Boris a year ago. Before the dark times. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
One year ago this Saturday, Boris Johnson handed the Conservatives their largest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third and final victory in 1987. Along the way, he sent Labour crashing to its worst defeat for nearly a century and captured a large swathe of its most cherished working-class territory.
Ever since then, we’ve been told over and over again that the Johnson premiership has been a total car crash. It is the worst government in our lifetime. The lowest of the low. The wheels are falling off. The Project is unravelling. The Emperor is Not Wearing Any Clothes. But what are ordinary voters saying?
You might not hear this on social media but the short answer for Number 10 is that it’s really not that bad. While Labour has drawn level in the polls, Johnson’s coalition remains pretty resilient. A year ago this week, just before the election, Johnson’s government held a net approval rating of -37. This week? It is actually up a little to -26. And after one of the most turbulent years in post-war British politics that includes one of the worst pandemics in the modern era, an economic meltdown and two national lockdowns the Conservatives are currently averaging 38% of the vote — down just 6 points on the election. Six.
Johnson’s slump in the high thirties is pretty much the best that David Cameron could ever hope for. Drill deeper and you will find that the Conservatives retain strong leads among the groups that were key to their victory last year — a 41-point lead among Leavers and a 9-point lead among the working-class. Nor have I seen any convincing and robust evidence that Labour is fixing the structural problems within its electorate. Ask Johnson’s supporters how he is doing and 83% of Conservatives and 56% of Leavers say “well”. These numbers have come down, certainly, but they remain resilient.
And while we are discussing leadership it is worth pointing out that with the coronavirus vaccine en route and hope in the air, Johnson’s leadership ratings have recently been improving, not falling. His lead over Starmer as “best prime minister” has doubled to 11-points while he holds commanding leads over the Labour leader on who is most likely to bring people together, build a strong economy, “get things done”, “stand up for the interests of the United Kingdom” and tackle coronavirus.
These are not popular points to make in a political bubble that remains largely a proxy battle over Brexit, but it’s hard to look at these numbers and conclude that Johnson is in trouble. For example, after everything, if you ask people today what they would prefer — a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer and Anneliese Dodds — the blues lead the reds by fifteen points. It’s not even close.
Why is this, exactly? Some will say that nobody outside of SW1 really knows who Keir Starmer is, or what he believes. And I do think that in our heart of hearts we all know that there is something missing — there is just not much charisma, much va-va-voom. There is certainly an intellectual hole at the heart of the Johnson Project; the general absence of a philosophy holding the entire thing together is something that he should prioritise in 2021. He needs more thinkers and fewer campaigners; they are not the same thing.
But at the same time if you asked me to set out the Starmer Project I’m not sure that I’d know where to start. I might mumble something about him being Director of Public Prosecutions, opposing Brexit, taking the knee for Black Lives Matter and falling out with his father, which I heard on Desert Island Discs. But that is about it. I know nothing about the man, what he believes or where he wants to take Britain. That is not a criticism, just how I suspect most voters see it.
But nor do I think that this is why the Conservative electorate is proving to be a little more resilient than Boris Johnson’s critics, including those from within his own party, would like. The real reason is because whether knowingly or not our Prime Minister has tapped into a deeper realignment that is unfolding not just in this country but across many other Western democracies. His premiership was not just made possible by a single campaigner, a single issue or a well-run campaign; it was related to the underlying tectonic plates of British politics being on the move and long before he even became the leader of his party.
There is a reason why, for the first time in our recorded history, Johnson and the Conservatives emerged from the last election as more popular among people on low incomes than among high earners. Both parties have inverted their traditional base of support, the Tories no longer the party of the rich and Labour no longer the party of the poor. How could it be when Johnson walked away with an astonishing 18-point lead among the C2 skilled workers who we used to call “Essex Man”, and a 15-point lead among all workers?
The real reason, the root cause of Johnson’s resilience, is the new values divide that is cross-cutting our traditional loyalties. In today’s world, where cultural questions have become more important than economic ones, people routinely put their values ahead of their wallets. The moment that Johnson’s team decided to unify the Leave vote was the moment they were destined for victory. Transfer the Brexit referendum result from councils onto constituencies and you are left with the simple but crucial fact that more than 60% backed Brexit. This is what unified the loose alliance of blue-collar workers and affluent conservatives; it was not their very different economic experiences but their shared views of the nation.
