Today, these words ring just as true in late neoliberal America. And it is the Democrats, formerly the party of the people, who occupy the place of the “Tory establishment”, with all the same lordly arrogance but with none of the Old World aristocratic charm.

The Democrats could learn from this comparison as they attempt to rebuild. For just as Disraeli concluded that the Tories should seek to harmonise class differences rather than flattening them, so too can Democratic elites serve ordinary citizens while acknowledging the chasms that exist between them.

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

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MAGA must be reborn

By Michael Cuenco

This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

This is where David Amess, the Tory MP, was killed last year at a constituency surgery. Due to this, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are not standing in the by-election today where they might, in other circumstances, have tried to dent the immense Tory majority. (Amess took 60% of the vote in 2019, in a Leave-supporting seat.) It wouldn’t happen though, and perhaps the opposition parties know that, and their politesse is also cynicism. If there is a Boris Johnson land it is here. This is Essex, the land of spurious self-confidence. Why else build a mile long pier into the mud of the Thames estuary, where no one wants to go? Because you can. The men of Essex have not lost their affection for Johnson because they are like him. When Johnson said “voting Tory would cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3” — and it is, in retrospect, a very truthful manifesto, in that it is dreams — he was talking to Essex Man and the things he wanted and understood. And, so, when I ask people in Southend about Johnson and the parties, they either admire him or forgive him.

“I broke the [pandemic] rules,” says one man. “I saw my Mum. I wasn’t going to not see my Mum. The thing before the funeral [of Prince Philip]. That was a bit a naughty. God bless her.” But “Naughty” is an indulgence. It is not a critique. “I didn’t get caught but he did,” he says, “I don’t give a monkey’s.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Boris,” says another man, angry even at the insinuation that there might be. The only critical man is a fishmonger, and he only says, “Better the devil you know.” Fish are swimming in the estuary, he says, and customers are plentiful. Things are looking up.

I am looking for the parties to the right of the Conservatives. With Labour and the Liberal Democrats — and also the Greens and Reform — absent from Southend, they have the field to themselves. (The Conservative candidate, the barrister Anna Firth is, as is usual when defending a constituency in a by-election, so elusive as to effectively be a myth. I only email her campaign to exercise my finger joints.) You can learn a lot about what people think when you talk to what is called the far Right, because almost no one begins their political journey there. Something took them there. And sometimes, if you are unlucky, you can predict the future.

But not always. I meet Jason Pilley, the Psychedelic Movement candidate and party leader in the Utopia Coffee Shop off Southend’s main drag. He is wearing a pin-striped jacket. He was once a Green — “they hate each other,” he says, because he has no filter to speak of — and his candidacy is a piece of performance art, or scream. He speaks fast, like a man who is never listened to enough, and calls Southend, “heaven and hell. You can’t win in this town [as an MP] unless you are a Tory.” He says, “I’ve never gone into an election thinking I can win. There’s a couple I’ve thought: ‘I won’t come last’. I write novels and poetry and I kind of see politics as part of that.” He hands me his manifesto. He is for allotments and renewable energy and martial arts training for children and cannabis and LSD clubs “around Southend”. He would burn incense in all public buildings and would replace the Queen with the Christian stabbed at Speakers’ Corner last summer: Hatun Tash. He wants to make Tommy Robinson a peer. It ends: “RIP David Amess”.

Further reading

The Left's shameful tribalism

By Paul Embery

As I read, he shouts at me because I criticised Tommy Robinson, and I have not read the Koran. Pilley is in politics for personal self-renewal, like the Corbynistas, and I leave wondering whether it is even responsible to interview him. He is very interesting, but he speaks for no one but himself. His policies are a collection of personal dreams, and prejudices, and I think he knows it.

I also speak to the English Democrat candidate Catherine Blaiklock by telephone because she is not in the constituency to campaign. I think she is too frightened. She lives in Norfolk, where she runs a B&B. Blaiklock left Ukip due to its links with Tommy Robinson under its former leader Gerald Batten. She co-founded the Brexit Party with Nigel Farage but left when Hope Not Hate publicised her anti-Muslim tweets. She has landed with the English Democrats. She sounds strained but pleased to be speaking to a journalist.

“Standing on an anti-immigration, anti-terrorism, anti-crime, Right-wing platform is a very unpleasant and nasty experience in Britain,” she says. “Anyone who has spoken out about illegal immigration has had to have protection and anyone who has spoken out illegal immigration and mass immigration has had their characters thrown through the mud”. She doxed herself, she says, by putting her address on public record and TripAdvisor customers posted fake reviews of her B&B. “Some of them were funny.” But it was hard to get them taken down, she says, which, when you consider the misery some migrants suffer, sounds slightly self-obsessed. Even so, “This should be a referendum about mass migration per se. Nobody has ever never had a vote on it. People are frightened and people are frightened to talk about it”. In her guesthouse, Blaiklock sounds as isolated as a woman can be.

I go to the Daddy Dragon rally, which is filled with people on mobility scooters wearing the bright yellow sweatshirts of the English Constitution Party and listening to a history of England, courtesy of Daddy at the microphone and the enormous copies of Magna Carta which travel with him. Some people are here merely because their friends are here. They sit calmly at the café drinking beer. There is even a 75^th birthday party for an ex-soldier called Nobby bolted on to the rally. The groups combine, fall apart, combine again. Nobby shows me photographs of his father, who was also a soldier, and I see a vaccine appointment card gleaming in his wallet. Splitter.

