Simon Gordon is a former Westminster and European Parliamentary candidate and former Area Chairman. He served as Chairman of CIPR Government Affairs Group for four years and has worked in the energy and housing sectors.
In 2019 electoral politics in Britain changed, perhaps forever. Previous loyalties were shattered; long-held voting habits cast aside. All this was epitomised by the so-called Red Wall.
For the Conservative Party, opportunities emerged that had not existed for generations. With signs that support for the party amongst traditional voters was crumbling, a new route to retain power had opened.
But little effort has been made to keep these new Tories. Despite having been given the biggest majority the party has had since 1987, quite a few well-placed people in the Party are ill at ease with the influx of new voters. It is time we asked why.
Solidarity amongst pro-Labour voters had eroded to a certain extent under Margaret Thatcher and cracks in the old Labour edifice in parts of the country were evident in the 2017 election. The Tories had revived to some extent in Scotland and Labour had hollowed out in Wales, with the Tories being the principal beneficiaries. However, 2019 was the moment the dam burst.
In the years after 1945 blocks of seats seldom changed hands (1983 and 1997 being exceptions). Labour could rely on the solid working-class seats of the North, with their manufacturing or mining base, to produce huge majorities. The Tories could equally count on the prosperous constituencies of the South, and to a certain extent the Midlands, to produce support just as strong.
2019 shattered that comfortable and predictable world. Canterbury, already lost in 2017, stayed Labour while the Rother Valley and Don Valley, Labour since 1918 and 1922 respectively, fell to the Tories. Seats Labour had held even in their worse debacle in 1931 were lost.
Whatever the reason – Boris Johnson, Brexit, the antipathy felt by many traditional Labour voters to Jeremy Corbyn – the settled electoral landscape where the voters seemed to know their place has been turned upside down.
Yet most voters, including many Conservatives, like politics to be predictable.
There have also been debates about whether the Tory Party can actually manage this new coalition of voters effectively: traditional supporters may be more inclined to tax cuts and limited public spending, while there is some concern that these new Tories favour higher spending. The Levelling Up agenda, now somewhat eviscerated, was part of this.
Such problems are manageable by a dexterous government. But I suspect that some Conservatives fear these new supporters will change the party. We saw the same thing in the Thatcher years, when in the course of winning three historic terms the Tories attracted many new voters across crumbling class lines… and were transformed in the process.
Most obviously, there will today be the dwindling band of Remainers who resent the new, post-Brexit evolution of their party (and the voters driving it).
But it not simply about policy – it’s social too. All parties are coalitions of interests and classes, and the coalition that delivered the 2019 majority is a novel and disparate one. Some pre-2019 voters, attracted primarily to the party’s more liberal economic position, may have little understanding of its new, more socially-conservative and economically left-leaning voters; so too, the politicians.
Even where it isn’t out-and-out snobbery, such a gulf in sentiment is bad for cohesion, especially when exacerbated by sometimes pronounced differences in economic position, education, and more.
But it would be a catastrophe if the Party slipped into the outlook that somehow the wrong people are voting Conservative, just as discomfited Labour supporters once said under Tony Blair that the wrong people were voting Labour.
Across traditional Tory strongholds in the South, we now see the steady growth of an electorally dangerous trend: voters fleeing the cities but taking their left-of-centre voting habits with them. The days when young professionals moved to Battersea and started voting Conservative are long gone; whilst this group flirted with David Cameron in 2015, on his best night they only gave him a slender majority – and that night was a political lifetime ago.
This is all part of a wider trend across Western democracies: the left losing its hold on its traditional voters just as the right loses some of its grip on better-off and more educated voters.
Johnson won in every class in 2019. However, whilst those labelled as C2DE backed the Tories by 48 per cent to 33 per cent for Labour, amongst those classed as AB he secured a much narrower lead, 42 per cent with 32 per cent.
And even as the Conservatives secured a historic landslide, Labour led 43-29 amongst voters with higher educational qualifications, and 56-17 with students. By contrast, the Tories led 48-31 with medium-education voters, and 58-25 with lower-education voters.
Those who have their doubts or feel uncomfortable with this new potential Tory coalition must accept the political reality that the party needs these new supporters. If what we saw in 2019 was perhaps the next swath of former Labour voters finding their opinions and beliefs have more in common with our party than they thought, that surely is something to rejoice in.
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Author: Simon Gordon
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