Johnson’s exploitation of this realignment was helped by Labour’s disastrous strategy. Having already lost Scotland long ago, and having not won the popular vote in England since 2001, Labour then opted to pursue an ultra-Remain strategy for a Remain vote that was too geographically concentrated to win a general election. It merely confirmed what we had already discovered during the People’s Vote debacle; that many of the people who claim to be wizard campaigners are not wizards at all and that more than a few senior voices on the liberal left essentially have no interest in parts of the country that do not share their view of the world.
This too is reflected in how, at a more fundamental level, Labour has lost its ability to even converse with its more instinctively culturally conservative working-class supporters. This became apparent even after the historic defeat when Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy tried to sound “patriotic” but were then flooded with complaints from liberal middle-class members in Brighton and London that they had sold out to the far-right group “Britain First”. Win back the Red Wall? Good luck.
Rab Butler, the Conservative politician and contender for one of the best prime ministers that we never had, once said that the secret to making it to Number 10 was being like the butcher who knows how to navigate the joints. You need to know how to cut up a carcass. You need to have the killer instinct. There is no doubt that Boris Johnson has struggled to convince many onlookers that he is the butcher, but he has at times shown the killer instinct by ruthlessly exploiting the realignment of British politics.
It was this reshuffling of the Conservative electorate that also allowed him to emerge as the first Conservative Prime Minister who can credibly claim to have triumphed over the “Europe question”, an issued that played at least some role in bringing down all four of his Conservative predecessors in Number 10 — Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May.
The Red Wall did not simply fall because Jeremy Corbyn was unpopular. It fell because many of those people put their instinctively “small c” conservative values ahead of their specific attitudes toward things like redistribution and inequality. Johnson certainly appealed to a bit of the latter through his “levelling-up” agenda, which should return to being his overriding priority for 2021, but his appeal was more strongly rooted in people’s belief that he was a Conservative who would finally stand up for family, nation, tradition and established ways of life.
But will he? There have been some signs. Contrary to the meltdown on social media the moves on international aid will be popular among his key supporters, and delivering Brexit is the backbone to his entire premiership. But even still, throughout this year we have been left wondering whether Johnson is simply too liberal for his more socially conservative supporters. Is he really willing to stare down more radical elements of the left?
Is he willing to venture into the culture wars on issues like intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, which enjoy widespread public support? Will he do more to protect and promote the family? Will he speak a little louder for the symbols, institutions and myths of nationhood? Will he do more to not only reform but also ideally lower the level of net migration to sustainable levels, which according to the latest figures remains at a historically high 270,000 per year?
And will he reconcile himself to the fact that when it comes to Brexit there remains a large chunk of his electorate that is not simply looking for the sort of global free trade on steroids that he outlined in his Greenwich speech earlier this year? In other words, can he set out a framework for Global Britain that also acknowledges and addresses the fact that globalisation has not delivered the broad-based growth that its advocates told us it would and think more seriously about how to compensate and repair those communities that have lost out?
All of these questions and others are the ones that will ultimately define what happens next. It was once said that some Prime Ministers are only ever remembered for one thing; Anthony Eden and Suez, Tony Blair and Iraq, Gordon Brown and the financial crisis, David Cameron and Brexit.
While Johnson always assumed that his premiership would be about three things — Brexit, building Global Britain and “levelling-up” the country — his too quickly became about one thing, Covid. But now the clouds are, finally, lifting. The arrival of a vaccine within only ten months of the first case of coronavirus in a British national is a remarkable achievement and the looming sunny uplands will play to Johnson’s optimism. So far, his electorate has weathered the storm, but his supporters will not remain loyal forever.
Matthew Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, is out on March 30.
GoodwinMJ 
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SubscribeA good analysis of why Johnson can afford to make quite a few mistakes.
I find it amazing that the MSM still haven’t worked out why the fishing issue is important. Every time they bang on about it being just 0.1% of GDP, Boris wins more voters.
The naive left-facing media have at least mastered one thing – “shooting themselves in the foot” at every opportunity.
As for Labour, just take a look at Paul Embery’s excellent book “Despised …”
I agree. The MSM has turned out to be Johnson’s greatest asset. Every time they sneer they win more votes for the Conservatives. You wonder why the penny doesn’t ever seem to drop?
