Monday 24 May 2021

Rebuilding the Red Wall

How do the Tories understand their success in former Labour heartland seats? This is a genre of politics writing the left tend to give the body swerve, which is par the course for our wider political culture. But this is unfortunate, because they often reveal insights that the gatekeepers of the centre left, by accident and design are completely uninterested in. For example, of his increased majority in Mansfield in 2019 Ben Bradley wrote with more awareness about his constituency than anything I've seen the Labour right produce in the last decade. This niche genre of commentary therefore deserves keeping tabs on, and the latest setting out his thoughts is North West Durham's Richard Holden, who famously defeated Labour's Laura Pidcock.

In his piece for Conservative Home, Holden suggests Labour were able to keep the show on the road for decades in seats like his because of the strength of mass working class institutions that sustained a collectivist life in and out of the workplace, a shared religious culture that promoted a uniform social conservatism and was indelibly linked to Christian notions of fairness (and therefore provided trade unionism and its struggles the blessings of divine justice), and "a traditional Labour Party of the people that was both of and in touch with these communities." How did this state of affairs come apart? He lays the blame at New Labour who, he argued, provided little in return for loyal votes. He also points the finger at the "Britain hating far left under Jeremy Corbyn", a man so unpopular with the voters of NW Durham that in 2017 Labour improved its standing by six points and won over half the vote. But, apart from this silliness he also notes the importance of Labour's Brexit positioning, and the long-term legacy of the party returning lazy MPs who simply banked the vote.

Then comes the most interesting question: why does this Tory MP think so many working class seats turned to his party? Flattering his audience, he puts it down to the hard work of Tory activists. But there is something in this: activism ensures the Tories have a presence. It would be easy to overstate this. After all, Labour with its contact rate targets and obsession with heavily scripted, bureaucratised "conversations" regularly pounds the pavements. But, historically, the Tories have tended not to. It's harder to maintain the idea Tories forget about places like Durham when blue rosetted activists are out delivering leaflets, doorknocking, and getting their mugs in the local paper. A trick, as it happens, the Tories here in Stoke have spent the last decade pioneering and perfecting. Holden counsels his more sceptical readers that there are lots of former Labour voters in plenty of traditional no-go areas for the party, and so Tory activists should go out and find them. In other words, because the class cultures that sustained Labour for a century in Durham have melted away, everything everywhere is up for grabs.

A couple of insights don't make a theory, and there's a lot missing from Holden's account of Tory advances in Labour's former core constituencies. The first is how the Tories have managed to detoxify themselves for enough voters. Again, the experience of the Potteries is instructive. After four years of a Labour council that meekly passed on Tory cuts, let the officers do the running, copped the responsibility for an unpopular housing stock renewal scheme that left vast swathes of the city derelict, the building of two new office buildings, and egregiously wasted money by entering the Chelsea Flower Show twice, their replacement by a Indie/Tory alliance in 2015 saw the latter take on all the key outward facing portfolios. Namely regen and economic development, with the then deputy leader Abi Brown fronting up Stoke's City of Culture bid. These were not the Tories of old committed to butchering everything that moved, but leveraged the council's spending power to push their regen schemes (which, in many cases, had their roots in the previous Labour administration), getting new housing developments sorted out, and visibly sprucing the city up with money showered on heritage projects and parks. A lot of this was brought by cuts to services, but the calculation was most people weren't bothered about restricting library services or defunding alcohol and drug support, whereas they would notice new buildings springing up about the city centre and if the city's parks were tidied up and restored. Their reasoning was right, making the switch from Labour to the Tories (via UKIP in many cases) less painful when punters were voting with their Brexit feet. And now all three MPs are Tories, and the council is a majority Tory administration.

