British Conservatives in Paris Blog

by Matt Goodwin

A version of this essay appeared in the Sunday Times

Labour’s humiliation at the recent by-election in Hartlepool is a powerful reminder of a simple point: there is no guarantee that a political party will live for ever. Reduced to its lowest number of seats since 1935, plagued by infighting and now losing one cherished heartland after another, the strange death of the Labour Party is unfolding before our eyes.D o not let anybody tell you that Hartlepool does not matter, that it is “only” a by-election in the middle of a pandemic. The last time a Conservative was elected in this area, Cliff Richard topped the charts with Living Doll, Ben-Hur was in the cinema, Winston Churchill was still alive and Tony Blair was six. The Conservatives not only captured the seat after being in power for more than a decade but did so with the sharpest increase in the vote for any incumbent government at a by-election in Britain’s postwar history. Hartlepool is now the 55th seat that the Conservatives have taken directly from Labour in the past two years, 51 of which voted for Brexit. The questions that now face Labour have been summarised by one senior figure, who told Times Radio’s Tom Newton Dunn: “To be honest, the party is so f***ed it’s not really a question of what leader. It’s more existential. What’s the point of the Labour Party?” Increasingly, the idea of Labour winning the next election looks implausible while theoretically the entire rationale for the party appears to be slipping away. For Sir Keir Starmer to win the next election he will need about 125 seats, eclipsing the swings that Clement Attlee and Blair achieved in 1945 and 1997. Labour needs to be 12 points clear in the polls, surging through England. Today, it is 10 points behind and losing England.This would leave Britain with the longest period of Conservative dominance since the early 1800s, before the onset of mass democracy, and cement the party’s reputation as the most electorally successful party in the Western world. Ever since the successful rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination programme Labour has slumped in the polls and Starmer’s personal ratings leave much to be desired. After everything — coronavirus, Cummingsgate, cronyism, wallpaper — if you ask people who they think would be the best prime minister, Starmer trails Boris Johnson by an astonishing 15 points. Only this week, his approval rating slumped to the lowest since he became leader while Johnson still holds a 15-point lead among the working class.Yet leadership is only a small part of the story. Starmer, like Jeremy Corbyn before him, is the latest victim of a much deeper realignment of British politics, which is also unfolding across many Western democracies. Hartlepool is merely the latest episode in a much longer story in the restructuring of politics that is leaving Labour on the wrong side of change, staring into the abyss. The Labour Party was built for organised labour, for a politics that was based neatly on “left” versus “right”, where people’s class loyalties did much of the heavy lifting. But even then, it struggled to connect with a country that remains instinctively conservative. Only three Labour leaders have won majorities at elections and only one was born in the past 100 years. Take away Tony Blair and Labour has not won a solid majority for more than half a century.This is why, in the 1960s, one unknown academic — Frank Parkin — suggested that the real puzzle in British politics was not why one third of the working-class consistently voted Conservative but why so many people voted for socialism, which was fundamentally at odds with Britain’s conservative roots. The only Labour leader in recent history to buck the trend was the only one who accepted and worked with this basic reality: Blair, who also shed Labour’s socialist clothes. And so its election record over the past 40 years, as Peter Mandelson pointed out last week, reads: lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose. Today, Labour’s disconnection from the wider country is being amplified by a new fault line separating “cosmopolitans” and “traditionalists”, which has little to do with class and much more to do with people’s age, level of education and also their geography: it is values that are now doing the heavy lifting.Cosmopolitans are the young, university-educated, middle-class Londoners and university-towners who think that Brexit is disastrous, support rising diversity, are passionate advocates for Black Lives Matter and other worthy causes and lean toward feeling ashamed, rather than proud, of Britain’s history. Traditionalists are older, working-class, lack degrees, live in small towns and industrial heartlands and want to see a far more robust defence of the nation, its history and culture. This rift is giving rise to things that we have simply never seen before in British politics. Just look at the last election: 77 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old “zoomers” voted for socially liberal parties while two thirds of the older baby boomers voted for pro-Brexit parties. Johnson had a 30-point lead among people who left school after their GCSEs, while had only graduates been allowed to vote then Corbyn would currently be prime minister.The Conservatives