In historical terms, this is a striking shift. For four decades, the Labour Party was the chief Eurosceptic party in British politics — far more so than the Conservative Party. Every Labour leader between Clement Attlee and Neil Kinnock had expressed opposition to joining (or support for leaving) the European Economic Community (EEC) at some point as a frontbench Labour MP. The first truly pro-European Labour leader was John Smith, who defied a three-line whip in 1972 to vote for the Conservatives’ European Communities Act. Pro-Europeanism was viewed as a Right-wing project — an attempt to constitutionalise capitalist principles in ways that would curtail the power of socialist governments to plan their national economies as they saw fit.

In the late Eighties, Labour finally abandoned its opposition to EEC membership, though the change was driven more by a response to repeated domestic defeats than a principled embrace of the European project. The promise of a “social Europe” was regarded by many Labour MPs as a chimera, but it at least offered some alternative to Thatcherism. So the party came to accept supranational legal limits on British governments, hoping the EU could mitigate the excesses of Conservative rule. Yet this Mephistophelian deal meant placing limits on future Labour governments, too. Policy tools which had once been fundamental to previous governments’ socialist programmes — trade policy, currency management, state aid and nationalisation, and capital and labour controls — were all sacrificed in exchange for the promise of minimum labour standards and regional development funds delivered through European institutions, rather than Whitehall.

Over time, more stridently pro-EU voices grew within the Labour ranks, but there was a sizeable contingent of Labour MPs even during the New Labour years who were sceptical of EU membership. Few outwardly advocated leaving the bloc, believing it to be too difficult or simply not politically feasible, but many argued against deeper integration, opposed the single currency, and raised concerns about European judges limiting labour rights. One of them, of course, was Jeremy Corbyn.

Even during the 2016 referendum itself, there was more openness to the Labour Leave argument. It’s not a coincidence that a third of people who voted for Ed Miliband to be prime minister then voted to leave the EU. For the most part, it was only after the Brexit vote that Remain voters started reacting with varying levels of horror and disgust to the idea that someone on the Left could vote for Leave. I have always found this viewpoint rather perplexing. My own arguments for leaving the EU were rooted in three core principles: democracy, socialism, and internationalism. They are both the reason I am a Labour supporter and why I was — and continue to be — a Brexit supporter.

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Joining the EEC in 1972, for instance, took a variety of national powers out of the hands of the UK Government and, by extension, parliament. EU countries are constitutionally transformed from nation-states to member-states, as the Cambridge academic Chris Bickerton has explained. This means that a variety of policy instruments are removed from national governments altogether, or their implementation becomes contingent on the wishes of the European Commission or interpretations of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Perhaps more obviously, EU membership is simply not compatible with a belief in socialist planning. At its core, the Single Market is designed to limit the power of national electorates to plan their own economies. Of course, a certain degree of national economic planning is permitted within EU membership, but it is conditional. Any time a national government takes a decision that is viewed as distorting the hallowed Single Market — which must be prioritised above all else — those policies are blocked.

Additionally, EU membership sits uneasily with genuine internationalism. Some of the most vocal Labour MPs to campaign against racism, colonialism, and global inequality — including Barbara Castle, Judith Hart, Joan Lestor, and Anne Kerr — were all staunch Eurosceptics. They condemned the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project, which created “a circle of privilege” for the “white tribes of Europe”. They believed it morally reprehensible that some of the richest, most privileged countries in the world should club together and create a superior form of citizenship in order to further enrich themselves.

Finally, the EU’s governing institutions remain mostly obscure and untransparent. We still don’t actually know which MEPs voted to make the Right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen President of the European Commission. Even worse, from a socialist perspective, European judges have struck down labour practices that they claim impose onerous restrictions on business, as in the infamous cases Laval and Viking. The former limited Swedish trade unions insisting on higher working conditions for construction workers from Latvia who operated in Sweden. The latter prevented a Finnish transport union from taking action against Viking Line for reclassifying their workers under the flag of a lower-wage EU country to ignore Finnish collective bargaining. Because these judgements are based on judicial interpretation of fundamental EU treaty rights, no legislation, either at a national level or from MEPs, can overturn them.

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Labour is winning the Brexit revolution

By Tom McTague

So, if the EU has all these obviously egregious impacts on the goals of the Left, then why have so many Labour Leavers seemingly given up on Brexit? Part of the reason, it seems to me, is that the Labour Party has totally and catastrophically vacated the post-Brexit policy space to the Right. Initially, there did seem to be some interest from members of the Corbyn Shadow Cabinet to think about the opportunities Brexit might provide for a Labour government. Corbyn himself spoke passionately about forming trade agreements with countries in the Global South that would benefit and support their economic development, rather than exploit them. Given his uniquely strong connection with the grassroots party membership and his own history of opposition to EU integration, Corbyn ultimately failed to “sell” Brexit to the Labour Party.

Indeed, there are so many areas of policy where Labour ought to have spent the last few years seriously thinking about the post-Brexit opportunities. How can we use procurement better now that we are out of the Single Market? How can we follow the example of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Act to provide economic stimulus through publicly supported domestic manufacturing? Can we use the increased income from no longer subsidising European university students to support students from poorer countries instead? What would a socialist trade policy look like, once protection of continental European industries and agriculture is removed from the equation?

Instead, Labour has wasted the years since Brexit almost as much as the Tories have. Labour had stood on a manifesto in the 2017 election which promised to take the UK out of the EU, Single Market, and Customs Union. That election saw the biggest increase in its vote since the 1945 General Election and the only net gain in Labour seats since 1997. A majority of the seats Labour won in England were Leave-voting seats off the Tories.

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But then the surprise hung Parliament gave hope to certain Remainers. It didn’t matter that every household in the country had been told that the outcome of the referendum would be honoured. Facilitated by Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, Labour MPs — with a few honourable exceptions — did everything they could to stop the implementation of the Leave vote. As a party member my entire adult life, it was the closest I have ever been to quitting.

Today, though, the Labour Party has apparently embraced Brexit thanks to Starmer’s post-2019 Damascene conversion. But the reality is that Labour is still not making the case for Brexit on Labour terms. Virtually every time a Labour politician speaks about Brexit, it is framed as an attempt to mitigate the damage. Labour’s underlying assumption is that Brexit has failed because the UK has diverged too much from the EU. A better Brexit is one closer to the EU. But, the reality is that the UK has not diverged enough from the limitations which EU membership placed on national economic planning.

There is much to cheer about Brexit from a Left-wing perspective, but very few are brave enough to express that view. My regret is not Brexit — but that Labour has failed to rediscover its historic love for it.

Three years on, the Robin Hood Inn has closed. If you want a drink on this street in Boston, just south of the town centre, you’ll have to make do with the Eastern European off-licence a few doors down.

Surrounded by fens to the north and marshes to the south, Boston looms over a dank sea of flat expanses; an island town that has always been the exception. Once, it was the biggest port in England after London. Today, it is the fattest town in the country, the least integrated, the lowest paid, the most murderous, and the most Brexity.

According to new polling by UnHerd, Boston remains the capital of Brexitland, albeit not by its 2016 margin, when 75.6% voted to leave. Still, Boston and Skegness is the only constituency in the UK that does not think it was wrong to leave the EU: here, 37% of voters believe it was a mistake, while 41% disagree. Our polling also reveals it to be the most concerned about immigration: 72% believe “levels are too high”.

Todor arrived here from Sliven, Bulgaria, a few months before the 2016 referendum, looking for the “breadbasket of Britain” and its promise of jobs for those who work hard. “I came with my friends after reading about Boston on the internet. We lived out of town in a caravan and picked cabbages, down on our knees for 10 hours at a time.” Now 29, he works in a food-processing factory, packing flowers, broccoli and potatoes for £350 a week. He can just about afford to rent a bed-bug-infested, one-bedroom flat with his girlfriend and month-old baby. “My friends and I were the first to come to Boston from Sliven,” he says proudly. “Since then, another 2,000 have followed.”

Sitting in his coffee shop on the corner of the town’s cobbled marketplace, Moroccan-born Anton Dani points out these new arrivals. “They come on a daily basis,” he explains. “You can tell who is new and who is not.” He gestures to the small groups of young men standing around the square; they are smoking, staring, whiling away the time until they can register for work. Dozens of families are milling about the city centre, too. “Often you know they are new because they are very poorly dressed — and they are with children who should be in school but haven’t been enrolled yet.”

