August 2, 2022 - 7:00am
Whoever becomes Conservative leader will need to find a way to appeal to national populist voters, namely the relatively working-class voters who want immigration levels reduced.
Why? Because Johnson’s ‘global Britain’ liberal conservatism appears to be of limited interest to many 2019 Tory voters, the same people who voted Brexit to reduce immigration levels and have come to realise that neither Brexit nor the Tories have delivered on the cultural issues they care about.
As Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak battle for the Tory leadership, one of the questions at the back of the selectorate’s mind will be which candidate can best attract the party’s lost voters. After all, as Matt Goodwin has recently pointed out, it is highly unlikely that the post-Boris Tories will be able to woo the mainly young, graduate and Remain voters who declined to vote for them last time.
The Tories won 44% of the vote in 2019, giving them a huge 80-seat majority. A year ago, after the tumult of the pandemic, they were still on 41% in the polls. However, the Tories now languish at 33%, well behind Labour’s 40%.
In a recent essay at Conservative Home, Alp Mehmet noted that 8 in 10 Tories, and 6 in 10 voters, wanted immigration reduced. It is the second most important issue for Tory voters after the economy. Yet immigration has been given only peripheral attention by candidates in the leadership contest.
In order to understand why, it is worth looking at data from a Delta Poll survey commissioned by Mehmet’s organisation, Migration Watch.
In Figure 1, 1,075 individuals gave a 2019 vote choice. Of these, 503 in the sample chose the Tories and 352 Labour. However, if we examine people’s voting intentions as of 26 July 2022, 374 in the sample said they would vote Labour and just 347 intended to vote Tory. The flow diagram shows what has happened. The Tories have lost far more voters than Labour to the ‘Don’t Know’ category, and a substantial number directly to Labour. Virtually no one who was not already a Tory in 2019 is one today.
While most voters who lost faith with the Tories checked out due to Johnson’s repeated lying, breaking of lockdown rules and general sleaze, Tory Remainers and the prosperous middle class in the ‘Blue Wall’ — who might be most sensitive to this — are not leading this revolt. It is quite the opposite.
What we are instead witnessing is a sense of national populist betrayal in which the Tories are perceived as being in politics for themselves and neglecting the cultural grievances that underpinned the Brexit vote. While many 2019 Tory voters made an allowance for the pandemic and delivering Brexit, there is arguably a sense that the party has no cultural vision, and no will to contest the immigration status quo.
The survey found that 86% of ex-Tories want less immigration compared to 73% of those currently intending to vote Tory. Indeed, Figure 2 shows that working class (C2DE) and immigration restrictionist voters are significantly more likely to have defected from the Tories since 2019. In fact, a working-class voter who wants immigration reduced and voted Tory in 2019 has a better than even (.56) chance of not intending to vote Conservative. Class and immigration attitudes have independent effects on switching.
This is not about delivering Brexit. Figure 2 controls for Brexit vote, and the results show that 2019 Tory voters who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum are no more likely than 2019 Tory voters who opted for Remain to have departed. Instead, differences hinge on whether voters are animated by the more politico-economic version of Brexit championed by Johnson and many Tory MPs or the more immigration-sceptic version popular with the base.
Whoever becomes Tory leader will require a message to mobilise the party’s lost national populist voters, many in key ‘Red Wall’ constituencies.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).
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SubscribePeople in the north (where I’m from originally) never seem to have accepted that the broken industries that went down in the 80s weren’t maliciously killed by Thatcher, they were dead already, she simply ended the theatre of dressing up the corpses in clothes and pretending they were still alive. If they’d been healthy competitive companies they wouldn’t have died the moment state support was withdrawn, but decades of a “it’s not our fault it woz fatcher innit” mentality has stopped people from accepting that.
So it’s an endless circle of problems – who would want to try and set up a new company in a place where everyone is proud to be as left wing as possible (=they see management as enemies not friends which is the last thing you need when trying to build a firm), then without new companies they can’t move on from the past, and the poverty that results keeps people voting left wing so the cycle repeats.
It’s really sad. It also holds the rest of the country back (like Scotland is doing). The north means even the Tories have to worship the NHS even though it’s now in open collapse. What can be done about that sort of leftism?
