Uttering the name Boris Johnson alongside the epithet blue-collar would have been incongruous, to say the least until just a few months ago. As mayor of London 2008-16, Johnson positioned himself as a liberal Conservative who advocated an amnesty for illegal immigrants, touted his green credentials and attacked Trump after his controversial comments in 2015 about the Islamification of London. The Prime Minister, who attended Eton College before going on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, had earlier gained notoriety for insensitive and snobbish comments about the residents of Liverpool in 2004 that necessitated a public apology. Johnson’s slightly German appearance, without doubt, has its origins in his Bavarian ancestors of the von Pfeffel family some of whose members were ennobled in the nineteenth century. On the face of it, then, the former editor of the Spectator magazine would seem an improbable champion of Leave-voting Labour supporters outside the metropolitan bubble.

Realignment

The shift from the largely class-based politics of the twentieth century to a world marked by the new fault lines of patriotism vs. globalism and traditionalism vs. cosmopolitanism is, however, creating some strange bedfellows as doors open to politicians who can make this realignment work to their advantage. In December 2019 Johnson, following in the tracks of Donald Trump and others, proved particularly adept at superseding the old divisions of his country. A glance at the electoral map before and after 12 December makes this abundantly clear. What had become known as Labour’s red wall crumbled as Leave-voting seat after Leave-voting seat in the North, the Midlands and Wales fell to the Conservative Party.  The constituency of Wrexham in North East Wales, purely by way of example, had never delivered a Conservative member of parliament since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928, having been Liberal, Labour, Social Democrat and Labour. All in all the Conservatives gained 57 seats from Labour across the country.

Labour’s electoral base

In Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, political parties inevitably represent coalitions of views and sections of the electorate. To understand the outcome of the general election of 12 December 2019 it is necessary to understand the coalition that had been the Labour party before that date. At the risk of oversimplification: in the one corner stood the socially conservative patriotic white working class that are left-wing to the extent they support Britain’s free at point of delivery national health service, the welfare state, workers’ rights and, with varying degrees of intensity, the trade union movement; in the opposite corner stood middle-class progressives in the metropolitan areas, woke graduates, champagne socialists, ethnic minorities and Muslims. Ultimately, the gulf between the two different parts of the coalition proved impossible to bridge, especially given the large metropolitan middle-class leadership of the Labour Party.

Snobbery and the metropolitan elite

The widening cultural gap between Labour’s metropolitan leadership and its base was nicely exemplified by an episode that occurred during the Rochester by-election of 2014. As Labour MP Emily Thornberry was campaigning on an estate in the Kent town she noticed a house draped in English flags with a white van parked outside. The MP for Islington South in London tweeted an image of the scene. Accused of snobbery and condescension she resigned from the Labour Shadow Cabinet later in the day. During the 2019 election, Thornberry was again at the centre of controversy when she allegedly called Leave voters in a pro-Brexit colleague’s constituency “stupid”. Thornberry denied the allegations and brought legal action against the Labour MP who made them. These episodes had echoes of the notorious incident in the 2010 election campaign when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called a Labour-supporting pensioner, who challenged him on the street about immigration in her home town of Rochdale, a “bigoted woman”. Brown was subsequently forced into a grovelling apology.

Somewheres and anywheres

Using the terminology of the British political scientist David Goodhart, the divisions within the Labour electoral base reflects the division of British society into the two camps of “Anywheres” and “Somewheres”. By “Anywheres” Goodhart means those individuals who are well-educated and value openness, fluidity and personal autonomy. They are mobile and have, or at least purport to have a cosmopolitan mindset. “Somewheres” on the other hand value rootedness, a sense of locality, familiarity, security and patriotism. Anywheres, according to Goodhart, are generally graduates and affluent people who make up around just a quarter of the population but this value block has in recent decades dominated political discourse through cultural hegemony in the education system, the civil service, the media and the arts. The two worlds collided in the Brexit debate.

One Nation Tory-ism

The chaos of the 2017-19 Remain dominated Parliament, the Labour Party’s shift towards support for a second referendum and the threat of the Brexit Party produced a seismic shift in the December 2019 election. Indeed, the election itself was in some ways reminiscent of the 2016 Leave Campaign as the Conservatives focused relentlessly on Brexit and funding for the National Health Service. For the moment at least Boris Johnson seems to have brought about a new settlement in British politics, bringing together an electoral coalition between the working class of Labour’s old industrial heartland and the Tory voting shires. Further, Johnson’s “One Nation” rhetoric alludes to the Disraelian conservatism of the 1860s and 1870s that sought to unite the country around social reform, patriotism and opposition to soulless utilitarianism.