Anton grimaces when I ask about Brexit: he is a Ukip-then-Conservative councillor, and was the town’s leading campaigner for Leave and its Mayor on Brexit Day. “I don’t think it’s made things better… Now we have a lot of migrants from Bulgaria and many of them are gypsies.” Brexit, everyone here agrees, has failed to stem the number of migrants arriving — though what that figure is remains unclear. We know that between 2004 and 2014, Boston’s migrant population grew by 460%; and we know that there was a tenfold increase between 2011 and 2021. But these are only the people who have registered their presence — and as Anton explains, “there are a load of houses with up to 10 people living in them”. Whatever the true number is, many locals feel like the town is no longer theirs.

The problem with Boston, Anton says, is not that people from the EU have come to live here, but that there is no infrastructure to support them. The local hospital is overstretched; traffic is a permanent blight; at one primary school, translators had to be employed after it emerged many of the children couldn’t speak English. “Brexit is failing,” he admits. “If immigration is to work, you have to integrate. But we’re not demanding this from people.”

Back in 1900, a local journalist predicted that, within a century, Boston will “be served by elephantine emporia”, while “aeroplanes will wheel and pirouette around the pinnacles” of St Botolph’s. The church still dominates the marketplace, but there are few elephantine emporia. Instead, Boston has West Street — known variously as “Polak Street”, “Little Poland” and “East Street” — with its scattering of Eastern European shops, bakeries and job centres. And rather than pirouetting planes, you are more likely to see the speeding minibuses which transport workers to the nearby factories or farms each morning. To those Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian immigrants yet to arrive, this is the Bostonian Dream.

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But for many of the migrants who have settled, as well as those locals who have always lived here, that dream has soured. “There was nothing wrong when they first came, but look at the marketplace now.” Stan Turner, who is 85 and has lived in Boston all his life, nods towards a group of young Bulgarian men smoking in one corner. “They are intimidating. I always used to walk around but now I’m too scared.” Many locals I speak to say the same, and each has a story to hand: about gang-on-gang vendettas, about a friend being stabbed for not having a lighter, about Eastern European off-licences illicitly staying open beyond closing time. “We now tell those staying with us, particularly old people and women on their own, not to go out at night,” one hotel manager tells me.

Locals avoid the marketplace at night. It is empty when, at around 8pm, men arrive five-to-a-car and wait. They don’t prowl. They park up in the middle of the square in pairs, trading words and more with those in the vehicle next door. The atmosphere is charged; headlights are kept on. They don’t hide. The point, I suspect, is to be seen. They sit there, presiding over an unnerving restlessness that feels like it could tip into violence at any time.

It was shortly after 6pm on a balmy July evening that Lina Savicke’s daughter was stabbed and killed on Fountain Lane. “My two daughters were playing outside my shop here, when I heard my youngest scream ‘Mama!’, and then…” Lina pauses to wipe her eyes. “And then it happened.” There were people milling about. Dusk was yet to descend. Lilia was just nine.

There are rumours within the Lithuanian community that it was an organised hit, paid for by a disgruntled family member back home. “But at the moment, we don’t have a clue,” Lina tells me. I ask if she thinks it could happen again. “Yes… It’s dangerous here, especially at night. There is hardly any CCTV or police presence. It means you can do anything you like. This is what happens when a town falls apart…”

If Brexit was about taking back control, in Boston, the opposite seems to have happened. Since 2016, the year the town was named the “Murder Capital of Britain”, Boston’s crime rate has increased by 25% — yet last week, Lincolnshire Police, the lowest funded force in the UK, announced it was cutting PCSO numbers by almost half. Today, it is not uncommon for people to install CCTV cameras on their houses, even in the town’s more deprived areas, such as Fenside. The owner of one house there, flying the Union Jack, has reinforced his garden wall (“they kept ramming their cars into it”) and installed seven cameras. “I just want to keep my daughter safe,” he tells me.

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Further up the road, I meet Nichola Williams. “I voted for Brexit,” she tells me. “It has nothing to do with immigrants who have jobs — I’ve worked with some fantastic foreigners here.” But, she continues, “you can go into town now and see others sitting around. We’ve had more murders and often it’s between themselves.”

This is borne out in Boston’s crime reports, though, as Nichola can attest, locals are hardly left unscathed by the anarchic cloud of insecurity and instability that the violence produces. “I lost one of my sons five years ago,” Nichola tells me. “He was only 32. He was the youngest and the cleverest and…” She tails off. I later learn he had mental health issues, lost his job working on the land, and started to drink heavily and take drugs. He was found by paramedics on a nearby riverbank in the middle of the day; a post-mortem report stated he had laid down and frozen to death after taking heroin and cocaine. “Then again,” Nichola adds, “I met someone from around here. You can’t say I made a mistake, but in many ways I did.” Is she blaming her son’s death on her decision to raise him in Boston? “Well… Yes and no.”

Unlike Lilia’s stabbing, the death of Nichola’s son received only a passing mention in the local press, but perhaps it is a more fitting symbol of Boston’s malaise. His actions keenly speak to the hopelessness and desperation that have taken hold in Boston in the past two decades. Ask anyone what they think of the town, and the standard response is “terrible”, “awful”, or “shit”. Ask why they think that is, and their answer feels fearful: a fear that their community is being dismantled, that the future looks bleak, and that all the institutions they once identified with — from the town’s defunct harbour to West Street in its prime — have been lost.

To some extent, Boston’s atomisation began well before the EU referendum. Perhaps it was sparked in 1970, when its direct rail service to London was canned, or, eight years later, when the medieval town was carved up by a dual carriageway. Or perhaps it started in May 2004, when the UK opened its labour market to Europe. Whatever caused it, by 2016, Boston’s decline was plain to see: in its extraordinary crime rates, especially when it comes to violent crime, and its sagging infrastructure.

Brexit was supposed to fix this. Forget taking back control of Britain; voters here would have settled for taking back control of Boston. Instead, immigration and crime continued to rise — and their town slipped from their grip.

This is where politics should step in, but, as Nichola tells me, “they’re all useless”. And to an extent, former Mayor Anton Dani agrees: “All politicians assume that people will forget things quickly. But the people here will not forget.” The legacy of this perceived betrayal is written in UnHerd’s poll results: in the fact that the root cause of Boston’s Brexit vote (its concern about immigration) remains strong, but voters’ belief in a political solution (Brexit itself) has plummeted. Politics was tried and failed.

“After Brexit vote, immigrants feel a town turn against them,” read one headline in The New York Times shortly after the referendum. Today, it is the locals who feel their town has turned against them — and many have given up on trying to win it back. That is the tragedy of Boston as Brexitland. It was supposed to be a Land of Hope and Glory, but the party only lasted one night.

In 2019, our “UnHerd Britain” survey used a statistical technique called MRP to map six big cultural questions onto all 632 constituencies in Britain; this year, UnHerd has again partnered with Focaldata to conduct a survey of 10,000 people across the country. Rather than asking for people’s voting intention, we have investigated the underlying cultural controversies, new and old, that form today’s divisions and alliances and mapped each one down to constituency level.  

We put 10 statements in front of voters, covering Brexit, gender ideology, political disillusionment, conspiracy, Net Zero, immigration, the monarchy, the cost-of-living crisis, housing and lockdowns. In each case, respondents chose whether they agreed or disagreed, and how strongly. Focaldata then analysed what the most predictive factors of each question were, including age, gender, working status, vote in the 2019 election and the EU referendum, and calculated estimates for each constituency. This technique, “multilevel regression and post-stratification”, or MRP, has been used with incredible accuracy to predict general elections.

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Labour is winning the Brexit revolution

By Tom McTague

You can look up any constituency, and see where it stands on the big talking points of the day. We will be releasing new results every week. 

We begin with Brexit. Three years after we officially left the European Union, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “Britain was wrong to leave the EU”. 

