Beginning to See the Light: Out of touch, out of time, and out of power

 

‘Once I was so sure,

Now the doubt inside my mind,

Comes and goes but leads nowhere..’

 
After Johnson’s landslide electoral victory in 2019, I followed it with an article entitled ‘Why did Turkeys Vote for Christmas?’ – writes Philip Gilbert
 
In this I wrote, ‘Victory was achieved by a Tory party new in all but name.’ It has far more in common with Populism, and would be unrecognisable to traditional Tory’s, myself included.

To combat this, many Labour supporters felt the party should have been quicker to move to the centre, whilst others pushed for more traditional left-wing policies. Both camps misunderstand that the UK electorate can no longer be viewed on the traditional left-right spectrum.

Dominic Cummings realised there are two separate inputs, economic policy (welfare, income inequality, nationalisation, etc.), and social matters (immigration, crime, etc.), which he exploited in his EU referendum campaign, looking left on economics (£350m per week for the NHS), and right on social issues (immigration).

This blend of economic liberalism and social conservatism has continued under Johnson. State support during the pandemic and policies such as levelling-up have taken Labour’s traditional place on the left, whilst Johnson has been able to expand his base of culturally conservative voters through his promotion of the ‘culture war’.

Promising to save statues, allied to the ‘kill the bill’ protests have played into the Tories hands and emphasised the cultural divide.

Timewise, being able to send gunboats to ‘defend’ Jersey was a polling day gift from the gods.

Labour has failed to understand that the UK is undergoing one of the most dramatic electoral reconfigurations of our lifetimes. They are fighting yesterday’s Tory party with yesterday’s policies, targeting yesterday’s voters. Until this changes we will live in a democratic dictatorship, effectively a one-party state.
 

being able to send gunboats to ‘defend’ Jersey was a polling day gift from the gods

 
As Leader of the Opposition, Starmer has only defined what he isn’t, rather than what he is. He should be looking to Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester and Paul Dennett in Salford, who champion the people on their side of a dividing line.

Starmer has been long on criticising the government (there is much to criticise), but rarely does he offer alternatives. To date, their big initiative was gathering round the Union Jack, which, as Hartlepool turned Tory for the first time in 57-years, became a symbol of the party’s identity crisis.

Labour head office was ‘obsessed with us getting a flag’, said one organiser, ‘There was no fleshing out what the flag means, or what policies have changed because we’re now patriotic. It was just: bung a flag up.’

Others felt that the party had a ‘misplaced confidence’, their candidate was appointed by the national executive committee without contest and the by-election date was set for the same day as the mayoral and council elections. This last point saw them pitched up against the popular Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen. The date ‘never crossed their minds – they thought they were gonna win’, said one activist of Starmer’s team.

Many, including myself, haven’t taken Johnson seriously enough. As a PM he is abysmal but, as an electioneering party leader, he is unrivalled, allowing him to remould Conservatism and the party in a way not seen since Margaret Thatcher.
 

As a PM he is abysmal but, as an electioneering party leader, he is unrivalled

 
His supporters have accepted his failings so long as he represents their values. They share the common vision of a Britain that is anti-immigration and nationalistic, protecting economic interests through continuing house price inflation, whilst being openly hostile to those who need taxpayer-funded help. As I wrote last week, the disconnect between house prices and wages has led to voters feeling the need to preserve whatever capital they have.

Many of the beneficiaries of house price inflation live in properties that, whilst ‘ordinary’ are beyond the dreams of millennials across much of the south-east. There are still parts of the UK where a house can be bought for less than £130,000, the price of the average deposit for first-time buyers now in London.

Areas like this, such as the ‘red wall’ constituencies, that Brexit allowed the Tories to reach-out to. They have high levels of home ownership; wages might be low, but property is still cheap enough to be affordable. Ultimately, these areas weren’t as broken as many outsiders thought.

‘When the pollster James Kanagasooriam drew up his original list of what have become known as ‘red wall’ seats, he did it by identifying places full of people who, had they lived in a southern market town, would be natural Tories: homeowners, small-business owners, habitual Daily Mail and Daily Express readers. If a 55-year-old plumber in a detached house in Bournemouth usually votes Conservative, he reasoned, why not the same guy in Wigan, who probably wants much the same things underneath? If the party could somehow override the gut hostility in traditionally Labour communities to the very idea of voting Tory, it might unlock votes in surprising places.’

This research looked at what voters in different parts of the country have in common, rather than what divides them. As a result, ‘red wall’ voters were seen as people who could be persuaded to vote for their traditional enemy if that party could find a way through to them.

