At least, that’s what we’re invited to believe. But the truth is that this depiction of our capital city is not one recognised by millions of its citizens. And that’s because London is, in fact, a tale of two cities.

There are the gentrified hotbeds of liberal cosmopolitanism – the Islingtons and Camdens – top heavy with the professional classes and cultural elites, the type of areas that were a bedrock of Remain support in the EU referendum.

But, then, there are those places outside the bubble. On the one hand, the grittier, traditional working-class areas – the Canning Towns and Bermondseys – populated by those steamrollered by globalisation, for whom austerity and mass immigration have exacerbated the problems of low wages, poor housing and under-pressure public services. On the other, the middle-class suburbs – the Upminsters and Eastcotes – inhabited by those who sense that their small ‘c’ conservativism is increasingly incongruous with the image of their city as a beacon of progressive modernity.

It is between these places that a new and unintended coalition has emerged, born out of resentment at having to watch their old-fashioned, socially conservative – what some describe as ‘faith, family and flag’ – views shunned and disparaged by the liberal elite. You can see something similar writ large across England: an accidental alliance between once-loyal Labour voters in the post-industrial towns and Conservatives in the shires. It’s an alliance which manifested itself most starkly in the Brexit vote.

For the Londoners that fall within these groups, their city is not the harmonious and cohesive ideal seen through the eyes of the chattering classes. It is, instead, a place that is increasingly atomised, where millions feel a diminishing sense of belonging and in which entire communities living within a few hundred yards of each other live utterly parallel lives.

The Year Nothing Changed

Theresa May's tin ear

By Henry Olsen

Take, for example, the borough in which I grew up, Barking and Dagenham. As working-class as it gets, it was once the very exemplar of a traditional Labour heartland. Never affluent, but stable, close-knit and settled. Centred around a sprawling 1930s council estate and with generally healthy levels of employment – the dominant Ford factory being at the heart of local industry – Barking and Dagenham enjoyed its steady constancy, its social and cultural homogeneity. For those short on money and opportunity, the concepts of place, belonging, identity and relationships take on so much more meaning.

More by Paul Embery

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

But then things changed. Over a few very short years, around the turn of the century, there was a sizeable influx of migrants, precipitating rapid social and cultural transformation. The demographic convulsions meant that stable, settled Barking and Dagenham suddenly found itself in the eye of the storm of the debate over mass immigration.

The indigenous population cried out for respite. The letters page of the local paper was filled with correspondents begging to be heard. But nobody in power took a blind bit of notice, other than to patronise them with trite arguments about improved GDP and cultural enrichment.

Rather than rally to their support, the Left – including, shamefully, the Labour party and trade unions – treated these marginalised working-class folk like an embarrassing elderly relative, imploring them to “stop blaming migrants” (something they hadn’t done in the first place). What was genuine bewilderment and disorientation on the part of local citizens was, inexcusably, dismissed as casual racism and bigotry. Yet it wasn’t their sense of race that had been violated by the sudden upheaval in their community; it was their sense of order.

So, in 2006, locals took the only route of protest they thought left available to them and returned 12 British National Party (BNP) councillors at the local elections. The noxious far-right, which previously had never gained a foothold in the borough (though had penetrated areas close by) now formed the official opposition on Barking and Dagenham council, not because thousands of locals had overnight turned into vile racists, but because they had repeatedly been ignored by a tin-eared establishment.

But even then, nothing changed. Locals were told to get with the zeitgeist. Women in their eighties who had lived in the borough for most of their lives, had raised their families there, and in many cases now lived a life of lonely isolation, were told to embrace the vibrancy of the new multiculturalism. That was the level of condescension to which the liberal establishment had sunk.

So thousands of people simply upped sticks and left. In the first decade of the new century, Barking and Dagenham experienced a vast exodus of families who had been rooted in its streets, workplaces and local institutions for generations. It was the only home that many had ever known, but they went all the same. They departed for the Essex coast or Kent. It wasn’t ‘white flight’, for skin colour was irrelevant to most of them. It was, instead, a flight to familiarity.

