Fraser Nelson:
The working class is so strongly behind Boris Johnson that he is willing to risk a December vote
December would be a miserable month for a general election, but Boris Johnson ran out of good options some time ago. It is a huge risk: voters dislike snap elections and often punish governments who call them. Nor is there any sign that Parliament will give him permission – why would Labour turkeys vote for this kind of Christmas? Better, surely, to keep him prisoner in 10 Downing Street. There are several Tory MPS who are anyway nervous about going to the country before Brexit is complete. But to the Prime Minister, this is the perfect time to strike.
He’s probably right. He has suffered no end of humiliation at the hands of this Parliament, Labour’s rejection of his election plan would be just the latest setback. But after each one, he poses as the underdog and ends up with an even higher opinion poll rating. Tory strategists have been watching the numbers with amazement. One group of voters, in particular, seems delighted with the Boris project: what pollsters call the “C2DE” voters, the blue-collar workers. They prefer him to Jeremy Corbyn by 48 per cent to 18 per cent, a lead that is – to put it mildly – unusual for a Tory. So if there is a December election, this will be his target audience.
The phrase “working class” has dropped out of political usage. Ed Miliband didn’t mention it once in any of his speeches and, until recently, social class seemed to have stopped being a factor. There was an unspoken, cross-party consensus: that older, poorer, lesser-educated voters represented the past. The lack of interest became mutual, as poorer voters just stopped voting. In their brilliant study of the phenomenon, Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley summed it up: “The new party of the working class is no party at all.”
Those words were written just before the referendum, after which everything changed. It was the return of such voters – missing, presumed politically dead – that has caused so many political earthquakes in Britain, Europe and America. The SNP harnessed this force after the independence referendum, and winning nearly 60 per cent of the working-class vote in the subsequent election helped it take almost every seat in Scotland. What had been called “voter apathy” was, in fact, a failure of the main parties to come up with an agenda people thought worth voting for. Brexit, and the issues it raises, have brought many of these voters back to politics.
This is where the Conservatives now see their opening. A new formula – you might call it Johnsonism – is being applied: generosity on NHS spending, toughness on crime, a strong line on Brexit (a proxy for immigration control and culture) and a keen interest in regional inequality. So far, this has been pretty popular: a great many voters feel that “the system” (however defined) is not working for them. They can see, in the Prime Minister, someone battling that system. Losing, to be sure, but battling none the less.
For all of the endless debate about Brexit, there has been precious little discussion about what caused it. The PM draws on the insights of the Vote Leave campaign: that the centre ground is nowhere near where Westminster thinks it is. That the old idea of a Left-right axis is useless when it comes to explaining new politics: you can promise extra NHS spending and tough border control and there’s no contradiction. To
No 10, most voters regard Priti Patel as a sensible Home Secretary, rather than a hardliner. And Westminster fundamentally fails to understand this, according to Johnson’s strategists, because the Commons has become detached from the country it purports to serve.
Social class is part of it. Half of the 1945 Attlee Cabinet held blue-collar jobs before entering Parliament: today, this is true for just 3 per cent of MPS. Then comes the educational gap: the vast majority of MPS are graduates, compared to just over a quarter of the population. This matters because graduates see a whole range of things – particularly immigration and globalisation – very differently. For example, 72 per cent of voters with no academic qualifications voted for Brexit; just 35 per cent of graduates did.
To the Prime Minister, Brexit is only partly about leaving the EU. It is mainly about closing the gap between the rulers and the ruled and he thinks the Conservatives are now best placed to stamp their flag in a new centre ground. A good number of his MPS agree: those who depend the most on working-class votes are the most enthusiastic about a December 12 election. The campaigning started some time ago already. No 10 think he does best when he’s on television talking about the health service, police or regional inequality: subjects that his new target voters want to hear about.
The new Toryism is a blue-collar Toryism, so we should not expect much in the way of tax cuts at Sajid Javid’s next Budget. The large cheques promised for the NHS will set the tone. The Chancellor is not, by instinct, a great spender, but the Thatcherite formula of low taxes and small government will not come back under Boris Johnson. The focus will be on a high-skilled, high-waged workforce – and if that means the Government setting the salary for a quarter of the country’s workers via the highest minimum wage in Europe, so be it.
Theresa May had roughly the same idea, but she botched it – and ended up copying lines from Labour. Her antibusiness rhetoric will not be repeated by the current Prime Minister, who thinks it unnecessary to hound the rich or snarl at profitable companies. This, he thinks, is Labour’s class-war politics and leaves people cold. He thinks his target voters would, above all, like their Brexit papers signed
– and he’s the only party leader in Westminster promising to do that. This he sees as the big advantage of a pre-brexit election.
No Conservative needs reminding that Mrs May also called an election with a huge opinion poll lead, among the working class and everyone else. That campaign was a reminder of how hard it is to gauge politics, how quickly things can shift, that polls can count for nothing. So yes, a December general election would be a massive gamble. But with no Government majority, and no end to Brexit in sight, there really is no alternative.