But there are true believers too. “Even though you are English, living in England, you are not actually English living in England,” a man tells me. They are all hungry to be listened to, and courteous, because they are used to be being despised. “You are just a British citizen living in Britain which actually makes no sense because there are four countries in the United Kingdom,” he says. His eyes widen, as if in pain. “I’m not Scottish and I’m not from Wales and I’m not from Northern Ireland. Everyone else has their culture pushed to the front and we’re not even allowed to talk about it in case you offend someone who’s just come over.”

I also meet a man with two greyhounds who runs a group called Mad Mick’s Conspiracies — alongside his own splinter group Mad Mick’s Resistance — who calls Covid, “the PLANdemic. None of it is real.” Why does he feel failed by conventional politics?” It’s in the words,” he says, as if giving me the key to a great secret, “they tell you themselves. The Left-wing and the Right-wing are two wings of the same bird. So, it doesn’t matter which one you vote for. You’re still getting the same bird in power. I don’t vote. I will never vote again.”

Further reading

The making of Essex Man

By Simon Heffer

“We’re the last indigenous group that doesn’t have a parliament,” says the next from his mobility scooter. “We just need to get England recognised as a country, to get us sorted out so we can get some stalwarts of the community in parliament: every day working people like Graham, myself, yourself, anybody.” What he says is not extraordinary. This is the common disconnect between those who have power, and those who feel they have none. But that he weeps continually as he says it is extraordinary. “The politicians are there for themselves,” he says through his tears. “You pull my strings. I’ll pull your strings. You just can’t warrant it. We need to get in, take our parliament back, get our people right and look after ourselves. And get rid of the mainstream politicians, the judges and get them starting thinking English again. Because there’s a lot of people who believe in England.” I don’t know if he is aware that he is calling for an end to parliamentary democracy, and it will not be as sunny as he thinks. If he is, he does it weeping.

At the end of the rally, Kay Shemirani, a former nurse, now struck off, speaks her combination of conspiracy theory and health advice. “They think you’re stupid,” she says. “We are the slaves, the slaves in debt. A whistle-blower right from the very top [of the NHS] told me, ‘They are doing black magic, they refer to us as toilet rolls’”. I have been here an hour, and it doesn’t even sound strange anymore. This is a parallel universe, though it shares some elements with mine. I believe in their powerlessness, and their grief. I just don’t think it was immigration that brought them here.

I also meet the remnants of Ukip, sullen and dispirited. They have erected a gazebo in a park and have placed Ukip mugs and Ukip badges on a table. Vote Leave says one badge. Take Back Control says another. This is a campaign from 2015, when they came third in the general election by percentage points with 12.6%, and they know it. Some of them are self-aware and ask me, privately, how the respectable element of Ukip can divorce itself from the racism I hear that day.

The Ukip candidate, Steve Laws, is slender and pitted. He was politicised by illegal immigration. He likes to stand at the edge of Channel in Folkestone, where he lives, making notes of the number of migrant boats in the English Channel: “8,500 in the year 2020; in the year 2021 it was 28,500. This year I am predicting at least 50-60,000 will arrive, all at the taxpayers’ expense and all placed into hotels and then into social housing”.

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Is Farage's Reform Party onto something?

By Gavin Haynes

Laws is a painter and decorator. “I believe immigration should be controlled because otherwise it affects the working class and ultimately housing becomes an issue,” he says, “jobs become an issue, wages remain low.”

I have followed Ukip for years and I have never seen them so bereft. It is, among other things, an education in getting your heart’s desire. When I find Laws at the end of the day, and ask him how it went, he says, “Nobody had much to say, not the people we met today anyway. A lot of people I don’t think are going to vote. But we don’t know until the ballot day.” Even so, “I haven’t been shouted at or abused which I kind of expected if I’m honest, being Ukip.”

Laws is an aggrieved man spending his life staring at the Channel when the true cause of his misery is behind him. I think that about all of them except Pilley, who speaks only for himself. The issues Laws grapples with — failing public services, housing, wages, the gap between rich and poor, the sheer disconnect — are not invented or untrue. They are real and they will get worse. Laws is right about everything, it seems to me, except the solution. That is, he sees the crime scene clearly, but he has no idea who the murderer is.

It is easy to laugh at Laws and Daddy Dragon and Mad Mick. I have laughed. I went to Ukip conference in 2004 and laughed. All the correspondents did. We laughed at their clothing and their speech and their manners. We laughed at their earnestness. We laughed at their class. We laughed at how they didn’t know how to conceal themselves for us, and how they always got everything wrong. We printed the laughter in newspapers, and we congratulated ourselves on the quality of our satire, and assumed they existed for nothing other than our satire. You know, of course, what happened next.

The pundits have been left scratching their heads, but really, they shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the story of the last eleven years is of one effing crisis after another — and the Tories clearly thrive on it. Don’t forget that their decade of dominance began with a crisis, not a victory. In 2010 the general election produced a hung parliament. Yet in the space of five days, the Tories negotiated the first coalition government since the war and carried on regardless. 

Since then, there have been many more crises, from austerity and the Scottish referendum, to Brexit and the pandemic. These are crises in the medical sense of the word — the point at which things could go either way for the patient. Any one of them could have sunk the Tories, but didn’t. Indeed, it was a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. At each election since 2010, the Conservative share of the vote has gone up.