The tragedy was that most of these people never were – still aren’t – anti-immigration. Being fundamentally decent and fair-minded citizens, they would not have objected to the integration of a modest and manageable number of arrivals over a reasonable period of time. But the whole debate around immigration has been toxified by what the ruling elites imposed on places such as Barking and Dagenham. They shook a kaleidoscope and then stood back in surprise when the pieces didn’t fall exactly where they wanted.

Remember all this the next time you hear someone speak of London as the greatest city in the world. Chances are the words are being spoken by a politician or a celebrity or a middle-class liberal from one of the trendier parts of town.

For there are, in reality, two Londons out there. One half of it – alienated, neglected and resentful – represents a potentially formidable army at the ballot box. Who will speak for it?

More on London

Gen Z’s favorite rabbi

By Charlotte Pickles

But if you try to have a conversation about the Conservative’s digital strategy today, you hear something different: “Are we on the record?” Which proves the old adage that while success has many fathers, failure is always an orphan.

In three years, the Conservatives have shifted from having a world-leading digital operation to being hopelessly outgunned – on the internet at least – by a reinvigorated Labour party, boosted by Momentum.

The only occasion a Conservative MP really broke through on Twitter this year was when the party’s deputy chair tweeted an apology to Jeremy Corbyn, which at Labour’s insistence included the phrase “please retweet”.

On the 19th of February I made a defamatory statement about @jeremycorbyn. I have apologised to Mr Corbyn and here is the complete text of my apology. Please retweet. pic.twitter.com/6JZc8O9E82

— Cllr Ben Bradley MP (@BBradley_Mans) February 24, 2018

The message was shared more than 55,000 times – more than twice the total number of retweets Theresa May’s account had achieved by that point in 2018.

Losing on social media hurts the Conservatives in two ways: first, it means fewer people see their messages on those platforms, but second it also has a huge effect on what news people see.  Almost all of the top 25 most-shared political stories during election 2017 were pro-Labour, often highly partisan articles from niche blogs with a virulently anti-Conservative stance; the widespread sharing legitimises the message.

Tory party insiders will, albeit off-the-record, blame their digital decline on a perfect storm of online factors, party funding and strategy, and online demographics. But there are real-world elements at play too.

The online factors are pretty straightforward: the Conservatives had a winning digital war room in 2015. But after the election this was largely disbanded, given the expectation that there would be no further elections for five years, and the need to save money after an expensive election. Some of that team did return for the 2017 election, but the momentum had been lost and the world had moved on. The party outspent Labour on Facebook by a factor of more than ten to one in 2015, but in 2017 Labour had caught up and the ratio dropped to three to one.

The backdrop to the spending has changed, too, especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: reporting from February 2015 notes the Conservative Party “spent over £71,000 on the purchase of ‘email collection’ and almost £36,000 on Facebook ‘likes’” – both practices that, in 2018, might be seen as ethically questionable. This serves to highlight another headache as the Conservatives rebuild online. Because the rules of the game have changed, they can only take part of their steer from 2015’s successes – they can’t simply recreate what they did last time.

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How the Left conquered social media

By Helen Lewis

The party’s online efforts also took a knock when Theresa May became party leader, because the feeling was online was “a David Cameron thing”, something which could be left behind, at least to an extent, in favour of door knocking and more down-to-earth politics.

These factors are all significant, but they’re dwarfed by the far bigger problem of a Labour party which is resurgent with young voters. Labour leads Conservatives among young voters by 25 to 30 points in most polls, and younger adults are far more likely to be on social media. The Conservative party simply faces a demographic struggle online: around one in three Twitter users is under 30, while only 5% are over-65. The internet is often hostile territory for a British Conservative.

This becomes all the trickier when you consider also the membership base of the two parties: while the Conservatives claim around 124,000 members (mainly older adults), Labour has four times as many, and these are often relatively new, active, young members eager to share large quantities of content online: perfect early boosters for the party’s messages.

The massive disconnect between party and online voters was perfectly captured at last year’s party conference – the nadir of the Conservatives’ online fortunes – when the official Instagram account pushed out promoted posts of cabinet ministers backstage, in unposed photos in beige rooms. These were met with widespread derision, as Labour posted slick, posed Insta shots of young activists holding banners with the party’s messaging.