We've seen similar repeated on Teeside with the ridiculously huge vote won by Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley metro mayor. A stone's throw from Holden's seat, Houchen has earned serious respect by being a different kind of Tory. Not one who deindustrialises the land and calls it success, but one who nationalised the local airport and has tapped directly into the folk memory by promising to regenerate the dockside via the government's ludicrous freeport scheme. To the casual observer, the Tories are building and creating jobs, they're doing a politics that Labour should have done or be pushing to do. And because the only people who care about constituency and local authority boundaries are politics people and local government geeks, the example of someone like Houchen makes the switch from Labour to Tory that much easier in adjacent seats.

The other issue Holden is silent about is just who are voting for the Tories, but it's there, he instinctively knows who the Tory vote is. Starting off with a vignette about cake with a 50-something small business owner, and talking about traditional Labour voters, these are both figures standing in for and invoking older people. As Labour languishes in the polls with its new core support peeling off to smaller parties or electoral abstentionism (though not necessarily political abstentionism), the Tories have an electoral advantage because older people are much more likely to turn out. And this gives them a real edge in second order elections where this effect is exacerbated, as we saw.

It doesn't have to be this way. Labour can look at its former heartland seats and just accept the political consequences of demographic drift and seemingly competent local Tory officials, or actually start fighting back. Despite Holden's boasts about campaigning, the Tory infrastructure is still much smaller than Labour's, even after a year's worth of membership losses. The party needs to go back to its roots in places like Durham, Stoke, and elsewhere and rebuild itself as a community centred organisation. Hence why scrapping the community organising unit is as daft as it is wrong. Labour needs to rethink its laissez-faire attitude to local government and offer some leadership about what the party should be doing in the council chamber. Preston and Salford, Greater Manchester and Merseyside, the record of delivery in Wales, just as the Tories have been awarded for doing things so Labour has its own good story to tell, and particularly in Preston and Salford where local government and regeneration actively and visibly rebuilds communities and solidarities. Ignoring them is just about the most ridiculous thing the party can do. And it has to think about what the party got right in the last two elections, and particularly how the economic radicalism of 2017 was able to cut through and assemble a coalition the party then spent the next two years demobilising. How it adapts to these political realities is the litmus test for its seriousness about winning.

There are plenty of Tories who think their dominance is next to overweening, and it will continue to be unless Labour understand why it is and what we can do so our party, not the Tories, can be the masters of our destiny. And the initial step can be taken by listening to the strategy and tactics talk of the Conservatives themselves, thinking about them, and drawing up appropriate counter strategies.

Image Credit

11 comments:

McIntosh said...

Do you ever fear we are like the last of the Jacobites - Redgauntlet - still trying to restore/revive a movement?
The cultural wars of the right seem to be embedding themselves or uncovering in ex-Labour voters a range of chauvinistic, militaristic and nationalist attitudes and behaviours. The 'hope' that Johnson gives of regeneration is concerning. Where will peole turn when the shipyards, steel works, car factories and local industries don't reopen?
The other themes of anti immigration of those exposed to competition and the hatred for scroungers, students, woke, human rights, Roma, trans people hardly bode well for a turn to tolerance, particularly when they are give the ideological cover by the Tories of values of hard work, merit, national identity and military might. They project power that many find attractive since they link it to order and stability - and Patel seems to be amplifying this and offer remedial action on problems which others have not addressed and attempts to slow or reverse cultural changes.
When class consciousness is disintegrating in communities then even more extreme forces than the Conservatives may find a hearing if they give convincing explanations of the issues - -or the Conservatives may go even harder to the right as part of their shift shaping.
Anyway, sound the bag pipes and show me the redcoat lines to charge.

Blissex said...

«A lot of this was brought by cuts to services, but the calculation was most people weren't bothered about restricting library services or defunding alcohol and drug support, whereas they would notice new buildings springing up about the city centre and if the city's parks were tidied up and restored.»