are more popular than Labour among people on low incomes while Labour is more popular among people on high incomes. The right is no longer the party of the rich and the left is no longer the party of the poor. This shift has thrown Labour into chaos, not only because it has cut across the old left-right split but because the party spent the past 20 years investing in only one side of the culture divide. Cosmopolitans flooded Labour’s parliamentary party and membership.The much larger group of left-leaning traditionalists in the Labour tent, people who lean left on the economy but right on culture, were pushed aside. New Labour walked into the casino of British politics and pushed all of its chips behind middle-class graduates. It paid off in the short-term but set the stage for the revolts of the past decade: populism, Brexit, Johnson, Hartlepool. All of them were driven primarily by workers, non-graduates and hacked-off traditionalists.“Labour have taken people in Hartlepool for granted too long,” said the new Conservative MP Jill Mortimer last week, the first woman ever to be elected as MP for this town. “I heard this time and time again on the doorstep. ”There is no easy way out. As I explained to demoralised Labour MPs after the 2019 election, they are haemorrhaging blue-collar votes in the small towns and industrial heartlands to apathy or a Conservatism that leans left on the economy and right on culture, and liberal graduates and professionals to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Many Labour insiders have feared this nightmare scenario ever since the 2019 elections to the European parliament, when Labour was battered by the Liberal Democrats on one side and the Brexit Party on the other. The party, pushed on by Starmer, made the fatal mistake of falling in behind a second referendum and prioritising Remainia over Brexit Country. And by standing as Remainer in Hartlepool they showed they have still not grasped the lesson. For the past year, Starmer and his advisers thought they could sidestep this deeper shift by downplaying Brexit and talking up the economy, competence and Tory sleaze. But Hartlepool has blown a big hole in the strategy. Johnson, the Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, is the beneficiary of the realignment, tapping into the “C2” skilled workers — factory workers, mechanics, plumbers and the “Greggs Guys” — who desperately want to believe in Britain and not be told on a daily basis they are ignorant racists. The quietly impressive performance by the Greens this week is a big hint that we may well be heading in the same direction as our European neighbours, such as Germany, where cosmopolitan parties are eclipsing the old centre-left. Fast-forward ten years and I’d not be surprised to see the Greens or Lib Dems as a much bigger force, rallying zoomer graduates, middle-class professionals and city-dwellers in the face of a Labour Party that looks bewildered and lost.This is why some argue that Labour should cut the cord with blue-collar Britain now, rip off the plaster and turn instead to the emerging “Blue Wall”, more than 40 seats that are filled with millennial and zoomer graduates becoming more liberal over time and trending away from the Conservatives. But while this strategy might be viable in 20 years, it would be a fatal mistake today. There are nowhere near enough of these seats to compensate for Labour’s losses in northern England. The reality is that Labour is stacking votes in places where it does not need them, such as London, while losing votes where it desperately does, such as Hartlepool. Here is one statistic that every Labour activist should keep in their heads: of the 44 most vulnerable Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the south. These are what I call the “Red Wall 2.0” seats and there is no route back to power for Labour that does not run through them and England, where Labour has still not won the popular vote since 2001. The fall of Hartlepool, made possible by Brexit Party voters decamping to Johnson, suggests that at least another two dozen blue-collar seats could also fall to the Conservatives at the next election, such as Yvette Cooper’s Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford, where her majority has been slashed from nearly 15,000 votes in 2017 to barely 1,000 today, or Dan Jarvis’s Barnsley Central, where his majority has crashed from over 15,000 to barely above 3,500.To hold them, Starmer needs the modern-day equivalent of Blair’s “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, a message that can cut through with traditionalists while not alienating cosmopolitans. Yet spend five minutes on Twitter, where Labour’s “woke” progressives deride such moves as “racism”, and it becomes clear why Starmer is in a fundamentally different position from Blair. As Labour’s organisation has veered left, the flexibility that it needs to meet the existential challenge has diminished.There are simply no easy answers for a Labour Party that was formed in a world defined overwhelmingly by economics and class, but which now finds itself in a world that is shaped far more by culture and values, leaving many voters like those in Hartlepool asking the same question: what’s the point of the Labour Party? Best wishes, Matt Goodwin Twitter – Website – Speaking