It couldn’t get much worse for the Tories. So credit to them for actually managing to improve since then, boosting its digital team and making more use of Theresa May and other social media accounts. But its main online difficulty isn’t really the fault of May or anyone else within the party: the problem is that the Conservatives are in government.

It’s easy for Labour to run campaigning messages that will go viral: it is in opposition and doesn’t need to get into specifics. It can promise to scrap tuition fees, or nationalise rail, or any one of its wide range of retail politics offers, many of which are targeted towards the young.

By contrast, the Conservatives are left with the prose of government. “It’s not as easy to sell ‘We balanced the national account books’,” said one party insider. “And ‘yes, but Jeremy Corbyn’ hasn’t worked as well as it should have. We’re getting the messaging right on the facts, but it’s hard to hit the emotions in government.”

Looked at this way, the Conservatives don’t have a digital problem so much as a policy problem: while it’s always hard to go viral when you’re in government and the country’s screw-ups are your fault, it’s particularly hard when you have nothing much as part of your offer.

So confident was the party of victory in 2017, that it bypassed usual political considerations, such as a few simple and popular policies that would be easy to sell on the doorstep, choosing instead to offer complex measures which proved unpopular (such as its social care proposals) or wonkish offers unlikely to swing votes  (like workers on boards).

Ever since that catastrophe, the Government has been almost entirely consumed by Brexit, with barely another policy on the table. Labour, meanwhile, offers free bus travel to under-25s, more health spending, an end to austerity, no more tuition fees, and more. A compromise not-too-hard, not-too-soft Brexit and fiscal responsibility will never match that in the world of social media. If the Conservatives want their messages to be better heard online, they have a simple question to tackle first: what is their message?

More on social media

Can journalism survive the onslaught of social media?

By Emily Bell

After a similarly surprising result in 2015, many a commentator lamented that they had given too much attention to polls and not enough to people. As a pollster, that grated, since talking to people is the very definition of what polling is. For all the bells and whistles we dress it up in, at its heart an opinion poll is just asking 1,000 or so people, among a representative sample, how they will vote.

In an ideal world, then, an opinion poll is a guard against groupthink – a way of checking your assumptions against actual data. The problem was that after the polling failure of 2015, journalists and politicians viewed such data with scepticism (and given many of the polls turned out to be wrong, they were quite right to do so).

It’s a reasonable response, no one wants to make the same mistake twice, but it meant that in 2017, opinion polling couldn’t act as a corrective. Where once upon a time, an unusual polling result might have made people second guess their existing predictions, now it was easy to dismiss as the “polls being wrong again”.

This tendency was also visible in the Brexit referendum. You will often hear that the polls were wrong, and indeed many of them were, but not all of them. Crucially, the commentariat paid far more attention to those polls they thought were correct (showing big Remain leads) to those they thought were wrong (showing a tight race). A form of groupthink blinded them to the fact that almost half of the polls during the campaign actually put Leave ahead.

In 2017, pollsters adopted various different methods to try to correct the errors of 2015. Inevitably, not all these worked, and the majority of polling companies ended up overstating the Conservative lead, in some cases by a long way.

However, some polls got it right – most notably the YouGov MRP model and Survation’s poll – but since they were seen as outliers, they were not believed. When YouGov first published the MRP model it was actively mocked: the Conservative party’s strategist Jim Messina tweeted that he had “Spent the day laughing at yet another stupid poll from YouGov”. And people scoffed at the absurdity of Labour winning Kensington or Canterbury. In the event, of course, these turned out to be correct.

Suggested reading

Theresa May's tin ear

By Henry Olsen

It is easy to be wise with the benefit of hindsight. But back in April 2016 it was clear why commentators doubted those polls that showed a tight race. After all, whenever polls had got it wrong in the past they had overstated Labour support, not understated it. Even we pollsters were full of doubt. While we do everything we can to check methodological changes, there is no way of running a “test election”. The only way pollsters can really tell if a methodological innovation works or not is to try it – live.

Saying the 2017 election campaign was a shock result, however, isn’t simply commentators making excuses. It was a genuinely unusual election that overturned much of our past understanding of elections. Normally there is relatively little change in support during campaigns. Yet in 2017, Labour turned around their position and significantly increased their support.

