicism. By banning marriage between cousins in particular, the medieval Church crushed the strength of clans and created a society in which people were willing to cooperate and share with strangers. WEIRD societies.

Even today, people from countries in which cousin marriage was banned the longest still consistently donate more blood, give more to charity and are less likely to cheat in exams or avoid paying parking fines — and also have the most successful democracies. Those parts of western Europe in which the Catholic Church struggled to ban cousin marriage also, and not by coincidence, produced Don Corleone and Tony Soprano.

One result of this high-trust form of society was, of course, liberalism, an entirely novel worldview that relies on people thinking way beyond their clan, to far more abstract levels of society — even to humanity in the general. Yet liberalism is still unnatural, after centuries, and most people are “default conservatives” — they believe that family should come before strangers, and countrymen before foreigners. They feel stung if their flag is burned or their ancestors mocked. However anti-social their own instincts, they, like Tony Soprano, feel an obligation to defend their country from external threats. Conservatism is our default setting, designed for a world that is dangerous and in which we need to be courageous, defend our family and group, defer to superiors and share acquisitions fairly. Liberalism, with its focus on individual rights, is a mutation.

Yet “social conservatism”, as we imagine it in the West, is not the same thing; like liberalism, it is an interpretation of Christianity, although a more disciplined (and perhaps less immediately enjoyable) one. Christianity is the most unnatural of self-disciplines; loving your enemies and laying down your life for non-kin go against all our instincts and Tony Soprano would never be foolish enough to do so. Sexual restraint, especially among powerful men, requires a role model as persuasive and powerful as St Paul, one who can overcome their Roman urge to dominate with guilt.

Sure, historically mafias paid lip-service to Catholicism because that was the cultural norm — the Church was strong and they craved respectability. But modern mafias don’t; the Camorra of Naples have in recent years had a lesbian and even a transgender boss, which is very brave and progressive of them.

Western social conservatism, like liberalism, is weird, and WEIRD. It takes discipline and education, and social conservatives tend to be highly conscientious and well-educated, partly because Christianity is complicated and requires great self-control. The most “consistently conservative” Americans, for example, are found not in trailer parks drooling over Fox & Friends, as their opponents might believe, but in universities.

Suggested reading

In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

As both Left and Right have proved throughout history, education and cultivation can produce the worst type of intolerance. If you look at European history, the most religiously intolerant time was not the Dark Ages, or early medieval period (c.500-1000). Surviving chronicles of that mostly illiterate era recall people talking and laughing throughout Mass, fornicating priests, and a widespread belief in unorthodox, often pagan ideas. You wouldn’t get burnt for heresy in the Dark Ages, contrary to the stereotype, but you might well do in the Late Middle Ages, the Renaissance era, when literacy had become widespread. Some of the worst torturers and sadists of the time could discourse on the Latin poets while turning the screw on a torture rack.

But the society they lived in was far safer and far more restrained; there were far fewer births outside marriage, and therefore lower infant mortality; men had become less inclined to have mistresses; violence, in particular the impulsive violence that plagued earlier medieval history, was in steep decline. That sort of social conservatism has to be learned; it is against our instincts.

Modern conservatism is a sort of alliance between these two ways of thinking, but it is an uneasy one, as Trump showed. His success was to appeal to default instincts in a society where powerful people openly provoke many of those seven basic human moral values. And it is a powerful selling point; far more sellable than the social conservatism that once dominated the American Right, but which depended on a shrinking churchgoing population.

Yet, unfashionable as social conservatism may be, there is a lot of evidence showing that churchgoers are less prejudiced than other conservative voters. They are more trusting, are more likely to volunteer and more satisfied with their neighbourhood and with family relationships. And since 1992 the share of Americans with no religion has quadrupled — and trebled even among conservatives.

There is a danger, therefore, that as social conservatism fades, the Right becomes a repository of the depressed, the disappointed and those in need of a cause and a leader; people who, to some extent like Tony Soprano, are anxious and confused by today’s moral confusion but lacking a firm moral code of their own. Social conservatism may appear off-putting but it offers a real vision, while the barstool variety, appealing to basic emotional brain responses, is little more than a political version of the social media clickbait, porn, junk food and opioids that pervade our time and overloads our minds.

There has been no general election in which Labour won fewer than 50% of Wales’s seats. The party’s post-war average is an impressive 71%, compared to the Conservatives’ 17%. And the picture is the same in the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly: since devolution, Labour has won the most votes and seats. Four years ago, in the 2017 general election, the party won nearly half the vote, taking 70% of the seats. And yet, just two years later, in 2019, it won 40.9% of the vote and just 55% of the seats — its second-worst performance since the “National Government” election in 1931 (1983 was Labour’s nadir in Wales, as in the rest of the country).

And recent signs suggest Labour has made no headway in regaining its grip on Wales. A poll by YouGov for ITV Cymru Wales/Cardiff University has put the party on 36%. That approval rating is roughly the same as in 2015 and 2010, but this time the Conservatives are breathing down Labour’s neck: they are just 3 percentage points behind. The Tories are still riding high on their 2019 success, which left Labour with a solitary single seat north of the coalfields.

Things are no rosier in the Welsh Assembly, where Labour is down 1.5% on their 2016 performance; Plaid Cymru is up 3% and the Conservatives up 6%. And with elections just three months away, the Tories are gearing up to convert their 2019 wins into Senedd seats.

Suggested reading

How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

Labour, understandably, is desperate to work out what’s going wrong. And given the recent intensification of Scottish nationalism, it’s easy to assume Wales is feeling the same way. While support for Plaid Cymru, the only party committed to Welsh independence, has not really shifted, support for independence has — in 2014 only 12% of respondents said they were in favour, compared to 74% against. Now the figure is 23% in favour, 52% against.