Via Brexit, the way through to them was home ownership which in Hartlepool is over 50%. Voters who own property have something to conserve and therefore align themselves with the Tories, it’s Thatcher’s enduring gift to the party.
 

Voters who own property have something to conserve and therefore align themselves with the Tories

 
Many of these ‘red wall seats’ are experiencing a generational shift leaving them with an older population.

In Hartlepool, the number of 16- to 24-year-olds in work dropped by 25% between 1981 and 2011 as young people left to find work in the cities, while the number of retirees jumped by 27%. In addition, a housebuilding boom has created a new demographic of young, comfortably off, car-owning white-collar workers who, aided by ‘help to buy’, own their own new-builds and, by and large, are more likely to vote Conservative.

These smart new estates are different from the town’s more deprived areas, which include some of the poorest in the country. One shadow minister who was canvassing the area said: ‘It was quite depressing going around because you could tell it hadn’t been looked after. It felt like the people whose doors we were knocking had just been forgotten about for 20 to 30 years and understandably were not well disposed to the Labour party because of that.’

Economically people such as the Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen, and Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor are offering an economic recovery from Covid. It might be nothing new, a home, a job, hope for the future, but these are what voters have always wanted, and what Labour used to offer. The smokescreen of the culture wars makes this look like new politics, all that is different is that it’s happening in different places.

Ben Houchen, the 34-year-old northern loyalist, is supported by 73% of Teesside voters, and represents a reinvented Conservative party attempting to deliver on its promise of levelling-up.

Houchen is a person who gets things done, one not bound by dogma. He embraced nationalisation to keep and expand Teesside International Airport, then switched to deregulation to support a free port for Teesside. There is a typical Tory opaqueness to finances, but if it means jobs and inward investment for his area he’s there.
 

Houchen is a person who gets things done, one not bound by dogma

 
He champions green policies such as the Net Zero Industry Innovation Centre, attracting the establishment of the National Hydrogen Transport Centre in partnership with Teesside University with the aim of making Teesside the UK’s hydrogen manufacturing hub. Then there are wind farms, creating the Teesworks Offshore Manufacturing Centre, in which GE Renewable Energy has just announced it will create a plant to build state-of-the-art wind turbine blades.

Teesside is becoming ‘a self-reinforcing virtuous circle of complementary industries in a public-private partnership, supported by the local university and FE colleges.’

In return, he has been supported by Johnson, who insisted that his chancellor and business secretary abandoned yesteryear’s Thatcherism to make the funds available. Many were surprised when the Chancellor announced that 750 Treasury jobs were going to Darlington not Leeds. They missed the point. Darlington is part of Teesside and Houchen was being obliged.

Houchen is not a traditional Tory, and Teesside voters, watching him deliver both a vision for the future and jobs, aren’t likely to embrace a Labour candidate. He is their answer to Joe Biden, and he’s beating Labour at their own game!

By comparison Labour appears to have no clear vision of what they offer, indeed much of what was traditional Labour policy has been stolen by the ever-osmosing Tories. With their traditional voter base deserting them Labour cannot win.

The party cannot survive as a potential party of government by relying solely on young voters, city dwellers, those with a university degree, or ethnic minorities. Somehow the party needs to recapture the votes of the millions of others still broadly defined as working class. Studying Labour’s membership base highlight this; 77% of them in social category ABC1, concentrated heavily in London and the south. As one Labour MP says candidly: ‘There is a canyon between us and the working class.’

Brexit appears to be a greater defining point in British politics than was ever envisaged, breaking down the perceived barrier for traditional Labour voters, turning them into Tories. Labour was out-of-step with many of its core voters in 2016 and is continuing to misunderstand their wishes.
 

the growing culture gap between Labour and the people it once represented

 
Whilst Brexit was the symptom, the cause was the growing culture gap between Labour and the people it once represented. Labour is now seen by those voters are representing ‘remain values’ (urban and ‘woke’) while the Tories represent supposedly leave values (traditional and patriotic).

There are more leave-minded seats than remain ones. The Conservatives own the ‘leave, whereas ‘remain’ is fought over by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens and the nationalist parties.

To reverse this, Labour needs to avoid walking into the culture-war traps Johnson and his allies’ favour and focus on winning back trust on the economic issues that are clearer unifiers for its potential voter coalition. At the moment there is a void where Labour’s vision should be.

As this column has written before a clue to that vision lies across the Atlantic, where Joe Biden has bridged the divide between the young, urban left and the traditional Democratic base by focusing on work. Biden casts every measure, including on the climate crisis, in terms of creating millions of well-paid, unionised jobs, a message both kinds of Democrat can support get behind.