Normally the specific policies that are announced in general election campaigns make little difference – they have been largely pre-announced and carefully prepared, and are either already priced into public support, or cancel each other out. The manifestos in 2017 had policies that people hadn’t seen yet and, in the case of the Conservative manifesto, were unpopular enough to have a genuine impact.

The 2017 election was another reminder that polls can sometimes be wrong. But also a reminder that we need to be cautious not to discard them entirely. Even those polls that got the scale of the Tory lead wrong were providing useful information – Labour increasing their support, Theresa May’s popularity falling, perceptions of Jeremy Corbyn improving. The levels may have been off, but the direction of travel was unquestionably correct.

Take away polling and you’re not left with other, superior methods of measuring public opinion; you are left with guesswork, instinct and your own biases. So yes, be sceptical of polls, but don’t fall into the trap of only being sceptical of the polls that challenge your existing beliefs, while assuming those that agree with your pre-conceptions must be correct.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

At least, that’s what we’re invited to believe. But the truth is that this depiction of our capital city is not one recognised by millions of its citizens. And that’s because London is, in fact, a tale of two cities.

There are the gentrified hotbeds of liberal cosmopolitanism – the Islingtons and Camdens – top heavy with the professional classes and cultural elites, the type of areas that were a bedrock of Remain support in the EU referendum.

But, then, there are those places outside the bubble. On the one hand, the grittier, traditional working-class areas – the Canning Towns and Bermondseys – populated by those steamrollered by globalisation, for whom austerity and mass immigration have exacerbated the problems of low wages, poor housing and under-pressure public services. On the other, the middle-class suburbs – the Upminsters and Eastcotes – inhabited by those who sense that their small ‘c’ conservativism is increasingly incongruous with the image of their city as a beacon of progressive modernity.

It is between these places that a new and unintended coalition has emerged, born out of resentment at having to watch their old-fashioned, socially conservative – what some describe as ‘faith, family and flag’ – views shunned and disparaged by the liberal elite. You can see something similar writ large across England: an accidental alliance between once-loyal Labour voters in the post-industrial towns and Conservatives in the shires. It’s an alliance which manifested itself most starkly in the Brexit vote.

For the Londoners that fall within these groups, their city is not the harmonious and cohesive ideal seen through the eyes of the chattering classes. It is, instead, a place that is increasingly atomised, where millions feel a diminishing sense of belonging and in which entire communities living within a few hundred yards of each other live utterly parallel lives.

The Year Nothing Changed

Theresa May's tin ear

By Henry Olsen

Take, for example, the borough in which I grew up, Barking and Dagenham. As working-class as it gets, it was once the very exemplar of a traditional Labour heartland. Never affluent, but stable, close-knit and settled. Centred around a sprawling 1930s council estate and with generally healthy levels of employment – the dominant Ford factory being at the heart of local industry – Barking and Dagenham enjoyed its steady constancy, its social and cultural homogeneity. For those short on money and opportunity, the concepts of place, belonging, identity and relationships take on so much more meaning.

More by Paul Embery

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

But then things changed. Over a few very short years, around the turn of the century, there was a sizeable influx of migrants, precipitating rapid social and cultural transformation. The demographic convulsions meant that stable, settled Barking and Dagenham suddenly found itself in the eye of the storm of the debate over mass immigration.

The indigenous population cried out for respite. The letters page of the local paper was filled with correspondents begging to be heard. But nobody in power took a blind bit of notice, other than to patronise them with trite arguments about improved GDP and cultural enrichment.

Rather than rally to their support, the Left – including, shamefully, the Labour party and trade unions – treated these marginalised working-class folk like an embarrassing elderly relative, imploring them to “stop blaming migrants” (something they hadn’t done in the first place). What was genuine bewilderment and disorientation on the part of local citizens was, inexcusably, dismissed as casual racism and bigotry. Yet it wasn’t their sense of race that had been violated by the sudden upheaval in their community; it was their sense of order.