This rise coincides with the arrival of a new pressure group for independence — YesCymru. Launched in 2016, it really hit its stride in Spring 2020 when membership doubled from 2,500 to 5,000. When the Westminster government refused to furlough Welsh businesses during Wales’ 17-day firebreak lockdown, membership of YesCymru increased by a further 3,000. Now, it claims to have 17,000 members. YesCymru’s own polling with YouGov suggested 33% of Welsh people with a view would support independence.

Eyeing the threat of Plaid Cymru riding the waves of Welsh independence, Welsh Labour have become much more Union-sceptic. Alun Davies MS claimed: “This union fails Wales every day. And until there is an acceptance of that, then the campaign for independence will only continue to grow.” Mick Antoniw MS called the Union “an increasingly Anglocentric, London-based institution with which [the Welsh] struggle to identify.”

But would a panicky pivot to a more Union-sceptic position actually help Labour win back its old voters?

Suggested reading

The by-election that spells a general election

By Polly Mackenzie

To find out, I used various waves of the British Election Study to compare two camps of 2017 Labour voters: those who are still intending to vote for the party and those who are not.

The latter, Labour defectors, have scattered: 16% to Plaid, 15% to the Liberal Democrats, and 14% to the Conservatives. But the biggest grouping are the ‘don’t knows’, at 34%. Perhaps unsurprisingly, defectors tend to be less Left-wing — on a scale of 0 to 10, Labour voters are placed at 1.9, and Labour defectors at 2.6. Labour voters are also more libertarian, at 5.2, while Labour defectors more authoritarian at 6.1.

So this defection could easily be a part of a broader UK realignment of political values and voting behaviour, with Labour’s electoral coalition coming from Left-wing social libertarians, and the Conservatives doing better among a less Left-wing and more socially authoritarian voter coalition. Defectors are more likely to think that attempts to give equal opportunities to ethnic minorities, women, gay people and lesbians have all gone too far, compared to Labour voters — so probably thought little of Starmer’s pandering to the Black Lives Matter protestors over the summer. Defectors are also less likely to think immigration brings cultural or economic benefits, compared to Labour voters.

Suggested reading

How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

What about the pull of nationalism? Are defectors abandoning Labour in search of a party that will explicitly support independence? It doesn’t seem so. When asked how happy or sad they would be if Wales left the United Kingdom (with 0 being extremely sad and 10 being extremely happy) there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Both Labour voters and defectors would be sad, with a score of 3.6. And who wants a policy that makes people sad?

Defectors don’t even want more devolution. If we construct a scale of how Wales should be governed — with 1 equalling abolishing the Assembly, 2 giving the body fewer powers, 3 representing the status quo, 4 more powers, and 5 full independence — we find no significant difference between the two groups. And the icing on the cake is that Labour defectors actually trust Westminster more than Labour voters do — on a scale of 1 to 4, Labour voters place at 1.5, and Labour defectors place at 1.9 — and there is no significant difference when it comes to trusting the Welsh government.

So it is fair to conclude that Labour is not losing support to other parties because of their stance (or lack thereof) on the devolution settlement, no matter how angrily YesCymru tweet.

If this isn’t about devolution, is it about identity? No, not really. There’s no significant difference between how Labour voters and Labour defectors see themselves in terms of either Welshness — both place themselves at 5, on a scale of 1 (not at all Welsh) to 7 (very strongly Welsh) — or Britishness (5.2 for Labour defectors versus 5 for Labour voters). In fact, the identity which seems to make a difference is Europeanness — Labour defectors feel less European (3.6) than Labour voters (4.5), again suggesting that Labour’s troubles in Wales are not due to Welsh-specific factors, but rather UK-wide developments.

What about good old-fashioned party politics? Leadership evaluations do seem to matter. Those who remain Labour voters are more likely to rate Starmer highly (8.4, on a scale of 1 to 11) than Labour defectors (6.1). The same is true for Corbyn (7.2 versus 4.6). And those who have defected from Labour rate Johnson higher than those who remain Labour voters (4.2 versus 2.3).

Other party-political factors come into play here too — Labour defectors are more positive about how the UK government has handled Covid; Labour voters, unsurprisingly, think the opposition would have done a better job. Similarly, Labour defectors give the Westminster government more credit, and the Welsh government less, for their handling of lockdown than Labour voters do (although both groups rate the Welsh government’s attempts higher than Westminster’s). Wherever we look, there is little support for the idea that Labour needs to become more anti-Westminster or pro-Welsh independence.

Suggested reading

Why nationalism matters

By Ed West

Overall, the data shows Welsh Labour shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to out-bid nationalists when it comes to devolution, nor should they flirt with independence. They might not like the Conservative government in Westminster, but constant attacks on the Union in a misguided attempt to win votes back. It risks undermining both the nation-state itself and the party’s own voter coalition. As Henry Hill notes, polling shows more Welsh voters back abolishing the Senedd than back independence. By fanning the flames of independence, Labour risks polarising the nation’s electorate. Welsh Labour should take a hard look at their colleagues in Scotland to see the consequences of playing with nationalist fire.

Instead, the party desperately needs to do three things. Firstly, it needs to separate its critique of the Conservative Westminster government from a critique of the Union, and remember that it’s only a ‘Tory Westminster government’ because of Labour’s numerous failings since the great financial crash.

Secondly, Welsh Labour needs to articulate a narrative which can unite those who feel Welsh and those who feel British (equally sized groups), and explain why both groups are better off within the United Kingdom.

Finally, it needs to appeal to the type of voters they are losing: those who are more centrist, who are socially conservative, and who don’t think the economy is working for them. These voters aren’t really bothered about constitutional reform, but if Welsh Labour keep blaming Westminster or England for every problem they face then the party risks radicalising them into the arms of YesCymru.