Of course, it’s not that Conservative governments haven’t taken damage over the last eleven years — just ask David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. But the other parties have always come off worse — as Nick Clegg or Jeremy Corbyn could confirm.

Conservatives aren’t supposed to like change — and especially not disruptive change. As Lord Salisbury put it, “whatever happens will be for the worse, therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” But that pessimistic, mistrustful worldview is perhaps why the Tories are better prepared to cope with disruption than their opponents.

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Serfs don't vote Tory

By Peter Franklin

In her 2007 polemic, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein came up with the concept of “disaster capitalism.” It’s an answer to an awkward question for the Left: why does capitalism keep on winning? It’s not despite the damage it does, she argued, but because of it: whether a disaster is natural or manmade, there’s always some corporation ready and willing to exploit the situation.

It’s a self-serving narrative — a universal cop-out for the failures of the Left, but it does contain a grain of truth. Whether in economics or any other sphere, there are those who are temperamentally suited to succeed through disaster. Perhaps we need a similar concept — let’s call it “crisis conservatism” — to explain the last eleven years of British politics.

Of course, the EFFing crisis isn’t over yet. It might have only just begun. The Conservative Party Chairman, Oliver Dowden, has promised that there’ll be turkey on the table this Christmas. But if there isn’t, Boris’s luck might just turn. The Prime Minister’s enemies are salivating at the prospect. Andrew Neil can barely contain himself: “big government requires big competence, something Johnson and his lacklustre Cabinet clearly lack. That is likely to become even more apparent during a winter of scarcity, disruption and rising prices…”

But in their impatience to see “BoJo the Clown” get his comeuppance, his critics are missing a more subtle threat to his grip on power. If the shelves stay full, the lights stay on and Covid is contained, then the political agenda will shift to this country’s long-term problems instead.

For a government used to short-term crisis management, that could prove fatal. Indeed, it is when a country emerges from a period of upheaval — and can finally see beyond the next emergency — that voters are most likely to demand a new direction. The three elections that defined Britain’s post-war history took place in 1945, 1979 and 1997 — after the Second World War, the Winter of Discontent and Black Wednesday respectively. In each case, victory went to the leader offering the surest promise of change: Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. 

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Unfortunately for the Tories, their leader now and for the foreseeable future is Boris Johnson. In his recent profile of Angela Merkel, Jeremy Cliffe describes the two basic kinds of leader: the gestalter who shapes the course of events and the verwalter who merely manages them. For the most part, Merkel is an archetypical verwalter. The trouble with Boris is that he’s neither. He needs a category of his own. I’d suggest strassenmusiker — because he’s the consummate busker. He turns up, improvises and moves on. It’s a skill-set ideally suited to the politics (if not the governance) of crisis. But what this government needs now is a gestalter — a Thatcher or a Blair who can both articulate and implement a serious, long-term vision. 

Boris would argue that he already has one: the levelling-up agenda. His government is committed to tackling the overlapping issues of regional inequality and stagnant wages. But, so far, he’s only defined the problem, not the solution.

The Prime Minister needs to plug that gap in his big speech tomorrow, because if he doesn’t then others will try to do it for him. Neil O’Brien, a minister in the Department for Levelling Up, defines the agenda as “boosting living standards”, “improving public services” and “restoring local pride”. His boss — Michael Gove — has been talking about a “high value, free enterprise, low tax economy”. Is that the same thing? It doesn’t sound like it — at least not without proper explanation.

More dangerous than these attempts to be helpful is the threat posed by the free market Right of the party — who don’t believe in Boris’s agenda at all. We’ve already had Cabinet members like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng banging the drum for free trade and low taxes. They don’t have much to offer apart from re-heated Thatcherism, but nature abhors a vacuum. All the more reason for Boris to fill it before somebody else does.

Potentially, the biggest threat of all is from Rishi Sunak. Judging by his conference speech yesterday, the Chancellor is triangulating between the Prime Minister and the free marketeers. He’s still on board with the PM’s agenda, but if he feels the need to compete with Truss for the Thatcherite mantle, then that will change. As Sunak made clear in his speech, tax cuts have to be paid for — which would mean less money for levelling-up.

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Why I'll never vote Tory again

By Giles Fraser

Boris Johnson is in danger of losing the initiative. Not to Labour, but to his own colleagues. He must therefore dial back the crisis conservatism and fight for the long-term solutions to this country’s long-term problems. Indeed, he must confront the economic libertarians in his party over the failure of their agenda. After all, they’ve had their chance. They’ve had almost everything they could have wished for — from a globalised economy to the mass migration of cheap labour. Corporate taxation is low, the unions are weak, credit is inexpensive and executive pay unrestrained. 

So given all that supply-side goodness, where’s the growth they promised us? Where’s the prosperity? Far from stimulating enterprise, the uncontrolled flow of labour and capital has undermined it. Investment and productivity have tanked — and no wonder. If there’s not enough consumer demand in the economy because workers aren’t paid enough, then why would companies risk their money on developing better products and services?

What levelling-up really means is fixing a broken economic model — and Boris should not be afraid to say so. The time to deal with root causes of our national malaise has come. He cannot rely on another crisis to distract our attention. 

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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Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

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.

“It is a new dawn, is it not?” Boris in victory couldn’t help himself, regurgitating the 1997 remark with which Blair proclaimed his own era. Laughing at Blair’s messianic pretension, throwing it back in Labour’s shocked, defeated faces.