That is the tried-and-true Conservative "Westminster Council model":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homes_for_votes_scandal
“Eight wards were selected as 'key wards' - in public it was claimed that these wards were subject to particular 'stress factors' leading to a decline in the population of Westminster. In reality, secret documents showed that the wards most subject to these stress factors were rather different, and that the eight wards chosen had been the most marginal in the City Council elections of 1986. [...]
In services as disparate as street cleaning, pavement repair and environmental improvements, marginal wards were given priority while safely Labour and safely Conservative parts of the city were neglected.[...]
In 1990, the Conservatives were re-elected by a landslide victory in Westminster, increasing their majority from 4 to 38. They won all but one of the wards targeted by Building Stable Communities policy.”

Stephen Bush "Politics" 2018-03-16 (NEW STATESMAN):
“One Tory minister in a safe seat told me that when she used to ask Osborne for something, he would first ask her how big her majority was — and then reply, with a smile, that it was too large for her enquiry to be worth considering.”

Blissex said...

«How do the Tories understand their success in former Labour heartland seats? This is a genre of politics writing the left tend to give the bodyswerve, which is par the course for our wider political culture. But this is unfortunate, because they often reveal insights that the gatekeepers of the centre left, by accident and design are completely uninterested in.»

I have read quite a few claims by Conservatives about their strategy, and I am "surprised" that they never say "we won because we moved to the centre with a more centrist political positioning than Labour and the LibDems".

That is instead how Prime Minister Swinson and Chancellor Umunna claim credit for the 2019 landslide for the LibDem-ChangeUK coalition, as easily and reliably predicted by Tony Blair. :-)

John Smithee said...

Social class and the “red wall” and the “blue wall” …towards a definition…
There are two definitions of the working-class. One is the Marxist definition of the working class which can be summed up as 95 percent of those on PAYE (pay-as-you-earn).
The other 5 percent on PAYE are those people who are paid, say, more than £50,000 per year such as MPs, senior state employees, and company directors.
The Marxist definition of the middle-class can be summed as the five-million self-employed, including builder, plumbers, electricians, etc along with self-employed GPs, accountants, solicitors, etc.
The other definition of the working-class and the middle-class is that used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the polling organisations.
This defines the working-class as social groups C2, D, & E (skilled manual, semi-skilled, and un-skilled manual workers, respectively).
At the same time, the middle-class is defined as social groups A, B, & C1 (managerial, professional, and white-collar workers, respectively).
Why are these different definitions of the working-class and the middle-class so important?
The answer can be seen in the collapse of the “red wall” in the North East and the Midlands. At the same time, we are witnessing the collapse of the “blue wall” outside London.
As Ben Page of polling organisation Ipsos-Mori has accurately pointed out – Age and homeownership is now the predictor of how people vote, not social class.
Using the ONS definition of social class we can see that the Labour Party is now the party of the middle-class, whereas the Tory Party is now the party of the working-class.
I am reminded of the famous Spitting Image sketch which followed the un-expected Tory general election victory of 1992.
In the sketch, Norman Lamont and John Major knocked on the door of a thick working-class Tory voter. When the voter opened the door Lamont and Major started jeering at him: Stupid, stupid, stupid! This accurately sums up the new Tory voters in the former “red wall”.
As I mentioned earlier, we are starting to see the collapse of the “blue wall” outside London. Labour won five out of the ten seats up for election on Worthing Council on the South Coast. Labour also won a couple of seats in Chipping Norton, home of David Cameron.
At the same time, closer to home, Labour won the Metro Mayor for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. This together with the Tories losing control of Cambridgeshire County Council to a coalition of Labour, Lib Dems, and Independents has sent shock waves through the Tory Party in Cambridgeshire.
As Ben Page says: Age and homeownership are the predictor of how people vote, not social class. This explains the results in Cambridgeshire. Rents and house prices in Cambridge are higher that most parts of London. No wonder more than 28,000 citizens of Cambridge voted Labour.
Using ONS definition of social class, the middle-class Labour voters of Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire outnumbered the working-class Tory voters of Fenland.
One policy that costs nothing which even Sir Keir Starmer could support and is a sure-fire winner of votes amongst “generation rent”, is rent controls.
Of course, rent controls mainly benefit existing tenants. So, it is necessary to link a policy for rent controls with a policy to build one-million council houses per year.
Rent controls and building new council houses would go down a treat in the working-class Tory stronghold of Fenland, if only Labour would campaign for them!
John Smithee
Wisbech (born & bred).