Copyright © *2019* *Matthew Goodwin*, All rights reserved.

As a Scot who grew up and spent much of his adult life in England and as a former British diplomat who has worked on European Community affairs, I read with great interest the two articles by Richard Pooley and Stoker about the merits or otherwise of a possible Scottish Independence.

By Michael Carberry

https://www.only-connect.co.uk/post/and-be-a-nation-again-an-independent-scotland-is-now-inevitable

An April 23rd, 2021 « Brexit & Beyond » blog posting by Chris Grey , Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/04/limping-on.html?fbclid=IwAR1P9AoEA0wQqIXtlANXMIqXNR3BFdi7KpnjrQxV_kqhtl85ChRiRzmRrfs

In the words of the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s in his Elegy – The Patriarchs :

The weather in the window this morning is snow,

unseasonal singular flakes,  

a slow winter’s final shiver.

On such an occasion to presume to eulogise one man

is to pipe up for a whole generation.

…Husbands to duty…

But for now a cold April’s closing moment…

On the 9th of  April  2021, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Greece and Denmark, Queen Elizabeth II’s consort for 73 years, drew his last breath aged 99 years old.

 Prince Phiiip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1964, The National Portrait Gallery

 A door was closing on Europe and England’s past, as one of the most famous witness and protagonist of the twentieth century’s turbulent and tormented history had gone, a cycle was ending. It was poignantly brought to bear this Saturday 17th of April 2021, at the St George’s Chapel at  Windsor Castle, when the small and frail black-clad figure of the Queen walked out alone of the funeral ceremony, having laid to rest her Beloved husband, with whom she had shared all of her reign, leaving a letter on his coffin signed Lilibeth.

This man was a born leader, strong in mind and body, made to rule, Prince Philip, wrote his teacher and mentor  Kurt Hahn, will make his mark in any profession where he will have to prove himself in a trial of strength,  a Royal Prince of Greece and Denmark who chose for the love of a woman to remain in her shadow and to serve both his Queen and her country, which became his.

He was born in a privileged world still steeped in the 19th century, yet his world was shattered as a babe, and when his family was made exiled and destitute, after a loving infancy he knew solitude and poverty. His life circumstances taught him early self-reliance, and it was reinforced by his Spartan  upbringing under the guidance of the  educational pioneer Kurt Hahn at Schule Schloss Salem in southern Germany, then at Gordonstoun in Scotland, where Hahn as a Jew had to flee from the Nazis.

Prince Philip was a stoic, Mens sana in corpore sano, which he expressed in a speech in 1958 in Ghana : The essence of freedom, is discipline and self-control.  Princess Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1952 meant the end of all his personal ambitions as a naval commanding officer in Malta.  He would have to let go of his first love, the sea: It is an extraordinary master or mistress, it has such extraordinary moods, and of the privacy of his married life. From then onwards his life would be public, at the service of the Queen   and of England. By Royal Warrant he would have precedence after the Queen in all occasions, but no constitutional role.