The headline result suggests the country has dramatically changed its view since 2019. Focaldata estimates that in every constituency in the country except three, more people agree with the statement than disagree — i.e. tend to think that Brexit was a mistake. The only three outliers are all located along the Wash in Lincolnshire: Louth and Horncastle, Boston and Skegness and South Holland and the Deepings. Of these, only Boston has more people disagreeing than agreeing: it is the only place in the country which doesn’t feel regretful about Brexit.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, in affluent Remainer heartlands such as Bristol West and Edinburgh South, as well as mixed urban areas such as Streatham and Islington North in London, support for Brexit has further dwindled. In Bristol West, for example, where 79% voted to Remain in 2016, only 13% now disagree with the statement that Brexit was a mistake.

The results also reveal a second finding, which is more subtle but the implications of which are profound for how we understand the country. When you compare the UnHerd Britain 2023 results to the 2016 results, it is clear that enthusiasm for Brexit has faded far more dramatically among Left-leaning areas and areas with higher Labour support than in the Tory heartlands. After six years of political argument and Conservative government, the Brexit question no longer cuts across party lines to the same degree: voting for a pro-Brexit party in 2019 is now a better predictor of whether you support Brexit today than whether you supported Brexit in 2016.

James Kanagasooriam, Chief Research Officer at Focaldata, commented: “The dovetailing of the Brexit divide and the country’s left-right axis has been ongoing for some time, but only with the receding waters of a depressed conservative vote has this pattern become so visible. The leave vote is fading and becoming less distinct from the conservative vote.”

By comparing the percentage of those who still support Brexit with the percentage who voted for Brexit in 2016, it is possible to identify the constituencies which have had the most significant change of heart over the past six years. Of the top 20, all but two are Labour seats. Barking in East London for example voted to Leave in 2016 by 60% to 40%; but now 54% of voters in that constituency think Brexit was a mistake. West Ham, Birmingham Ladywood, Dagenham and Rainham, Middlesborough, Walsall — all of these fit a similar profile: poorer areas with a very high proportion of ethnic minority voters. Many of them supported Brexit at the time, and they are now the most disillusioned of all with the project.

Saying Britain was wrong to leave the EU is a different question from whether Britain should rejoin — when asked, voters do not tend to want to re-open the argument. But the overall picture that emerges is that, after the Brexit shock of 2016 and the extraordinary realignment of 2019, the country is gradually reverting to a more traditional Left versus centre-Right divide. The power of the Brexit question to make people rethink their fundamental political perspective is receding into history.

The 2016 Brexit vote has focused minds on the recalibration of our social politics, but the leftward economic shift of the Establishment, who are in some ways following the public, is less commented on. Indeed, while the Brexit vote explained the Conservatives’ rise in the Midlands and the North in the 2017 General Election, it was the popularity of Corbynomics which propelled Labour to near parity with the Conservatives two years ago – a spectre which haunts this election.

The figure of Corbyn obscures the fact that Labour’s economic statism and red-in-claw socialism is popular and has been for some time. A recent YouGov poll indicates that the unpopular Labour leader, with the worst opposition leader ratings of all time, has a manifesto whose contents, when polled, have majority support across the board.

Survey after survey, and vox pop and after vox pop indicates that the British public are tired of austerity, tired of a battered and shabby public realm and now fully support better funding for public services, and more investment — even if this means higher taxes. The 2019 party manifestos reflect this new normal, with the Tories committed only to modest spending and tax rises, with Labour committed to shifting the country’s economics to the far Left.

UnHerd has commissioned polling which indicates that only 30% of the public agree that “Tax rates for high earners should be minimised to keep the UK competitive”, with 42% actively disagreeing with this statement. In terms of electoral geography, FocalData has estimated that only 22 of Britain’s 632 parliamentary constituencies have more people than not committed to tax competitiveness. Indeed those high spending manifestos are a reflection of these sentiments.

Of the 22 seats that support minimising tax on high earners, 17 are in London – including, somewhat ironically, the constituencies of Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry; yet another issue on which the capital finds itself out of step with the rest of the country. In fact, it’s easy to assess how likely an area is to support minimising the tax burden on the richest simply looking at how high house prices and average wages are in a constituency.

Just as interesting, though, is people’s perception vs reality on where the tax burden in this country really lies. The Government’s own data suggests that the Top 1% pay a staggering 30% of all tax, while taking only 13% of income. Tax change after tax change has shrunk the tax base, and while the many may want the few to pay a bit more, what happens if the 1% decide, in a world of global capital and free movement, that they don’t fancy paying for 1/3 of all Britain’s public services. We may be about to find out…

Source: HMRC

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

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

Eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rankings suggest a pattern: that in our tougher, fiercer, poorer regions support for such freedom is strongest, whereas in the tree-shaded southern and midland suburbs (and also, oddly, in Scotland, which is, for the most part, not very soft and bosky) it is at its weakest. Why ever would this be? By all means ask a statistician, or a sociologist, for the answer. But I have a different theory: let me explain it to you.

Rudyard Kipling, in my view rightly, put a lot of our national class division down to the deep remaining bitterness between the invaders of 1066 and their resentful subjects, and to the lingering Saxon belief in ancient liberties once held, now lost, and one day to be restored, in what has often been a common belief in this country.

It peeps out from the Robin Hood legend, of an exiled nobleman beloved by the people, but driven from his true title, and from many ancient local stories of poachers who are really the true owners of the land from which they are now driven by gamekeepers. One such tale, of a sort once common in country districts, lies at the heart of M.R. James’s troubling ghost story “The Mezzotint“, about a picture which comes alive, and shows a terrible dynastic murder in progress, far away and a long time ago.

In Kipling’s clever poem “Norman and Saxon” a dying Norman baron is warning his arrogant young heir to be careful when dealing with his Saxon peasants.

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.”

Arthur Conan Doyle touched on something similar in his glorious but largely forgotten historical novel The White Company (words most people now associate with a firm that makes bedding).

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The making of a reactionary

By Peter Hitchens

The book’s hero, Alleyne Edricson, is heir to a great Saxon noble name, now down on its luck. But “he knew enough of the ancient greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country. His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to … the time when the Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil.”

With their lands seized and confiscated over 300 years, their wealth and power had dwindled to a crumbling manor, two small farms and a wood full of pigs. But even so, “above all, the owner of the soil could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead — that is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and answerable to no man lower than the King”.

My grandfather, a proud son of Portsmouth with a rolling, deep, soft Hampshire burr that I seldom hear nowadays, often seemed like one of Doyle’s untameable Saxons (though the name Hitchens actually originates from Cornwall, whose inhabitants have an even more ungovernable pedigree).

More than once I heard him rumble, when he heard or read of some aristocrat claiming that his forebears had come over with the Conqueror: “Yes, and my ancestors were here on the shore, waiting for them.” He was not entirely joking. I don’t think he was any kind of socialist, though he worshipped the crippled cobbler John Pounds, who had founded some of the first schools for the children of the poor, in the desperate, squalid backstreets of Old Portsmouth.

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Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

But he was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers, and held to the same sort of blood and fire Protestantism that helped Cromwell’s Ironsides to sweep through their decadent foes like a sickle through the wheat. I have little doubt which side he would have taken at Edgehill or Naseby. He never read a work of fiction, so far as I know, in his life; the Bible contained all the stories he needed.

From this fierce, cross-tempered, deliberately eccentric old patriarch, as I believe, I have inherited things which came to surprise me in later life, especially a furious prejudice in favour of liberty, an inability even to understand those who would give it away, and an accompanying suspicion of authority. I know jury trial is good. I know the presumption of innocence is beyond price. I loathe the sight of an armed police officer. I watch TV reports of police smashing down people’s doors (however wicked they may allegedly be) with suspicion and shock. I can easily provide good reasons for these positions.

But I do not really need them, except in attempts to persuade others. And I can rather easily tell when these others are not interested. These legacies only really flowered in my mind as I came to maturity. My education and upbringing provided the knowledge and understanding. But my first encounter with Macaulay’s History of England awoke something in me which was not theoretical.

As I read his account of the great defiance of 1688, I remembered that Liberty was my inheritance. And now I had to pass it on unharmed. Much as I hated the prospect, after a lifetime of comfortable cowardice, I might even have to take risks to do so. The piston and the cylinder already existed, but a profound cultural heritage filled it with the steam which actually moved the mechanism.

