Worksop is the largest town in Bassetlaw — the constituency that saw the greatest Labour-to-Conservative migration at the last general election. It’s the heart of Borisland. And now, exactly one year on from his ignominious resignation, many people here remain steadfastly loyal to their populist tribune. This was where the Boris majority was won: where miners, pensioners, Brexiteers and lifelong Labour voters united to stick it to their old party. Other than the brief blip of Malcolm MacDonald (son of the first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald) defecting to National Labour in 1929, Labour had held the town since 1929. Brendan Clarke-Smith is the MP who, in 2019, smashed that red record with a stonking 18.4% swing, the greatest, he later assures me, at any general election since the Second World War. (“I think it’s on Wikipedia.”)

When Johnson took the seat, it heralded a new era of Tory politics. A new coalition, forged from the fires of Brexit, stretched from Hampshire to Hartlepool. Like Columbus, he seemed to have landed upon virgin territory ripe for the taking. Labour — cosmopolitan, effete and out of touch — looked sunk. But four years on, the shaggy conqueror is gone, and a string of by-elections threatens to chip away at his majority he built. In Selby, Uxbridge, Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and now Chris Pincher’s seat of Tamworth, the prognosis is gloomy. So far, the bookies believe every single one will be lost. And Bassetlaw itself, the clearest expression of that much-heralded post-Brexit realignment, is now a harbinger of doom. In March, one poll suggested it, and all the other 44 Red Wall seats won from Labour, will be lost at next year’s general election. What went wrong?

“He’s still hugely popular,” Clarke-Smith tells me. “A lot of people voted for Boris. It wasn’t the only thing — it had been trending our way anyway — but those Brexit Party voters and so on came across, and he was a big part of that.” The big man, he says, has an “aura” about him that helped draw in converts. “You still get voters saying: ‘Oh, I voted for Boris…’”

When I meet the MP, he is wearing a checked suit and has a small ketchup stain at the corner of his mouth. A self-described “libertarian Thatcherite”, he was raised on a Nottingham council estate, trained as a teacher, and worked at a school in Romania before entering politics. He is also, on the day I visit, on the cover of the Worksop Guardian, delivering a sly grin alongside the headline: “MP slammed for ‘vile’ Twitter attack.” It is the outcome of Clarke-Smith’s engagement in the culture wars — he is at the fore of a group of working-class Tories keen to give as good as they get online. A member of the New Conservatives, a collective currently lobbying for tougher action on immigration, he is also part of the Common Sense Group, which has attacked “the woke agenda”.

He says this posture is what the Red Wall wants. “Apart from the obvious stuff about the economy and NHS, what would you guess the main issue is here?” he asks me. “The number one thing I get emailed about, more than Dominic Cummings, more than anything, is small boats. There is very little immigration here — but it’s the number one issue because they linked it to taking back control.”

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The Red Wall firebrand is a myth

By John Oxley

If true, this harks back to the political energy Boris personified, and which this squad of Red Wall MPs were elected to enact. The highest-profile member of the Nottinghamshire Tory contingent is Lee Anderson, the spiky-haired former miner and ex-Labour councillor who now serves as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In a recent segment on his GB News show, which captured much of the banal absurdity of politics in 2023, Anderson fed Clarke-Smith baked beans in a blind taste test to prove that bargain hunting is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis. “Here comes the aeroplane,” he said as he raised the spoon, firmly back in single-dad mode.

It’s perhaps not the most traditionalist-Tory publicity stunt. But, “we’re not in London — there’s no liberal elite here”, his campaign manager assures me. In Bassetlaw now, “the bigger the house and the bigger the gravel driveway, the less chance there is they’ll vote for us”, Clarke-Smith boasts. They claim the realignment is still working.

Worse-off voters were crucial to the Tory success in 2019. In that election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Labour lost nearly one in three low-income voters who had turned out to vote for them in 2017, while the Conservatives retained 90%. In the Red Wall now, however, the picture is shifting. The same March polling that foresees the Tories losing 45 seats in the North and Midlands shows the party behind in all social groups, from managers to unskilled manual labourers. That 19th-century notion of “working-class Toryism” has proven more elusive than first claimed.