At first he threw himself in a very active social life. His task as Prince Consort was not an easy one, his foreign origins, half German from his mother, his lack of fortune, his strong virile personality used to command, clashed in the hushed, privileged atmosphere of the English Court. His aura was that of a dashing adventurer not of a subservient cautious courtier. His equerry recalled: Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles… I felt Philip did not have any friends or helpers.  Yet he learnt to channel his creative energies in the defence of the principles inherent to his nature and enforced by his education, with honour and steadfastness, never looking back : There’s never been ‘if only » except perhaps that I regret not having been able to continue a career in the navy. His philosophy of life was thus resumed: The ability we have as humans to make our own moral and ethical decisions.

Beside his constant presence at the Queen’s side in her official engagements, state visits and world tours, spurred on by a high moral sense, he dedicated his life to causes close to his heart. His concern for the welfare of young people led in 1956 to the creation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, on the educational lines of his own mentor Kurt Hahn: community service, teamwork, responsibility and respect for the individual. He explained it to the BBC: If you can get young people to succeed in any area of activity that sensation of success will spread over into a lot of others. It encapsulated all his own beliefs and life experience in allowing young people the world over to involve themselves physically, mentally and emotionally in a range of outdoor activities designed to promote a sense of self-reliance, developed team work and respect for nature.  Over six millions 15 to 25 years old, some disabled, benefited from it over the years.

He was himself a great sportsman: he sailed, learnt to fly, swam and rowed, rode horses and drove carriages, he was President of the International Equestrian Federation, played polo, cricket and squash. He developed hundred of projects and patronages in relation to the education of youth, sports and the outdoors. He had a relationship to nature as a country born responsible gentleman farmer, fishing, shooting and stalking with a sense of preservation. He expressed it on the BBC: I think it’s marvellous we have such a fantastic variety of life on this planet, all interdependent, I think also that if we humans have the power of life or death – or extinction or survival – we ought to exercise it with some sort of moral sense. Why make something extinct if you don’t have to? And he became the World Wildlife Fund’s first President.

Early on a biographer wrote: He believes he has a creative mission, to present the monarchy as a dynamic, involved and responsive institution that will address itself to some of the problems of contemporary British society. His 60 or 80 speeches a year were thoroughly researched – his library counted over 13,000 volumes – and showed the wide spectrum of his interests, science and industry included, he was the patron of the Industrial Society, now the Work Foundation.  He was a visionary with encyclopaedic knowledge ahead of his time, denouncing in 1982 the greedy and senseless exploitation of nature…a hotly-debated issue directly attributable to the development of industry… the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or greenhouse effect. He also foresaw the dangers of the white heat of the technological revolution, and the dangers of consumerism with its noxious effects on human spirit and integrity: ..;it is much more important that the human spirit should not be stifled by easy living, emphasizing the moral aspect of life, with the importance of the individual as the guiding principle of our society.

If he could on occasion be cutting and abrupt, certainly not suffering fools gladly, his sharpness was that of an acute observer with a wicked sense of humour, such as the British enjoy. He displayed it in 1957 on their first  Royal visit to Paris in perfect French – he had lived in France, and the Queen had been taught French with her sister Margaret by a Belgian aristocratic governess, Lady de Bellaigue – the Royal Family are great Francophiles. He talked about the French being grenouilles according to the British, but added that he would not say what the French called the British!   He was a very handsome man of considerable charisma endowed with great charm. He loved beautiful elegant women and enjoyed their company, having being surrounded by four loving older sisters as a child, even if deprived of his mother’s presence through her mental illness. He became the centre of the Royal family around which all revolved, a patriarch, my rock, would say the Queen, seeking to bring peace and harmony between all. During her painful divorce with Prince Charles, he tried to help Princess Diana as was later revealed in their exchange of correspondence.