Boris has a talent, shared by no other politician, of being able simultaneously to poke fun at his overblown Churchillian rhetorical style, without undermining the seriousness of its message. It’s (one reason) why he drives his opponents to insanity – did you see that sliver of malice, Alastair Campbell, snarling about “Johnson” on Friday morning? He hates that we think of the PM as “Boris”. Snarl away, Campbell, for all the good it’ll do your shrivelled, impoverished politics. Snarl right off, in fact, and close the door behind you.

Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

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The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.

Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.

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By Paul Embery

Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?

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By Paul Embery

And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?

Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.

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The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet. Not quite what Hardie had in mind, but there you go. I love Keith, of course: I’m only just beginning to understand why.

There’s so much more to be written – how to deal with Sturgeon, the BBC, the re-centering of power out of London and into the North, how to renew our misdirected Academy … but that’s not for today, and probably not for me.

Today, I’m just a guy who’s feeling humble, but proud. Proud to live in a nation where working-class and middle-class, North and South, stood in solidarity against a common threat.

Humbled to be married to a man called Keith, who saw Corbynism for the wicked filth it is, and so did what he does every day of his life: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. To keep Barnet, our home, safe. Keith (who will be mad at me if he sees this) would probably call it his “duty”; an inability to comprehend that word is just one more reason why Labour deserves its extinction.

But while there is a case to be made for an amnesty, it certainly shouldn’t be a general one — definitely not in the wake of a Windrush scandal that has, for now, partly paralysed Britain’s internal protections against illegal immigration.

There are many different kinds of illegal immigrant among the estimated one million (well, anything between 500,000 and 1.5m) currently in the country. There are people who came in with a false identity card or passport and live in the mainstream (working, paying  tax, using public services); people who came in legally but have out-stayed their visa, they too may be living in the mainstream undetected by the authorities; there are failed asylum seekers, who can then be subdivided into those known to the authorities (about 80,000) and those who have gone off the radar; and finally those who entered clandestinely on a lorry or boat and remain undetected. The latter often survive in a twilight world in parts of inner-city Britain where exploitation and modern slavery flourishes.

There are also many different kinds of amnesty. There is a general one, intended to encourage everyone here without status to come forward; or there are those defined by category, such as failed asylum-seeking families with young children that are hard to return; and there are those defined by length of time in the country, such as anyone who has been here more than 10 years, who does not have a criminal record.

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The Spectator is not clear about what kind of amnesty it wants — although it seems to want something short of a general one. It says: “A common sense line can be drawn between those who have lived here for several years, and those who have not put down roots, who can be removed in a way that deters illegal immigration.” In principle, this is not a stupid idea because the reality is that many illegal immigrants are never going to leave. It is, in an era of human rights law, very hard to remove them, especially those who have been here for a few years and can claim protection under the right to family life. Back in 2004 (under Labour), there were 21,435 forced removals; but in the year to June 2019, that had fallen to below 3,000 (excluding the 5,203 Foreign National Offenders).

Given these circumstances, there are two ways to reduce the stock of illegal immigrants — some form of limited and controlled amnesty for the hardest to remove groups or a so-called hostile environment that makes life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they choose to self-deport.

The sensible option is a combination of the two. Labour initiated a more rigorous system of status checking (and first used the term hostile environment) towards the end of its period in office but Theresa May as Home Secretary after 2010 gave it more teeth. This means that, in the absence of ID cards, the favoured status-checking system in continental Europe, people who have recently moved to the UK have to prove their status for jobs, renting flats, opening bank accounts, using the NHS and so on — with big fines for employers and landlords who are caught employing or renting to illegal immigrants.

For a while it looked as if the hostile environment might be working, as the number of voluntary returns climbed steeply from below 4,000 in 2004 to a peak of nearly 29,000 in 2016 (though better data collection may also have been a factor behind the rise). Partly as a consequence of last year’s Windrush scandal, both enforced and voluntary returns are now falling sharply, enforced returns are just over 8,000 a year (but most of these are Foreign National Offenders who are removed direct from prison) and voluntary returns have fallen to just over 13,000.

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Why is the Windrush scandal casting such a shadow? A quick reminder of what happened. More than 1m people came to live in Britain between the late 1940s and the early 1970s in the great post-colonial migration, almost all of whom were granted Indefinite Leave to Remain in 1971. In some cases, they did not acquire the documents to prove it, and in particular the poorer people in this group never acquired a British passport because they could not afford foreign holidays. For several decades this did not matter until, especially after 2010, the UK changed tack from the relative openness of the Labour years to a much more controlled border and a more concerted attempt to tackle illegal immigration.

This is when some of those people who were here legally, especially those of Caribbean background, found themselves being treated as illegal immigrants. More than 80 were actually deported, several hundred more were seriously affected — refused entry into the country after going abroad, lost jobs, refused NHS treatment — though nobody knows the exact number. Thanks to a Guardian campaign that placed this injustice on the national agenda in April last year, Amber Rudd had to resign as Home Secretary.

It is fair to say that this was an egregious error stemming from an over-zealous application of the striving for greater control symbolised by Theresa May’s period as Home Secretary. There are all sorts of more specific reasons for the mistake: the loss of historical memory in the Home Office, a “tick-box” culture being applied by people too junior to be taking these decisions, perhaps also the lack of people of relevant ethnic minority backgrounds at the top of the department who might, through family experience, have recognised that the Home Office was wrongly classifying a whole category of legal British residents.