So, in 2006, locals took the only route of protest they thought left available to them and returned 12 British National Party (BNP) councillors at the local elections. The noxious far-right, which previously had never gained a foothold in the borough (though had penetrated areas close by) now formed the official opposition on Barking and Dagenham council, not because thousands of locals had overnight turned into vile racists, but because they had repeatedly been ignored by a tin-eared establishment.

But even then, nothing changed. Locals were told to get with the zeitgeist. Women in their eighties who had lived in the borough for most of their lives, had raised their families there, and in many cases now lived a life of lonely isolation, were told to embrace the vibrancy of the new multiculturalism. That was the level of condescension to which the liberal establishment had sunk.

So thousands of people simply upped sticks and left. In the first decade of the new century, Barking and Dagenham experienced a vast exodus of families who had been rooted in its streets, workplaces and local institutions for generations. It was the only home that many had ever known, but they went all the same. They departed for the Essex coast or Kent. It wasn’t ‘white flight’, for skin colour was irrelevant to most of them. It was, instead, a flight to familiarity.

The tragedy was that most of these people never were – still aren’t – anti-immigration. Being fundamentally decent and fair-minded citizens, they would not have objected to the integration of a modest and manageable number of arrivals over a reasonable period of time. But the whole debate around immigration has been toxified by what the ruling elites imposed on places such as Barking and Dagenham. They shook a kaleidoscope and then stood back in surprise when the pieces didn’t fall exactly where they wanted.

Remember all this the next time you hear someone speak of London as the greatest city in the world. Chances are the words are being spoken by a politician or a celebrity or a middle-class liberal from one of the trendier parts of town.

For there are, in reality, two Londons out there. One half of it – alienated, neglected and resentful – represents a potentially formidable army at the ballot box. Who will speak for it?

More on London

Gen Z’s favorite rabbi

By Charlotte Pickles

The trouble with Theresa is that she failed – and fails still – to understand what voters want or care deeply about. She could have campaigned as a change agent, someone who would – through Brexit and all those reforms to capitalism put forward in her first conference speech as leader – make Britain work for all. But instead, she fixated on Brexit, making the election a de facto second bite at the referendum apple.

May’s tin ear cost her the majority. In 17 of the 33 seats the Tories lost in the election, Remain had won. In another eight, Leave won by only a narrow margin, with less than 55% of the vote. But her inability to grasp that Brexit was a call for change, not simply an opinion on the European Union, meant she failed to gain enough support in hard-pressed working-class regions to make up for these losses.[1.  Estimated Brexit referendum results for each parliamentary constituency can be found here. The list of seats lost and gained by each party in the 2017 general election can be found here.]

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Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

Conservatives picked up only six seats from Labour in England and Wales. Leave won each of these seats handily with between 59% and 71% of the vote. The Tories fell short in ten other seats that also heavily backed Leave, and failed to make sufficient gains in other Leave super-majority seats to even come close.

Contrast this with Ruth Davidson. She, too, had to adapt to the passions that a referendum had wrought – albeit a referendum of a different stripe. But she correctly saw that the Tories could strip votes away from the pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party by painting her party as a responsible, eminently Scottish, pro-Union party. Her success meant that the election results in Scotland did not reflect the Brexit vote, but instead turned almost completely on the 2014 independence referendum.

The independence referendum failed, and in 11 of the 12 seats Davidson’s Scottish Tories gained from the SNP, 55% or more of the electorate voted against independence. The SNP lost a further six seats to Labour or the Liberal Democrats in similar areas, and only narrowly beat the Tories in five other seats that voted heavily against independence.

Unsurprisingly, the SNP won 24 of the 28 seats where more than 45% of voters had supported independence, and they won most of the others where independence fared less well only because unionist votes were split between at least two other parties. The 2017 vote for representatives in Westminster was directly related to whether the voter thought anyone should be going there in the first place.

The Prime Minister has struggled in the year since the country last went to the polls. Her party remains split between a majority that wants to leave the EU and a vocal and sizeable minority that wants to remain. The logical thing in such circumstances is to find a middle ground, something neither prefers but both will accept under the circumstances. She has failed to find this. Or even to feign that she is looking for it. And so the continued intra-party war over Brexit continues unabated.