Boris has almost nothing in common with Trump except this: every time the Fake Noos Media plunge in the knife, he gets more support.
That is because thy do not know what a penny is, they only recognise large value paper.
I wonder what percentage of GDP the fishing industry in UK was, before it was destroyed by the EU and shared out among the French, Dutch. and Spanish? Must look it up one day.
I’ve just seen Paul Embery arguing with Lloyd Russell-Moyle and telling him over and over again that he personified the problem. And what did LRM retort: antisemitic! raci-st! These people are suicidal in the way they carry on.
Why exactly should we sacrifice do much for a trivial fraction of our GDP?
Most of the people I know that voted Brexit, did so to re-establish/guarantee long-term democratic control of the U.K. by the U.K. Parliament.
To them, the issue of whether fishings contribution to GDP was 0.1% or 10% is a secondary concern.
Their view is that the longer-term principle far outweighs shorter term hits to economic growth.
Sir keir stamer the champion of the working classes?
2nd referendum.
Knee taking.
Cheerleader for a anti Semitic 70s throwback.
A cabinet full of racists like lammey, butler, abbot, sultana etc
He is my mp and none of my friends will vote for him as he is just unappealing to us c2de,s (what an insult that is, like we’re 2nd class citizens)
What a nasty joke labour is
With opponents like that only Boris can ruin it for himself and so see what happens in about 2 years but hopes are not very high, it is boris
Andrew, all the points you raise are English nationalist / white-grievance identity politics – and some of them from a distorted viewpoint at that.
NHS treatment? – do you think real Tories care about that given that they have private health insurance?
Rights of employees at work? – real Tories hate them. They believe that the CEO is entitled to his 50% pay rise for ‘taking costs out of the system’ by slashing employees’ pensions and pushing as many of them as possible into outsourced roles.
Housing? – Jeremy Hunt MP bought five marina flats in one go as an investment.
Feeding hungry children during the school holidays? – Tories opposed it until Labour and Marcus Rashford shamed them into (yet another) U-turn.
Education? – 8% cut in spending per capita, after allowing for inflation, on the education of YOUR children. But not THEIR children, in schools whose fees have risen faster than inflation for decades and the schools compete on how much they can splurge to convince parents that theirs, rather than a competing private school, is the best school in the region.
No Deal Brexit – the penny will finally drop for the Nissan workers in Sunderland when the company announces that it has no future when tariffs on exported vehicles are higher than the profit margin, and the UK market can’t absorb enough of one or two models to make it viable.
But feel free to obsess about the Black Live Matter political movement (George Eustice is right about that) if you want.
Is it not possible to care about all these AND be patriotic, proud of British values, optimistic about our future, and all the things that make Boris appealing? To me Labour are just so naive and also so self conscious. They are not robust, they get bogged down with things that many people think are irrelevant. I just wish they were ‘better’ at putting forward a counter narrative. It’s not as if there isn’t enough ammunition. But somehow they manage to acheive zero cut through with the mass of the electorate. They need a personality beyond ‘earnest, well meaning but slightly whiny school teacher’
Boris’s problem, like all politicians, is that he isn’t what he’s pretending to be. At heart he’s a globalist corporate London-centric lefty of the kind despised by most of the country outside the m25. Luckily for him, so are all his political opponents, and he at least has the good sense to *pretend* to share our values and do it reasonably well most of the time
That’s a perceptive point. I always felt Boris is conservative with the truth (excuse the pun) but definitely socially liberal when it comes to his personal life.
The difference between him and the other liberals is that he really loves this country and wants it to prosper – mightily. He doesn’t suffer from the self loathing which drives them on, and he isn’t ashamed of British success. This is what people of all classes find congenial in him and want more of.
Let’s hope he (or someone) discovers a way to do some prospering. The neoliberal internationalism has been great for the prosperity of the corporations who back it, but the ‘working people’ who have benefitted most are in India, Korea, China, Mexico, and the other places where the corporations have ‘outsourced’ their manufacturing and production facilities.
The irony is that the neoliberal model has redistributed far more than 0.7% of Britain’s GDP, all to places with much lower standards of living than Britain!
As a cover for international redistribution the Conservative and Labour parties had the audacity to criminalise and insult the dispossessed workforce for being unemployed, they have turned British workers against each other by propagating the charge of fecklessness, the mendacious media and the dim politicians have had fun with that agitprop – a cultural revolution of brutality against one’s own reminiscent of communist China.