Welsh Labour is still the dominant force in Welsh politics, and the political dynamics of the Wales are not yet like those of Scotland. But if Welsh Labour really are a unionist party, then they need to defend the Union themselves instead of using it as a scapegoat to distract from their own failings. Their current tack won’t protect their vote come 2024.

Menial tasks first. There are children’s toys everywhere, remnants of the weekend’s play, which I will arrange in orderly ranks on top of the climbing frame. The litter that has blown in from the street will need to be clawed out from the undergrowth and binned, and the leaves tumbling in such profusion from the London planes must be raked into piles and bagged.

Next, I will prune the wisteria by hand — a pleasant job for the morning, as the wall where it clambers is burnished by the early sun — then fire up the hedge-cutter to reshape the more robust escallonia. Chop down the geraniums, the crocosmia, the withered foliage of the peonies and hellebores. And all the while I’m snipping and raking and digging, I will be thinking, “Damn these people with this beautiful garden. They don’t know they’re born.”

For the past eight years, I’ve supplemented my precarious writing career by working as a gardener. The work suits me well, in that the physical labour keeps me healthy, the cash keeps me solvent, and the break from the keyboard keeps me sane. In modern London, it feels like a relatively secure form of employment, in part because the robotics industry has thus far failed to invent a machine that can effectively prune a box hedge. But more because there is a glut of wealth in my area of south London, and where there is asset-money, there are people with money to spend on prettifying the home, inside and out.

I suppose it was inevitable, given that labour relations are so often the basis of a person’s politics, that this work would become my prism for how power and money shape this city. Given where I work, at the point where the high-rise city reclines into the residential precincts of its inner boroughs, my average client is a certain type of person; this is a milieu whose habits and preoccupations are in many ways crucial to an understanding of modern Britain. I work for London’s rich, liberal middle class. In 21st-century London, these are the victors, and these streets represent their spoils.

Further reading

Life on the Cornish breadline

By Tanya Gold

It is 8.30am on the perfect street, and the man of the house is nowhere to be seen.  He works in the city, so is either there, or more probably, during Covid, upstairs, “taking calls”.  Sometimes, he will switch banks, which involves taking “gardening leave”, a misleading designation for a paid sabbatical as he seems strangely reluctant to wield a trowel. More likely, he will mooch around the house in flip-flops, where his presence will provoke exasperation from his wife or partner, because he gets in the way of the million things she has to do.

You see, the woman of the house is also busy. She isn’t at work per se. Since having babies, she has developed more flexible pet projects at home. Now, she takes photographs and dabbles in interior design; one woman used to come outside asking us to taste the sticky, hair-gel like prototypes of her nascent marshmallow business. Last I heard, they were stocking them in a luxury hotel chain.

Sometimes, my clients want to talk, and it is over the course of hundreds of such conversations that a certain boilerplate biography emerges. Where did they come from? Rarely London. In most cases, they gravitated to the capital after university, chasing, like millions before them, the outsider’s burnished idea of the great metropolis. Maybe they fell into a graduate scheme, or, just as likely, someone rang around. Many of them will still own their first London flat, bought with parental help or when the banks were handing out mortgages like candy, which they will now rent out at strict market rates to someone younger who doesn’t have the deposit to buy.

Even as they accumulate pieces of its real estate, it’s hard to escape the sense that the city doesn’t fit them. I mean, sure, they like the Sunday farmer’s market and the sourdough pizza place. But this London is a simulacrum of the real city, one without the grime and rage.

Given time, their disproportionate spending power transforms the social and commercial landscape around them. Prone to homophily,  they are London’s agents of what Kevin Baker, writing about New York in Harper’s Magazine, described as the “urban crisis of affluence”. Community identity, once embalmed in generations-old family businesses, soon vanishes under an assault of displaced patronage and rising rents. Soon, it will be supplanted by whatever on-trend, franchisable business models are currently attracting the most city seed-funding. One person gets plantation shutters, then everyone does. Before long, these predilections engineer a Stepford enclave of homogenous respectability.

That’s why I’m here: to manicure the ersatz London of their own imagining with flowers and greenery. To help keep the outside world, with its food-banks and knife crime, over there, in the next postcode. With my mower and spade, I furnish a Potemkin village. Now that the inner-city diversions are shut, remote-working in vogue, you can hear them thinking: “Do we really need to stay?”

Further reading

Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

There is building work going on all along the roads, always. The original dimensions of a property are never enough. They must knock through and up and outwards. Rip out the old innards until all that remains is the surface, a varnish of heritage. The rest ends up in the skip, and with it go the house’s unloved ghosts. Usually, when a client commissions a big face-lift, the garden vanishes beneath rubble and portaloos. But only until the builders pack up and leave, and we return to disinter the anaemic tendrils of the plants that have survived, to dust them down and see what can be salvaged.

I work the front gardens; I watch the comings and goings. There are personal trainers, dog-walkers, delivery drivers, battalions of cleaners. One of the most popular cleaners in my catchment is an irrepressible lady from Warsaw. In Poland, she is a professional midwife with two degrees. Here, on the perfect street, she is someone who does ironing and steam-cleans the terrazzo tiles. We share an unspoken kinship, the cleaners and the gardeners, because we are the competent ones, maintaining the households, stewarding the land.

It is one of the more curious idiosyncrasies of contemporary British life that, when people speak of the country’s elite, they no longer mean the haute bourgeoisie. They mean the people I work for: this new financial caste. The people who were like them once, and who now, through some alchemy we barely understand, reap the new economy’s elusive harvest.