And, away from the bustling high street, signs of discontent lurk. The cabbie who drove me from Retford, the handsome market town that makes up Bassetlaw’s other major population centre, tells me Boris was popular among his clientele in 2019. Now passengers young and old tell him they want a change of government. “My grandad was a well-known cab driver around Retford — he died during Covid. My gran couldn’t get out of her care home to attend the funeral.” It was, he adds dryly, “a bit crap”. He now works part time at Rampton Hospital, on a secure ward, where he helps transport imprisoned psychopaths. “There are cutbacks just like the rest of the NHS,” he says. “It’s much harder to transport patients now we have less staff.”

In Worksop itself, Wallace’s gleaming pate is plastered across town to advertise the food festival. I watch him deliver his own populist punchlines while cooking, laying into “clickbait” news and telling his audience not to trust headlines in the papers. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures the distrustful mood. Lindsay Martin, a Retford resident manning a friend’s market stall nearby, tells me she never fell for Johnson’s charm offensive. “Boris made a lot of false promises that were never delivered on. The country got worse under his leadership.” Asked about levelling-up, that chimera of social transformation, she merely laughs.

This region has always been sceptical of received opinion. The local council’s website grandly claims that “many regard Bassetlaw as the birthplace of the United States of America”. And, while that “many” is doing some heavy lifting, a sizeable chunk of the separatist-nonconformists who could no longer stand the Church of England did hail from the flat fields around here. At the local museum, a study resembling that of Plymouth Colony leader William Brewster is now preserved in aspic. And political dissidence, including to the benefit of the Right, is part of its history, too. During the miners’ strike, Nottinghamshire stuck out when the majority of its miners kept working and thus helped Margaret Thatcher’s government survive the winter of 1984.

Today, though, like much of the rest of the country, dissent has sublimated into a kind of jaded desolation. Others walking up and down the high street are less cynical. Janet, a pensioner in a purple windbreaker, tells me she voted Conservative for the first time in her life because of Boris. “It was his principles,” she says. “He got stuff done. Then he was brought down by other people.” What about the parties? Didn’t he break Covid rules? “It wasn’t his fault,” she tells me, without elaborating. “Rishi turned on him.” She will vote Tory again at the next election.

A middle-aged couple tell me that they, too, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. “I liked Boris at the time,” says the wife. “The slur against him now smells a little of a smear campaign.” Her husband agrees: “I think I’d vote for the Tories again if Boris returned as leader.” “Cameron” will “sell us out” with Europe, he claims, before his wife hurriedly reminds him that the Labour leader is called Keir.

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Will Starmer recapture Nuneaton?

By Felix Pope

As the food festival winds down, the high street becomes deserted. I walk past Clarke-Smith’s high street office where one window has taken a hit but remains just about intact, bearing a spiralling network of cracks. Retford is similarly quiet. People aren’t interested in talking: a densely bearded man bringing down the shutters on his vape shop tells me he “doesn’t do politics”. I pass the empty headquarters of Jo White, Labour’s chosen candidate and the wife of John Mann, the constituency’s former MP. A sign proclaims that she supports “Traditional Values in a Modern Bassetlaw”. I do not quite understand what this means, but when I email her campaign to ask I do not receive a response.

Johnson, meanwhile, has got his trotters up in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career, the former PM cultivated a set of allies before discarding them and Clark-Smith now faces a potential suspension from Parliament after falling foul of the privileges committee — was it worth it to defend Johnson? “Part of me thinks I owe my position as a member of parliament to Boris,” he says. “Winning that election, and getting Brexit done and everything else. I thought he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances. It wasn’t just loyalty — I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do.”

His words are laced with unwitting irony. Four years ago, victory here seemed to herald the start of a new age. Levelling-up money might reverse economic decline; an end to Brexit psychodrama might let old wounds heal. Perhaps it was hope more than expectation when Bassetlaw, the Red Wall and Brendan Clarke-Smith all tied their fortunes to a New-York-born columnist with a history of disappointing those who trusted him. While some still keep the faith, that realignment seems to have delivered little change to their lives in return. And, beyond tribal loyalties, that was the promise of 2019, broken utterly when Boris resigned last year.

I asked Boris-loyalist Janet if the town had got any better since the election, and I received a simple answer: “No.”

And yet despite this growing resentment, despite the fact that a majority of voters want him to resign, there’s every chance that Johnson will cling on. Yes, if the Met Police’s soon-to-be-published report on his alleged Covid breaches reveals that he misled parliament or lied to his own backbenchers, he is probably toast. But if it gives him enough wriggle room to survive, it will take the wind out of his rivals’ sails — and the PM will live to fight another day, and another election.