I honestly find it difficult to read Boris, he’s a bit of a chameleon to me. Maybe you’re right or maybe he’s just very good at putting on a facade. I think he does care for his place in history but I have never sensed he was a conviction politician like Thatcher, I guess unlike her, I can’t sense his moral core but others I’m sure have a different opinion.
Spot on!
A masterpiece of brevity coupled with accuracy. Bravo!
Whoa, wait a minute. What’s the basis for believing that Boris has a problem?
Interesting article, though I don’t think it’s necessarily small “c” conservative voters who are driving support for the Tories. For instance, I don’t think there’d be a while lot of support for overturning gay marriage outside of Muslim and evangelical immigrant communities who are all going to vote for Labour. This seems more like a nationalist/globalist divide.
The amusing irony here being that Labour, in many cities, is substantially dependent on the votes of people implacably opposed to gay marriage.
‘Twas ever thus among these identity politics shysters. The various minority client groups tend to hate each other more vehemently than anybody hates them, which makes the left’s heads implode. The British Crime Survey used to publish stats on racial crimes, but had to stop because it was embarrassingly clear that by a factor of about 30 a minority was more likely to victimise someone white than vice versa, and that the biggest perpetrators of racist crimes were racial minorities against a different racial minority to themselves.
Today we see that fundamentalist Muslims hate gays, feminists and male-to-female sex-changers hate each other, and so on.
Leftism is founded on hate and envy and can no more hide than a leopard can hide its spots.
The Labour Party of old is dead. It no longer functions as any kind of opposition to the establishment and anybody with an oppositional attitude to the establishment left years ago. The political classes in Scotland most of whom found a natural home in The Labour Party have emigrated to the SNP or Greens. The purges against Corbyn and his acolytes has completed the process by which there is no effective or realistic opposition to the establishment within the democratic process. Under these circumstances populism is the only survivor. Johnson and his pals know this.
After the 2019 GE I can understand you thinking that. But if the 2017 election campaign had run another 3-4 weeks, then the way Theresa May was haemorrhaging support at over a percent per week we would have had Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. Memories are short.
The single biggest contributor to the loss of Labour seats in the longer run was the SNP sweeping up Liberal and Labour support in Scotland. Quite the re-branding for what used to be thought of as the Tartan Tories!
Yeah. But that didn’t happen. What did happen happened. May won. Corbyn failed to beat Boris. Game over.
Quite so – if I poured treacle over my head, and if I put a cricket stump up my bottom, and if I went to fancy dress parties, I could go to one as a toffee apple. But that’s a lot of ifs.
The Tartan Tories was an insult thrown at old fashioned supporters of Scottish Independence by moronic lefties until about the 1980s. Since then the SNP has matured into a party of good governance. Claiming that the biggest contribution to the failure of Scottish Labour is a rebranding exercise by the SNP is to ignore the rise in support for independence and a general recognition by the Scottish people that the SNP does a better job of government than Westminster. History is happening here. Not marketing and campaigning.
“Transfer the Brexit referendum result from councils onto constituencies and you are left with the simple but crucial fact that more than 60% backed Brexit. This is what unified the loose alliance of blue-collar workers and affluent conservatives; it was not their very different economic experiences but their shared views of the nation”
Surely this is his most difficult task. How do you unite the ‘affluent conservatives’ who want Singapore-on-Thames, more deregulation, more free-market, with the ‘blue-collar workers’ who don’t want a liberal Brexit? The ‘blue collar workers’ want more govt and less free-market. They want to reduce immigration, prevent a repeat of the financial crisis that saw their incomes stagnate, higher minimum wages and an increase on spending on the welfare state. All things I suspect the ‘affluent conservatives’ and Thatcherite’s like Carswell and Hannan would oppose.
Precisely. It’s a con, and when the blue-collar workers realise that they are not members of the ‘people who matter’, the tide will turn.
Remember the comment by arch-Conservative Charles Moore that of course fracking shouldn’t be allowed in the Home Counties, but it was OK in what he called parts of the country which don’t matter very much. That attitude extends across the field of topics, not just the niche issue of fracking.
From two perspectives it is pretty clear the Conservatives will be in until about 2034.