John Smithee said...

Education, education, education:
I see that soft-left Corbynite MP, Diane Abbott, has described the upcoming Batley and Spen parliamentary by-election as make or break for our Sir Keir Starmer.
At the same time, Abbott has come out in support of Andy Burnham as a possible replacement for Starmer.
This shows the complete collapse of Corbynism. Abbott famously sent her son to a private school costing £10,000 per year, which was a huge amount of money at the time.
Burnham, it must not be forgotten, is no socialist. Burnham having voted for Tony Blair’s support for George W Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
Changing the subject slightly. I recently listened to a podcast by soft-left Guardian journalist, John Harris, about the prospects for Starmer’s Labour Party.
Harris comes from a northern working-class background and has reported in his podcasts from Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham, Plymouth, and Hartlepool.
Harris makes an interesting point – whereas Thatcher re-built support for the Tories through council house sales, Blair re-built support for Labour in the cities by getting 50% of school and college leavers into university.
The development of “gradland” in the cities reminds me of the work many years ago of an organisation called Forecasting International (FI) which predicted upheavals in places as far apart as Poland and Iran many years before they happened.
FI could predict these upheavals by looking at the number of unemployed male graduates aged 21 to 28, a major source of political dissidents and activists.
Changing the subject slightly, again. Phil in his blog: All that is Solid, has described how the Labour Party has become “radioactive” when it comes to winning back “red wall” Leave voters because of its call for a second referendum.
So radioactive is Labour, that these retired white homeowning former blue-collar workers cannot be reasoned with. All we can do is wait for them to die off.
This is unfortunate for Labour in the North East Cambridgeshire constituency where I live, which has a sitting Tory MP – Stephen Barclay (now First Secretary to the Treasury) – with a majority in 2019 of 29,997.
This contrasts with 1970 when Labour came withing 2,500 votes of winning the seat. Interestingly, in the 2016 EU referendum, 72% of Fenlanders voted Leave.
Fenland is made up of four small towns, the largest being my hometown of Wisbech.
Interestingly, Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky all grew up in small towns. The conservatism of small-town life was a major reason for these giants of the labour movement becoming revolutionaries.
Wisbech currently has no Labour Party branch, although there are moves by the CLP to re-launch one. In North East Cambs CLP there are just two branches – Sutton and Littleport branch, and March, Chatteris, and Whittlesey branch.
These two branches are nearer to Cambridge, and therefore have been helped by the “Cambridge effect” where white-collar workers who work in Cambridge come to live in Fenland due to its low house prices.
So, what conclusions can we make from all of the above?
First, Labour must win over “generation rent” through a policy of rent controls and the building of one million council houses per year.
Second, Labour must win over the five-million self-employed whose average income is just £11,500 per year through cheap credits from a nationalised banking system.
Third, Labour must support a Universal Basic Income. This is something Mark Drakeford, leader of the Labour Party in Wales, is already planning to do.
Finally, there is no point in Labour arguing with the ageing white homeowning Tory voters. These people are thick and cannot be reasoned with.
The support for the Tories is dying of old age. Blair, just like Tito in Yugoslavia, must have been an “unconscious Trotskyist” when he came out with his mantra: “Education, education, education”.
Whether by intention or accident, Blair, by getting 50% of school and college leavers into university, has changed the political landscape for Labour for generations to come.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Blissex said...

«As Ben Page says: Age and homeownership are the predictor of how people vote, not social class.»

That is functional class (being a property rentier or a business owner) defines Conservative voting. That was established a long time ago: I read in "The Economist" that in 1970s a right-wing think-tank proved something important, that property, share-based pension, car owners voted to the right of renters, occupational-pension, public transport users, *even at the same income level*. So was thatcherism launched.