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But there is a very powerful account from the Left (summarised in the recent book, The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman who covered the story for The Guardian), which states that the mistreatment of the Windrush victims was not a mistake at all but a deliberate policy, the inevitable result of a draconian attempt to reduce immigration, combined with an inhuman system of internal status checks, all driven by racism in both the Home Office and the wider society. The report on lessons of Windrush by Wendy Williams, expected early next year, is likely to reinforce a version of this account.

The policy conclusion from this account is that the hostile environment should in effect be scrapped and almost all forced deportations (apart from criminals) be stopped too. This is where we are currently heading. One Home Office official told me that once someone gets into the country illegally, their chances of being deported are now close to zero. Moreover, the chances of them leaving voluntarily are also close to zero because the hostile environment, apart from employer checks, has also been largely suspended, meaning that information about suspected illegal immigrants is no longer handed over by landlords, banks or NHS officials to the Home Office. Survival is now far easier for illegal immigrants.

The Windrush scandal is not a reason to scrap the current system — which is really a cumbersome UK version of an ID card system for non-citizens — but to make it work better and make sure, with the introduction of a Home Office ombudsman and other such measures, that the Windrush scandal can never be repeated. And if status checks tend to be demanded more from people who do not look or sound like the British majority then the simple answer is to make everyone submit to a status check when taking a job or renting a property.

Immigration restrictions are always most likely to be aimed at people from poorer countries, and people from such countries tend not to be white. If that makes immigration restrictions racist then the Home Office is racist. But it is also worth recalling that the largest national category turned away at the border every year are Americans (mainly white) and the top three countries for forced returns in 2019 were Romania, Albania and Poland.

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The Home Office’s completely legitimate attempt to bear down on the scourge of illegal immigration has, in effect, been kicked into touch. The Immigration Enforcement department of the Home Office employs nearly 5,000 people and spends almost £500m a year and parts of it are now paralysed by the post-Windrush trauma. Many of the decent people who work in it have been made to feel dirty about the important public service they perform. Too many of them are leaving.

This is why all talk of an amnesty has to be treated with great caution. Britain is, and will remain, an internationally open “hub” country inviting large annual flows across its borders. There were 142m arrivals into the UK last year. About 120m of those people are UK and EU citizens who have the right to live and work here, but 20m are people who do not have that automatic right and 3m of them came in on time-limited visas. The temptation, especially for some people from poorer countries, to overstay a visa is considerable before even mentioning the tens of thousands who arrive every year clandestinely on lorries or boats and a similar number who have their asylum claims turned down but are seldom removed.

There is a constant struggle by Immigration Enforcement to keep these numbers down and prevent the illegal population running out of control. So now is not the time for Boris Johnson to make a flamboyant gesture on amnesty, much as his sister-in-law might like it (his brother, Jo, is married to Amelia Gentleman). A general amnesty is a terrible idea and would be a huge incentive to illegal immigration at a time when the policing of the internal border has been severely weakened.

Clearly in the longer term, when the Home Office has recovered from the Windrush trauma, we need a sensible combination of quiet regularisation — I would favour an amnesty for anyone who has been here over 10 years — plus a restored hostile environment (with proper safeguards to ensure no repeat of the Windrush scandal), and deportation, enforced if necessary, for those who have no right to be here.

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It also makes sense to bribe people more generously to leave. Some of those funds that the Department for International Development sits on could be usefully employed helping illegal immigrants to return home with the promise of support to start a small business or fund a course of study or something similar. Many illegal immigrants are among the most energetic and ambitious citizens of poorer countries and while it is understandable that they want to short circuit the historical process by jumping straight into the rich world, their fellow citizens badly need them to help their countries catch up.

Of course, there is one simple policy idea that would have prevented the Windrush scandal, would deter illegal immigration, and would simplify relations between the individual and the state—the introduction of a national system of citizen identification (ID cards in old language). That is something worth putting in the Tory manifesto.

A version of this piece appears in the next issue of Standpoint

Jonathan Swift said you couldn’t reason a man out of a position he hadn’t been reasoned into in the first place, and this is why most politics is tribal, not rational.

So it is with me, though I have built a reasonably sound superstructure of reason on the bedrock of my immovable love of certain, unchanging things. What has always, ultimately, been my politics was absorbed like the lore of a tribe, not taught to me or even suggested to me, or much discussed — just known, very deep down, as essential and desirable. Every political organisation I have ever joined has been, by comparison, cardboard, fraudulent and unsatisfactory, like a cheap hamburger.

For me, my politics came as a succession of heavy, deeply moving images of what sort of country I lived in — serious, warlike, chilly, full of the potential of power or even violence but, in reality, often almost silent. The sleek, fierce warships I saw at Rosyth aged, perhaps, three; the heroic engineering of the Forth Railway Bridge; the compact, hissing power of steam locomotives, all under dark skies, and all in a cold climate.

And then, I piled on top of that the world I met in various preparatory schools, one of them a choir school: the chilly beauty of the choir at evensong, the potent silence of a cathedral holding its breath between prayers, the arches reaching upwards into shadow, the strange and alluring mixture of magnificence and austerity that Protestantism brought. “Father, hear the prayer we offer. Not for ease, that prayer shall be, but for strength, that we may ever live our lives courageously.”