This isn’t something we discuss that much, historically acculturated as we Brits are to deference and class stratification. However, they have come to occupy a unique place in the national tectonics in that they are unpopular with both the Left (for their privilege) and the Right (for their faux-liberalism). You hear it most explicitly on those rare occasions when the journalists deign to leave the city. When they head north, to vox-pop pallid, scowling people against a backdrop of some bleak, dilapidated shopping street. “Those people down in London…”; “All those politicians in London…”; “They might think that in London, but up here…”

Behind the acrimony is an allegation that goes something like this: the keepers of the liberal flame promised us all a piece of their covenant. But its perks have all coalesced in their own streets, where it is least needed. Perhaps, in an earlier, less cynical era, they would have been viewed as those with the education and talent to make good in the City. Now, they are the metropolitan elite, sole beneficiaries of the stable jobs, flexible working, generous leave and gold-plated pensions that we were all promised a piece of yet never received.

Hypocrisy clings to this constituency like their floral athleisure pants. Their politics tend to lean progressive, and ostensibly egalitarian, but it prescribes a society that they seem reluctant to live in. During the summer’s BLM marches, the parents sat down with their kids to do homework projects about slavery, Windrush, and the fight for race equality. But few dark-skinned people actually live on these streets; “strangers” are viewed with suspicion. The families trumpet diversity, yet send their children to private school. They lament the dismemberment of the NHS, but the corporations they work for offer private family health insurance. They sigh about climate change but take three long-haul holidays a year and drive gas-guzzling SUVs. The Guardian lies neatly folded on the kitchen worktop, undisturbed.

They have so much stuff. Plastic stuff and metal stuff, antique stuff and state-of-the-art stuff. Also: organic stuff. Each November, we enter one house to find boxes ordered from on-line horticulturists filled with two to three thousand bulbs. Yet every plunge of the spade excavates the hundreds we planted one, two, three years before, and we stand there muddy and bewildered, figuring out which to discard.

Further reading

Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffrey

It’s raining today on the perfect street, and my boots are heavy with mud. On one hand, it is possible to feel ennobled by the hardship and exposure of this hands-and-knees work: the communion with the earth, the soil beneath my nails. This job, which permits me to escape the city’s artifice, to notice the spiders setting webs in the hedgerows, the robins toiling for worms. But it can also breed resentment. And so being a gardener comes to mould a conflicted identity. The skin peeling from my hands is at once a testament to honest graft and an indictment of an economy that demands I strain my muscles while others stay indoors, obsessing over trivialities, or in the shiny totems at the horizon, conjuring wealth out of thin air.

Sometimes, between the yoga and the online painting class, a client will come outside to extemporise on the latest news. Mostly, it’s incomprehension. “Why are they doing this?” they say, when talk turns to Brexit, because there is no escaping Brexit if you live on these islands. “What could they possibly be getting out of it?”

I just shrug, feign ambivalence. They wouldn’t like the answer. For whatever deceits and nostalgias underpin Britain’s culture war, this is what really animates the national rage: the theory that the people holding the reins inflated huge bubbles in the financial and property markets, colluded in sustaining them for as long as possible to the detriment of everyone else. The obstinacy with which many cleave to the Brexit cause is rooted in the suspicion that Europe was somehow an apparatus of this hegemony, and, by association, of their dispossession. That behind the liberal establishment’s horror of Brexit is the fear that it might immiserate these gleaming streets. That it might drag us all, poor and rich alike, back into the primordial clay.

Perhaps one day I will tell them: “Because it will hurt you, too.”

I wouldn’t claim to be a voice of Britain’s disaffected working classes. The product of a middle-class upbringing myself, and conscious that the ability to scrape by in London betrays a certain privilege, I am culturally closer to my clientele than I might care to admit. But in cynical moments, when I’m kneeling on the wet ground, using a trowel to spoon cat shit into a bag for someone who has never offered us tea, I think: “No wonder.” As unfair as it is to taxonomise people this way, I get it, I feel it, the proletarian wrath.

“You’re so lucky, working outside,” they often say, when the sun is shining, and the work is genteel, an hour spent dead-heading the climbing roses. Who is having the better day?

For the second year running, the clematis has grown leggy. It doesn’t thrive in that spot near the French doors, so perhaps I will cut it back hard, transplant it to a sunnier position, and hope for its resurrection next spring. I will chop down the anemones, as their flowers, the last of the summer colour, have already surrendered to the changing season.

I will till the London soil, as my city sinks deeper into a mire of its own furies. And all the while I’m snipping and raking and digging, I will be thinking, “I hope they never see this essay. I need the money.”

Virtu, for Machiavelli, was the political skill to turn circumstances that you did not choose and events that you could not predict to your advantage. Fortuna is a condition of politics, there are always things happening which you cannot control, and without virtu you can never escape its constraints.

And this Government has experience of riding the waves of fortuna to reach the shores of glory and power. It understood that the long-term disaffection of Labour’s heartland voters with globalisation and abandonment combined with the short-term incoherence of Jeremy Corbyn offered a moment to transform the class basis of English politics, with Brexit serving as the perfect proxy through which these could be aligned. The Labour heartlands vote was a covenantal bond that endured through generations, and it was broken last December.

More from this author

All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

In his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s character Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. He replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” That was Labour’s story last December. The ties that bound had been loosening for decades and were then broken. The Conservative lead among C2 voters was almost 20%, and the scale of the carnage would have been worse were it not for the presence of the Brexit Party in Labour-held seats.

And Brexit held out the promise of a Covenantal renewal based on the restoration of democracy, of Parliament, of the Common Law and sovereignty. By embodying that, Boris Johnson achieved the class realignment of the political parties, with the Conservatives overwhelmingly dominant outside the big cities and university towns.

They could speak for England in a way that Labour could 80 years previously. The Conservatives broke with Thatcherism with their talk of levelling up and a regionally-targeted Keynesian industrial policy. They grasped the framework of a new era in which there was a more constructive role for the state in the organisation of the economy, a significant role for the working class and for the places where they lived — which had been desecrated and neglected for half a century while the Conservative Party was committed to the City of London, the primacy of finance and the magic of the market.

