by Make no mistake, British politics is about to feel an earthquake – an earthquake that could be even louder than the crumbling Red Wall. The mindset driving it is an enigma. It’s not the “ick factor” – the shrill embarrassment that entered Westminster discourse in the 2010s. It’s not public “anger” – the rebellious mix of Irishness and hope that drove the majority of voters to vote for Brexit and oust Corbyn’s Labour. It is the white heat of moral rage: an almost fearful rage to bring justice to a fallen party. The Tory heartlands have simply had enough. A full-blown revolution might just be brewing. It could kill politics for good.
It is true that the first rule of British politics is not to read too much into local elections, and the second is not to even underestimate the power of voter clientelism. But the scale and geographical distribution of Tory losses in local elections suggests something unprecedented is happening. Labor has taken control of councils in Tory heartlands from Buckinghamshire to Hampshire. Not only is he on track to beat the Tories in England’s 100 largest rural constituencies, but he is also targeting large swaths of the south. Brewing is also in trouble in Yorkshire. Pollsters whisper about Labor snapping up some of its safest strongholds like Skipton and Ripon. It is no longer inconceivable that Rishi Sunak himself could become the first incumbent PM in history to lose his seat in a general election. One projection has him achieving a majority in his seat of Richmond with 146 seats.
I got a sense of the ferment affecting the English Tories during a recent trip to the safe seat of Boston in Lincolnshire – the most leave-voting seat in the country. A market town where mobility scooter shops burst with stalls decorated with “flowers of hope”, and large groups of Romantics gathered outside its magnificent medieval church playing ghetto blasters, the spirit of Boston seemed to be imbued with a challenging yet winning melange. than I felt in the Red Wall in 2019. A local told me: “Boston has been Tory all my life and I’m 75. It’s time to warn them.”
The parallels with the build up to the fall of the Red Wall are unexpected. Not only is the political landscape criss-crossed with the same signs of tension and erosion – the devastating “canary in the coal mine” of by-election and local election footfalls. It also has sharp tectonic changes, from demographic change to the existential breakdown of class tribalism (though the latter is not due to deindustrialization this time, but rather to economic slowdown and an exploding welfare bill in a society that aging left the Tories unable to protect the middle class from tax increases).
Still, the most interesting thing about the coming revolution is the unprecedented anger that fuels it. While Tory England feels loathed and abandoned, just like the Rust Belt in 2019, this is imbued with a sense of depth never seen before – even in the Red Wall. Traditional working class politics has never ceased since industrial collapse and the death of trade unions. In contrast, the Thatcherite belief in self-sufficiency and low taxes was not sufficiently crushed by historical forces. It is now, and the Tory public’s sense of betrayal is as coldly clear as it is epic. A view has crystallized that not only has the ruling party cataclysmically overridden the spirit of conservatism, but that this has damaged the country on a truly awesome scale. So millions of loyal Tories cannot vote for their party with a clear conscience. Many would prefer to be a little poorer under Labour.
In particular, an unholy trinity of Tory sins is attacking traditional voters. First of all, the party granted a referendum on Brexit – a project it never believed in and treated with dismay. Britain is now the worst of both worlds, stuck in the orbit of the EU but still excluded from its decision-making core. Second, a massive Tory gamble that could escape historic levels of mass migration after binding Britain twice – both without the incentive to upgrade the country’s economy from one that lives on activity low skills, low wages, and (due to the limited GDP generated from such a weak growth model) unable to afford infrastructure spending to meet migration surges. Thirdly, he betrayed those conservative intellectuals who favor freedom, personal responsibility and a careful cost-benefit approach to the crisis when he implemented draconian lockdowns that destroyed the economy and saved as few as 1,700 lives in the spring of 2020.
I think Tory voters are flocking to Reform in their millions with the lonely knowledge that much of this Tory damage is irreversible, and that it will be the children and grandchildren who will bear the brunt. . After all, the EU has no incentive to heed Britain’s pleas to renegotiate the Tories’ flawed Brexit deal. Higher interest rates mean the 15-year window the Tories had to borrow heavily to fund tax cuts and infrastructure investment to pull the UK out of its productivity hole is now closed. The damage of lockdown must be paid for, not only in tax receipts but tragically, in school absenteeism rates, young lives lost. Stagnation is so far advanced, the welfare state is so entrenched that it will be impossible to reduce the number of immigrants without unleashing intractable controversy and unbearable pain. And yet the reluctance of the ruling class to continue will only pave the way for the far Right. The Tories have trashed this country there on a scale that is completely mind blowing.
Those who believe in the “wisdom of crowds” may organize if the Tories have developed a powerful intuition that the party must be pulverized almost to the point of destruction in order to reshape it into a pro-growth party. to make up for all the damage. Because when you look at the numbers, that’s just right. Even if the Tories suffer a significant defeat and are reduced to, say, 170 seats, the Single Nations Tory “wetness” will remain the largest faction, mainly because the David Cameron machine has been so effective at parachuting the liberal, centrist Tories -Left to safe seats. . It is only when the party is reduced to less than 100 seats that rough arithmetic suggests that this faction would cease to be dominant.
In 2019 I was one of the few journalists who predicted the fall of the Red Wall. The Tories had better hope my instincts are off this time. Because if I’m right, maybe history is about to be made, with the Tories facing a situation as miserable as the country itself.