And I owe to the Duke of Edinburgh the great privilege of being one of the very few women who have been allowed in the famously exclusive men only White’s Club in St. James’s in London. Prince Philip was a member, as was my husband, and on the occasion of Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding, the Duke had it opened for the first time in its history to members’ wives, at a reception on the eve of the wedding.  The second time I would see him was years later at an exhibition at the Royal College of Arts in South Kensington, when I could sense his eyes following me around the room…

The Queen at Breakfast, Windsor Castle, 1965, now in Her Majesty’s private rooms in Sandringham

Highly gifted and multifaceted, Prince Philip’s sensibility and creativity found expression in collecting works of art, developing his own photographs, but also as a designer and an artist.  He received tuition in oil painting from Edward Seago, a self-taught artist, and exhibited some of his works, among which many landscapes, as well as a famous 1965 intimate depiction of The Queen at Breakfast, Windsor Castle,  now in Her Majesty’s private rooms in Sandringham.

Prince Philip had a natural self-deprecatory style, another British trait, to make light of his position and achievements, put his public at ease and make it laugh, which is the hallmark of the British Royal Family’s simplicity and its utmost courtesy. He said with great sincerity and humility to the BBC what could sum up the exceptional life of this exceptional man: I’ve just done what I think was my best, I can’t suddenly change my whole way of doing things, I can’t change my interests or the way I react to things. That’s just my style.

He was one of the last Knights of Honour and Chivalric Duty, bearers of a European tradition that England seems to have preserved better than other countries. Much of it is of French origin and shows the strong historical and cultural links between the two countries. Such as the Order of the Garter’s motto, Honni soit qui mal y pense, or the sacred ritual of the Royal Coronation ceremony harking back to Charlemagne’s own coronation as Holy Roman Emperor and perpetuated by the French Kings in Reims Cathedral. And even the national anthem, God save the King, sung since 1745, comes from a hymn composed by Lully on words by the Duchess of Brinon to celebrate Louis XV’s return to health. It was sung by the Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr on the King’s visit :

Grand Dieu sauvez le Roy!

Grand Dieu vengez le Roy!

Vive le Roy

Qu’à jamais glorieux,

Louis victorieux

Voyez ses ennemis

Toujours soumis!

This motet by Jean-Baptiste Lully, was translated in latin Domine salvum fac Regem, and became the French royal hymn until 1792. It survives exalted in England to celebrate the British Royal family in its continuity Prince Philip has been one of its most eminent members, embodying in his long life the enduring virtues of altruism and dedicated service to a nation democratically governed by Consent.

Monique Riccardi-Cubitt

Paris, April 18^th 2021

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/monique-riccardi-cubitt/blog/180421/hommage-prince-philip-duke-edinburgh-prince-greece-and-denmark

This Foreign Policy Centre report focuses on two unusual but strategically important British communities overseas. It builds on the findings of 252 survey responses, interviews, a focus group and research to give a detailed summary of who the British communities in Brussels and Washington DC are, what their needs are and how the UK Government can better support them and other Britons around the world.

Global Britons: Understanding the unique British communities in Brussels and Washington DC