«This explains the results in Cambridgeshire. Rents and house prices in Cambridge are higher that most parts of London. No wonder more than 28,000 citizens of Cambridge voted Labour.
Using ONS definition of social class, the middle-class Labour voters of Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire outnumbered the working-class Tory voters of Fenland.
»

That is proletarian Labour outnumbered the rentier Tory voters of Fenland. Both voted for their material interests.

«One policy that costs nothing which even Sir Keir Starmer could support and is a sure-fire winner of votes amongst “generation rent”, is rent controls.»

Keir Starmer is targeting like New Labour the affluent property owning or comfortably pensioned rentier classes like New Labour did, so zero chances of that.

«Of course, rent controls mainly benefit existing tenants. So, it is necessary to link a policy for rent controls with a policy to build one-million council houses per year.»

That is just wishful thinking, and pointless as in part because there is a surplus of housing in the UK, and in most of the UK accordingly real property prices have been falling for over 15 years. The real problem with housing is that the Conservatives and New Labour have concentrated government policy to attract businesses and thus tenants and buyers into the Home Counties and London, where their core constituency own property.

That policy is hard to reverse, because spreading businesses and jobs to the "pushed behind" areas would cause not merely a stagnation of property profits in the Home Counties and London, but a collapse of prices that would blow up the entire english financial system, as its "solvency" is 90% based on southern property valuations.

Dr Zoltan Jorovic said...

@blissex - could you put a link to the source of that data regarding real house prices falling for over 15 years? That isn't the impression I have but I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Thanks

BCFG said...

I think John Smithee and Blissex are correct to focus on these class configurations, though their lame exchange based solutions leave me pretty cold.

I personally don’t regard the Marxist definition of class as being the 95% of those on PAYE, it is rather more refined than that I think. I would also lump C1 and C2 into the middle classes, in fact these groups would likely have coronaries if anything approaching communism was spelled out to them, still I think this is what should be done, as at least it offers a definite alternative to what currently exists. The tactic of offering tweaks is not only counterproductive but pointless.

The red wall was always brittle. I have lived within the so called red wall all my life and have always been puzzled how labour ever managed to win given the views I was hearing in everyday life. Most people I met were somewhere between the BNP and Adolph Hitler.

The only thing that I can think of which helped Labour maintain power was that the people were related to the industrial proletariat, miners, steelworkers etc and this aspect somehow overrode the nationalistic/racist/bigoted aspects.

Given the gentrification of the area, the demise of the industrial proletariat and its culture, we are now left with ‘culture’ identity wars. And so Labour relies more and more on the battle between the sexes, the races and the ages. So it’s old folk v young folk etc, white folk vs non white folk. High horsemanship you might say. This reflects that the political parties are all fighting over the same well worn ground.

In this battle it appears the Tories have decidedly the upper hand, at least in the short term.

It isn’t surprising in one way, because all woke can offer is a shaking up of the bag, so the plan is that more women and dark skinned people are thrust in the middle and upper classes and more white folk are thrown into the lower orders. The white folk don’t readily sign up for this deal.

My advice would be to stop the culture wars and articulate a world where upper and lower orders is no longer a reality. I.e. the end of exchange.

Let us take the laughable idea of market socialism, they argue that if workers had had control over the workplace then many enterprises would not have moved to China. Ok, so does that mean we would have had a better or worse exchange system? Would we even have had amazon or online shopping?

Most socialists offer us some tweak to the exchange system, such as the demand for Universal basic income (rather than the communistic demand for Universal basic Necessities) but anything less than the end of exchange is pointless, it really doesn’t matter which representative of the bourgeois is elected, no really, it doesn’t. In fact the only thing socialists might be offering us in those circumstances is an inferior exchange system, no wonder the masses do rush to the banner, you are really not worth the effort.

Blissex said...

«a link to the source of that data regarding real house prices falling for over 15 years?»