Firstly this is because in the past 75 years, when oppositions have won general elections, it has usually been against governments that were a minority when the election was fought. Labour in 1979 and the Conservatives in 1997 are the most recent examples of this.
The only exception since the war, when a government with a working majority was defeated at a general election and replaced by the opposition with its own working majority, was in 1970 – Labour (majority 98) lost to the Conservatives (majority 31). Nothing that has unfolded over the last year suggests that this rule of thumb is about to change. The bigger the majority, the longer it takes for the opposition to overturn. Johnson’s majority looks good for another two Conservative terms
Next, looking at the state of the Labour Party under its hole-in-the-air leader Starmer, it’s clear that it has not even begun to deal with its electorally poisonous quadrifecta of anti-Semitism, Marxist infiltration, reflexive metropolitan hatred of the white working class, and total extinction in Scotland. Add to that the inevitable association with loony-left wokery, and it’s clear that Labour is at least ten years’ hard work away from starting to look electable.
Broadly speaking, then, Boris Johnson’s majority Government can expect to win the next general election, and Starmer will lose it by a further three-term majority.
The earliest GE the Tories risk losing is that of 2034.
Worth remembering that following 1979, Labour splintered into two halves. The only thing that prevented that happening to the Tories in 2019 was the spineless capitulation by Farage when he didn’t contest a single Tory-majority seat.
It took 10 years for Labour to reconsolidate after the SDP departure. There is no such wound to repair this time.
It’s much worse for Labour now, but that’s beside my point, which is that to know the result of the next election, you just look at the result of the last.
This approach predicts a Conservative victory. It’s based purely on looking at what happened last time, but when one looks away from data to sense-check it against reality, look what you see. Look at Labour, and the prediction is corroborated by Starmer’s utter shambles: a party driven by hate, riven by division, and that stands for nothing except envy and identity politics.
If we had a really impressive opposition it would shake my faith in my model, but we have an opposition worse even than that led by Kinnock. Labour manifestly cannot win, are 10 to 12 years away from looking like doing so, and as a party bitterly, bitterly hate the leader who saved them from oblivion last time.
The best analysis by far
One thing not discussed is the possibility of Nigel Farage getting a new party off the ground. And sneer as you might it is a possibility.
I am perhaps a natural conservative , but after the total mess they have made of the Covid crisis, crashing the economy and their totally stupid tier system, when all cause mortality in the U.K. this autumn is clearly in line with previous years and perhaps even less than 2018, I will certainly not be giving my vote to Boris and his buffoons. And before this crisis I have always been a huge fan of Boris.
So for me it’s either a new party that we can all align with or a spoiled ballot paper.
And I suspect the conservatives will have great difficulty hanging onto their northern gains on the strength of their performance so far
We have just learned that Labour MP from east London (I will leave you guess her background) has been charged with 63K’s worth of mortgage fraud. it used to be the Tories who were the criminals, and to some extent they still are. But the balance of criminality and fraud etc now lies firmly on the Labour side, and ‘traditional’ Labour voters have finally woken up to this.
As John Ottaway seems to suggest below. Farage needs to get on with his Reform party so that all those who have given up on the rest of them have someone to vote for.
Can’t we concentrate on Sir Kneel Starmers failings for a change? What’s the point of having an opposition party that doesn’t oppose anything, paid for by us I add. I can’t think of a single good thing Boris Johnson has done since he became leader, apart from replacing Teresa May. But Starmer? Please, this feeble man is almost invisible.
In UnHerd today we have Ed West telling us why he has come round to thinking that leaving the EU is a terrible blunder, while here we have Matthew Goodwin telling us that BJ is still popular despite various issues, not least Covid. Unless we see an astounding about turn in the next three weeks it seems that BJ will (finally!) deliver a Brexit that will please all but the most fervent of the Brexiteers. Go figure.
The working class(s) and the industries that employ them are finding a common home in conservative coalitions. They may not have chosen that suitor as they may have been shoved. Shoved by Labour in UK. By Hilary in the US. By Trudeau in Canada. Even the socialist New Democratic Party in Canada, the NDP, or, [if you prefer, the Nearly Dead Party], obsesses over climate change, race, indigenous issues, gender issues, etc, issues which their erstwhile supporters seem not to give a damn about. So, the welders and factory workers and oil hands are gravitating towards people who, at least, talk about them. Trump is dead, but, Trumpism may have a long life, more refined and respectable than the mercurial Donald could ever make it.