Fortuna had opened up the space and, with Dominic Cummings by his side, Boris Johnson had the virtu to seize the moment. All Hail Good King Boris as he flew off to the West Indies last Christmas with a decade of uncontested dominium before him.

And this is when the face of fortuna turned and a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appeared over Wuhan, a faraway place that no-one had ever heard of. And, in the storm that followed it was revealed, with the clarity of a lightning bolt, the underlying conditions of our polity, and the lack of strategic clarity of the new Government. Events, dear boy, events.

More from this series

Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

First there was the unresolved incoherence, framed as the economy versus human life. An emergency was declared in which the liberties were pitted against public health.

Then came a state characterised by debt and the NHS: local initiatives were overridden by centralised directives. Local authorities were ignored, and the full scale of our industrial palsy was revealed. In a perverse homage to the model that had created the conditions for their political success, state centralisation was combined with crony capitalism.

It was recognised that our economy had no capacity to produce face masks or dressing gowns, let alone ventilators or aspirin. Some £1.5 billion pounds went to companies linked to the Government, mainly to facilitate emergency imports. Another £479 million was spent on consultants in order to by-pass the civil servants. Many millions of the face masks were faulty.

The state of emergency rendered procurement procedures redundant, and it turned out that the main source of supply was also the source of the virus — China. Britain had contracted out its industrial capacity and no aspect of the response addressed the underlying problem.

While it is true to say that no Labour politician other than Keir Starmer made any impression, it is equally true to say that whenever a cabinet minister emerged into public view they were revealed as either inept or corrupt. Robert Jenrick and Gavin Williamson spring to mind.

More from this author

Keir Starmer, a true conservative

By Maurice Glasman

The furlough scheme made no distinctions between sectors that would provide the growth of the future economy, no incentives to reduce extended supply chains in agriculture, medicine or PPE. There was no attempt to strengthen regional resilience, to level up.

They did not have the virtu to withstand the change of fortune. None of the responses to Covid gave any indication that there was either an industrial policy or an institutional strategy that could serve as a basis for consolidation of the class coalition they had created last December. While Danny Kruger outlined a strategy of a new social covenant that would strengthen place and society, no other aspect of public policy was aligned with that. The late Sir Roger Scruton was given a knighthood for his work on developing a housing strategy based on place, local building and beauty, and when he died in January the only Government response was a further deregulation of planning laws.

The underlying conditions that Covid preys upon and intensifies are geographical inequality exacerbated by lack of assets, the weakness of productive capacity and the primacy of finance and debt. The polity is threatened by Scottish secession and a strategy of centralisation. Super Hospitals and Super Labs denuded local places of capacity, track and trace as well as testing failed to establish themselves.

What is required is the establishment of local banks and vocational colleges to generate value, but the Treasury took control and small to medium sized businesses, particularly in the catering and entertainment sector, have amassed a debt that will require relief and sustained partnership.

A programme combining debt relief with institutional renewal is required to resurrect local businesses and there was nothing in the Covid response that would lead to that. It was sporadic and intense, indicating crisis management rather than strategic statecraft. There has been talk of infrastructure, but not in institutions such as British Rail and the Post Office that could be shared with Scotland and strengthen the institutions of the Union.

The Conservative victory in December was based upon an understanding of the importance of three things that were denied in the previous era. The first was a recognition of the important role of the state as an economic actor, and not simply an external regulator. The kind of economic intervention envisaged by the Government would have violated EU rules relating to competition law and state aid. That was how they could present Brexit as a moment of national renewal.

More from this series

Why Boris is still beating Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

The second was the political importance of the working class, which was previously considered an anachronistic irrelevance. Their vote decided the referendum and the election of the Government. The third was the importance of place, and the distinction between the hubs and the heartlands. Not only were local authorities and initiatives discarded in favour of central control but there have been no steps towards the integration of the state, place and work into a form of statecraft appropriate to the scale of renewal.

The inability to react strategically to events means that you become their prey, and the removal of Dominic Cummings has only intensified the strategic void. He understood that the Government’s programme could only be delivered outside regulatory convergence and an active role for the state was required. We will find out in the next few days whether there is any understanding of that remaining within the Government. It is not fishing and transport but state aid that really matters; if they fold on that then there will be no possibility of achieving their political goals.

Fortuna could yet save the Government. The inability of Labour to renew itself as an object of affection for the working class or articulate a plausible economic plan for national renewal may allow the Government to limp along. They wish to give a Christmas present of a vaccine and a deal and start the new year as if this one never happened. Yet a year after their triumph they have no strategy, no narrative and very little energy. And they know that next year could be worse.

Likewise, half a century later, this time led by the magnificent but hapless Michael Foot, Labour’s routing at the hands of a Tory leader riding a wave of popularity on the back of a war in the South Atlantic — a defeat made more crushing thanks to the SDP’s splitting of the Left vote — convinced some that there was no way back. Fourteen years after that particular catastrophe, the party stormed to its second landslide.

Prophecies of Labour’s extinction should, then, be taken with a generous dose of salt. And that applies even today, with the party still reeling from the disaster that befell it one year ago. Though Labour is wounded badly, we won’t wake up one morning to discover that it has gone out of business; its roots are — for the moment, at least – sunk too deeply into our national life for that to happen.

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The PM's cabinet of puppets and placemen

By Peter Franklin

But there is certainly a question mark over whether Labour will remain a serious electoral force in British politics or instead become an organ of permanent protest. How that question will be answered depends on the party’s desire to win power again, and that in turn is contingent on whether it has the courage to reflect with the searing honesty demanded on why things went so badly wrong and the boldness to do what is necessary to put things right.

