There is a lesson for Democrats supporting Sanders or Warren in the UK election....
Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke—And Now It’s Broke
The Conservatives’ resounding victory in yesterday’s British General Election won’t come as a surprise to anyone who spent time canvassing in the ‘Red Wall.’ That’s the name given to a thick wedge of seats in the Midlands and North of England, some of which have been held by the Labour Party for over 75 years. Seats like Penistone and Stockbridge in Sheffield, once the home of the British steel industry, and Bishop Auckland in County Durham, a former coal town. Both turned blue in this election, as did a large number of seats in Labour’s post-industrial heartland. Not so much a ‘Red Wall’ now as a Mondrian painting made up of blue and red squares. It was the voters in those constituencies—many of them working minimum wage jobs and living in social housing—that provided Boris Johnson’s Conservatives with their highest number of seats since 1983.
Not that they have much love for the blond-haired leader. A friend of mine was standing as the Conservative candidate in Newcastle upon Tyne North, where the Labour incumbent won a 10,000 majority two years ago, and I knocked on a few doors for him last week. Every person I spoke to said they were going to vote Tory. In some cases, it was because they wanted to “get Brexit done,” which has been the Conservatives’ endlessly repeated campaign slogan over the past six weeks, but in others it was because of their visceral dislike for Labour’s leader.
“Most people I know who used to be staunch Labour are now saying no way Jeremy Corbyn,” said Steve Hurt, an engineer. “It’s not our party any more. Same label, different bottle.”
According to the activist I was with, that had been the reaction wherever he went. He had knocked on 100 doors in a council estate earlier that day and all but three people he’d spoken to told him they intended to vote Conservative—and this in a city where 26 per cent of the population are among the most deprived in England. I asked why, if these electors disliked Corbyn, they didn’t simply abstain? Why were they planning to brave the elements on a cold day in December to vote for a party led by an old Etonian toff?
“Because they hate Corbyn that much,” he said. “The biggest message they can send to him is to elect a Tory government.”
It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse. We won’t have a breakdown of how people voted according to income and occupation for a while yet, but a few of the opinion polls in the run-up to election day contained some astonishing findings. For instance, a Deltapoll survey for the Mail on Sunday last month showed the Conservatives outpolling Labour by 49 per cent to 23 per cent in the C2DE social grades—the bottom half of the National Readership Survey classification system that ranks people according to their occupation. That is to say, people in the bottom half of the NRS distribution—skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, state pensioners and people on benefits—were intending to vote Conservative rather than Labour by a ratio of more than two to one. (Exit polls suggest the actual figure was closer to 1.5 to one.)
A taste of things to come was provided on Tuesday when a clandestine recording was released of Jon Ashworth MP, Labour’s shadow health spokesman, telling a friend how “dire” things were for the party outside urban, metropolitan areas. “It’s abysmal out there,” he said. “They can’t stand Corbyn and they think Labour’s blocked Brexit.”
Ashworth described the electoral map of Britain as “topsy turvey,” a reference not just to the anticipated losses in traditional Labour areas, but to the uptick in support for Labour in middle class cities like Canterbury. One of the other startling features of the opinion polls was Labour’s lead among graduates. As a general rule, the higher the concentration of graduates in an area, the more likely it was to skew Left on Thursday—and vice versa. (Labour held on to Canterbury.)
The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.
If you look at the working class constituencies that turned blue, most of them voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a significant margin—Great Grimsby, for instance, an English sea port in Yorkshire, where Leave outpolled Remain by 71.45 to 28.55 per cent. Labour’s problem, according to this analysis, is that it didn’t commit to taking Britain out of the EU during the campaign but instead said it would negotiate a new exit deal and then hold a second referendum in which the public would be able to choose between that deal and Remain. This fudge may have been enough to keep graduates on side, but it alienated working class Leave voters in England’s rust belt.
This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes. But mass immigration and globalization have driven a wedge between Labour’s middle class and working class supporters, as has Britain’s growing welfare bill and its membership of the European Union.