On that score, things aren’t quite as a bad as they first seem for Johnson — especially when you compare his position in the polls to Keir Starmer’s: 46% of people trust neither Johnson nor Starmer to tell the truth; 26% trust Starmer more than Johnson; and 14% trust Johnson more than Starmer. Of course, there is still a gap. But even immediately after the 2019 general election, Johnson had a net-negative trustworthy rating. Nobody voted for Johnson because they thought he was an honest politician. His dishonesty is priced in.

Similarly, voters are not overwhelmingly convinced that ditching Johnson would help the Tories: 34% think the Tories would be better off without him, compared to 48% who believe they would be doing the same or worse. Among Conservative voters in 2019, those figures are 23% and 66% respectively. Nor are voters warming to Starmer — just one poll this year has given him a net-positive approval rating. IpsosMORI, who remove the “neither” option in their satisfied/dissatisfied question, find a -15% satisfied rating for Starmer.

What about the latest YouGov poll, which gives Labour a six-point lead and finds that Starmer’s party is keeping 65% of its 2019 vote, versus just 52% for the Tories? Well, it’s worth noting that 25% of 2019 Tory voters say they “don’t know” who they’d vote for, compared to just 11% of Labour voters. This is important — “don’t knows” are excluded from headline voting intention figures, so the Conservatives could be in a stronger position than we think. One pollster which does not do this is Kantar; since the North Shropshire by-election they have, on average, found the Conservatives to be 2 points higher than other pollsters (and Labour nearly 1.7 points lower).

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

So, if Boris is in a stronger position than we think, how should he use it to his advantage?

Since 2019, political scientists have largely responded to this question by wheeling out hackneyed truisms about mystical Red Wall voters. These voters, we’re told, are a unique fighting force, chomping at the bit to fight Johnson’s culture war. But that’s a myth; they are not more anti-woke than Tory voters in general, nor do they differ significantly on economics.

Indeed, the original purpose of the ‘Red Wall’ moniker was that it represented seats which, given their socio-demographic make up, should have voted Tory anyway. The question was not why these seats turned Conservative in 2019 — it was why they were not Conservative long before 2019.

If he’s to succeed, Johnson needs to remember what this Conservative voting coalition cares about. At the last election, Brexit was the most important issue for voters, leave and remain. Now, only 15% of leave voters think it is one of the top three most important issues; for Remainers, that figure is 32%. Brexit will not deliver the next election for Boris — but playing on traditional Tory strengths might.

Nowhere, for instance, is the divide between Tory and Labour voters starker than in the issue of immigration and asylum. For Tory voters it is the third most important issue (at 46%), whereas for Labour it is ninth (at 8%). You would struggle to find any voter who thinks the government is doing a good job on asylum seekers crossing the Channel — even 77% of Conservative voters thinking the government has handled it badly. So if Johnson wants to shore up his Tory base, a good place to start would be putting Home Secretary Priti Patel on notice: stop the boats or lose your job.

Then there’s the economy, which is rated one of the top three issues by 55% of Tory voters, compared to 45% of Labour voters. Johnson’s coalition is sceptical of how the economic system is structured: while they do not necessarily believe in income redistribution, they do think the system is rigged in favour of the rich, and that ordinary working people do not get their fair share. Generally speaking, Conservative voters are much more Left-wing than Conservative MPs.

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Boris is our sin-eater

By Mary Harrington

So perhaps more than anything, the most pressing concern for Johnson should be levelling up. After “getting Brexit done”, levelling up formed the core of the Conservatives’ offer to the electorate. Yet it took more than two years for the government to get around to defining exactly what it means, let alone release a white paper on the subject.

It’s hardly surprising that voters are not convinced: 44% think levelling up will lead to no change in spending in their area, while 18% think it will lead to lower levels. Just 7% think more money will flow as a result. The figures are broadly the same among Tory and Labour voters.

One reason for New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 was that the public wanted more money spent on public services — 18 years of Thatcherism had left them in a perilous state. Cameronite austerity has done the same today: all the signs suggest that voters want to see a difference by the end of this parliament, otherwise they will lose faith in the government’s promises.

Despite this, the Government is caught up in arguments over funding between the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, who wants more money, and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who is saying no. But levelling up — undoing decades’ worth of inequality — cannot be done on the cheap.

For Johnson, there is an obvious solution to this. If levelling up is to be his legacy, it is currently under threat from Sunak’s penny-pinching instincts. So a true government reset — one that would send a clear signal to voters about his commitment to ending the North/South divide — would see Johnson sack Sunak and replace him with a true believer in levelling up: someone like Michael Gove.