I’m from Liverpool, and I can tell you they’ll never get over it, and as a result it’ll never rise above the ingrained sense of dependant entitlement.
Its like there’s pride in failure because it just proves how everyone else holds them back. They even manage to complain about probably the cleverest football club owners in the Country who turned LFC around from 30 years of decline.
“Death before Resurrection”.
Germany proves that another way was possible. She helped South England adjust to the economic realities of the 21th century, but took the North back to the 18th. And the whole country is still paying the price.
It’s the same story in Newcastle where the LibDems had a taste of power in the Council but lost to further hegemony by Labour. And the people wonder why nothing changes when they have the same old, same old in charge for ever. As Oscar Wilde put it – a triumph of hope over experience.
What is missed out in this article is that ever since Manchester and Liverpool became dominated by Labour they have used the Local Govt machine as a propanganda machine for left wing views.The one that got away was Brexit.On the evening of the referendum i had a social event in Tameside with 20 mostly working class local people and it turned out only 2 of us (the 2 bohemian people present) were voting remain .In the 2019 election the Tories came within 1000 votes of taking what had been a very safe labour seat there.What the Tories need to do is a U-turn on Net Zero and take on the green red left on energy policy.
Yes its so blindingly obvious. Net zero is pointless, irrelevant and not based on science. And yet it will make the poor even poorer. Why on earth cant the Tories see this. It’s an open goal to win back the red wall
Because the green movement is generally not calling for policies that make the poor poorer. Quite the opposite, if not implemented regressively (as it has been by the economic right here, in France, the Netherlands etc): insulating homes would save working people money, the green new deal would create proper paid, highly skilled jobs, renewable energy development would reduce our dependency on foreign energy (although of course national storage capacity needs to be expanded to avoid the ‘unreliables’ accusation) – unfortunately however our government isn’t doing those things
Just for information (as another Tory, originally from Manchester), Didsbury, as part of the Manchester Withington constituency, had a Tory MP, Fred Silvester, until the 1987 election. Didsbury Ward continued to be represented by three Conservative councillors until 1994. The last (elected) Tory councillor, Cllr Peter Hilton, lost Didsbury in the May elections of 1996. He’s now the President of the Manchester Conservative Association. The absence of any Conservative representation — or alternative to the dominant left-wing voice — on the city council is indeed a sad loss, not least given the very long and distinguished service of the Tories in the city (Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, Nellie Beer, Eveline Hill, Harold Tucker, etc.) throughout the 20th century.
I thought that Manchester was given a Mayor with additional spending money – Andy Burnham, I believe. What’s he done?
Over on Tees-side the Mayor there seems to be running a Free Port and investing in manufacturing!
What’s wrong with Manchester? Are they sitting down with their feet up?
I feel so isolated as a single parent conservative party member in likely the most socio economically run down neighbourhood in Manchester that im relocating to a more conservative city in the South. The lack of motivation to improve ones lot is incredible. I refuse to have my child grow up thinking this life attitude is acceptable.
The simple answer is no, they don’t need the Tories. Apart from London, the NW, you can also add the NE, receive more funding than any other region in England including the SE. What would having a few Tory MPs do for them. Burnham is clear going for more power, which is the next logical step.
The problem is that so many people only think of London when they think of the SE. I have heard many work collegues who relocated from the North to central southern England saying that they were unaware that there was any poverty in the South, they believed that everyone was sitting pretty here; food banks in the South was something that they could not conceive of.
Deprivation in parts of London is also Dickensian,
as a stroll around Tower Hamlets will quickly reveal
The pampered parasites of Quislington are the exception not the rule.
Fortunately London is policed by, as we used to say “the finest Police Force money can buy”, so there is no cause for concern………..yet.
Islington has some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country
Do you have any evidence to support this?
Here you go Tom.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04033/
Thanks for this link – very interesting.
The article doesn’t fit its headline. How is it Labour’s fault that consecutive Conservative governments have invested so little in the north? (And, from what they have been telling us, whoever wins this drawn-out leader contest will continue in the same vein.)
Conservative governments have invested huge amounts in the North. It’s just that as it’s in large part via public sector salaries it’s not very obvious.