Matthew Goodwin:
If the Conservatives do not defend traditional values, previously loyal voters will continue to abandon them
This week, it was the turn of the people of Peterborough to throw light on the radical transformation of British politics. Coming less than two weeks after the Brexit Party’s victory in the tumultuous elections to the European Parliament, the Peterborough by-election almost delivered another upset.
Labour, whose disgraced MP was convicted for perverting the course of justice and then removed by voters through recall, narrowly clung to power with 31 per cent of the vote. Just 638 votes behind them was the Brexit Party, launched only eight weeks ago and with no data on local voters.
Nigel Farage and his party should still have won this pro-leave seat and their failure to do so reveals his greatest enemy once again: first past the post. Either way, a strong vote for Mr Farage spelled ruin for the Conservatives who, until this week, had only lost this seat on three occasions since 1950; Tony Blair’s first two landslides and then 2017. That number has now risen to four, with the Conservatives left in a humiliating third place with 21 per cent; a slump of more than 25 points since 2017 and their worst result in this seat since 1880.
All of this raises a deeper question, critical to the future of the party – who, exactly, is voting for Mr Farage and how might Conservatives win them back?
One way of answering this is to point to the polls. As a professor of politics, I could tell you that the Brexit Party is attracting nearly two-fifths of people who voted Conservative in 2017 and almost half of those who voted Leave in 2016. As in Peterborough, this is more
than enough to pave the way for Prime Minister Corbyn.
But another way of answering the question is to dive much deeper, to ask who these people really are and, given that most of them voted Conservative in 2017, why are they abandoning their party?
This is a group who are instinctively conservative. They love their country, care passionately about their traditions and culture but are tired of being told that they should be ashamed of them. They talk to Mr Farage because nobody else seems to be talking to them; these skilled working-class plumbers and electricians, who work hard and play by the rules, but are tired of seeing others rewarded for doing none of these things. They feel that things are quickly moving beyond their control; that a creeping and relentless spread of what the journalist and author David Goodhart has called “double liberalism”, both economic and social, is eroding community and nation.
They worry not only that Conservatives are wedded to a formula that cannot shelter them from the economic and cultural winds of globalisation, but that nobody in their party seems to care. They value individual responsibility but are deeply concerned that today’s Conservatives have stopped thinking about how to promote the social bonds necessary to build other fundamentals of a conservative society: trust, reciprocity and obligation. They are looking for something that no Conservative seems able to offer; more economic security combined with a little bit more cultural security.
They want to talk about how to build this security while Conservatives only talk to them about tax cuts. And they are incredibly wary of those who pray only at the altar of free markets, who they fear will subordinate all that they cherish – faith, flag and family – to the invisible hand of self-interest and the pursuit of free trade.
They would like the Conservative Party to be bold and follow clear ideological principles – for instance, by standing up for thinkers like Roger Scruton. They detest politicians who no longer seem to know who or where they are, what they are supposed to say or whether they are even “allowed” to say it. They wonder where an earlier generation of Conservatives, with clear answers to these questions, has gone.
Liberals will always welcome and encourage endless change and flux. Tories are meant to welcome change while ensuring that it does not destroy what has come before. Mr Farage is winning over those who have concluded that today’s Conservatives are more interested in the former than the latter.
One of the peculiarities of Britain is that once you step outside of London and the university towns this remains an instinctively conservative nation. Yet at the same time it has a Conservative Party that is afraid of being conservative. Many Tory MPS have concluded that the less they look and sound like one the more successful they will be. They are wrong.
Yet winning back these voters would not be hard. It requires a Conservative Party to do what it says on the tin: strengthen law and order; slow immigration; champion the nuclear family; award more status and opportunity to the working classes by investing seriously in technical education and apprenticeships; give tax breaks to key groups in their electorate; promote Britain’s Christian heritage; start HS2 in the North not the South; and start a Marshall Plan for England’s small and coastal towns.
But, above all, they want leaders who stand up for their creed. Farage is winning over people concerned that Britain’s political and popular culture has come to be dominated by a deeply illiberal brand of liberalism that is more interested in historic “injustices” than respecting tradition, in turning everybody who is not a white male into a victim and defining people by membership of identity groups rather than individual agency.
This is why there is such a gulf between the rulers and the ruled, and why the likes of Farage, Trump, Salvini or the centre-left in Denmark, which combine economic protection with a hard line on immigration, are winning elections. Populists may lack a coherent thesis but they don’t need one so long as they recognise what the old parties do not: that large numbers of people want to put the nation, and their fellow citizens, first.
Mr Farage thrives on these weaknesses. The longer they persist, the stronger he becomes. What he has recognised, as Margaret Thatcher did, is that there are millions of people in this country who simply want the Conservatives to be all that their name implies.
They love their culture and country, but are tired of being told they should be ashamed of them