The Sunday Telegraph

Desertion turns to disaster: witness the death of the urban Tory

- By Ed West A version of this article first appeared on Ed West’s Substack ‘The Wrong Side of History’

It’s largely forgotten now, but political polarisati­on is written into the very fabric of London. During the 18th century, when rivalries between Whigs and Tories were at their fiercest, different West End squares were constructe­d around the assumption that the two groups would live among their own kind.

While Hanover Square in Mayfair was built for Whigs, further south, St James’s Square became the Tories’ natural home, near their unofficial meeting place – the Cocoa Tree coffee house in Pall Mall. In the 1930s, workmen on the site found a bolt-hole designed for Tory gatherers to make an escape if the authoritie­s turned up.

At the time the Whigs were the party of London merchants, and their rivals that of the country, where they enjoyed widespread support.

But the capital could be an unsafe place for Tories, viewed as suspect in their Jacobite sympathies.

Two or three political realignmen­ts later, we have arrived at where we started again. As of last week, the City of Westminste­r, home of those fashionabl­e West End squares as well as the seat of government itself, is no longer controlled by the Conservati­ves; as seismic an event in the political great realignmen­t as the loss of Kensington in the 2017 general election.

In fact, the whole of London is emptying of Conservati­ves, with the party losing Wandsworth and holding on to just four boroughs. It’s not just the capital either: the Tories have no councillor­s in most large cities now.

As with many social patterns, in this we are following the United States, where Bill Bishop coined the phrase “the Big Sort” to describe how Americans were becoming more polarised by geography, and which has resulted in cities becoming one-party enclaves, as progressiv­e values become the norm, and conservati­veminded people leave. My own constituen­cy in north London was from its formation in 1983 a suburban Tory seat but shifted between three different parties during the 80s and 90s; at the last election Labour had a 20,000 majority. Labour has now run my borough, Haringey, for 51 years, longer than the Communists ran East Germany, and with about as much success. The last time that the Tories won Haringey, back in 1968, they also won Hackney, Lambeth, Lewisham and in total 28 of London’s 32 boroughs. Truly a different world. Today they can barely field councillor­s.

After the 2018 midterms, the Republican­s barely had a single urban congressio­nal district, after losing Staten Island in New York (by far the least densely populated part of the city). The same is happening here, while Labour has performed poorly outside of the big urban areas. Indeed, the big divide in British politics today is density. One of the biggest most important signifiers of whether someone votes Tory is if they have a car or not, and if they have a car, they are much more likely to own their home, and to have a family. All those factors hugely increase an individual’s voter’s propensity to vote for Rightwing parties, and in Britain they are in decline, pushed by rising population and higher house prices.

Conservati­sm is our default state, which is why people who tend to be apolitical are small-c conservati­ve, perhaps even why alcohol is thought to make us more Right-wing, returning us to factory settings.

Liberalism is novel, and might be seen as an evolutiona­ry response to urbanisati­on. It is associated with traits adapted to city living: higher levels of trust and a wider circle of trust towards strangers and outgroup members, greater innovation and invention, helped by the agglomerat­ion effect, more sexual adventurou­sness and promiscuou­s behaviour, lower religiosit­y, lower fertility, and also higher levels of mental illness (liberals and city dwellers are both more likely to suffer psychologi­cal problems).

But just as liberalism is a product of urbanisati­on, perhaps modern progressiv­ism, including its often abrasive intoleranc­e for other opinions, is also a result of extreme urbanisati­on. While 27 per cent of Americans in 1976 lived in counties with at least a 20-point margin of victory for one candidate, in 2016 a full 60 per cent did.

In Britain the percentage of safe seats increased by 50 per cent from 2015 to 2017. More safe seats means more extreme politician­s, but also more intolerant population­s.

On top of this, it has also unbalanced the compositio­n of the media, with outlets overwhelmi­ngly staffed and based in big cities. The density issue is partly why so many people were shocked by the Brexit result – because half a million voters live in postcodes where 90 per cent of people voted Remain (and a large number of those will be in the media).

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