Every middle-class Corbyn supporter should do well to read this and digest it:
This new Tory coalition has deep foundations
Shared values mean the Conservatives won’t struggle to keep their new voters
Dominic Lawson
Sunday February 23 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Conventional wisdom is often right, in politics as in everything else. But that does not mean we should not question it. Since the Conservatives’ ballot-box triumph in December, the fashionable argument has been that it is impossible for the government to remain true to its “traditional” support in the affluent south while satisfying the demands of the former Labour voters in northern England and the Midlands who provided the electoral breakthrough.
This is a truism rather than a demonstrable truth. No one has been more assiduous in challenging it than James Frayne, founder of the opinion research group Public First and author of Meet the People. He has conducted countless focus groups in these former Labour heartlands, so his opinions have an empirical basis. In October he wrote on the ConservativeHome website: “I ran a detailed opinion research exercise for the Taxpayers’ Alliance to probe working-class attitudes to prospective tax policies . . . This research showed that working-class voters are much more supportive of business tax cuts than middle-class professional voters . . . For example, they strongly favour start-ups paying no corporation tax for their first three years of operation and tax cuts for small businesses and the self-employed . . . Fundamentally it is because working-class voters are much more concerned about their jobs.”
Not only did this “contradict popular wisdom at Westminster”, as Frayne observed: it reminds us of the popularity of Margaret Thatcher’s approach in her heyday — when the Tories also seized support from social groups previously regarded as unalterably Labour. In this context, Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, provided an invaluable service on The Times website this month, analysing results in the 60 constituencies that Labour lost in December, some of them back to 1918. As he concludes, what happened in 2019 was far from unprecedented: “In most cases the position has returned to something similar to how things were in the 1980s.”
This was when Thatcher was honouring her commitment to sell council homes to tenants — the obverse of Theresa May’s fateful 2017 manifesto pledge to make people’s homes collateral for the costs of their social care. Even this did not alter the underlying trend. Every general election of the 21st century — all six of them — produced an increase in the Conservatives’ share of the vote. The crucial fact was how this was happening. In the wake of the 2015 election, when the Tories’ win defied expectations, I observed: “Over the three general elections of 2005, 2010 and 2015 . . . as the [Labour] leader seemed to move steadily to the left — from Blair to Brown to Miliband — its middle-class support held remarkably firm. Yet among what might once have been broadly described as “the working class”, Labour’s vote share plummeted.”
So although Boris Johnson’s success in 2019 is always referred to as “crashing through Labour’s red wall” — exemplified by his election stunt of driving a JCB through a wall of plastic bricks — it was anything but sudden. It much more resembled an electoral version of Jenga, in which the removal of one last brick causes the whole construction to collapse.
That last brick had Brexit written on it. But Labour’s edifice had already been fatally weakened by its assumption, most obvious under the Corbynite ascendancy, that the British masses are socialist who lack only consciousness of that fact. As the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson (from an impoverished background) bitterly said to Momentum’s (privately educated) founder, Jon Lansman, in an ITV studio after the exit poll predicted the extent of the debacle for the Corbyn mission: “The working classes have always been a disappointment to Jon and his [Marxist] cult.”
Here, too, research by Public First gives empirical evidence of how big this (amazingly persistent) error is, and why there is no great area of conflict between those former Labour voters in the collapsed red wall and the views you would find among longstanding members of Conservative Party constituency associations. As Frayne — born in Nottingham and educated at a comprehensive — notes, his focus groups reveal these working-class voters to be eye-wateringly tough on matters such as border control, crime, welfare “scroungers” and national security. Indeed, on the conventional measurement of political opinion, they would be defined as more right-wing than the bourgeoisie of the southeast.
They certainly believe in the merit of hard work, and in being appreciated for it — which includes not being overtaxed. If you want a single insight into how little Labour has recognised this, the left-wing website Politics Joe has tweeted an interview with Rebecca Long Bailey in which the candidate for the party’s leadership declares: “If you get on under a Conservative government then good for you, because it was out of sheer luck.” So: not hard work; not talent; not long hours of dedication to the desire to provide the best for your family. Just luck. This is an emanation of Corbyn’s view that everyone is a victim of capitalism, apart from the “one per cent”.
Nor is this facile cod-Marxism rejected only by those in the Midlands and northern England who would have liked Labour to see them as the strong people they are, rather than victims: it is also true in London. The Trust for London (mission: “tackling poverty and inequality”) has just released a report on views about differences in wealth. Its focus groups, in the words of one of the trustees, Sonia Sodha, showed “most people do not view the wealthy in the way the left wishes [they] would . . . while they were less keen on those who did not earn their wealth, they admired people they thought had worked hard to make it”.
What seemed to surprise the researchers was that this view was held as much by focus groups of those on lower incomes as those on high salaries. Originally they planned to have those separate groups meet “to see if a common view could be reached”. But the researchers decided this was not necessary because “it became apparent that the discussion of lower-income, higher-income and mixed-income groups did not significantly differ . . . so there was no need to mediate contradictory or widely diverging opinions between these different demographic groups”. And there, in a (somewhat academic) nutshell, you have the refutation of the conventional wisdom that it is impossible for the government to serve both the “new” working-class Conservative voters in the towns of the former red wall and the southern bourgeoisie.
Of course, in time this government will do something to infuriate all of them. That piece of conventional wisdom is definitely true.