By Matthew J.Goodwin <m.j.goodwin@kent.ac.uk>

Fri, 9 Apr at 09:00, 2021

[Some of this draws on recent talks at the Council on Foreign Relations, UK In a Changing Europe, Withers LLP and Atticus Communications.] There are some leaders of the opposition who you always knew, in your heart of hearts, would never become Prime Minister. Michael Foot, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith are the more obvious examples. Keir Starmer might soon be another.   Starmer, in his defence, inherited a sinking ship. He was handed the lowest number of Labour seats since 1935, a bitterly divided party and a Labour brand that even today remains thoroughly discredited among a large swathe of the country. Many of these problems had been building for decades.   Labour’s fracture with the working class, its loss of credibility on crunch issues like the economy and growing dependency on social liberals who tend to congregate in the big cities and university towns where Labour no longer needs votes have all been a long time coming. This is why any recovery — if such a recovery is even possible — will be generational rather than cyclical.    There is no doubt that Keir Starmer has made a good start. Over the past year, Labour has picked low-hanging fruit, winning back voters repelled by Corbyn. When Starmer took over his party was languishing on 28% and some 22-points behind the Conservatives; today, it is averaging 35% and trails by 8. But more recently this recovery has stalled, as can be seen in the chart below. Amid the successful rollout of the vaccines it is now the Conservatives who are pulling ahead. Of the last 50 polls, Boris Johnson and his party have led in 49. [Refer Image 1 below]  How much of Labour’s improvement is down to Starmer also remains unclear. While his supporters point to his strong leadership ratings relative to Corbyn, the fact remains that even today Starmer’s “net satisfaction” score still lags well behind Boris Johnson — while 33% of voters are satisfied with him, 42% are not. And when people are asked who would make the “best Prime Minister”, Boris Johnson still leads comfortably on 37%. His nearest rival is not Starmer but ‘Not Sure’. The Labour leader is trailing in third, ten points adrift from the man who has been in power for a year and is criticised by much of the media on a daily basis.   There are, of course, many who argue that Covid-19 dealt Starmer an unlucky hand. But critics might argue that it is precisely during moments of crisis, when the glare of attention is strongest, that leaders are made. It won’t be lost on Starmer’s team that it is precisely at the same time as the entire country has been sat at home, watching the news and paying attention to politics, that Starmer’s ratings have been falling. To put it simply, the more people have seen, the less impressed they have been.   Starmerites might respond that his ratings are better than Mr Corbyn’s. This is true but we should remember that Michael Howard’s ratings were better than Iain Duncan Smith’s. Yet In the end, neither saw power. And it appears that the British people can sense that, too. More than half of them told YouGov last week that they simply do not see Keir Starmer as a prime minister in waiting. This is a problem.   [Refer Image 2 below]   And even if you put the question of leadership to one side, there remains little evidence that Labour is dealing with the deep-rooted structural problems that will make it very impossible for the party to win the next election. To do so would require a swing close to what Tony Blair and New Labour achieved in 1997 – with a leader who is nowhere near as popular as Blair was and a party that is nowhere near as popular as it needs to be outside of London and the university towns. Here is one fact to keep in mind; Labour has not won the popular vote in England since 2001 yet it is in England where the party needs to make up most ground. Today, Labour leads by 16-points in London -which it already controls- but trails the Conservatives by 26-points across the rest of southern England. In other words, Labour is stacking votes where it does not need them while failing to win votes were it desperately needs them. The broader realignment of British politics is reflected in the fact that while Labour’s Sadiq Khan’s will enjoy an easy victory at the London mayoral election next month, Labour will simultaneously struggle to hold its historic blue-collar fiefdom of Hartlepool.   