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Covid could still save Boris

By Freddie Sayers

Sunak’s much-touted popularity may make Johnson think twice about this, but support for the chancellor is overstated. It is, after all, difficult to be anything but popular when you’re paying people to stay at home, or subsidising their dinners out in the middle of summer. But since the rush of cash has disappeared, his approval rating has begun to fall — from a net 43% positive in April 2020 to just 2% in December 2021.

If Johnson survives the consequences of the Met’s report, he will probably live to fight the next election. By then Partygate will have faded and the PM will need to point to a series of policy wins that his voter coalition wants: most of which involve spending more money. Now is not the time for a self-declared fiscal conservative to sit in Number 11. If Johnson wants to win in 2024, he needs to put voters’ money where his mouth is.

As the first malodorous waves reach his nose, and the nostrils of those around him, the perpetrator suddenly panics. The stench is far more toxic and powerful than he had expected, and as the scale of the nasal assault becomes obvious the child attempts to transform himself from culprit to observer, even eyeing up the opportunity to move, in due course, to victim. So it is with Owen Jones’s This Land, a turgid and strangely dull account of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.

You might have thought that Jones would be well placed to perform the task. Jones was an early cheerleader for Corbyn, campaigned for him, spoke at his rallies, advised him, served as his most prominent mainstream media defender and was otherwise central to the whole movement.

Sure, that move meant transgressing the boundaries of journalism and political activism, but this was a move already mastered by Jones’s comrade Russell Brand. When Brand was pinned down on any of his political pronouncements he would say “I’m just a comedian”. Yet his political pronouncements were only ever taken seriously (to the extent they were) because the stage was given to him as an entertainer.

Similarly, when Jones organises protests outside the offices of papers of which he disapproves and speaks at rallies for his preferred far-left candidates he clearly does so as a political activist. Yet whenever it gets too much for him he slips back into pretending (as he does here) that he is merely a writer, with a dispassionate eye and a judicious historian’s pen.

Perhaps it was inevitable that once the fumes of the Corbyn experiment surrounded him and then (thanks only to the British electorate) dissipated, Jones should try to get away with a book pretending that he was only really an observer of this movement. The desire to get away from the scene of the offence is understandable; what is unforgivable is that the results are so slyly dishonest.

For example, in the chapter on the anti-Semitism controversy Jones is conscious of the tightrope he must walk — trying not to condone the open anti-Semites in Corbyn’s movement, but at the same time trying to defend his hero from the most serious accusations. Jones can only do this by re-writing or editing out parts of the story, including his own.

So while he is willing to address and condemn some of the more minor cases of anti-Semitism in the party he at no stage contends with the most serious accusations against Corbyn. There is, for instance, simply no mention of Corbyn’s campaign for and support of Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, two people imprisoned for bombing the offices of a number of Jewish charities in London. To raise such a thing would mean having to excuse it, condemn it or contend with it. Jones can bring himself to do none of these things.

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Pity poor oppressed Prince Harry

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It is the same with the wreath-laying at the graves of the Munich Olympic terrorists. Jones writes that in 2014 “Corbyn had taken part in a ceremony commemorating the innocent victims of a 1985 Israeli air strike, during which wreaths had been laid for the Palestinians accused of taking part in the terror atrocity at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich”. This is characteristically dishonest. First Jones drops in (and mis-portrays) an Israeli action; then he suggests that anybody might find themselves laying a wreath either at or near the graves of such terrorists; and finally there is that little sleight “accused of taking part”.

What Jones does not mention in his own role in this controversy. For in 2018, when the Tunisia wreath-laying photos broke, Jones was still the most prominent mainstream media defender of everything Corbyn did.  While fighting to defend his hero Jones tried to minimise the incident, proclaiming on social media “No one has [presumably he meant ‘was’] killed by a wreath.”

Perhaps Jones the would-be historian is embarrassed by this statement — but in avoiding his own embarrassment he also avoids the job any honest writer would perform. For in precisely such moments lie the problem. In pursuit of their dream of getting a socialist into Downing Street people like Jones were consistently willing to degrade themselves, defame others and otherwise lose any moral sense they still possessed.

There is a rich seam of thought to explore here, but Jones is neither a good enough writer nor an honest enough thinker to perform the task. Perhaps he thinks that both he and the revolution have many more acts left in them — so we read pabulum like the idea that the anti-Semitism crisis could have been lessened if Corbyn had been more willing to “embrace people”.