The first step is obvious. Labour needs to win back the trust of voters in its lost Red Wall seats. Without them, electoral redemption is a pipe dream. Every morning when he wakes, and again before he goes to sleep, Sir Keir Starmer should recite in his mind the mantra: “There is no route back to power for Labour that doesn’t pass through Don Valley.” That statement should become his personal credo.

In everything the party says and does over the next four years, it must consider how the message resonates in that former mining constituency in South Yorkshire which returned a Labour MP at every election from 1922 to 2019 and is now represented by a Conservative. That means a major shift in language and recalibration of priorities. It demands a laser-like focus on the everyday concerns of those living in our neglected post-industrial and coastal communities, and the crafting of a programme that puts those concerns front and centre.

Labour must treat the voters of Don Valley and other Red Wall seats like a lost love whom it knows it has betrayed and whose affections it is willing to go to any length to win back. There is deep contrition to be displayed and much penance to be served.

For a start, there can be no more equivocation on Brexit. The party’s vacillations between the referendum and last year’s election were in no small part responsible for its obliteration in Red Wall constituencies. If Labour doesn’t like any deal agreed by the Government and EU, then it should support no-deal. It must be one or the other. A call to extend the transition period (other than where a deal is genuinely within grasp) would go down like a lead balloon among the millions in the party’s old heartlands who voted Leave. It would also be the surest sign that Labour hadn’t learned a thing from its defeat. Painful though it will be for them, the party’s MPs must suppress their compulsive Europhiliac tendencies in the interests of electoral rehabilitation.

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What Covid stole from Boris

By James Kirkup

Labour must, naturally, commit to a programme designed to improve the lives of Red Wall voters in a material sense. But as we saw in 2017 and 2019, pledges of economic security are not enough. These voters want something more than promises of money. In an age when their communities are relentlessly buffeted by the storms of globalisation, and they fall prey themselves to the sense of dislocation and dispossession that comes with it, they want politicians to recognise their yearning for a rekindling of social solidarity and stability, to understand their sense of cultural attachment and belonging. They are parochial and not ashamed to be so. Labour must stop looking upon such sentiments as ignoble or exclusionary, and understand why they exist.

Many in these communities fall into that category of voter — significant in size, but long neglected by politicians — which is to the Left on economic issues (so they support, for example, a higher minimum wage and action to tackle regional inequalities and boardroom excesses), but to the Right on culture (so they are patriotic and communitarian in outlook, respecting of tradition and often hold small “c” conservative views on social issues).

If Labour is to be successful again, this is the sweet spot on the political spectrum it must exploit. This cohort — once upon a time the party’s base — should be its number one target, and only once it has locked them in can it even think about the necessary next step of building outwards. To achieve it, Labour will need a fresh vision that combines a more egalitarian economy with the cultural politics of place and belonging.

On the first, it can afford to be bold, for it is unlikely that Red Wall seats will be put off by a healthy dose of economic radicalism. So an interventionist programme that, for example, institutes full employment as the prime goal of economic policy, resists austerity, seeks to narrow the gap between rich and poor, takes key utilities and industries (such as rail) into public ownership, and returns the Bank of England to democratic control, while also promoting innovative polices such as workers on boards, regional banks, employee share ownership schemes and a jobs guarantee, would appeal to much of Labour’s traditional vote (as well as a layer of the middle class that has always been sympathetic to a redistributive Labour programme).

But, more importantly, there must be a decisive shift on social and cultural issues. This means understanding that Twitter and Britain are not the same thing. It means no longer treating the working class as some kind of embarrassing elderly relative, and being prepared to stand up to the shrill demands of wokedom. Labour must embrace the spirit of patriotism that runs through many working-class communities and see the nation state as a force for good and a bulwark against an ever-rapacious global market.

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What Labour learned from a year of Boris

By Paul Embery

The party’s activists must start speaking to the working-class about the things it wishes to speak about, and not the things those activists themselves wish to speak about. That means prioritising the issues and anxieties — such as law and order, immigration and national security — that matter to working-class voters but which too many Labour activists feel uncomfortable discussing when they are raised on the doorstep. And when the party speaks about these things, it must convince voters that it isn’t just paying lip service but has well-crafted policies in its armoury to achieve their desired outcomes.

By definition, all of this will mean that the causes which middle-class Labour activists have for too long given high priority — LGBT rights, climate change, free movement, Palestine, and so on — but which many working-class voters see as, if not unimportant then certainly not central to their everyday stresses and concerns, must take their rightful place in the pecking order. That is not to say they should never be discussed (only a fool would argue that a major political party should not talk about climate change, for example). But the attention paid to these things by the party’s representatives and foot soldiers is often in inverse proportion to the significance attached to them by ordinary working-class voters. Ultimately, these are not the issues which win and lose elections.

Labour must also start speaking in a language that working-class communities understand. That means talking incessantly and in plain terms about things like family, work and community, and ending the tiresome resort to buzzwords such as “diversity”, “inclusivity” and “equality”, which mean little to normal people.

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By David Kogan

None of this means that Labour should seek to drive its middle-class liberal wing from the party or appeal only to its old blue-collar base in an effort to win power. On the contrary, the party has always performed best when it has brought Hartlepool and Hampstead together. The point, however, is that, over the past couple of decades, that historical alliance has become fundamentally unbalanced: Hampstead has come to dominate and Hartlepool has been elbowed out. The pendulum must swing decisively the other way again if the party is to ever return to government.

To his credit, Sir Keir has made a steady start. I’m quite sure he doesn’t get some of this stuff instinctively, but he has shown signs — not least in his conference speech, which pressed the themes of family, community and nation — of knowing what needs to be done. But he must know that he is still in the foothills of the mountain. Matters will not be helped if the incipient civil war between the leadership and disaffected Corbynites is allowed to overshadow every new initiative designed to reconnect Labour with its lost base. The party needs to get its own house in order — and quickly — if it is to convince voters that it is again fit to run the country.