Trumpism is dead because it lost an election.
Partially because of shifting demographics (more website designers, fewer welders) and partially because the welders may well be concerned about climate change, getting fish back into the river they fished in as a child before pollution killed them off, etc. And the welders’ children are liable to be concerned about those issues.
Echo chambers rarely get it right
“There is certainly an intellectual hole at the heart of the Johnson Project; the general absence of a philosophy holding the entire thing together is something that he should prioritise in 2021.”
He just needs to deal with the wokescum.
Johnson “needs to deal with the wokescum”.
Perhaps you could compare notes with the guy above who claimed that Socialism is about hatred.
Dear BUTY
Kay Burley’s Coronavirus Suspension Proves Hypocrisy of Media Elite
you tube watch?v=zpW4GDidIq8
MP (who voted for lockdown) tells Andre Walker that they all know Coronavirus is nonsense
“how to compensate and repair”
This had better not be welfare. What people – his potential voters – want and need – is jobs, especially in manufacturing and commerce.
“Johnson is simply too liberal for his more socially conservative supporters. Is he really willing to stare down more radical elements of the left?” The best way to defeat the radical left is to expose the woke terror for the neo-Marxist postmodernist totalitarian scam it is and then promote true liberal principles of freedom of speech and solving problems through rational and open debate. The trouble is if he does not get round to it soon the administrative bureaucracies might be too heavily infected by the woke virus and work to block anything he does try.
An entire nation indulging in entryism, conservatives espousing socialism, socialists spewing conservatism and globalists regurgitating nationalism, while the ideologs patiently play wingmen on the extremes. Boris Johnston is the epitome of the political convolusion, a real world representation of the nations schizophrenic political subconscious. He is you!
Poor Boris and even Trump, the pandemic hit them and their freedom loving principles.
Corbyn when he saw what Boris had to do, he offered him some copies of his Manifesto which he had left over from the election.
We have to live with this Marxist China Virus as one more curse forced on to us by the Marxists who have destroyed our greatness at every turn since 1945, 1997 and what they threw at the leavers of power in 2019, the Marxist IRA was simply unbelievable and lethal to England itself.
Anyway, here we are, I still voted for Boris, I wouldn’t have anybody else steering us through the pandemic and I thank our lucky stars that our elections just missed the virus unlike poor Trump! Imagine if that had happened here, in my nightmares I can see Corbyn, McDonell and Abbott addressing us from podiums during the pandemic.
I voted for Boris to get Brexit Done! and so long as he doesn’t sell us to Europe and undoes the treachery of Major, Blair, Cameron and May that is fine by me. So I say: Boris the best! Go Boris go! Don’t give in to Bussels!
Ha ha! I had no idea viruses were given to Marxist ideals!
Still, as you say let’s get Brexit bodged and see what happens next….
MSM?
“Labour then opted to pursue an ultra-Remain strategy” that is certainly not how I recall it. I am not sure what the strategy was and I am not sure many Labour supporters did either. The Lib Dems had an ultra-Remain strategy and that was really clear and simple and totally devastating as yet another Lib Dem leader lost her own seat (oh how I laughed at that one).
I did try to discover the Labour Brexit strategy at a summer music festival last year where there was a labour stand giving out stickers saying “stop a Tory Brexit” so I asked does that mean we should have a Labour Brexit then and the answer was possibly, it will be whatever Corbyn can achieve and could be no Brexit at all, but it whatever it is it will be better than what the Tories will do.
You say you don’t know what Starmer stands for, but it is clear what he is against – anything he thinks he can say that sounds better than what Boris has said. The not Trump line seemed to work for Biden and maybe in another 4 years Starmer hopes a not Boris line will work for him. However we know the real reason Starmer does not stand for anything and that is that his party is so divided it would fall apart around him if he did actually try to stand for something.
This precious democracy we must the EU to “save” is so appalling that 44% of the electorate yields a majority of 80 in Parliament. Perhaps replacing it with a real democracy might be nice.
Johnson is beating Labour because Corbyn took the Labour party too far to the left, and since Cameron the Tory Party has adopted Blair’s policies and are no longer a conservative party.