Johnson is a tougher, nimbler opponent that the neo-fascist Trump was, governing ‘as a social democrat in a blue rosette, willing to tax and spend big’. However, as the Labour MP Jon Cruddas says, if his party were to adopt Bidenomics on jobs, ‘the Tories would never be able to go there’. He believes that their Thatcherite creed would hold them back.

To fund his $6tn (£4.2tn) proposals for post-Covid recovery, infrastructure, and welfare spending, Biden has recognised that taxation must change to pay for this transformation. For example, the super-rich; the share of private wealth held by the top 0.1% in the US tripled from 7% in the late 1970s to about 20% in 2019. Biden is proposing that capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income.

Whilst there have been rumours of Johnson proposing something similar, as recent weeks have shown, events such as the access enjoyed by Brexit-supporting billionaire James Dyson, and the planning permission row surrounding Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, Johnson continues to favour ‘plutocratic populism’.
 

The question is, does Johnson have the courage to implement what Biden is taking on?

 
Whilst Johnson is happy to spend is support of local Tories initiatives which are delivering real investments to previously neglected parts of the country, at some point, the bills have to be paid. The cost of continuing ‘levelling up’, added to the huge expenditure caused by C-19, plus future bills for the NHS, and all the other good things just promised in the Queen’s speech mean that more tax revenues are required. The question is, does Johnson have the courage to implement what Biden is taking on?

Current Tory policies and intention are pregnant with contradictions, preaching both balanced budgets and massive public spending. What is happening on Teesside is based around buildings and burning red tape, state-led investment and deregulation, public investment rather than public services.

As someone wrote ‘Keynesianism without the welfare state’, or ‘capitalism with Brexit characteristics.’
 

‘They say, ‘Things are done for the majority’

Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear

It’s like what my painter friend Donald said to me

‘Stick a fork in their ass and turn ’em over, they’re done’

 
A reflective piece from Philip this week as the ripples from last week’s Hartlepool reach all corners of the union, and he contemplates the challenge Labour faces in trying to rebuild as a credible opposition to Boris’ populist juggernaut; it remains to be seen if he will extend to offering his sage opinions to Messrs. Gammon, Fox and Binface in subsequent columns.

Philip highlights the Tories ability to change, and to recognise opportunity; that red-wall voters have become ‘natural’ conservatives speaks volumes of Cummings’ and Johnson’s project to fuse economic liberalism and social conservatism, and the way in which Nigel Farage connected with those feeling disadvantaged and left-behind created the perfect storm for an opposition struggling to create its own identity.

The role of property is once again to the fore; the contrast between young, white-collar home owners in smart new-builds and those neglected by Labour in Teeside’s neglected terraces could barely be more stark.

The challenge facing Sir Keir is that whilst the Labour party may be en vogue with a young metropolitan elite, they may not be sufficiently numerous to carry the day; somehow the party needs to reconnect with its traditional voters, and draping union flags around may not cut the mustard.

If Ben Houchen is proving a breath of fresh air for a party that is proving remarkably adept at reading and responding to the mood of the moment, Andy Burnham seems to being touted as a potential future saviour.

Sir Keir has struggled, finding himself broadly in support of much of Mr Johnson’s work to combat the pandemic, and finding himself left to applaud from the touchline as the vaccination good news just kept on coming.

It has been interesting to speculate as to where Boris may encounter his log on the line; assuming he can see to find his way to HQ, Mr Cummings may heave a few bouncers in his direction and the Parliamentary Standards Committee may feel his collar, but you’d probably still have a shilling on his ability to emerge, triumphantly waving to the crowd. 

In which case, maybe the Labour party had better come up with some policies, and that opportunity may have arisen when Boris relegated the reform of social care to a few token words in the Queen’s speech.

Sir Andrew Dilnot who has advised successive Conservative administrations recommended that the cost of social care should be capped at £45,000; there have been various similar proposals with different caps, but all have been swerved to date, and Boris shows no sign of adopting it.

If the preservation of property has been one of the key factors in people voting blue, it would seem to be a sensible tactic for Labour to allay the fears of those facing care home costs that can reach £2,000 a week, that people will not need to sell up should they face that eventuality. Let’s see if they pick up that particular baton.

Mind you, Boris is so chameleonic that he’ll probably say, ‘now don’t you worry dear, you can come and live with me; I’ve had the place buffed up a bit’. 

Two tracks, just for fun – ‘often dismissed as style over substance, how wrong they were’ Japan with ‘Ghosts’ and ‘from Lou Reed’ wonderful ‘New York’ album, which is wonderful social commentary’ Last Great American Whale’. Enjoy!
 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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