This reflects how Britain’s new political geography, the first-past-the-post system and earlier Labour leaders have made life harder than it ought to be for Starmer. Over the past two decades, the Left essentially walked into the casino of British politics and put all of its chips behind social liberals whose support is concentrated in liberal enclaves rather than spread across the country. The cost of this strategy was not only reflected in the collapse of the Red Wall but is also visible in the polls today. Ask the working class who should lead Britain and they give Boris Johnson a 19-point lead. Starmer might win a few more seats around London, but he should remember that there are many more Red Wall seats that could yet fall. The assault on the Red Wall might just be starting. [Refer Image 3 below]  This reflects a broader point. At the heart of recent political commentary has rested one big assumption – that once Brexit was over and done with life would return to the traditional “Left versus Right” fault line that governed politics during the twentieth century. We would get back to debating the economic issues that play to Labour’s strengths and that would clear the path for the party to repair its relationship with workers and return to power. But I was never convinced. For a start, this narrative completely ignores the extent to which the Conservatives have now also leaned left on the economy, variously promising to “level-up” the most regionally imbalanced nation in the industrialised world while moving institutions, civil servants and banks into northern England. This stuff matters -it will give the Conservatives a strong narrative at the next election. The assumption that we are returning to the old world also underplays the extent to which cultural debates remain prominent in national life — as reflected in our intensifying debates over ‘cancel culture’, freedom of speech, the Royal Family and racism in British society. Boris Johnson is still holding a much more ‘aligned’ electorate than Starmer -while close to 70 per cent of Britain’s Leavers are with the Conservatives only 50 per cent of Remainers are with Labour. Put another way, Labour has still not fixed one of the big problems that ultimately cost it the election in 2019 -its far more fragmented electorate. These problems are also being reinforced by the cultural isolation of many Labour MPs and activists, who as much research has shown hold a very different outlook on these issues than the average person. They are far more convinced that racism is endemic in British society, are far more focused on tackling historic injustices and are, put simply, far more socially liberal. There is nothing wrong with these views. It is just that they are often very far apart from the worldview of the average person. Every day that progressive activists are in the media screaming about racist Britain is, ultimately, a good day for Boris Johnson. As Ronald Reagan reminded Jimmy Carter, nobody wants to be told over and over again what is wrong with their country and people.   Put all of this together and you begin to see why it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for Starmer to chart a path to Number 10 Downing Street. While he might have steadied the ship, many (big) holes remain clearly visible and water is still gushing out – Labour’s broken bond with the working-class, its lack of economic competency in the eyes of voters, the cultural isolation of its MPs from the average voter and radical left activists who are cheered on in seats that Labour already holds but alienate people in seats that Labour actually needs to win. In year two, these are the areas where Starmer will need to act. Unless he does, he might find himself going down in the history books as the Labour Party’s Michael Howard -the man who brought stability but ultimately failed to win power. Best wishes Matt Goodwin Twitter – Website – SpeakingCopyright © *2019* *Matthew Goodwin*, All rights reserved.