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Elsewhere you get the feeling that Jones wrote his book on social-justice auto-pilot. At the outset we read that his only desire as a writer is “to support struggles against injustice” and that as such it is his duty to provide “a clear-eyed assessment of the many failures and mistakes of the Corbyn era”. His book does no such thing. The introduction — in which Covid is uneasily squeezed in — concludes with an insistence that “We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”. But “if our time is to come, then we must learn from our past”. There is no evidence that Jones is able to rise to his own tract-like aspirations.

And if writing is indeed where this wounded revolutionary seeks to berth for a while then he should work harder at his art. Throughout his book no cliché goes undeployed. When any victory approaches Corbyn “hurtles” towards it. When Corbyn does well it is because “he came out swinging”. People who Jones likes are “a force of nature”. The Labour MP Andrew Gwynne is “an absolute hero” (for an appearance on the Today programme). By contrast a Liberal Democrat leader is “dropping clangers left, right and centre”. Under the Conservative Government youth services are “butchered”.

Best is when Jones has to mention someone he cannot stand and is briefly torn between his aspiration to be a chronicler and his urge to engage in the sort of drive-by that really motivates him. Every time the lower urge wins out: Chuka Umunna and other Labour moderates get a swipe every time they appear, but it is Boris Johnson who get the most characteristic, and repetitive, attacks.

On page 260 we can read that Boris Johnson is “untrustworthy, with a record of dishonesty and lies, and a history of racism, homophobia and bigotry”. Three pages later we get to read of Johnson again that “his record of overt homophobic, Islamophobic and generally racist behaviour was unparalleled for a modern British politician of his prominence”. Later still we can read that Johnson has “a history of whipping up bigotry against minorities ranging from Muslims to gay people”.

Meantime the party which Johnson leads is accused of having “carried out what seemed like a systematic programme of deportation from the UK” over the last decade. It is as though Jones cannot understand why his denunciatory incantations do not seem to have their desired effect. A serious thinker might come to one conclusion; Jones appears to believe that it is because he has not repeated himself enough.

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As we go through unimportant policy debates between forgettable people in Corbyn’s office there are lacklustre attempts to turn all this into a thrilling narrative. Jones’s stabs at reportage are occasionally enlivened by colour such as this: one interviewee “stirs a cappuccino in a theatre café on London’s South Bank”. Someone else smokes an e-cigarette. We get exclusive interviews with figures as exciting as Andrew Murray and Len McLuskey.

Elsewhere Jones attempts to whip along his narrative (Corbyn runs for leader, Corbyn is challenged from within, Brexit, 2017, 2019 etc) with cliff-hanger chapter endings. So as each chapter closes we are alerted to things that have not happened yet but are about to happen despite the main characters not knowing that they are about to happen, because they have not happened yet. Jones deploys this same technique last used by James Mcintyre and Mehdi Hasan in their truly thrilling 2011 biography of Ed Miliband, Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour leader.

By the conclusion (more Covid shoehorned in) Jones is back to pamphleteer mode. He writes: “History will undoubtedly be far kinder to the reluctant Labour leader than the judgement that currently prevails.” Perhaps Jones is confident of this because he believes that he has written the history. He hasn’t. He has written a non-tell-all, designed to get himself away from the scene of a stench he was instrumental in unleashing. Perhaps he will get away with it — but we must hope not.

With the polls narrowing there’s a question as to whether this approach will work any better. But if the current government is returned next week, might we see a more radical agenda emerge into the light?

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The 10 brains behind Dominic Cummings

By Peter Franklin

If anyone in this administration has big ideas it’s Dominic Cummings. That much is clear from his blog, an in-depth guide to his thinking and influences. He stopped blogging when he followed Boris Johnson into Downing Street.

But last week there was a new post. This was mostly about Brexit and the election campaign, but there was an intriguing post-script:

“If you’re interested in ideas about how the new government could really change our economy for the better, making it more productive and fairer, you’ll find this paper interesting. It has many ideas about long-term productivity, science, technology, how to help regions outside the south-east and so on, by a professor of physics in Sheffield: A Resurgence of the Regions: rebuilding innovation capacity across the whole UK.”

The media love to portray Cummings as some kind of Bond villain, so is this professor — one Richard Jones — his mad scientist?

In a word, no. The media, finding no hint of insanity in Jones’ work, tried to make something of his political differences with Cummings instead. That’s a shame, because the real story is whether the paper, having been endorsed by Boris Johnson’s licenced thinker, represents the Conservatives’ real manifesto.

