The Left would rather dissolve the people than try to understand them
Labour shows no sign of wanting to get to know the electorate. Indeed, it seems to hold them in contempt
Watching the Establishment take in the election result has been a sight to behold. We have public schoolboys giving insights on the working classes, Southerners telling us about Northerners, and those who said Labour’s Red Wall would never fall explaining why they always knew it was inevitable.
Like explorers and colonials returning from faraway lands to inform wide-eyed Victorian audiences, liberal newspapers have treated their readers to a series of portraits of exotic creatures from the North of England. Without quite describing the contours of the natives’ heads, their cheekbones and jaw size, these studies present a wildly different animal to those from London and the Home Counties.
Northerners, we are told, are quite unlike the rest of us. They drink ale and smoke, they bet on horses, and the more traditional among them keep pigeons. They are poor and uneducated, but they retain a strong sense of custom and local pride. They are superstitious, believing in discredited rituals like marriage, work and a mystical old faith they call “patriotism”. For a group living in towns, cities and countryside stretching across tens of thousands of miles, they are surprisingly uniform in their beliefs and circumstances.
Comparatively little is known about the Northerners’ tribal relatives living directly to their south, often called the Midlanders. Our limited knowledge might be because the maps used by many explorers are inaccurate, marking the border between England’s North and South in a clear line from the Severn to the Wash. For this reason, many experts have denied the Midlands exists at all. But some cultural artefacts – like old television comedies mocking the natives’ strange accents – always suggested that mythical places like Birmingham and Derby were in fact real.
Well, thanks to the general election, everybody knows now that Birmingham is as real as Buckingham, and Workington matters as much as Wokingham.
For years, millions of voters from these places, and working-class voters across the country, have been ignored, taken for granted by Labour in particular, and treated as though their voice and vote did not matter. But these are the people who in the past three years have changed Britain’s future course: first in the referendum and now in the general election. But is anybody – especially the leaders of the Labour Party – willing to learn the lesson?
Usually, after an election, the winners get on with governing and the losers try to work out how to change. Yet in this case, the victorious Tories are trying to change – as fast as they can – and Labour seem determined not to learn from their defeat. The Tories want to convince their new voters to stay with them for the long-term. Meanwhile the Left is seething, and seems to want to dissolve the people and elect another.
In the race to become Labour leader, we have Emily Thornberry, who famously mocked a working-class family for flying the St George’s Cross. She is alleged to have said that working-class Leave supporters in the North were “stupid”, though she has denied it. And she argues that Labour’s only mistake was to allow an early election that would be all about Brexit.
Then there is Jess Phillips, who explains to fawning liberal journalists that she disrespects what her voters think about Brexit. Yet because of her Brummie accent – and, one suspects, her support for policies like high immigration and EU membership – she is treated as a tribune of the working classes. In reality, she is another cultural liberal who despises the inconvenient beliefs of those who elect her.
Sir Keir Starmer is written off as “too middle class” by some in Labour circles, yet he was brought up the son of a toolmaker and a nurse. Confusingly, that makes his upbringing far less privileged than that of Phillips, the self-proclaimed working-class hero, whose father was a teacher and mother was the deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Yet really this matters little: Starmer, like Phillips, is one of the cultural liberals who have helped to turn the gap between Labour and their voters into an unbridgeable chasm.
And these are the so-called “moderates”. Rebecca Long-bailey, who is many an insider’s tip to win the contest, has appointed a Stalinist close to Jeremy Corbyn as her campaign manager. Clive Lewis, another contender, seems to believe no ethnic minority can legitimately be a Conservative. When James Cleverly joined the Cabinet, Lewis tweeted: “I’m just sorry you had to sell your soul and self-respect to get there.”
The Left’s obsession with divisive identity politics is so deep-rooted that any hope of a unifying policy prospectus from Labour seems ridiculous. Lisa Nandy, another candidate who speaks intelligently about the need to renew UK towns, recently criticised a photograph of several of the new Northern Tory MPS because they were all white men. Nandy represents Wigan, incidentally, which is more than 97 per cent white. But that is beside the point: Labour’s mentality has become reductive, divisive and far removed from the interests of ordinary voters.
Yet in one respect, the Corbynistas are right. Labour’s decline did not start with them. Corbyn might have alienated many traditional Labour voters, but the rot started with Tony Blair, who ignored and marginalised them. But those on the Left who have convinced themselves that Labour lost only because of Brexit – as if Brexit was not a symptom of the cultural chasm – are deluded. Thinkers who do offer a way forward, such as the social conservatives from Blue Labour, are already being dismissed as racists, misogynists and transphobes.
And so the Tories have an incredible chance to consolidate their gains and become the party that rises above regional and class factionalism. Yet they must heed the advice of James Frayne, the quiet political strategist who saw this opportunity before almost anybody else. “The Government was elected by people it doesn’t know well,” he says, “while the party represents seats most senior Conservatives couldn’t place on a map.” The Tories must not repeat Labour’s mistake: take their new voters for granted, and they will lose them forever.