Talking of cultural heritage, I will mention here a curious experience which causes me to think that we inherit more than we think from our forebears. Some years ago I was privileged to spend a night aboard one of the warships of the Royal Navy, in which my father spent 30 years of his life. Between waking and sleeping, I heard the call to hands at the change of the watches, broadcast over the ship’s Tannoy quite softly. I knew, factually, that I had never heard the words before. But simultaneously, I also knew, instinctively, that I had heard them before in exactly the same order and intonation.

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Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

I wonder what else, among my thoughts and desires, comes down from farther and farther back, so far back its origin can only be guessed at until its origin can no longer be seen. As Thomas Hardy described it in his extraordinarily moving short poem “Old Furniture”:

“Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.”

Well, if it has happened to me, why not to others? How far does it go back? Is there some inherited division? Has it faded in the South, among the Normanised middle classes, descendants of those who made their peace with the invader, and persisted beyond that persistent line of division that still runs from the Mersey to the Humber? On its far side are the lands subjected to the Conqueror’s terrible “harrying“, a repression as bloody and merciless as anything in the Thirty Years War.

I expect most educated people of my generation are embarrassed by Wordsworth’s talk of the “Flood of British freedom” which “to the open sea of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity hath flowed”. And since the massacre of the grammar schools, I do not suppose it is very well-known among the bleak, salty and wind-scoured housing estates of, for example, Hull. A pity.

But something else has perhaps been passed on, and survives, even if it does not rhyme or scan. And perhaps it may save us yet from the enemies of free speech and thought, though I must admit I have yet to see any sign of it.

It is interesting, therefore, to see that according to the data published by UnHerd today, the city remains far more religious than the countryside. Respondents were asked whether or not they thought morality is rooted in religion (my answer: it’s not). But I am going to assume that, generally speaking (and unlike me), the more religious you are, the more likely you are to think that morality is rooted in religion. As a result, the survey gives an idea of the distribution of religious belief around the UK.

It is no surprise to me that faith is more vigorous in the cities, especially in places shaped by migration. This is partly about the impact of Islam in the West Midlands and elsewhere. But also about the extraordinary growth of Christianity worldwide and its return back to the places that first sponsored its evangelisation.

Take the patterns of church growth/decline within the Anglican communion, which has doubled in size in the last 50 years. There are now some 86 million Anglicans worldwide. Western liberals might keep telling themselves the story of secularisation, but in truth this is bubble thinking: religion is growing fast and expected to keep on growing. From China to India, in post-Soviet Russia, throughout the Middle East, religion has been growing fast since the mid 20th century. It was not that long ago that only a couple of hundred thousand people went on the Hajj to Mecca; it is now 2.5 million. And no, this growth is not just in poorer places – South Korea has gone from 1% Christian to 30% in half a century.

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The pointlessness of happy-clappy atheism

By Giles Fraser

As with the first Urban Christians, faith is pulsed around the world via the arteries of migration. And so it is, within the Church of England for instance, that church-going is declining fastest in those Dioceses that are furthest away from the big cities. And even though the overall picture is one of decline, this conceals as much as it reveals. For example, between 1990 and 2010, adult membership in the Diocese of London grew by a whopping 70%.

My own congregation near the Elephant and Castle is a good example of why. Looking back at parish photographs of 50 years ago, a large congregation of exclusively white faces tells the story of the important role that religion played in the lives of working-class Londoners. Today, my congregation is mostly black, many originally from West Africa, and I host packed services of Christians from Zimbabwe to Sierra Leonne.

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Why Polly Toynbee is wrong about God

By Freddie Sayers

My boss, Bishop Woywin Karowei Dorgu, was born in Nigeria, where Anglicans grew from 3 million in 1970 to 20 million in 2010. When there is trouble in the congregation, it is in Yoruba that the Churchwarden tips me off: “Wahala” she whispers. I suspect there is no place in this country that is as diverse as a London church. Just down the road from me, the other side of the Elephant and Castle, is a growing Church of England congregation that has Mass in Spanish to cater for the large numbers of people who have come to settle here from South America.

Not that urban Christianity is the best way to understand this survey. For a while, I was Vicar of a parish in North Walsall, number 2 on the list. It was a great big barn of a church and very few people came. It is Islam that best explains many of these figures. In 1961 there were 50,000 Muslims in England and Wales. In 2017, there were 3.4 million. And the Muslim population continues to grow some 10 times faster than the rest of the population, generally in the cities.

One familiar explanation for the religiosity of migrants is that faith is a way of maintaining a connection with the places and culture from which people have travelled. There may be something to this, but the bigger story is surely that the world is a much more religious place than the western secular imagination often recognises. If Brexit happens, and the UK is forced to face more towards a world outside of Europe, it will be engaging with a world that is far more religious than it is used to and perhaps comfortable with.

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No, my marriage is not a "second holocaust"

By Giles Fraser

It is not insignificant that many of the places in this list that are the ‘least religious’ — Cambridge, Edinburgh etc — are also the most Remain-y. For the secular minded, the EU is a safe little space where the fantasy of religious decline can still be maintained. Stuck in a mid-20th-century narrative of secularisation, Remainers are trying to ward off the realisation that they may have to contend again with an idea that they believed to have been dead and buried – that of God.

As David Goodhew, director of The Centre for Church Growth Research, has put it: “The assumption that everywhere will eventually become like the West has a strong whiff of imperialism about it. We should be sceptical of the idea that the future belongs either to the ‘modern’, the secular or the West.”

It is interesting to note where religion is renewing itself in the UK, many of these places are traditionally Labour seats. Now, I would not describe Labour as the least religion-friendly of the main political parties – that prize is clearly won by the Liberal Democrats who have, for example, just deselected a candidate for being a Roman Catholic. But Labour, more Marx than Methodism, is often tone-deaf to a great many religious sensitivities – as Corbyn’s failure to understand anti-Semitism so obviously demonstrates (Finchley and Golders Green is number 23 on this list).

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Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

When Labour tries to address the subject, it talks obliquely about ‘communities’ – as with the recent launch of its “Race and Faith Manifesto”. This includes a commitment to set up a new body to teach about the legacy of colonialism. I wonder if this body will explain how colonialism also helped spread Christianity throughout the world, a legacy that is now returning home as those who were originally converted by the British are now arriving here to remind us of the faith we have abandoned.

“We don’t do God” as Alastair Campbell famously put it. Unless they are content with being the party of the few not the many, they had better find a way to do precisely that.

Small-c conservative working-class voters have migrated to the Conservative Party because of immigration and Brexit. On the other side, successful educated cosmopolitans opt for Labour or the Lib Dems.

As a number of academics, including me, have pointed out, apart from attitudes to the EU, nothing predicts whether someone voted Leave better than their views on immigration. This shows up clearly in UnHerd’s data.

For instance, as figure 1 reveals, 55% of the variation in immigration attitudes across constituencies can be explained by Brexit vote share, a powerful association. The relationship is especially strong toward the top left, with the strongest Remain seats far more pro-immigration than elsewhere.

Figure 1

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Brexit data from: “Areal interpolation and the UK’s referendum on EU membership”, Chris Hanretty, Journal Of Elections, Public Opinion And Parties, Online Early Access, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081

This rising cultural cleavage made a powerful impact in the 2017 election despite the fact Corbyn’s far-Left image gave prosperous voters a strong incentive to vote against him. But what makes Hackney different from Boston on immigration attitudes? At the constituency level, this is about demographics, of which the key ones are, in order of importance: the proportion with degrees, the level of ethnic diversity and average age. The share with a degree varies from under 5% in Clacton to over 50% in Battersea. Immigration attitudes largely track this measure, as figure 1 shows. The reason higher education is so important is not because it boosts earnings, but because it is a measure of psychological openness and a liberal worldview, both of which incline curious minds toward the pursuit of higher education.

Figure 2

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

When it comes to explaining Brexit, Trump or any other western national populist vote, it’s breathtaking how resilient the narrative of the ‘left behind’ is. This suggests that those who feel they have lost out during the economic modernisation of the British economy are striking back at the elites. Yet, as I mentioned after the Brexit vote, economic factors do not tell us much about who voted Leave or Remain. As figure 3 clearly shows, unemployment level — as with other purely material factors — can’t explain immigration attitudes. The flat regression line and wide spread of constituencies around it tells us there just isn’t a story here.