The outlines of Johnson’s One Nation Toryism or what his detractors label as populist nationalism, then, are taking shape: Brexit, greater funding for the NHS, a substantial increase to the minimum wage, increased public spending in the north, a clampdown on foreign criminals, an extension of police stop and search powers and symbolic acts such as reducing the UK presence at globalist glamour events like the Davos World Economic Forum. Such measures may not please some on the corporatist-globalist wing of the Conservative Party but the prospect of a very long period in government thanks to the new dispensation may assuage their concerns.

L'articolo Boris Johnson and Blue-Collar Conservatism proviene da InsideOver.

It’s the most important election for a generation. ‘Boris’ is ahead in all manner of polls but the result remains unequivocally unpredictable.

The 2017 snap election presented many Brexiteers with an opportunity to unseat the MPs attempting to sabotage the result of the EU referendum. Other voters may have called it a ‘Selexit’: a means of selecting the political party to deliver Brexit and by extension nominating the preferred version. Either way, voters participated in the last general election on the assumption that Brexit was going ahead. That certitude has been increasingly eroded with each rejected deal and each episode in Parliament.

The upcoming election is, at first glance, a coded second referendum. Remainers are being persuaded towards the Liberal Democrats who vow to cancel Brexit, whereas the Conservatives, who pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’, are going for the Eurosceptic vote. The newly created Brexit Party is deliberately not standing in Conservative strongholds to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote. Early speculations even envisaged the Brexit Party and Liberal Democrats as the two new major parties. But this general election is not simply an EU referendum in party political clothing. If it were, the result would be predictable and it is anything but.

In the time that the UK Parliament has vainly negotiated a Brexit deal, so many socio-economic issues disappeared from the frontlines of political discourse. These include poverty, inadequate housing, low wages, educational cuts and poor job security, especially zero hours’ contracts. The announcement of the December election caused these problems to step back into the limelight and they became highly weaponised in the Labour Party’s election manifesto that vows to address them.

While the other parties’ Brexit policy is their main vote winner, the promise to address ongoing austerity is central to Labour’s game plan with the Party promising to give the People ‘a final say on Brexit’. Reminding the electorate of the problems that have worsened while Brexit has dominated has worked in the Party’s favour, providing ‘its strongest lead over the Conservatives as the Party most concerned about people in real need in Britain (59% vs 34%)’. Thus, the return of forgotten austerity seems capable of securing a Labour victory and affecting the subsequent ‘Final Say’. We could see voters persuaded to forgo Brexit in favour of fixing the austerity long overshadowed by EU matters. Just that outcome seems plausible, further opinion polls contradict it.

The latest Ipsos MORI Political Monitor polls show Labour to have convinced voters of their compassion, but not their leadership competency. The party’s ‘being fit to govern’ rating is nine points lower than in 2017 and a staggering 75% of those asked described the Party as ‘divided’. The perceived schisms in Labour can only have been strengthened by its ‘Leave’ wing that actively opposes the Party’s official ‘Remain’ stance. And here is where the Conservatives’ selling points come in. Until now, the Tories were always more divided by the EU than Labour. Now the tables have turned and that ability to keep to a consensus and plan may well be what is attracting voters. 49% of those polled see Boris Johnson as ‘the leader who would make the most capable Prime Minister’ and Johnson has a 21% lead over Jeremy Corbyn for general likeability. More voters say the ‘Conservatives have a good team of leaders (37% [+10] vs 22% for Labour) and are fit to govern (46% vs. 29%).’ Concurrently, the polls predict traditional Labour strongholds of Bishop Auckland, Great Grimsby, Stoke-on-Trent North and Workington will elect the Conservative candidate. These are all places that voted to leave the EU.

That the traditional Socialist heartlands are now favouring Tory rule poses the question – why? Is it simply because voters there favour the Brexit that Boris promises or because the Tory Party seems simply more organised? Or does it bleed into the wider issue of delivering the will of the People? Many voters feel those with the power to uphold the referendum result have deliberately sabotaged it. That some Labour MPs have needed to be persuaded to respect the ‘Leave’ outcome has angered so many, as did the vetoing by the ‘Tory Rebels’. The Liberal Democrats have been ridiculed by some for keeping the word ‘democrat’ in their name while vowing to overrule the result of a democratic vote. Yet 18% cannot trust them to keep their promises in any event. Thus, are the Tories doing so well in the polls and winning in Labour heartlands because voters are adopting a ‘better the devil you know’ mentality, enhanced by the good organisation the Party espouses? Or is it because many British voters feel ignoring the vote to leave would be so undemocratic, any future votes would simply not be worth the ballot paper they are cast on?

Simply put, this election is chiefly so unpredictable because it is impossible to tell what people will prioritise: tackling austerity, party reliability, good leadership and organisation, delivering Brexit or the upholding of democracy, the definition of which is open for interpretation.

L'articolo UK ‘Elexit’: The Most Important and Unpredictable UK Election proviene da InsideOver.