So there we have it. It turns out that the British working-class was not, in the end, willing to throw its weight behind a London-centric, youth-obsessed, middle-class party that preached the gospels of liberal cosmopolitanism and class war. Who’d have thought it?
Well, me for a start. And plenty of others who had been loyal to the party over many years and desperately wanted to see a Labour government, only to be dismissed as ‘reactionaries’ who held a ‘nostalgic’ view of the working-class.
It barely needs saying that these election results are an utter catastrophe for Labour. For the party to have failed to dislodge the Tories after nearly a decade of austerity and three years of political chaos is bad enough. But for the so-called Red Wall to have crumbled so spectacularly underlines the sheer scale of the failure. Bolsover, Blyth Valley, Leigh, Redcar, Don Valley, Sedgefield, Burnley, Great Grimsby, Wrexham — just a few of the long-time Labour strongholds in traditional working-class areas which have fallen to the Tories.
Labour’s meltdown in these places will come as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention and wasn’t blinded by ideology or fanaticism. Some of us had long warned that working-class voters across post-industrial and small-town Britain were becoming increasingly alienated from the party. But we were banging our heads against a brick wall. When many in the party were bathing in the afterglow of the 2017 general election, we tried to remind them that not only had Labour, in fact, lost that election, there had been a swing to the Tories in many of the party’s heartland seats.
We sounded the alarm bells again earlier this year when, in the local and European elections, Labour haemorrhaged support in several working-class communities across the north and Midlands.
But the woke liberals and Toytown revolutionaries who now dominate the party didn’t listen to us. They truly thought that ‘one more heave’ would bring victory. They believed that constantly hammering on about economic inequality would be enough to get Labour over the line. In doing so, they made a major miscalculation: they failed to grasp that working-class voters desire something more than just economic security; they want cultural security too.
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Subscribelabour lost the election because the offered a village idiot as future prime minister