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And, from there to Tennyson and Newbolt. Once I knew, almost by heart, Tennyson’s long poem about Sir Richard Grenville’s little ‘Revenge’ sailing into the midst of a Spanish fleet which towered over her, and fighting to the very end, against appalling odds, to destroy those “Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain”. And Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum — with its legend that in England’s peril the drum would sound and Sir Francis would rise from his salty sea grave, his hammock his shroud, “slung atween the roundshot in Nombre Dios Bay” and return to “drum them up the Channel, as we drummed them long ago” — made more real to me by living in deep Devon lanes a short walk from Buckland Abbey, where the alleged drum still hung.

A little later, I was allowed to stand on the very spot where Nelson had fallen on the deck of HMS Victory, at Trafalgar in 1805, and was not spared a visit to the dark place far below, where he had died, as the surgeons did their savage work on wounded seamen all around him, on a deck painted red so the blood would not show so much.

Then along came Macaulay, and Horatius at the Bridge and “How can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?” How indeed? It remains a good question, though I no longer hope at all for the chance to see if it is true.

“Britons sing!” I and my schoolfellows on our West Country hilltop would pipe to the tune of Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary, as the Atlantic rains dashed against the windowpanes. “Britons, sing, that all the world shall know we are free! Trumpets! Fling the Challenge over the boundless sea!”

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Note that part about freedom. We really were brought up to believe we were the freest people on earth. We were proud of that, proud that our police were unarmed and our courts were fair, even when we had only a faint idea of what these things really meant. There was something after that about “Christian service and true chivalry”, but in many searches since I have never been able to find the original words of this song, which I may well have been one of the very last people to sing, and which may well now be illegal.

We were not in the least embarrassed by these sentiments. The dormitories in which we slept were named after seadogs, the more senior, the more majestic. I can still remember the order of them, from Blake through to Nelson. We had not heard the word “Profumo”, not yet, and we had been mostly protected from the implications of Suez, though I sensed a weakening in authority, of which I was quick to take advantage in a thoroughly Leninist way (“Insert the bayonet. If you meet steel, withdraw and try elsewhere. If you meet mush, push harder.”).

I remember also, for the first time, holding a golden Sovereign in my hand and being troubled by the thought that a society in which such coins had (almost unbelievably) been normal daily currency might have been better in some ways than one which relied on scruffy rectangles of paper. I longed for the solidity which my tribal upbringing seemed to rely on, but which was visibly crumbling around me.

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Cuba killed my communism

By James Bloodworth

Avoiding my headmaster’s incessant and urgent suggestions that I should expose myself to fresh air and exercise, of which I already had quite enough in my view, I hid from sight in the unfrequented school library, where nobody ever looked for anyone (we were expected to grow up to be naval officers or gentleman farmers, not intellectuals). And so I absorbed a whole version of history through the unequalled cartoons of Sir Bernard Partridge.

It was then that I became quite sure that we had lost a world of immense stability and peace in 1914, and that what had come after (and what I now lived in) was a shabby, gimcrack imitation of it, lit by a harsh and glaring light, and invaded by tinkling music and braying voices. And I have spent much of my life being told I think the 1950s were a golden age. The 1950s? That tatty, threadbare, apologetic, smelly era — golden?

So I was not a Tory, or even a conservative: I was by nature and upbringing an actual reactionary — as it happened, the perfect preparation for my long later years as a homicidal Bolshevik. The same almost berserk passions were engaged (Bolshevism is thoroughly Edwardian in so many ways) in pursuit of a distant, supposedly beautiful ideal. Since the end of that, I have never really been able to stomach the insipid potions of supposed ‘mainstream’ politics, which, set beside the deep passions of my reactionary and revolutionary phases, are much as non-alcoholic lager would be after a generous measure of Calvados. Why even bother?

Someone should have taken me in hand, I suppose, and given me a normal modern upbringing, all about shiny new hospitals, equality, and the United Nations. But they came too late. I had already heard the distant trumpet call of a much more seductive, much older world view. And I am glad of that. I wouldn’t have missed any of it, and if now I can laugh cheerfully at the absurdities of our politics, tiny figures scuttling through cavernous halls built for much greater men, it is because for a few short, dreamy years I was given a glimpse of a lost past, just before it vanished forever. And from then on I knew what I liked.

All political philosophies come with sacred ideas, for which all else must be sacrificed. The Left uses accusations of -ism or -phobia to wall off areas it considers beyond the pale, and while the Right likes to imagine it is above such repressive strictures on debate, this is not quite true. For conservatives, ‘growth’ is a sacred idea, in much the same way as racism and other forms of prejudice are for the Left, and the result has been a steady shrinking of acceptable policy space, with social conservatism giving ground at every turn.

Since Thatcher broke the unions, and started the long march of privatisation through the utilities, conservatism and the free market have been treated as essentially the same thing. In mainstream political discourse, the accepted proxy for a healthy free market is GDP growth. In popular terms, to be conservative is to be for growth. Anything that might impede growth is therefore not conservative.

A prime example would be policies that encouraged — or at least didn’t financially penalise — parents to stay at home with their children. This is off-limits for modern conservatives, because it would incentivise millions of people to spend their days doing ‘economically inactive’ things like caring for the old and young and not contributing to GDP. Instead, modern conservatives mumble about feminism and the ‘gender pay gap’, and implement policies to get all those layabouts out earning and spending.