Twice over the past century, Labour hauled itself back from the abyss after devastating General Election results. Today, with the old tribalisms fragmenting swiftly around us, that task may prove to be even more challenging. Whether the party is equal to it will ultimately depend on the extent of its willingness to change itself — and how far it is prepared to go to win back the affection of the good people of Don Valley.

But this sense of an ending doesn’t seem to have done much to shore up discipline. If anything, it seems to be going the other way: anti-lockdown protests this weekend led to over 150 arrests, people are moving around much more in lockdown 2 than lockdown 1, and the political rebellion among Conservative MPs has gathered, rather than lost, momentum since the vaccine news. It looks like keeping up restrictions is going to become more difficult, not easier, as the end comes into view.

You can see why Tory MPs are worried. The map of areas still stuck in ‘tier 3’ lockdown restrictions, with pubs and restaurants shut, has echoes of the most Brexit-voting parts of the country: a new ‘red wall’ stretching from Lancashire in the North West across to Lincolnshire and the Wash, with a separate pocket of red in the Thames estuary and Kent. These are the voters most precious to the Government — fear of getting on the wrong side of them runs deep.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

By Sir Graham Brady

What’s more, the latest polls are not offering much reassurance. We’ve become used to surveys showing overwhelming support for more restrictions, leading to the general assumption that ‘lockdown sceptics’ are little more than a small but vocal group on social media; Nigel Farage’s attempt to launch a new political party on the back of that passion has so far fallen flat.

But on the post-lockdown tier system, opinion is more divided — of four options offered by YouGov, the most popular at 33% is the view that too many areas are now being held in top tiers. More disconcertingly for the Tories, the dissenting group rises to 37% of Brexit voters (compared to 28% of Remainers) and 44% of voters in the all-important Midlands (compared to just 21% of Londoners). The voters who propelled them into office are the least happy.

What Tory MPs know (and not only the 70-odd rebels lined up by Steven Baker and Sir Graham Brady) is that there’s something about this whole approach that goes directly against what they were elected to do. As Editor of the Sheffield Star, Nancy Fielder, told Andrew Marr on Sunday, Tory MPs in the North “were elected around Brexit, which was all about freedom — we want to be able to do what we want to do ourselves without being dictated to — and look where we are now.” Brexit was a rebellion against control from the centre, against remote regulations set by faraway people in Whitehall or Brussels who aren’t interested in the details of your area — the Covid tiers have an unhappy whiff of the same hauteur.

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By David Jeffrey

The aggravation doesn’t stem from people being selfish or from behavioural fatigue so much as from the bluntness of the regulation. Even among those who are concerned about the virus and keen to be responsible, rules that are arbitrary and insensitive to local conditions quickly start feeling pointless and sinister; from there it is a short step to them feeling tyrannical.

Notes of absurdity are even more potent at destroying support. Think of how much energy the Brexit movement got from reports of EU regulations on “bendy bananas” — today’s elaborate one-way systems around half-empty garden centres and tiny designer Perspex vizers covering only the chins of waiters in restaurants are surely the new equivalents. You can imagine the mixture of hilarity and fury in the Kent village that has been divided down the middle between two tiers, so one of its pubs has to close but the other can remain open.

At heart, the flaw in the system is the continued adherence to a one-size-fits-all approach. A “traffic light” system of regional tiers may sound targeted and human at a No 10 press conference, but it doesn’t feel that way to the millions of people lumped together in Manchester or Kent, or to the 99% of the population still forbidden from seeing anybody inside during an English winter. As each MP knows, within each constituency, let alone county, there is a variety of urban and rural areas, and a range of different demographics — it’s a whole world, not a dot on a map. This is the central shortcoming of the lockdown movement — that you can force everyone in a hugely varied society to behave in the same way, by diktat.

This was never true, and particularly not for a threat like Covid that is so unusually targeted at a certain subset of the population: we all know people who are more- or less- cautious about Covid and have been all along for perfectly good reasons. Wise regulation would acknowledge this reality, and provide principles that people can apply to their unique circumstances. The Government will win their vote in parliament, but the anger will start to subside only when we move beyond universal life-rules controlled by the centre. The principle of different advice for different groups is already established: the proposal to ‘protect the vulnerable’ in the Great Barrington Declaration may have been rejected on the grounds of practical difficulty, but different ‘shielding’ advice was given early on to the particularly vulnerable and ministers insist that as soon as the most vulnerable are vaccinated, restrictions can begin to ease.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

By Tom Chivers

So as we move through this difficult winter, with the new promise of a sunset clause on the Tiers system, perhaps the Government needs to switch up its metaphors: instead of traffic lights, which are notoriously frustrating and treat everyone the same, it might be better to start thinking about traffic lanes, which when functioning well on a motorway are a remarkably effective way for society to move safely along together.

A nationwide traffic lane system would allow people to choose at an individual or household level how to live: amber means you carry on as now, respecting regulations to a normal degree, red means you are additionally cautious because either you or your regular contacts are highly vulnerable, and green means either you have decided that the risk of contracting Covid is acceptable to you and you are personally not worried, or that you are now immune via prior infection or vaccination. Information about local virus levels and your own risk profile can help you choose your lane, and you can quarantine between lanes (which is already what the Government recommends to students coming home for Christmas). As long as you aren’t a threat to others, everyone can decide for themselves.

Rather than attempting to micro-manage the entire public square as a single space, which is the source of so much unhappiness, individual venues and events could be allowed to cater to different risk levels. Care homes and hospitals will obviously continue to operate on ‘red lane’ principles with the highest care, but supermarkets and shops could return to the excellent system where the first hour of the day is reserved for ‘red lane’ customers. Which system would you prefer, as a vulnerable elderly person — to be forced in, as now, among the noisy young people being cavalier about masks and bumping into you, or to be able to know that the newly-cleaned shop was open at limited capacity only to people taking proper care?