May’s task, though, has been hampered by the Conservative’s long history as a class-based party. For generations they were the party of the best-educated and wealthiest. As late as 1992, the Tories received over half the vote of these ABC1 voters.[4.  Data from the polling company Ipsos-MORI on UK general election voting patterns between 1974.]

But Tony Blair’s New Labour put an end to that and the Conservative share of the upper-class vote dropped in 1997 to only 39%. Nor has it returned in subsequent elections, even those fought by the self-described moderniser – and old Etonian – David Cameron.

In 2015, Cameron’s Tories only managed to win about 43% of these voters, gaining their majority only because of tactical voting in key marginal constituencies. Nonetheless, 25 years of failure has not stopped many Tory Remainers, like Lord Andrew Cooper, from arguing for a policy towards Brexit and the economy that is heavily titled towards the wealthy.

In fact, May’s Conservative Party is the only Tory Party since the Second World War to be evenly balanced in its support among the social classes. According to the polling firm Ipsos-MORI, her Tories received 47% of the upper-class AB vote and 44% of the middle-class C1 vote. They also received a record high 45% of the lower-middle class C2 vote – higher even than Margaret Thatcher achieved in her three landslide elections.

The Tories also received a record-high 38% of the working-class and poor DE vote. The trouble was, even these record high percentages weren’t enough to translate into seats because of the Tories’ historic weakness in those areas.

May needed to be more radical and comprehensive in her platform to drive support among the less-advantaged, while simultaneously attracting traditional upper-class voters with either a concession on Brexit or other reforms that met their priorities.

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Five ways Theresa May could have played things differently

By James Kirkup

Her difficulties in creating a modern version of One Nation Conservatism have left some party activists hungering for the woman who won, Ms Davidson. This is not to suggest that her success in Scotland is transferrable to the South. Scottish opinion polls suggest she continues to appeal to Scots who put their faith in her Tories last year, but she has yet to show that she can move beyond that appeal to other unionist voters.

Nor would it be easy for her to do so. Scotland voted Remain by a large margin: even most Conservative-held seats voted to stay in the EU. Taking on a national leadership role while Brexit remains an open wound would require Davidson to demonstrate significant support for Brexit, something that would likely imperil the Scottish Conservative Party upon whose new-found strength the Westminster party relies. Davidson wisely is refusing to drink from this poisoned chalice, knowing that any move to the South requires the passage of time and the entrenchment of Tory gains in the North.

May’s future, and perhaps the Conservative Party’s, rests not on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations but on what will happen next. Britain, like most other developed, Western nations, is undergoing a period of rapid, wrenching change. May and her party ought to lead that change, to make Britain’s marketplace one that works for all of its citizens. Failure to adopt this approach will likely leave voters looking for a man with a plan. And Jeremy Corbyn has been waiting for that moment all of his life.

Political analysis should make more use of the counterfactual. Asking “What If” isn’t just about intellectual entertainment, it allows the useful re-examination of political decisions and the consequences. The Government of Theresa May is ripe for that examination, as ministers are lost and local elections loom, because things really didn’t have to be this way.

The Prime Minister is doing her best to play a very bad hand of cards, but this is a hand she dealt herself. Perhaps if she’d done things differently over the past year, that hand would contain rather more aces today.

1. Brexit for all

The first lesson Mrs May should have drawn from the 2017 election is that there was no absolute electoral endorsement for the sort of Brexit she had proposed before the poll.  Having called the election to request a mandate for a Brexit that takes Britain out of the single market and customs union, she should have accepted that her failure to win a majority – and the relative success of a Labour Party whose Brexit stance was deliberately ambiguous – meant that the “will of the people” was unclear and possibly contradictory.

National leadership, therefore, lay in uniting moderate Remainers and moderate Leavers around a Brexit that did end our EU membership but retained membership of the Single Market. To do that, she could have made a “big, open offer” to Labour centrists: accept that Brexit must indeed happen, and in exchange you can take seats on Cabinet committees overseeing Brexit strategy, with the aim of an EFTA-style deal.

That would have meant clashes with some Tory Leavers, but the row would have been less violent than you might think; although people now choose to forget it, many of those Leavers did once support EFTA or something similar.