Today, three-quarters of mothers with dependent children work, and only 1.8 million women under 65 are ‘economically inactive’. But now the decades-long growth bonanza triggered by the movement of women from the home to the workplace is tapering off. So Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has set its sights on the retired, no doubt hoping for another growth boost from swelling the ranks of the employed, as well as the savings on state pension payouts.

But who will replace all those older people caring for their grandchildren while both parents work? Modern conservatives can add the cost of all that paid childcare to the growth figures, and congratulate themselves on their stewardship of the country, even as the reciprocal obligations and benefits of family life attenuate ever further.

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Once upon a time, conservatism valued home ownership as a way to help young people plan for the future, put down roots, start families and play a full part in the social fabric. But in the interests of growth modern conservatives have encouraged us to treat housing as an asset class, leveraged for loan collateral or snapped up by overseas buyers for investment. Those who can buy move house every few years to ‘climb the housing ladder’, meaning they never put down roots or participate in local civic life. Prices have skyrocketed, closing out the young.

Over 40% of the social housing flogged at a discount under Right to Buy is now in the hands of rent-seeking landlords. Build more social housing? No, conservatives now argue, the free market should sort it out, driving jobs and growth. Chalk up all the money borrowed and spent against rising homeowner equity to growth, along with rising rental spending and of course house prices themselves. Meanwhile, a generation of young people gives up on home ownership, moulders in grim flat-shares, and vows never to vote Conservative. Who can blame them?

Once upon a time, conservatives saw us as custodians of the landscape and rural ways of life. After all, what could be more conservative than conservation? But for farms to become efficient, drive down prices and contribute to growth they must agglomerate into ever larger agribusinesses with minimal staff, using methods that decimate wildlife, degrade millennia of topsoil and turn varied, life-filled rural vistas into monoculture tundras. Laid-off farm workers can get zero hours jobs in Amazon warehouses, farm cottages can be sold for bankers’ second homes. We can import seasonal fruit pickers. When even that stops being economical, modern conservatives can loosen planning regulations and create jobs and growth concreting over the fields to house all the people they imported to bypass flatlining productivity and drive consumption and growth.

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By Peter Franklin

Once upon a time, conservatives thought that government should be democratically accountable to the electorate, and that a nation-state was the largest scale at which a legitimate demos could be convened. But as we are witnessing more or less in real time, when faced with the unenviable task of choosing between growth and democratic accountability or the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, a significant number of modern conservatives now prioritise growth.

Tories get caricatured as heartless, punitive plutocrats fixated on crime, cuts and the wealthy, and it is easy to see why, since more or less every other aspect of conservatism is hamstrung by being subordinate to growth. Modern conservatives can’t even touch the classic conservative topic of immigration because reducing the flow will harm growth. The result, as exhibited by every Tory Home Secretary in recent history, is a policy of holding the door open with one hand while making rude gestures with the other.

Immigrants, it is implied, should move here en masse, to plump our consumption figures and wipe the backsides of all the old people whose offspring can’t afford time off work to care for them. But those useful growth-boosters should all also feel jolly grateful and possibly a bit guilty about being graciously permitted to do so. It is an incoherent position, not to mention insulting to immigrants, who must find the doublethink bewildering.

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There is a great deal of merit in the argument that free markets and economic growth have overall been a force for good in the world. But today, the benefits of growth accrue to an ever smaller proportion of the population. And while Thatcherism bet on the persistence of ‘traditional moral values’ to provide a bulwark against the disruptive power of markets, the decades since her accession have shown Thatcherite market reforms to be increasingly in conflict with Thatcherite morals.

Nowhere has this battle for the soul of conservatism been clearer than in the Brexit referendum. Led by Conservatives, the Remain campaign hectored the masses about the risk to growth and the economy, and ended up losing to millions who have not benefited from growth for some time, and to whom social and cultural matters are now more important than the economy.

Once upon a time, conservatism appealed to the majority. But modern conservatism’s sine qua non — a commitment to growth at all costs — benefits an ever-smaller proportion of the population, undermines the environment, impoverishes rural life, picks at the social fabric, erodes family life and threatens the foundations of democracy and the nation-state. The Conservative Party’s erstwhile base values all these things, and is beginning to realise modern conservatives do not share this view.

Conservatism must choose. It must either call itself something other than conservative, or it must de-prioritise growth. The alternative is that there will soon not be a great deal left worth conserving, not least of conservatism itself.

It proposes to withhold payments to the EU, slash overseas aid and scrap HS2 high-speed rail in order to deliver £200 billion of investment to regions outside London, improve transport links and broadband across the country and scrap business rates for new firms outside the capital. It is casting itself, as Freddie Sayers noted, “as the party of the regions, pitted against an over-dominant capital”.

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The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth.

The problem for the main parties is that this narrative resonates. Whisper it quietly: the Brexit Party’s offer is not a bad reply to the referendum result. The Leave vote was always anchored as much in regional inequalities as conservative Euroscepticism.

Such policies are also not a million miles away from proposals that have been put forward by think-tanks such as IPPR North, the Social Mobility Commission and former prime minister, Gordon Brown, who rightly suggested that we should have a royal commission to think more seriously about those regional divides. So why is it the populists and not the main parties who have translated this discussion into concrete proposals?

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result.

The seats most conducive to the Brexit Party can be identified by using data that I compiled with Caitlin Milazzo for a book on UKIP, which turned out to be an extremely good predictor of how Farage’s party performed in 2015. We have subsequently demonstrated how there is a strong relationship between support for the two, and so the data paints a pretty reliable picture of where the Brexit Party will strike a chord.