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Conservative Policy Forum (CPF) – The Union & Constitution : BCiP response

My season’s greetings to all readers of this blog and a Happy New Year full of health and happiness.

I wish this New Year 2021 to be also full of positive developments for the UK!

Erika Angelidi, Conservatives Abroad Representative in Athens, Greece

The Conservative Party is no longer the party of the rich while the Labour Party is no longer the party of the poor. That is the central finding of my new report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, released last week. As I said in a talk this week, there is no doubt that Boris Johnson is a prime minister under pressure. Public disapproval of his government is drifting upwards. Public confidence in the economy has collapsed. Johnson’s approval ratings have shed more than 20 points in just two months. MPs are openly complaining about the workings of his government. And, for the first time, when voters are asked who they think would make the ‘best Prime Minister’, Labour’s Keir Starmer is now in first place. In fact, as I write this Starmer is enjoying the highest rating for any opposition leader since Tony Blair was transforming Labour into New Labour in 1995 and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory was topping the charts. But look beneath the surface of British politics and far more profound changes are taking place -changes that will ultimately determine not only what happens at the next election but, potentially, many elections after what. Britain is in a state of realignment.  As I shown with Professor Oliver Heath, things are now happening in Britain which have simply never happened before. The Conservative Party is more popular with people on low incomes than it is with people on high incomes. Labour, the party that was founded to speak for struggling workers, is now just as popular with the wealthy as it is among people on low incomes. Both of Britain’s two main parties have inverted their traditional support base. This is, put simply, remarkable.  As recently as 2017, Labour still led the Conservatives among people on lower incomes -as it has always done. But at the general election six months ago Boris Johnson and his party overturned this unwritten rule. The Conservatives established a striking 15-point lead over Labour among one of Labour’s core groups. This is the first time in Britain’s recorded history that the Conservatives outpolled Labour among low-income voters. Remarkably, the Conservatives are more popular among people on low incomes than among people on high incomes. Much of this new support for Boris Johnson has come direct from Labour, which is why Johnson was able to tear down Labour’s Red Wall. Six months ago, Labour lost nearly one in three of its low-income voters who had turned out to vote Labour in 2017.  Meanwhile, Johnson and his party hoovered up votes from working-class people, pensioners and people who left school after taking their GCSE’s, at sixteen or seventeen, while they lost ground in areas that contain large numbers of young voters, graduates and people from minority ethnic backgrounds. Johnson has been winning over the small towns and industrial heartlands but he has also been losing the cities, university towns and highly diverse areas; of Labour’s 50 strongest results in December nearly half (22) came in London while highly diverse and/or young urban areas such as Bradford, Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield hosted many of the others. And these shifts are reflected in the polls today. Ask Brits who would make the best leader and Starmer leads Johnson by a striking 44-points among Remainers, 24-points among 18-34-year-olds, 19-points among Londoners, 12-points among people who live in cities and 3-points among middle-class professionals. But Johnson leads Starmer by 46-points among Leavers, 19-points among pensioners, 10-points among the working-class, 6-points in non-London southern England, 5-points among voters who live in seats that Labour has lost since 2005, 5-points in rural areas and 2-points in towns. What these numbers reflect is how broader winds are sweeping through Britain’s political system and pushing it into a state of realignment. Why is this happening? As we show in the report, the reality is that lots of people who live on average or lower than average incomes are ‘cross-pressured’ -they lean to the left on the economy, favouring more redistribution, but lean to the right on culture, supporting Brexit and the reform of migration.  These voters want power sent down to the regions, not up to London and the big cities. And, by the way, they wanted a much tougher reply to the unilateral tearing down of statues.  They do not fit neatly onto the traditional map of British politics. Johnson tapped into this by leaning left through promises to deliver more infrastructure and help the ‘left behind’ while promising to deliver Brexit and change immigration rules. Labour, in contrast, went in the other direction. As we show in the report, Labour’s drift to support a second referendum on Brexit damaged the party among these low-income voters who noticed the shift. This handed Johnson the keys to the Red Wall. Most of those who switched to him were strongly pro-Brexit and wanted to see their decision carried through and implemented by their representatives. Johnson also had another in-built advantage – more than 60 per cent of constituencies had favoured Leave at the 2016 referendum. So long as Johnson’s strategy was focused on consolidating the Leave side he had a major advantage. This was further underlined by the failure of Remainers to find unity, being split between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. So, where do we go from here? Johnson needs to tread carefully, for obvious reasons. Many of the same people who switched over to him six months ago also come from those groups that have been hit the hardest by the double crisis that Johnson has struggled to manage -the Covid-19 health crisis and the accompanying economic crisis. There is not yet much evidence that they are jumping ship. Perhaps they are willing to give Johnson benefit of the doubt until the end of the Brexit transition period. Either way, it is not hard to see how things could start to go very wrong for the incumbent prime minister. Immigration numbers are still high and there is also no guarantee that amid a major economic crisis these voters will continue to prioritise their values over their wallets. Nothing focuses minds like lost jobs and rising debt. Keir Starmer has challenges, too. Winning adulation in London and the university towns -or ‘Remainia’- is fine. But Labour already holds much of this territory. To return to power, and given the SNP’s dominance in Scotland, Starmer also needs to make serious progress in non-London England -where lots of voters are instinctively socially conservative and wary of the new turn toward identity politics. It is worth remembering that the Labour Party has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. Let me say that again – by the time of the next election Labour will not have won the popular vote in England for more than twenty years. So, there are also huge challenges for Starmer’s team. Blair managed to crack this nut by promising to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ -he hoovered up the professional middle-classes while giving the more instinctively socially conservative working-class a message that resonated. But that was also before the values-ridden debates of today -with debates over migration, Brexit, gender, statues, the legacy of empire and who-knows-what-is-next shooting up the agenda. Starmer will need to find his own way of navigating our values divide. But find a way he must if he is serious about winning the next election. So, is Britain’s realignment temporary or permanent? Can Boris Johnson retain his support in the Red Wall? Or can Labour repair their relationship with these low-income, blue-collar and cross-pressured voters?  Only time will tell. And for Johnson, especially, the clock is ticking …  Matthew Goodwin – Twitter – Website – Speaking Subscribe to this mailing list

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