Figure 3

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Beyond education, what social indicators underpin immigration attitudes? An important — but not dominant — factor is ethnicity. Many are fond of pointing out that places with few immigrants seem to be the ones most concerned about immigration. Yet this statement completely sidesteps the fact that a high-immigrant area will have lots of immigrants in it! Since immigrants and those who are from minority communities tend, all else being equal, to be more pro-immigration than White Britons, highly diverse constituencies are also more open to immigration, something evident in figure 4.

Even so, there is considerable variation around the trend line. Constituencies with a more educated population tend to lie above the line, and those with fewer degrees below it. In addition, there is an important current of immigration restrictionism among ethnic minorities, especially those who are UK-born. This is more pronounced in constituencies with a higher Sikh and Hindu component to their minority population since these groups are more restrictionist than other minorities, and less so in places with a higher Afro-Caribbean share, as they are relatively liberal on immigration compared to other non-White British groups.

Figure 4

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’. NB: excludes constituencies with less than 20% non-White British share (a majority of seats)

The share of the population aged 20-24 is also an important correlate of immigration attitudes, with younger constituencies more ‘open’ and older ones more ‘closed’ in immigration outlook. Yet this matters considerably less than education or ethnicity. The share of passport holders, however, is an indicator, even when we account for its relationship with education, age and ethnicity. Figure 5 shows the importance of this association.

Figure 5

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Education, ethnicity, share without a passport and age account for nearly 80% of the variation in immigration opinion across constituencies. This means almost all of the differences in immigration attitudes over place have to do with these demographics. But is there any role here for the properties of place — whether local tradition, regional economy or cultural atmosphere?

The answer is a qualified yes. Even with controls for education, ethnicity, age and share without a passport, London emerges as somewhat more open, and the East of England and South East somewhat less so. We should bear in mind, however, that regional differences are small. Apart from London (at 46% agreement), the share agreeing with open immigration fluctuates in a tight band from 32% in Wales to 36% in Scotland. When you account for education, ethnicity and age composition, London remains only 3 points more pro-immigration than the supposedly restrictionist East of England. Moreover, some of this may be due to social indicators we haven’t included in the model, so the geographic effect may be weaker still.

Geography is important, but it’s also vital to appreciate its limits, which too many pundits fail to do after perusing an election map. A map of SNP vote by British region would suggest that living in Scotland explains 100% of the variation in SNP voting among people. It doesn’t. Mapping state income and the Democratic vote in America would show that richer states back the Democrats. Yet richer individuals aren’t more likely to vote Democratic than poorer people. In other words, you can’t simply read individual-level relationships off aggregate correlations. More than that, most of the variation (90% or more) in attitudes lies within constituencies, not between them.

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How bigoted is Brexit?

By tom shivers

Consider university education, the most important cross-constituency predictor of immigration attitudes in Britain. When we drill into the survey data on individuals (as distinct from constituencies) — using the British Election Study — we find that education is much less important. That is, once we take psychological factors such as the death penalty into account, having a degree makes only a modest difference to immigration attitudes.

Figure 6, based on a sample of around 20,000 individuals, shows that a person’s views on the death penalty matters vastly more than whether they have a degree in predicting whether they want less immigration. Almost 9 in 10 strong death penalty supporters back restriction against barely 3 in 10 strong opponents of capital punishment.

Next to this 60-point chasm, the roughly 5-point gap between those with and without degrees pales into insignificance. While graduates are less likely (41%) than non-grads (62%) to back the death penalty, this is beside the point. The massive difference between pro- and anti-death penalty supporters holds as strongly within the population of university graduates as it does among non-graduates.

Figure 6

Source: British Election Study Internet Panel Study wave 9, 2016

As I argue in my book Whiteshift, immigration attitudes are the fulcrum around which the politics of western societies are realigning. This is because those whose psychological make-up inclines them to see difference as disorder and change as loss are voting for parties that promise to slow immigration. This isn’t generally about competition for jobs or services, which is a safer narrative to voice, but instead mainly about majority-ethnic and what I term ‘ethno-traditional’ national identities. Conservative voters feel that these are being unsettled by the rapid ethnic shifts sweeping across western countries.

The Brexit vote was primarily driven by the immigration question, though the focus on the economic risks of Brexit is presently overshadowing the subterranean force of this issue. Should Johnson ink a deal while failing to reduce migration levels, we should expect this debate to return — intruding as sharply into British politics as it did in the runup to 23 June, 2016.

A generation later, the stakes are far higher for our kids. Today the refrain might be Called social media; have you got yourself a gender identity?

It is remarkable that, although we spend so much time talking about gender identity these days nobody can define it without recourse to either circular reasoning or sexist stereotypes — and usually both. Even legislators are guilty; the State of Massachusetts, for example, defines it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behaviour, whether or not that gender-related identity or behaviour is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth”. Which doesn’t exactly sound very progressive.

Layla Moran, the Lib Dem MP, may have told Parliament that she could see souls during a debate about trans issues, but all we can actually see are bodies and they have a sex rather than a gender. Which leads us to the deeper question: why do we need a gender identity?

For generations we have known about sex: there is female and there is male and we need one of each to produce the next generation.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Society devised different restrictions and expectations according to our sex, and while most people complied, some of us found them so excruciating that they crushed our mental health. That used to be called “gender identity disorder”, an identity problem relating to gender. When people objected to being labelled as “disordered”, the language was changed to gender dysphoria, but from the original terminology grew the notion of gender identity.

In itself, that is not a problem. As a transsexual I’m happy to say that I prefer to identify with females, and hence I may be described as having a female gender identity. But I am also a science teacher and, after fathering three children, two of them boys, the evidence that I was male and I am still male is overwhelming. The fact is that we have a sex and we cannot change it.

Yet with neither proof nor evidence, language has changed the way we think and many now assume that gender identity is some prescriptive innate quality that drives our personality. At a time when opinions and feelings are in the ascendency, evidence and facts are too easily jettisoned from the public consciousness as inconvenient truths. In many people’s minds, gender identity has replaced biological sex as a means of dividing humanity.

Of course nobody fits perfectly into the two gender roles. There are over seven billion personalities on the planet, all unique and all a curious combination of feminine and masculine. As the theory developed, non-binary identities were created and then subdivided. At one point, Facebook suggested there were 71 different gender identities to choose from. While they have now — probably wisely — allowed users to make up their own gender identities, society loves to create boxes and then force people to identify into them.

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The impact on children is massive. Have you got yourself a gender identity? The implication is that if you haven’t, then you don’t know yourself. BBC Education recently produced a film to help teachers counsel their pupils; there are “over a hundred” gender identities, the primary school children were told. When I was a boy, it was traumatic enough choosing between the 92 teams in the Football League.

But unlike choosing a football team to support, or a genre of music to enjoy, the conflation of sex and gender identity places a different sort of burden on the shoulders of children, and especially those who might previously have been described as gender non-conforming: boys who like to play with dolls, or girls with more interest in football. Are they really the opposite sex? No, of course they are not. Science is clear: our sex is determined by out chromosomes, gonads and genitals. A boy who likes to wear dresses is a boy who likes to wear dresses.

But this is not the message they are hearing from society and — especially — from social media. Maybe you are transgender? Or non-binary? Or some other recently invented gender identity? With that imposed choice comes pressure, and for children approaching puberty that pressure is unlike anything previous generations had to face. Puberty is irreversible and the clock is ticking. Children know that but they also know about puberty blockers and the possibility of delaying the onset of puberty — supposedly to buy some time.

And puberty changes the mind as well as the body. I am a teacher and I see with my own eyes the development of abstract thought that occurs in children as they go through the teenage years: delay puberty and we may be delying mental development.

Meanwhile, as their friends go through puberty, those ‘buying time’ are left behind. Nobody wants that, not least 14-year-old children seeing their friends developing into adults before their eyes.

The decision then has to be made: withdraw the puberty blockers and allow nature to take its course, or move to cross-sex hormones. At that stage, children still too young to be tattooed face sterilisation followed by a lifetime of medication. And the decision is theirs.

