This process is known as the “Great Realignment”, something best summarised by Stephen Davies of the capitalist running dog think-tank the Cato Institute.

The old political axis was defined by the main aligning issue of government intervention and “egalitarian spending”, but today it’s about identity: diversity v solidarity, global v local, remain v leave.

The realignment began in the 1990s but, as it gained momentum, moved towards a more decisive shift in 2016 when large numbers of socially conservative Labour voters backed a Tory-led initiative to leave the European Union, with numerous small-l liberal Conservatives going the other way. At the following year’s general election huge numbers of voters swapped parties, with the Tories winning Mansfield and losing Kensington – the UK’s richest constituency.

In this, as with so many trends, we’re following the US; so in Fairfield County, Connecticut, hedge fund capital of the world, Hillary beat Trump by 20 points, in Aspen she won by 45 points, and in ultra-exclusive Marin County in northern California by 50 points.

Among people listed on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Hilary raised 20 times more than Trump, employees at private investment funds donated $47.6m to Hillary and $19,000 to the Donald, while those who work for Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated by a margin of 60-to-1.

These facts are all cited in Tucker Carlson’s 2018 book Ship of Fools, which I’ve been reading recently. Tucker is a bellwether of conservatism: more nationalistic and less overtly religious but notably hostile to big business in a way that would have been unthinkable for a mainstream conservative a generation back. He recently called big business a bigger threat to freedom than government and, with the whole woke capital phenomenon, I think he has a point.

He’s especially scornful of Amazon, Uber and Facebook, and the liberal journalists who write headlines like “The Peculiar Genius of Jezz Bezos” — all because these companies are all seen as progressive or at least anti-conservative. That’s because most big businesses these days are anti-conservative.

Watching the recent Margaret Thatcher documentary, which showed footage of the 1970s, with liberal economists in London set against working-class white men in sideburns fighting for higher wages, I wondered which of these two groups would now be considered on the Right. Hard to tell.

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Ed West’s book Tory Boy is published by Constable

edwest

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