I’ve read it and agree with the following assessment by Stian Westlake, a Whitehall advisor on innovation policy:

“The mini-storm over Dom Cummings citing @RichardALJones’s recent paper on innovation policy prompted me to re-read it, and *boy* is it good. I agree with more or less everything, and as a bonus it is delightfully written…

“On a couple of occasions I’ve been asked by a new science minister ‘what should I read on innovation?’, and it was always quite a hard question to answer. But now, I’d just say ‘read that’.”

*

It begins with an unsparing look at the weaknesses of the British economy. Basically, the UK is two economies: there’s our thriving capital, surrounded by a prosperous hinterland; and then there’s ‘Outer Britain’ (as officialdom once called it), which is stuck in what Jones calls a “low innovation, low skills, low wage equilibrium”.

Outside the orbit of London, neither business nor the state puts enough investment into skills, innovation and infrastructure. That’s because there’s not enough demand for these things. At the same time, the high-productivity enterprises that might supply the necessary demand don’t set up shop here because the necessary skills etc can’t be supplied. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation.

Britain beyond the South East is working hard and creating jobs, but people and communities don’t just need work, but prospects too — a chance to get on, not just get by. For that to happen a ‘jobs miracle’ is not enough, we also need a productivity revolution — a shift to a high innovation, high skills, high wage equilibrium.

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The state can’t achieve this alone, it ultimately depends on private enterprise. However, government can provide the catalyst.

Jones observes that “the industrial strategy of the Conservative administrations between 1979 and 1997 was not to have an industrial strategy”. This continued until the dog-end of the New Labour years. This was deliberate; industrial policy was associated with failures of post-war planning and the strife-torn industrial relations of the Sixties and Seventies.

And yet, it became abundantly clear that the industrial non-strategy of the Eighties and onward was broken too. Not only has the UK’s established economic model not worked for most of the country, it was also implicated in the devastating crash of 2008.

In the course of our current decade, there’s been a big shift in Conservative thought. In 2016, a new Department of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy was created — its name signalling the end of an old taboo. And even though ‘regionalism’ has remained a forbidden term, concepts such as the Northern Powerhouse have been actively promoted as part of a decentralising agenda.

Then there’s the U-turn on research spending. After a long period of decline, the Government wants more public and private sector investment in science and innovation. Its manifesto commits to a “target of 2.4 per cent of GDP being spent on R&D across the economy”.

Furthermore, there’s a new consensus that investment in science and technology can’t just be limited to academic research in Britain’s universities. Our higher education sector is one of strongest in the world, but we are weak in what the paper describes as “translational research” — i.e. turning knowledge into innovation, and innovation into enterprise.

Countries such as Germany have strong translational research institutions, a key component in the ecosystem of universities, leading-edge companies, supply chains, providers of technical education and the networks through which individuals, businesses and organisations cooperate and compete to build local economies. Jones calls this the “industrial commons” — which is intact and flourishing in some parts of the country, but hollowed-out in others by decades of de-industrialisation, political centralisation and under-investment.

*

In this decade, there are signs that Whitehall and Westminster have woken up to this reality. We’ve seen significant decentralisation of power and resources; industrial policy, as mentioned, is firmly back on the agenda; and support for innovation includes funding for a growing network of Catapult centres — institutions which specialise in translational research and the regeneration of our industrial commons.

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So, does that mean that Richard Jones’ programme for regional revival is being implemented?

Yes and no. Some of the elements are definitely in place — but we’ve yet to see a full and conscious commitment to the most revolutionary aspects of his argument.

For instance, he’s not just calling for more funding for research (including translational research) but a sea-change in how it’s allocated. The established approach is “place blind”. This principle is that instead of ensuring a particular geographical spread of resources, the money should go to where the decision-makers think it will be most productively used. That’s sounds fair, but in practice it tends to pile further advantages on those areas that already have the edge on everywhere else. When it comes to R&D that means the so-called ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

Jones sees this is an example of the Matthew Effect — named after a verse in Saint Matthew’s Gospel:

“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

When it comes to individual funding decisions, choosing a location with top universities, leading-edge companies and a highly skilled workforce maybe entirely rational, but it ignores the bigger picture which is the need to build capacity in more than just one part of the country.