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No wonder politicians won't talk about gender

By James Kirkup

What are we thinking as a society? We do not allow 17-year-old boys to have vasectomies just because they want one. But we allow 13-year-old transgirls to elect to have treatment that leads to the same outcome: infertility before they have even reached the age of consent.

This is the context in which the polling conducted by UnHerd needs to be analysed. Few people know what is going on — they just want children to be happy in themselves. But at the same time, there is a mental health crisis among our young people, and no wonder, given the demands we place on them, including, now, the responsibility for making profound decisions about their bodies.

Life was simpler in the 1970s. If we got our profession wrong, we could re-train and have a second career; if they get their gender identity wrong the changes to their bodies may be permanent, and they cannot have a second body. Perhaps some of those children will need to transition eventually — as I did — but they need to make that decision as adults, and maybe after they have had had the opportunity to have children of their own.

We should not put children in the quandary of having to decide their gender identity. It is neither progressive nor kind. Rather we should allow them true freedom – the freedom to express their personality in the sexed bodies that nature gave them.

As I lay out in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, there may be plausible claims made within the trans debate. And of course, most liberal-minded people (in the true sense of the term) generally agree that other adults should be free to do what they want and live as they like. But this can only be the case if the choice of behaviour does not severely and negatively affect the lives of others.

In this regard, however, trans campaigners have at least four highly vulnerable points.

The first is their demand to change the language. The great pronoun wars of recent years have few upsides (other than a reversal in the decline of young people who know what a pronoun is). But they have highlighted an interesting limitation, the extent to which people are willing, or otherwise, to fit around somebody else’s sense of themselves.

The second vulnerability is the extent to which trans demands may insult, offend or harm the rights of women. As these claims have become more and more assertive, so there has been an increasing worry about the extent to which trans rights may run counter to women’s rights as they were understood for least the last half century or so.

A third is the fact that — as with the case of women — elements of the trans argument run considerably against assertions about gay rights. These are hard-fought rights which have come to be accepted by wider society for the last several decades.

But it is the final vulnerability which is probably the most serious — the extent to which the trans issue stumbles when it comes to the welfare of children. Once again, in a liberal society, consenting adults may be allowed to do almost anything they like in private (and to some extent in public); but this does not assume that the general population will nod through irreversible medical experimentation on minors. While trans rights are important, they do not trump the welfare of children.

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In recent weeks each of these vulnerabilities have come to the fore.

The issue of language was once again a matter of public debate with the decision of YouTube to remove an interview with the activist Posie Parker for the podcast Triggernometry. Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, the two comedians who present the show, did not allow Parker to speak without any pushback; on the contrary, when she restated her view that men who transition to female are still men, they questioned her and held her views up to scrutiny. Nevertheless YouTube removed the content.

Their action is striking not because it shows the strength of the trans case on language — but its weakness. Parker is not a very prominent public figure, nor is she somebody who is in any way calling for violence against anyone. She is simply a private citizen holding to a refusal to use opposite-sex pronouns. That this can be portrayed as hate speech is not a demonstration of argumentative strength. Given that what Parker is suggesting (that we should call people by the pronouns of their sex at birth) was commonplace until very recently this clamping down on her own right to speech looks like an absence of real argument.

Parker herself appears to be motivated by a belief that the trans argument is, among other things, disappearing natural born women. Her argument, though very interesting, is one which trans activists strenuously deny. But it is striking how many women are becoming aware – and increasingly vocal – about the extent to which trans demands appear to be treading all over the feminist advances of recent decades.

Take the example of Andrea Long Chu. Last November, this male to female transsexual wrote a piece in the New York Times with the memorable title “My new vagina won’t make me happy. And it shouldn’t have to“. Earlier this month – to coincide with the publication of her new book Females – Chu was interviewed by what remains of The New Republic. The interview, headlined, ‘We are all female now’, contained some remarkable assertions, many of which will raise eyebrows.

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By Julie Bindel

One is her claim that “femaleness” is the urge to be “a vessel for another’s desire”, and that gender is “a mechanism for getting the right people to desire you“. These claims – among others – run so completely counter to the advances of first and second wave feminism that it is surprising how little public push-back there has been (although perhaps it has been censored online, as YouTube and Facebook removes even moderate content in this area). However, Chu’s arguments have not gone unnoticed by campaigners for women’s rights.

In the realm of the LG and B without the T, there has recently been a number of striking developments, all caused by the rise of T demands. In the UK, a number of prominent gay rights campaigners, including founders of the group Stonewall, have publicly split from that group in its current incarnation. There has also been the formation of the “LGB Alliance” which is “asserting the right of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted“.

This is a demand that would not have been remotely controversial in the gay rights movements of the last half century. Indeed, it is only now, as an increasing number of gay men and women find themselves accused of “transphobia” for being attracted to members of their own sex, that such a reassertion of basic facts would have to be made.

And finally, the children. Such as the seven-year-old child in Texas whose parents are in court fighting over what sex the child is. The child’s mother claims she has a girl. The father says they have a son. The mother is intent on “transitioning” the child, something the father is trying to prevent.

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Whatever else, the Texas case serves as a stark warning that such arguments — both in and out of the courthouse — are going to become increasingly common, and that wherever they happen they will throw up the same basic concerns. As polling carried out by UnHerd this week shows, the British public is by no means certain that an adolescent child should be allowed to make their own decisions about their gender identity.

But if the question asked was whether children who identify as the opposite sex from the one they were born as should be able to medically transition (or take life-altering drugs) during childhood, then I would expect the answer to be clearer — and not in favour of the answer trans campaigners are pushing for.

Of course YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms will continue to try to censor this discussion and stop parents, women, gay men and many others from discussing the issues. But they are attempting to close an un-closeable door. An overdue and properly nuanced discussion is surely now impossible to stop.

Whether people agree or disagree with that statement opens a window onto one of the issues that politics doesn’t talk about enough, yet which matters a great deal.

The politics of transgenderism are under-explored for several reasons. Politicians’ timidity in the face of activists’ ferocity is one big factor. But there’s another, revealed in today’s UnHerd Britain data — that it’s a fiendishly complex issue that doesn’t fit easily into the narratives and categories that structure so much of British political debate. Or at least, political debate at Westminster.

Even a quick glance at the results at the UnHerd Britain results shows how enthusiasm for, and scepticism about, teenagers being able to change their gender at will are not distributed along conventional party lines.

Yes, the places where there is greatest support for that opening statement lean to Labour: Bethnal Green and Bow, Islington South and Finsbury, Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North. Here, well over half the respondents are happy for children to “self-identify” as male, female or something else. Fewer than one in five people express any doubts.

But look at the other end of the spectrum and you’ll find that some of the places where people are most sceptical are also solid Labour. In Doncaster North and Wansbeck in Northumberland, well over a third of people are not persuaded that children should choose their gender.

Tory seats split in a similar way. Chelsea and Fulham and the Cities of London and Westminster are near the top of the “agree” list, yet true blue places such as Buckingham and South West Surrey are among the most sceptical.

This probably helps to explain why neither party has found the trans issue a comfortable one to accommodate. Even though both Labour and Tory leaderships (at least, Theresa May’s) have in recent years enthusiastically embraced calls for self-ID, both parties have also faced significant internal resistance.

Among the most organised sceptics of trans orthodoxy have been women from the trade union movement, traditional left-wingers who set up the Woman’s Place UK campaign. They have been surprised to find themselves fighting on the same side as social conservatives; Tory David TC Davies has become an unlikely hero to some lifelong left-wing feminists because of his willingness to air their concerns about this issue in Parliament.

What, if anything, unites the places that share similar perspectives of transgender issues?

A superficial analysis would conclude that this is just part of the “anywheres vs somewheres” debate that is en vogue in parts of Westminster. That’s the same story that dominates a lot of Brexit analysis, where Remainers are all urban sophisticates and Leavers all nativists in bleak post-industrial backwaters. Yet just as Phillip Cowley and Rob Ford brilliantly showed on these pages recently, a closer look at the transgender polling shows this issue can’t be neatly slotted into the “rich liberal cities — poor conservative towns” template either.

Yes, scepticism about that gender question is strong in some places that really have been “left behind” — Clacton in Essex and Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire are, among other things, physically isolated, as much by dismal transport connections as by geography.