There are many articles on the topic on yields on BTL and returns to property "investors", but I like this in particular because the map is particularly obvious:

https://loveincstatic.blob.core.windows.net/lovemoney/House_prices_real_terms_lovemoney.jpg
http://www.lovemoney.com/news/53528/property-house-price-value-real-terms-2005-2015-uk-regions

The data are from 2005 to 2015, but the trend is pretty obvious. It is also obvious that it is aggregate by region, so there are hidden hotspots, for example the £1,157 inflation in housing costs for the "greater Anglia" region is obviously an average between massive cost inflation in the area between Cambridge and London, and disinflation in the rest of the region.
Similarly the £22,046 disinflation in the south-west is an average between massive inflation in picturesque holiday spots and the rest of the region.

It is all about jobs quite clearly.

Blissex said...

«Blair re-built support for Labour in the cities by getting 50% of school and college leavers into university.»

That is the usual claim that somehow “Blair re-built support for Labour” when instead he lost millions of votes to Labour:

1992: 11.56m Lab. 14.09m Con. 6.00m LD
1997: 13.52m NLab. 09.60m Con. 5.24m LD
2001: 10.72m NLab. 08.34m Con. 4.81m LD
2005: 09.55m NLab. 08.78m Con. 5.99m LD
2010: 08.61m NLab. 10.70m Con. 6.84m LD
2015: 09.35m NLab. 11.33m Con. 6.30m LD+UKIP
2017: 12.88m Lab. 13.64m Con. 2.37m LD
2019: 10.30m Lab. 13.97m Con. 3.70m LD

The exception of 1997 was gifted to John Smith and then Tony Blair by the high-interest rate recession and property crash of the 1990, which made the Conservatives even more electorally toxic than Tony Blair, who managed to lose nearly a million Labour voters between 1992 and 2001, and more than another million in 2005, never mind New Labour shedding another near million in 2010.

The people who “re-built support for Labour” were in a very modest way Ed Miliband in 2015 and much more so Jeremy Corbyn in both 2017 and 2019, when the Labour votes rose higher or at the same levels as in 1992, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015.

The recent by-election in Hartlepool shows a similar trend:

1992: total 51,710, Lab 26,816, Con 18,034, Lib 6,860

1997: total 44,452, Lab 26,997, Con 9,489, Lib 6,248, Ref 1,718
2001: total 38,051, Lab 22,506, Con 7,935, Lib 5,717

2004: total 31,362, Lab 12,752, Con 3,044, Lib 10,719, UKI 3,193
2005: total 35,436, Lab 18,251, Con 4,058, Lib 10,773, UKI 1,256
2010: total 38,242, Lab 16,267, Con 10,758, Lib 6,533, UKI 2,682, BNP 2,002

2015: total 39,490, Lab 14,076, Con 8,256, Lib 761, ind. 2,954, Gre 1,341
2017: total 41,835, Lab 21,969, Con 14,319, Lib 746, UKI 4,801
2019: total 41,037, Lab 15,464, Con 11,869, Lib 1,696, BXP 10,603
2021: total 29,933, Lab 8,589, Con 15,529, Lib 349, ind. 2,904

Blissex said...

«a link to the source of that data regarding real house prices falling for over 15 years?»
«There are many articles on the topic on yields on BTL and returns to property "investors", but I like this in particular because the map is particularly obvious [...] The data are from 2005 to 2015,»

For the same period there is corroboration in this graph of Industrial and commercial electricity consumption by region, with 2005=100 (from a commenter on another blog):

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dataelectrukfallbyregion2005to2015.png

It is pretty stark, and the collapses in several region happened well before 2008-2009. SO I had a look at related type of data, more aggregate, which is total electricity consumption per head for several "interesting" countries:

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dataenergyeuuschjppergdpperhead1960to2014.png

The data is more than stark, it is *catastrophic*, but in public it is being bravely ignored, because there are more pressing issues for public debate: https://dilbert.com/strip/1990-12-20

I would suggest reading: http://pragcap.com/you-cant-handle-the-truth-2 for another topic that was not debated in public, except once in 2011, and that provoked such a commotion that the relevant data was not published again.