To make that change, geographical neutrality must be abandoned — along with the investment decision models that embed the Matthew Effect in their underlying assumptions. This needs to apply to the funding of skills and infrastructure as well as research. Furthermore all these forms of investment need to be coordinated with one another on the basis of direct knowledge of local economic needs. Thus further decentralisation of decision-making power over these resources is a key test of just how seriously Government takes this agenda. If power-hoarding departments like the Treasury aren’t howling in rage, then we’ll know the reformers aren’t pushing hard enough.

*

Increasing the supply of productivity boosting inputs is only half the battle. Professor Jones emphasises the other half which is all about stimulating demand. As well as the usual ways in which government encourages companies to move to priority areas there is something that it can do directly, which is use its vast power as a policy maker, regulator and purchaser to make markets in leading edge products and services.

That’s exactly what happened with success stories such as offshore wind power. As well as investing in relevant skills, infrastructure and technology development, the government has mandated the purchase of renewable energy at a guaranteed price — thus enabling private-sector investment. With the industry established, competitive auctions for the right to build new wind farms then put pressure on developers and manufacturers to cut their costs. Today, the industry is close to being subsidy free.

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The public sector spends vast sums of money with external suppliers every year — Jones quotes a figure of £255 billion. Government also influences procurement in regulated industries such as energy. Last week, Boris Johnson said that public procurement should be used to support British industry. But it’s important that this isn’t a matter of mere ‘propping-up’ — both central and local government must use its economic clout strategically to nurture clusters of innovation throughout the country.

*

But isn’t this all a tad protectionist? In fact, isn’t it downright statist?

Well, yes, it is protectionist up to a point, but no more so than what our competitors, the Americans, Germans and Chinese, have been doing for decades. The UK, having suffered persistently high trade deficits and multiple currency devaluations, needs to worry less about free trade purity and more about how we’re going to earn our living as a country.

As for the charge of statism, the fact is that the state is, and always will be, the biggest customer in the economy. Big private companies don’t just purchase goods and services on short-term cost calculations alone, they use their clout to influence and develop supply chains that meet their long-term strategic needs. So why on Earth wouldn’t HMG want to do the same?

That’s especially true given the enormous challenges facing us as a nation. Professor Jones mentions the challenge of decarbonising the economy without bankrupting it and also the urgent need for productivity breakthroughs in health and social care. I’d add three further challenges to the list: the controversial goal of building millions of new homes over the next twenty years; the public transport solutions desperately needed to rescue our traffic-choked towns and cities; and the ecological revolution required to restore life to our degraded landscapes and seascapes. 

The idea that the state shouldn’t use its purchasing power to encourage the innovation upon which all this depends is frankly insane.

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To revive our cities we must set them free

By Peter Franklin

But for someone like me, a conservative social democrat reconciled to Brexit, there is an interesting paradox at play: to make Britain safe for moderate social democracy, you really have to lend your vote to the flamboyant metropolitan Conservative Boris Johnson (or at least hope he wins convincingly).

The Brahmin Left cannot see this, though, and believes the future for social democratic politics over the next decade is “dire”, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer.

But the logic is plain. If Johnson wins a decent majority, it will only be because a sufficient number of mainly lower income voters in the North and the Midlands has switched from Labour to Tory. If this happens, it will shift the voter base of the Tory party and thus the interests that the party represents.

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What will survive this seismic election?

By Matthew Goodwin

Of course, the party will still also represent a solid block of the most affluent in the South and elsewhere, but why have the 2017 and 2019 Tory manifestos been so relatively quiet about the free market and tax cuts and so noisy about investing in public services? Brexit has forced the party to seek a new segment of the electorate and, contrary to all the talk of lurching to the Right, this strengthens the hand of One Nation Tories who are happy to see the party becoming more like a cross-class Christian Democratic alliance — minus the confessional attachment.

The party will remain in favour of the market economy and enterprise, but it is no longer going to be the party of small government, because its new voter base wants quite high public spending and plenty of redistribution. As Daniel Finkelstein put it in the Times: “If you win Bassetlaw or Hartlepool, you have to become the party of Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.”

You remain the party of the shires and the affluent suburbs too, and this will no doubt create interesting policy conflicts over the coming years — over housing for example — but the Left’s de-regulatory, small-state caricature of the Tories is going to look increasingly unbelievable.

Apart from getting Brexit done, the only other Johnson slogan that I have noticed, particularly evident at the manifesto launch, is that decent public services and public infrastructure underpin a successful market economy — and isn’t that almost a definition of market-friendly social democracy?