But what about Wolverhampton South West, barely 20 miles from Birmingham, and the Selly Oak seat where support for gender change is substantially higher? Wansbeck can not easily be written off as a north-eastern throwback. The seat is centred on the relatively affluent market town of Morpeth, home to better-off Newcastle commuters. (I went to the town’s comprehensive school; it was hardly Brideshead Revisited, but nor was it a Geordie version of Deliverance.)

Meanwhile, South West Surrey and Bracknell are safely inside the (large, affluent) London commuter belt. Bracknell is barely 40 miles from central London; the train takes little more than an hour. These are not the “left behind” towns of metropolitan media imagination, but they have significant doubts about a change in social mores that some people living just a few miles ago might consider unquestionable.

For the most enthusiastic supporters of transgenderism, there can be “no debate” — accepting the fluidity of self-defined gender is a given, something that posterity will judge was both inevitable and enlightened.

Yet it’s striking that in only in seven of all the constituencies did a majority (more than 50%) agree with that opening statement; everywhere else, the majority either questioned a staple of trans orthodoxy, or expressed no view. Some in the “Neither” column will be wary of expressing a view, but most will not yet have engaged with the issue in depth.

“No debate”? This poll shows that the debate about gender in 21st Century Britain is not just unresolved. It has yet to even begin in earnest.

They’re the consequence of fundamental disagreement over how we see ourselves as a nation and the kind of future we desire. Contrary to popular belief, Brexit was not the cause of our current polarisation; rather, it was the most powerful manifestation yet of something much more deep-rooted and long in the making, an eruption of anger that had been building for years.

One of the most pronounced schisms is that between, on the one hand, our big urban centres, populated by large numbers of students and the liberal cosmopolitan middle-classes with their globalist outlook, and, on the other, an accidental alliance between our old industrial working-class towns and the conservative suburbs and shires – a coalition likened by the commentator David Goodhart to ‘Gavin and Stacey’ for its embodiment of a ‘benign independent-mindedness and pride in place that infuses two Brexit heartlands: Essex and ex-industrial South Wales’. Insightful, indeed.

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Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Euan McColm

In UnHerd’s poll of every British constituency on support for the Royal Family, this divide between our cities and the rest of the country is illustrated once more — and strikingly. Respondents were asked to what degree they agree with the statement: “I am a strong supporter of the continued reign of the Royal Family.” The results demonstrate that the monarchy continues to enjoy a healthy degree of support among the electorate, with 48% agreeing with the statement, 25% disagreeing and 28% not sure. But drill down a bit and the data becomes altogether more fascinating.

The 10 most supportive constituencies are spread across the English shires and suburbs (two are technically in London, but these are very much part of its small-c conservative suburban outskirts, once part of Kent and Essex, and most definitely not the trendy, cosmopolitan metropolis). Of the 10 least enthusiastic, not one was outside of our major cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and London all feature.

The two Islington constituencies, North and South, heart of liberal elite territory and represented in parliament by Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry respectively, are among the 75 least royalist of the 633 constituencies polled, as are the London constituencies represented by Diane Abbott and Sir Keir Starmer. Brighton Pavilion, represented by the only Green MP Caroline Lucas, is at 610 on the list.

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Brexit didn't cause all our divisions

By Freddie Sayers

And, sure enough, attitudes to Brexit loom large, even on an apparently unrelated question such as this. All 10 most royalist constituencies voted Leave in the 2016 referendum, while — you’ve guessed it — all but one of the ten least royalist voted Remain. Thus, it would perhaps be wrong to present this as a crude monarchist versus republican divide.

While it may be true that large parts of the populace have become so disillusioned at being routinely treated with contempt by a tin-eared parliament that they are willing to invest their faith instead in alternative public institutions such as the Royal Family, the poll results also speak to the underlying — and widening — general cultural schism between our cities and everywhere else.

Intriguingly, of all Labour constituencies, support for the Royal Family is highest in Dagenham and Rainham. Having grown up in the area — and though no great fan of the monarchy myself — I think I can explain this. Citizens in places such as Dagenham and Rainham don’t see themselves particularly as political monarchists; instead, for good or bad, many associate the Royal Family with the cultural values they themselves often hold dear: patriotism, custom, tradition, duty, social stability.

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Call yourself a Monarchist?

By James Kanagasooriam

This is not a unanimous position among the working-class, of course. Far from it. And one might well ask why some of the poorer sections of our citizenry feel any special fondness at all for an aristocratic (and often deeply flawed) family blessed with the type of wealth and privilege of which they could only dream. But, like it or not, they see the institution of monarchy, and particularly the Queen, as embodying some of the things about their country of which they were once rather proud.

And amid the maelstrom of rapid and deep-seated social and cultural upheaval, the steady constancy of their monarch provides something of a mooring. And as a result, working-class affinity for the monarchy still holds firm in some areas. Needless to say, Dagenham and Rainham voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.

The poll results, though ostensibly about the Royal Family, highlight something more profound about our country. They illustrate the extent to which we have tipped into a very real cultural war, with competing values and priorities vying for ascendancy. Much of our political discourse and debate must now be seen through this prism. We had better get used to it.

Back then, it was still relatively straightforward: survey a group of people, usually between 1,000 and 2,000, ‘weight’ the answers to make them more representative of the whole UK population, and interpret the results. The methodological arguments that raged back then among the pointy-heads —  telephone polls vs online polls; how to deal with past vote recall and turnout — have either now been settled or are at best secondary issues.

Polling companies were still, only half a decade ago, headed by larger-than-life public figures, more likely to have had a journalistic background than a statistical one, who regularly went on TV to “read the runes” for a grateful nation. For them, polling, like politics, was an art not a science.

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The royalty loyalty of the working classes

By Paul Embery

Today, the question everyone asks during an election is still the same one — who is going to win? — but the world of opinion polling looks very different. We have, of course, all been burned by a succession of difficult elections with unexpected results that various polling companies failed to predict and as a result the media and public are rightly much more circumspect. We want to know more, before believing anyone’s predictions.

‘Data scientists’ are gradually replacing those grand ‘pollsters’ who used to offer confident insights with a neat turn of phrase. These new number nerds are likely to be under 30 and might well know nothing about politics. Instead of simple surveys and uniform national swings, they are using complex statistical models. For people whose bread and butter relies on being seen as a savvy political ‘expert’, all this amounts to an existential threat.

The most powerful data modelling technique in politics at the moment, is something called MRP. It stands for “multilevel regression with post-stratification” —  not exactly catchy — and the number of people who fully understand it in the UK can be counted on two hands.

But, roughly speaking, you conduct a huge survey, normally 10,000 or more so that you have sufficient numbers to look at small subsets of people, and you then analyse what the most predictive characteristics are behind the question you’re interested in, for example whether race, education or income is more predictive of how people are going to vote (that’s the ‘multilevel regression’ part).

Then, once you have identified the most predictive characteristics, you use what you know about the people in each constituency, and in combination with any local effects you observe in your sample, you can estimate the outcome in every constituency in the land (that’s the ‘post stratification’).

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Call yourself a Monarchist?

By James Kanagasooriam

With this method, instead of crude national swings, you create something close to a simulated version of the whole electorate, in miniature, in all its complex glory.

The defining moment for MRP arrived during the general election of 2017. The conventional opinion polls had showed a dramatic narrowing, with most still showing Theresa May’s Conservatives significantly ahead on election day. The Westminster bubble was expecting her to build on, not lose, David Cameron’s majority.

But as well as their conventional poll, YouGov had also run an MRP model, and, instead of a majority this one pointed to something very different: a hung parliament, with the Tories losing ‘safe’ seats such as Kensington, Canterbury and Ipswich. Two weeks before polling day they gave it to the Times, who put it on the front page with the headline: Shock Poll Predicts Tory Losses.

Almost nobody believed it, but it turned out to be astonishingly accurate.

In the polling world, the pattern of the turbulent past few elections has been one of repeatedly trying to correct for the mistakes of the previous election  (and sometimes overcorrecting in the process). Because YouGov’s model turned out to be so accurate, right down to Canterbury and Kensington, this time everybody is waiting for the YouGov MRP to drop. It is expected next week, and if it shows a large Tory majority, I would expect the pound to surge against the dollar within seconds.