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Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke—And Now It’s Broke
The Conservatives’ resounding victory in yesterday’s British General Election won’t come as a surprise to anyone who spent time canvassing in the ‘Red Wall.’ That’s the name given to a thick wedge of seats in the Midlands and North of England, some of which have been held by the Labour Party for over 75 years. Seats like Penistone and Stockbridge in Sheffield, once the home of the British steel industry, and Bishop Auckland in County Durham, a former coal town. Both turned blue in this election, as did a large number of seats in Labour’s post-industrial heartland. Not so much a ‘Red Wall’ now as a Mondrian painting made up of blue and red squares. It was the voters in those constituencies—many of them working minimum wage jobs and living in social housing—that provided Boris Johnson’s Conservatives with their highest number of seats since 1983.
Not that they have much love for the blond-haired leader. A friend of mine was standing as the Conservative candidate in Newcastle upon Tyne North, where the Labour incumbent won a 10,000 majority two years ago, and I knocked on a few doors for him last week. Every person I spoke to said they were going to vote Tory. In some cases, it was because they wanted to “get Brexit done,” which has been the Conservatives’ endlessly repeated campaign slogan over the past six weeks, but in others it was because of their visceral dislike for Labour’s leader.
“Most people I know who used to be staunch Labour are now saying no way Jeremy Corbyn,” said Steve Hurt, an engineer. “It’s not our party any more. Same label, different bottle.”
According to the activist I was with, that had been the reaction wherever he went. He had knocked on 100 doors in a council estate earlier that day and all but three people he’d spoken to told him they intended to vote Conservative—and this in a city where 26 per cent of the population are among the most deprived in England. I asked why, if these electors disliked Corbyn, they didn’t simply abstain? Why were they planning to brave the elements on a cold day in December to vote for a party led by an old Etonian toff?
“Because they hate Corbyn that much,” he said. “The biggest message they can send to him is to elect a Tory government.”
It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse. We won’t have a breakdown of how people voted according to income and occupation for a while yet, but a few of the opinion polls in the run-up to election day contained some astonishing findings. For instance, a Deltapoll survey for the Mail on Sunday last month showed the Conservatives outpolling Labour by 49 per cent to 23 per cent in the C2DE social grades—the bottom half of the National Readership Survey classification system that ranks people according to their occupation. That is to say, people in the bottom half of the NRS distribution—skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, state pensioners and people on benefits—were intending to vote Conservative rather than Labour by a ratio of more than two to one. (Exit polls suggest the actual figure was closer to 1.5 to one.)
A taste of things to come was provided on Tuesday when a clandestine recording was released of Jon Ashworth MP, Labour’s shadow health spokesman, telling a friend how “dire” things were for the party outside urban, metropolitan areas. “It’s abysmal out there,” he said. “They can’t stand Corbyn and they think Labour’s blocked Brexit.”
Ashworth described the electoral map of Britain as “topsy turvey,” a reference not just to the anticipated losses in traditional Labour areas, but to the uptick in support for Labour in middle class cities like Canterbury. One of the other startling features of the opinion polls was Labour’s lead among graduates. As a general rule, the higher the concentration of graduates in an area, the more likely it was to skew Left on Thursday—and vice versa. (Labour held on to Canterbury.)
The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.
If you look at the working class constituencies that turned blue, most of them voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a significant margin—Great Grimsby, for instance, an English sea port in Yorkshire, where Leave outpolled Remain by 71.45 to 28.55 per cent. Labour’s problem, according to this analysis, is that it didn’t commit to taking Britain out of the EU during the campaign but instead said it would negotiate a new exit deal and then hold a second referendum in which the public would be able to choose between that deal and Remain. This fudge may have been enough to keep graduates on side, but it alienated working class Leave voters in England’s rust belt.
This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes. But mass immigration and globalization have driven a wedge between Labour’s middle class and working class supporters, as has Britain’s growing welfare bill and its membership of the European Union.
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