One biggy that politicians and educated folk seldom understand is that when you’re having a hard time, you need to feel you’re not rock-bottom – and the only way to do that is to feel “not as bad as the family down the road”!
Then folk that are almost having a bad time behave as if they’re better than you.
Hence the way my Mum looked down her nose at the divorcee across the road.
Unfortunately, I am not convinced by the assumption that the ‘socially conservative white working class’ have the kind of commitment to ‘family values’ in that Dr Goodwin implies. We live in an area of SW London to which a large number of ‘white working class’ have started to move over the past few years. This has made the area more right-wing politically as many of them appear hold racist or nationalist views. However, in terms of family, female-headed households seem to be the exception rather than the norm, closely followed by step-families. Couples with children are often unmarried. Parenting skills are poor: children shout and scream and their parents/step-parents scream back at them. F- and c- words are used in front of children, which is really, really not okay. I rest my case.
Traditional family values, put into practice from day to day and not sentimentalised or shouted about, are more likely to be found among the South Asians (Hindu, Muslim and Christian), Chinese and Koreans, West Africans and Eastern European’s who (thankfully) are also moving into our area and improving it. They have the kind aspirations and respect for education found in previous generations of London’s working class communities and probably (hopefully) still extant in other parts of the UK.
Good article.
For those of us who long for honourable and accountable government this is a very depressing read.
Always easier on the outside looking in, of course, but as the best character in Groundhog Day* says, “Yup, that about sums it up for me.”
* It’s Groundhog Day tomorrow
Right now there is a good chuck of the working class that is being paid to sit at home and do nothing. It’s call furlough. It’s calculated to financially support white British so-called working class voters, who are never fond of hard work at the best of times.
Sooner or later furlough will end. A hard Brexit will have happened. The globalist middle class will be tightening their collective belt. There won’t be any trickle down of money from the globalist middle class who pay the taxes that support the so-called working class white British voters.
That’s when the opinion polls will start to tell the story.
I have no love for Labour and its identity politics. I think it gets worse every year. I think Starmer is a disaster. When the economy is chugging along and unemployment is low people can afford to vote on cultural issues. That’s not the case when the economy has gone under, unemployment is at 1980s levels and the country is bankrupt. The Conservatives got through the 1980s with votes from the middle classes who are no longer be there for them and certainly won’t be there in 2024.
Matthew Goodwin’s books are an interesting read, but like anyone who specialises in one aspect of a larger picture, he is prone to believing that the area he focuses on – the C2DE Leave element – determines the whole picture. In the long term, it’s a declining demographic, however much Unherd commenters love it as a touchstone for their own views.
I think you are misusing the current definition of C2DE in a narrow sense to skip by the fact that it’s jus a definition of a very large chunk of people who occupy middling and low paid jobs. C2DE is the bottom three categories of the whole NRS scale. Whatever you think is declining is just historical definitions that may need updating. But if your essential point is that somehow the middling and ordinary sort is declining and the entire population will somehow move into the top three grades of the scale and be directing, managing supervising and administering almost no-one, then that is a bizarre understanding. Most people have middling jobs, middling incomes, middling education. It’s almost the definition of average. We can’t be all chiefs and no Indians. However much telesales executive sounds like a middle class profession to some.
I agree with a lot of that.
And globalised capitalism has hollowed out the middle class. As a result, the middling jobs/incomes/education people (who mathematically have to exist – if you define them as the middle third, then by definition they are a third of the voters!) no longer have so much of a stake as they used to.
I don’t believe that the young ‘telesales executive’ on a short term contract in Coventry, living in a rented flat and paying half their income in rent – thus left acquiring absolutely nothing by the 31st of each month, because instead they are funding their landlord’s retire-at-50 plan – is naturally a Tory in the way that they might have been in 1980 when they might have had a job doing customer services in British Gas or the regional Electricity Board (remember them?) and been buying their own home. People don’t vote for their landlord!
Yes, the Tories can still win elections for a while by achieving 85-90% turnout among the over-70s while it’s only 40% or less among some younger groups. That makes the older C2DE people more influential at the ballot box than the younger C2DE ones, in the red wall seats. But you can’t play that game for ever. And the younger C2DE voters, even as they age, are not adopting the “You’re not allowed to say it now, but Enoch was right” or “We should never have given away the Empire, it’s all been downhill since 1945” attitudes of the 80 year olds.