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Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Euan McColm

At UnHerd, though, we’re interested in the things everyone else is ignoring, and so we’ll leave to YouGov the unenviable task of forecasting the main result.

Instead, we’re doing something slightly different. We’ve teamed up with an impressive startup called Focaldata that specialises in MRP — and we’re doing what we believe is a first. Using the same technique that predicted the result last time, we’re mapping how the 632 constituencies of Britain differ on six big issues of the moment that aren’t being much talked about in the election campaign: attitudes to the Royal Family, gender, immigration, religion, free speech and tax. We’ve called it UnHerd Britain.

The first set of results, out today, reveal how different parts of the country feel about the Royal Family. The results are striking. Prince Andrew may be all over the news, and the new season of The Crown may be keeping people busy across the country, but nobody gets to vote on the Royal Family.

For the first time, today, we can see what would happen if they did — down to individual constituencies. For Buckingham Palace, it’s a mixed bag of news. Overall, their position is still secure: only 2 of 632 constituencies have more people disagreeing than agreeing with the phrase, “I am a strong supporter of the continued reign of the Royal Family.”

But all is not rosy. Scotland, while still tilting towards support of the royals in all 59 seats, is dramatically less in favour than the rest of the UK; the large cities, including London, are similarly much less enthusiastic. The groups that are growing fastest in our society — university graduates and ethnic minorities — are the groups least excited about the Royals.

It may sometimes feel like Brexit is the cause of all our divisions, but as UnHerd Britain will reveal in full Technicolor over the next few weeks, the Royal Family reign over a deeply divided kingdom across many more issues than that.

But recent research shows that it is not all doom and gloom for the Monarchy.

As the Royal Family’s PR team goes into damage control, the clever people at UnHerd and FocalData have published a poll of the UK population which has found that around 73% of Brits (adjusting for Don’t Knows) support the continued reign of our royal family. This finding is consistent with previous research conducted by YouGov during a happier time for the royal family — just before Harry and Meghan’s wedding.

Using a statistical method called Multilevel Regression and Poststratification, UnHerd and FocalData were able to estimate the level of support for the monarchy in each of Britain’s 632 Westminster Constituencies. Analysing support for the Monarchy by constituency — it appears that it is wide, with all but three British seats containing less pro-monarchy sentiment than anti: Liverpool Riverside, Manchester Central and Glasgow Central.

There’s interesting regional variation. In England, support for the Sovereign is 11 points higher than in Scotland, and five points higher than in Wales. Less than half of Scotland registers active support for the Monarchy – again probably a reflection of wider nationalist and separatist sentiment, as well as its currently ambivalent place within the Union (and had we polled Northern Ireland, this would have no doubt showed a similar pattern).

Exhibit 1: Support for Monarchy by Region / Seat allocation

Despite widespread national support, there are clear markers which indicate that monarchism is basically a super-charged Conservative vote. Every single Tory seat is pro-crown with Labour and SNP seats exclusively making up more republican areas of Britain.

Exhibit 2: Support for Monarchy vs Conservative Support

From the seat estimates, it also emerges that monarchism sits at an interesting intersection between Conservativism and “Leavy-ness”. There’s a distinctly southern feel to monarchism, too, with not a single Northern seat outside rural Yorkshire in the Top 20 in England and Wales.

Exhibit 3: Top 20 seats for Monarchism (England and Wales)

The picture in England and Wales for republicanism is the inverse. Younger, more urban, more graduate and BAME-heavy, Remain and Labour voting parliamentary seats make up most of the Top 20 republican seats.

Exhibit 4: Top 20 seats for republicanism (England and Wales)

Indeed, all of the fastest growing demographic groupings (graduates, BAME voters etc) are the ones who are least supportive of the monarchy. So while the polling indicates that monarchism is in a strong position today, it is by no means impregnable.

Exhibit 5: No 2 AV Support vs Support for Monarchy

Nonetheless, this 73% coalition of support for the monarchy is something that Boris Johnson would surely dream of – and, in fact, it is a coalition which we’ve seen in a different guise before. The 2011 Referendum on the Alternative vote divided along very similar lines, with the same types of seats and voter types voting to reject electoral reform. The weight of support does suggest that, even at this trying hour, Britain is some way away from the republic that many within Britain’s metropolitan elites would like.

But before that coalition pops champagne corks, a note of caution should be sounded. The group who could not make up their mind on this question – 1 in 4 voters — do seem to be located in greater numbers where there is less pro-monarchy sentiment. The inference is that as these voters make up their minds about the monarchy (or where forced to do so), they may not break in its favour. The weather forecast you would say for the Firm is mixed.

Exhibit 6: Undecideds vs supporters of the Monarchy

For all our chippiness and our tendency towards Scottish exceptionalism (I dare you to buy a 73-year-old Scotsman a pint and ask him to list the achievements of our scientists and inventors) we’re not, I daresay, so very different from our neighbours south of the border. Just as is the case in England, Scottish society is built on a bedrock of small-c conservatism. The majority of us are not the radicals of contemporary myth but traditionalists, suspicious of sudden change.

And so it is not entirely surprising that a majority of Scots remain, for now, in favour of the Monarchy.

The Queen, if not every member of her family, retains the respect of most Scots. Crowds may be depended upon to appear whenever she is north of the border. When she is in residence at Balmoral, the route to Crathie Kirk in nearby Ballater will be lined with locals who see her as one of their own. A publicised visit to Holyrood Palace at the foot of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile provokes similar interest, with tourists and locals alike gathering in the hope that they might catch a glimpse of the monarch.

It helps that the Queen has never been backward about describing her love of Scotland. Visiting the Scottish Parliament to mark its 20th anniversary in June of this year, she described her “great affection” for Scotland and spoke of “the many happy and personal connections I enjoy with this wonderful country.”

It is safe to say that among those listening to Her Majesty from the cheap seats that day were MSPs — particularly those from the SNP, the Labour Party, and the Greens — who do not reciprocate these feelings. There is a strong vein of republicanism running through Scottish political life. It is only the caution of mainstream political leaders which prevents much discussion about the matter. The findings of UnHerd’s survey, showing that Scots are not as enthusiastic about the continuation of the monarchy as our neighbours south of the border, will come as encouraging news to many elected members.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Back in 2004, when Alex Salmond returned to the leadership of the SNP for a second stint, he and his team created a new story of Scottish nationalism. Out went the Braveheart rhetoric and in came a more widely palatable narrative. Basically, everything would change with independence but it would also, somehow, stay the same. The radical break up of the United Kingdom would not seem like the nationalists overturning centuries of tradition.

Crucial to this story was Salmond’s effusive support for the monarchy. He spoke enthusiastically about the Queen’s role in an independent Scotland; she would, he said, be proud to be its monarch.

Scotland is changing, and quickly. Politicians have long since abandoned the pretence that theirs is a battle between Right and Left. Rather, the fight now is between two visions (or fantasies, depending on your taste for populism) of how the country might be. For the (slender) majority of Scots, the country’s future is more secure as part of the Union. For nationalists, nipping at the heels of Unionists, a radical shake-up is required.

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Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

Cautious senior figures in the SNP will continue to publicly support the monarchy. The future of the monarchy, one tells me, is not a discussion worth risking right now. But the results of the survey — which show approval and disapproval of the monarchy equally split in some areas of the country — might reveal the existence of a ticking time bomb.

Not so very long ago, you could say with certainty that the vast majority of Scots would continue to vote Labour until the day they died. Now, the party languishes behind the SNP and the Conservatives in the polls. Nothing is set in stone.

Scotland may not yet be ready to discuss the abolition of the monarchy but with radical voices urging the SNP to be bolder in its approach to breaking up the union, it would be unsurprising to hear more republican voices emerge in our national debate. Should Scotland become independent, a debate on the future of the monarchy would be unavoidable.

One veteran SNP politician tells me that the outcome of that discussion may hinge on who is at the head of “the firm” at such a time:

“Nobody at the top of the party is going to agitate to get rid of the Queen. But if someone else is in charge, there may be a debate to be had in an independent Scotland.”

There might not yet be an insatiable appetite among Scots to ditch the monarchy but, as the findings of the UnHerd survey show, the Royals are endured rather than admired by a great many of us.