There are, of course, many Conservatives whose economic instinct remains more Thatcherite, and who tend to see the public sector as a sort of necessary evil, but they are a political hangover. And incidentally, although there is still a highly disproportionate number of Tory MPs who were privately educated, the proportion has dropped from 75% in the 1970s to 45% now (and possibly below 40% after the election) — so many more will have been dependent on public services most of their lives. Tory candidates look and sound more like the voters than ever before.

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It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There is a second leg to this story about making Britain safe for moderate social democracy: it is the breaking of the hold of the true-believer socialists who currently control the Labour party. A thumping victory for the new Tory party described above is a necessary condition for that outcome.

This change will not happen swiftly and could entail a more complete break-up of the Labour party than the minor splintering we have seen so far. How swiftly exactly will depend on many imponderables, such as how serious the defeat is, which Labour MPs are left standing, and whether, after a second defeat (and maybe a heavy one this time), the Momentum surge might start to lose momentum. This itself might also depend on the medium term socio-economic fate of what one might call the ‘educated just about managing class’ — people with degrees from non-Russell Group universities who end up in jobs not so different from those of their parents.

In any case, a big victory for Johnson surely increases the chances of the sensible centre-Left either recapturing the Labour Party, or leaving it as a hard-Left rump party and establishing a new (Brownite) centre-Left party. This new party would be a few notches to the Left of the new Tory party on economics, and several yards to its Left (if that is the right word) on social and cultural matters.

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How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

So here is the second paradox of this election: at least in the medium term, it will shift UK politics in a European direction, with two cross-class “peoples’ parties” (like the CDU and SPD in Germany) with similar approaches to economic management, but with the Tories representing the more socially conservative strands of the electorate and Labour (or its successor party) representing the more liberal strands.

That will also mean that the most free market of the big European countries does not have a party that enthusiastically represents the free market (it is hard to see the social democratic Liberal Democrats filling that gap). But the free market can probably look after itself for now, and if Britain becomes too statist, the electorate will sense it and reshuffle the pack at some point in the future.

One doubt that some people, especially on the Left, will have about this thesis is whether a modest increase in NHS investment and a slogan or two about public infrastructure really amounts to a social democratic shift in the Tory party.

It is true that the Tory manifesto in the end was more modest on public spending commitments than I had hoped, and implicitly less redistributionist than I had wanted, with the promise not to increase any of the main income related taxes. The lack of a proper commitment to a partial socialisation of adult care costs, while understandable politically, was also a disappointment.

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What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

So is the Tory party just putting on a more centrist mask to appeal temporarily to the Brexit-voting lower-middle and working classes? I do not think the world works like that. Even for our short-termist, adversarial political culture, that would be an impossibly cynical move. It also ignores the fact that the party has almost certainly lost a section of the middle class over Brexit that needs to be replaced — and not just for one election.

No, from my own observations (and I work part-time in a centre-Right think tank and meet plenty of Tory MPs), I would say that the party — thanks to Brexit — is going through another of its great evolutionary shifts. My own think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a major piece of work calling for the socialisation of adult social care costs (with a supportive forward by that well known 19^th century mill-owner Jacob Rees-Mogg).

The last Tory party conference had a mantra of three policies for post-Brexit Britain: sort out social care, build a lot more houses (including public ones for rent) and invest more in non-university, post-school education for the 60% who do not go into higher education. If this is the plan for de-regulated, race-to-the-bottom Britain, it is very craftily disguised.

So why are so many Tories so passionate about leaving the EU if it is not to loosen protections that their new voters are strongly attached to? No doubt there are some who are keen to see the back of the Working Time Directive and so on, but de-regulation and autonomy are here too often confused. The moderate nationalism that Brexit appealed to is the localism of our more globalised world.

Brexit now allows us to make our own choices about immigration, about farm subsidies, about regional aid and state subsidies, about contracting out rules in the public sector, about VAT levels, about the future of our legal system and much more. In many areas we will stick close to EU rules, in other areas we will diverge, and pay some economic price for doing so, but it will be our choice.

Is all this just the grumpy rationalisations of a privileged 60-something who flirted with leftism in his youth and is now returning to his Conservative/conservative roots? Well, I was a member of the Labour party for about 35 years and continued to vote (and sometimes even canvas) for them right up to 2015. I voted Tory in 2017, largely on Brexit grounds (as a Remain voter who wanted the decision implemented), and I might vote Liberal Democrat as an anti-Corbyn tactical vote in 2019. So to the extent that beliefs are expressed through political acts, I think I can now claim a pretty sound centrist record.