To be fair to Mrs May, her record over the past year suggests that she is fully aware of the need to compromise over Brexit, and willing to call the bluff of the Tory Leavers: she has successfully tiptoed over their “red lines” on the EU budget, transition and the ECJ, and may yet repeat the trick over the Customs Union. But politically, socially and economically, Britain would be happier if she’d been bolder about the need for compromise.

The Brexit Trilemma

The three-way relationship that brought about Brexit and Trump

By Peter Franklin

 2. Immigration reset

But wouldn’t EFTA mean free movement continued? Yes, although there is, and always was, more scope for national restrictions on the movement of EU nationals than is often recognised in the UK.

Politically, though, Mrs May could have seized the moment to start a new national conversation about immigration, seeking a new tone and a far more pragmatic approach that accepted the commercial, fiscal and social advantages that come from openness. Public opinion would have been favourable to an immigration reset: polls show public anxiety about immigration has been waning since the referendum in 2016.

Mrs May, having built a reputation as an immigration hardliner, had a big reserve of political capital and credibility to spend on such a reset: who could question her commitment to listening to voters unhappy about the issue? She was perfectly placed to make another big, open offer to embrace EU nationals and other migrants, welcoming them into a new, 21^st Century idea of Britishness.

And if she’d throttled back on her hostility earlier, she might have pre-empted the Windrush scandal, or at least taken the sting out of it. Today she’s being forced to move by public opinion, but she could have moved first, leading not following on immigration.

The immigration dilemma

Immigration into Britain hasn't fallen much at all. It still endangers our security, culture and well-being

By Douglas Murray

 3. A real social mobility plan

But what about the concerns of working-class voters, who tend to be more worried about immigration than their wealthier neighbours? This is where Mrs May should have followed through on the “burning injustices” agenda she set out in Downing Street in 2016, with a real focus on social mobility.

Instead of leaving this issue to the Department for Education, which naturally focuses on schools, she should have taken personal charge of the social mobility strategy from No 10, driving action not just in the education system but on economic policy, transport and local government. She could have even addressed wider cultural issues, confronting systemic prejudice against white-working class kids and asking awkward questions about the quality of parenting different children receive.

She should also have been bolder on the education front, delivering the sweeping “parity review” of post-18 education funding her manifesto promised, in order to send a message that the people who don’t go to university matter as much as the people who do.   Revisiting the tax status of private schools – also signalled in that manifesto – would have been symbolically important too. And instead of driving Alan Milburn of the Social Mobility Commission to resign in despair at inaction, Mrs May should have offered him a crossbench peerage and an office in Downing Street to make it all happen.

Where's the social mobility plan?

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

4. A stakeholder economy

If a real social mobility strategy could have helped poor kids do better in the education system and the labour market, a real industrial strategy would have done more to ensure there were more good jobs for them to compete for, especially in the places where they grow up and might want to remain as adults. Social mobility shouldn’t have to mean geographical mobility and Mrs May could have done more to deliver an industrial strategy which would encourage business to develop outside London and the South East.

Part of that encouragement could have been delivered via meaningful reform on corporate governance, ensuring that executives had a strong legal duty to consider stakeholder interests including regional development when running their firms. Slaying the dragon of “shareholder value above all” would have allowed the corporate cash currently earmarked for dividends and buybacks to be used investing in productive capacity and higher-wage jobs around the UK. And new rules on ownership could have given the people doing those jobs a better chance to own a stake in the company they work for.

Buyback greed

Corporate buyback culture is financial engineering not value creation

By Charlotte Pickles

 5. Borrow and build

Having embarked on a real rebalancing of the UK economy, Mrs May could have backed up that agenda with real public spending on infrastructure, including a substantial programme of public housebuilding. That would have required explicitly changing the Government’s fiscal targets, committing to run a primary surplus not an absolute one.

This is hardly revolutionary stuff: Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, is among those said to have advocated this change in the last year; it is also supported by forward-thinking Tories such as Nick Boles. It would have required Mrs May to call the gilt markets’ bluff, but her reward would have been the scope to spend billions more building a new, fairer economy that would, in time, have delivered higher wages and a more sustainable distribution of wealth.

Further reading

Home Truths – Part III: The nine drivers of a broken market

By Liam Halligan