The picture highlights peripheral, unheard Britain – towns, communities and neighbourhoods which have been neglected and ignored for decades. There are typically larger numbers of working-class residents, pensioners, white voters and people with few or no formal qualifications. Most have been sidelined by the economic transformation of Britain over the past 30 years and battered by the winds of globalisation. There has been very little inward investment.

They include coastal communities such as Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and Boston and Skegness, and then pass through struggling communities in Wales like Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil, up to Ashfield in Eastern England and into Blackpool and Sunderland in the North. Spend one-hour in these seats and the question of why so many people turned away from the main parties to vote for UKIP, and then Brexit, is not a hard one to answer. These are the areas that are suffering from a ‘double whammy’: few people with skills and qualifications but also few local opportunities.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Many of the Brexit Party’s most favourable seats are currently in Labour hands. Of the 20 most favourable, no fewer than 16 were won by Labour in 2017; of the 50 most favourable, 36 are held by Labour. They include seats such as Yvette Cooper’s seat of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and other northern Labour seats such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Wentworth and Dearne, and Easington. In many of these places, Labour’s MPs have large majorities, which have been built up over many years. But this is not the case in all of them.

There are also seats where the margins are closer and where a strong Brexit Party vote could easily make life far more complicated for both Labour and the Conservatives. There are, for example, northern and more marginal seats that should normally be in Conservative sights, such as Ashfield, Great Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Dudley North. Even if the Brexit Party were to only poll around the 10% mark this would seriously complicate the Tory task of capturing these Labour seats.

Nor is Farage starting from scratch. He is already well-known in these areas. Only four years ago, at the 2015 general election, UKIP won only one seat (in Clacton) but finished second in 120 constituencies, 44 of which went to Labour. UKIP easily surpassed 20% of the vote in lots of Labour seats without really trying or targeting them, seats such Barnsley East, Don Valley, Doncaster Central, and Houghton and Sunderland South.

Farage’s relationship with these places was rekindled when, at the European elections this year, many of them put the Brexit Party well ahead of Labour. His party humiliated Labour in its oldest heartlands – Ashfield, Redcar, Merthyr Tydfil, Bolsover and Hartlepool. It won all but a few of the 39 districts in England’s northwest, every district in the northeast and more than doubled Labour’s share of the vote in Wales.

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How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

This is not to say that the Brexit Party is about to capture dozens of Labour seats – but the challenge to Labour from Farage at the next election will be stronger than the challenge presented in 2015

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

The claim is not without evidence. In 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives appealed directly to Brexit voters, hoping to offset losses in Remainia by capturing pro-Brexit seats in Labour’s heartlands. In the end, however, the former happened while the latter never really materialised. The Tories captured just five seats from Labour in places where a majority of people had voted to Leave the EU.

While a handful of Conservative candidates suddenly found themselves representing the good people of Walsall North, Stoke South, Mansfield, Middlesbrough South and Copeland this was simply not enough when set alongside Conservative losses in Remain voting areas.

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The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

This time around, a Prime Minister Johnson or Hunt will need to find a far better way of appealing to these areas, otherwise they risk serious losses in both Remainia and Leave Land. This means grappling with the fact that many voters in these seats are ‘cross-pressured’. In their hearts, they agree with the Tories on the cultural issues of Brexit and immigration, and also crime. But in their heads, they agree with Corbyn’s economic radicalism and his promise to do more to redistribute an economy which many feel is rigged against them. Talking only about Brexit is not enough; voters also want to know how this moment will be used to make our society fairer.

Theresa May is familiar with this problem. Many voters liked her on culture but were deeply sceptical when it came to economics. So, while the Conservative vote increased a bit, so too did Labour’s, which was a disappointment to May and her advisors.

So, in short, the next Tory leader needs to go much further on economics than they are probably prepared to. In a world where the vast majority of Brexit Party voters earn less than £40,000 per year, tax cuts for people on £50-80k are not going to cut it.

Farage may have set out his stall, but there has been remarkably little during the Conservative leadership campaign to suggest that either candidate, or the Tory Party as a whole, truly grasps what is needed to appeal to Brexit Party Britain – that place where voters share a profound sense of economic insecurity and pessimism. These voters are looking for a far more radical domestic policy agenda and one that is chiefly focused on economic fairness, not on how to build a Singapore-on-Thames.

More from this author

The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

With an election looming, the Tories need to come up with a counter offer for Brexit Britain and one that goes further than ‘we will deliver Brexit’. And do it fast. If they fail to do so, then even a mediocre Brexit Party vote could cause major problems for incumbent Conservative MPs who are sitting on small majorities – like Johnny Mercer in Plymouth Moor View, Lucy Allan in Telford, Amber Rudd in Hastings and Rye or Simon Clarke in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.

Other Tory seats that were gained in 2017, have wafer-thin majorities and are favourable to the Brexit Party like Thurrock, Southport, Aberconwy and Southampton Itchen could fall in the same way. The Tories will need to find a new way of appealing to these areas, not just by delivering Brexit but also going further on the economic axis.

Meanwhile, unless Labour retains its relationship with its traditional working-class voters then it could find that its majorities in pro-Leave seats are further whittled down as Opposition voters coalesce around the Brexit Party.

In short, as British politics continues to fragment, the future of the main parties depends on how they seek to renew their relationship with the Britain that they left behind.