Sherelle Jacobs
The Conservatives must not base their entire strategy on a nonexistent working-class caricature
After days of wondering whether the Tories were even going to turn up to their long-demanded election, the PM has finally set off his campaign in a pyrotechnical display of Bbc-bristling polemic and fizzing optimism. Boris Johnson has vowed to “unleash the potential of the country”, with tax cuts, freeports and a Northern Powerhouse revival. But as the passionate leader of a professionally mediocre party, he resembles a fire trying to light on a pile of soggy leaves. If the PM wants to win a majority (a task already complicated by his halfbaked “oven-ready” deal), he must galvanise visionless colleagues to spread his Right-wing message.
Early signs in target Labour marginals are troubling. Perhaps due to a mixture of snobbery and timidity, “chuck-a-load-of-money-at-it” focusgroupery seems to be the order of the day. The strategy is essentially to be the pro-brexit version of Labour. Cue a haphazard slew of pledges, from ending the benefits freeze to raising the state pension, which will see expenditure rocket to 1970s-levels.
Though the PM is making the case eloquently for conservatism on the airwaves, on the doorstep it is nowhere to be heard. Instead of inspiring people to invest in a capitalist dream, the Tories are trying to buy local votes with retail policies. No 10’s fracking U-turn, after a poll found that Northerners have reservations, has set a cynical tone. Even worse, in deprived target seats, candidates are repentant about the symptoms of that deprivation, when they should be resolute on the cause. Take the constituencies in my native Black Country – high on the Tories’ target list – where PPCS have been campaigning on mental health rather than the economy, even though lack of decent jobs has sunk whole towns into almost transcendental depression.
Soggy One Nation Toryism risks dominating this election because wet Westminster politicians do not understand the working-class. The Tories’ campaign strategy seems to be inspired by the proto-blairite cartoon character Workington Man. This council-housed Brexiteer who favours security over freedom is the contrived answer to a flawed question. In the real world, “freedom” is not the natural opposing value to “security”; this bizarre assumption merely reflects how deeply liberalism permeates the philosophical premises of Western academia. If the question had been: “do you favour security (staying still) or progress (getting on)”, the response would have been different.
If No 10 policy wonks threaten to botch this election by distracting the PM with caricatures, it begs the question: who is the real Workington Man to whom Johnson must appeal?
I suspect he/she is a Thatcherite. To quote yet another study that should be taken with a pinch of salt, six in 10 voters on lower salaries want income tax cuts, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Call me biased, but I think they might be onto something. “Take Back Control”, the three most influential words in recent British history, show why. Many Tory MPS share the Left’s view that Dominic Cummings’s brilliant slogan is the political equivalent of a Millwall football chant. But the working-class Brexit vote came from a place of confidence rather than impotence – and expressed a hunger to challenge the metropolitan narrative of “grim” Britain and its working-class “victims”.
In Dudley North – a marginal the Tories are eyeing – the phrase I heard over and over during the referendum campaign was “Britain needs to get off its backside”. It hints at the political secret that has been hiding in plain sight for decades: the working-class has completely insulated itself from the condescending simperings of the liberal media and gently despises the sterile nourishment of the welfare state. We love Brexit because it embodies our values: self-sufficiency, originality and pride.
Untruths have deep roots. The enterprising eccentricity of workingclass history has been utterly crushed by Left-wing union mythology which depicts our ancestors as identikit cogs in an industrial machine. The stories of my own family – chain makers who moonlighted as salt hawkers, and worshipped in nonconformist churches – are gone with the wind. But the attitudes in places like Dudley, where three jobs is normal and the “tax mon” endures as the bogeyman in pub jokes, grafting attitudes live on.
Westminster-cosseted Tories have failed to pick up on this – let alone connect it with the glaring fact that the last time they made big inroads into working-class seats was under Thatcher. She was popular in “no-go” areas because she did not patronise voters and did not let wonks set her agenda. She said what she thought and did what she believed – hence why so many people were willing to put their faith in a politician from the other side.
Which hits on why the party should rethink its game plan. Dodgy Brexit deal aside, people can smell the insincerity of its strategy’s semisocialist flourishes. No 10 is so fixated on clever voter profiles and deviously targeted policies that it is failing to grasp the bigger question that will seal their fate in Labour areas: “Can you really trust a Tory?”