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Pubs and restaurants could start to operate similarly — red lane on one day, amber for most of the week and green on Fridays and Saturdays when young people and the increasing number of immune and vaccinated can do as they please without being accused of being selfish. Transport could work on similar rush-hour principles, and even schools would be safer than they are now with a class or stream reserved for students who had genuinely vulnerable people at home, rather than pretending all schoolchildren obey distancing guidelines when quite obviously they don’t. If a venue or service cannot be modified safely in this way, it can remain in the amber lane — no change.

A post-lockdown regime along these lines could provide a route for the whole UK to offer better protection to the vulnerable as discipline starts to collapse, while providing safe outlets for the people who will break the rules anyway to live their lives without censure. Most of all it would reacquaint people with the ability to make decisions for themselves, and move beyond the local colouring-in exercise that is causing so much political tension.

Thinking along these lines will become only more important as vaccines start to be administered: if people are frustrated now, imagine how they will feel if they or their loved ones have had the vaccine and are still being asked to lead a half-life of distancing and not seeing anyone for months afterwards. There must eventually be a mechanism to release the vaccinated and the less vulnerable, while providing proper support for people who need to continue avoiding exposure. The sooner it gets moving, the better.

Well, something along those lines happened to me this week. My book, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, analyses the rupture between the British Left and working-class voters, and concludes that a contributory factor was the former’s increasing tendency towards authoritarianism and its habit of shutting down legitimate debate by dismissing opponents routinely as ‘fascists’, ‘xenophobes’, ‘racists’, and suchlike.

We see it all around us — this creeping despotism which seeks to engender an atmosphere in which any expression of unfashionable opinion is met with fierce condemnation. No longer, it seems, is the Left interested in winning hearts and minds or reconciling competing interests. Instead, every debate is viewed as a battle between good and evil, enlightened progressives versus reactionary bigots, tolerance against intolerance. It does leave one wondering why, if these people are so inherently right, they feel a constant need to wield pitchforks and hurl abuse at opponents rather than attempt to win them over through the power of argument.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Think kids are better off through being raised by two parents? Not terribly keen on Black Lives Matter? Support proper control of immigration? Don’t believe a man is a woman just because he says he is? Then, in the minds of many on today’s Left, you belong in the basket with all the other deplorables, and the debate should go no further. It is irrelevant that such views still hold currency across much of the land. Liberal-progressive types always know better.

But I digress. No sooner had the more fanatical among the Left got wind of Despised’s release than they were inveighing against it across social media. No matter that none of them had read so much as a single word of it yet; they apparently knew everything about it.

The Left shouldn’t touch the book with a barge pole, they warned. It was an apology for ‘fascism’, claimed some. Others portrayed it as a homage to Vichy France or a manifesto for a new style of ‘red-brown’ politics. All this because – horror of horrors – the synopsis contained a call for the Left to return to the “cultural politics of belonging, place and community”. That was enough for these people to know my secret and sinister motives in writing it.

That an entire chapter of the book is devoted to making the case for the Left to renounce its support for the soft totalitarianism we have seen emerge over recent years, and to renew its historical commitment to free expression and diversity of opinion — the very antithesis of fascism — mattered not a jot. I talk about all that ‘faith, family and flag’ stuff. So I am, by definition, a Blackshirt.

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Whose side is Labour on?

By Paul Embery

One prospective reviewer announced quite boldly that she couldn’t wait to get her hands on a copy – how kind – but as part of her preparation was swotting up on the far-right. That particular review will be a belter, I’m sure.

I’m not looking for any sympathy here. As a seasoned political activist, I’m unlikely to lose any sleep over the brickbats chucked by petulant student revolutionaries and latte-sipping bourgeois bohemians tapping furiously on their smartphones. You will not, I promise, hear of me being bullied off social media. In fact, I find the levels of hysteria mildly amusing.

But, to be serious for a moment. It is worth remarking on how extraordinary it is that a book written by someone rooted in the labour movement and making a straightforward call for the Left, as a means to winning back millions of lost working-class votes, to combine socialist economics with a much better focus on social solidarity and the politics of belonging, should provoke such fury among supposed political allies.

There was a time when Despised’s key arguments would have been considered mainstream on the Left. Not that long ago, in fact. But a Left that is these days far more concerned with personal autonomy, open borders and identity politics than it is community and class finds such views beyond the pale. And then it wonders why it experienced electoral annihilation.

This all serves to illustrate the mountain that is to be climbed if the Left is to again play any relevance in the lives of those working-class voters who no longer feel any affection for it. A schism occurred for good reason. A movement that once welcomed those who, on the one hand, wanted to see a fairer and more redistributive economy while, on the other, holding true to some traditional — dare it be said conservative — values on social issues now looks upon them as an embarrassment. It still wants their votes, of course. But it would sooner not be seen in public with them. And it thinks they really ought to keep their noxious opinions to themselves.

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A manifesto to rescue Labour from irrelevance

By Paul Embery

This modern Left inhabits a world of safe spaces, echo chambers and group-think. It doesn’t want arguments articulated or books written which challenge the new orthodoxy. And those who transgress – especially if they do so from within the movement – must be silenced or hounded.

It is a mindset that leads to the Kafkaesque situation where someone who rails against the new censorship and defends with every fibre the principles of democratic debate and pluralism can be demonised in all apparent sincerity as a ‘fascist’. It is unthinking, unreasoning twaddle.

Ultimately, there is no alternative to confronting and defeating these people. We need a united front across mainstream politics — and indeed wider society — to resist those who would see it as their mission to stifle open discussion and dissent as a means to securing ideological hegemony across our public life. They have enjoyed success so far only because they have too frequently been indulged. The only serious option now is to take them on.

Paul Embery’s book, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class is published by Polity