It is a development that has been under way for some time: the traditional left/right political divide is no more. A poll this week shows how a supposedly right-wing PM now gets his support from blue-collar communities but is deeply unpopular with the well-educated: Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have emphatically won the “red wall” and lost the support of the intellectual elites.
There is clear evidence here that modern British blue-collar workers no longer care for the class war rhetoric which kept them voting Labour in decades past. It is interesting how this is happening while we are bombarded with data that points to ever increasing economic inequality (which Karl Marx would certainly have assumed could mobilise the workers of the world to unite), but while voters can of course still be bribed by the promise of government handouts, it seems that when people reach a certain standard of living which has largely been attained by the working class in the western world they simply become less susceptible to the rallying cries from economically egalitarian politicians.
Consequently, today, the political left’s voting constituency consists primarily of the young, people in intellectual and creative circles, the unemployed, and certain minority groups. They have very consciously focussed on those who can be made to feel downtrodden by virtue of race, religion, and sexuality because here, their traditional “oppressor vs oppressed” world view finds much more fertile ground than in the increasingly less polarised setting of an economic class struggle. It also mobilises not just the targeted minorities but, perhaps to an even larger extend, the liberal elites, who have found common cause in “woke” radical identity politics. Electorally, however, there is a problem: while this is a powerful and very vocal constituency, they are too few in numbers. Social justice warriors may dominate media, education, and the arts, but you don’t win elections by bending the knee to the socially liberal elites on the modern left. Consequently, identity politics is most rampant outside of the political sphere, in places like university campuses and on TV. However, Labour is in thrall to the woke left – and decolonisation of our cultural heritage and an affinity for critical race theory is anathema to working class communities up and down the country. The result is that it is the Conservatives who win elections in Britain: they have been in office for over a decade and look like they might well be there for another.
But who is actually in power? The welfare state has long since been adopted by all mainstream politicians as an untouchable feature of the modern state, but while Margaret Thatcher’s Tories spoke of small government and balanced budgets, and even David Cameron and George Osborne showed some reverence for economic conservatism, in Boris Johnson, despite his ostensible credentials as being on the Tory right, we have a big government Conservative in charge. His hand perhaps somewhat forced by the lockdown crisis, the government has abandoned all pretence of fiscal responsibility, and its flagship policies are the commitment to an eye-wateringly expensive zero carbon future and paternalistic initiatives to reduce the population’s consumption of food and drink deemed to be unhealthy. The Tories occasionally speak tough on things like immigration and the culture wars, but it is obvious that the government is very comfortable that they are firmly to the right of the opposition on these issues and thus see no need to risk going so far that they might be accused of bigotry or lack of empathy. The modern Tory wants a reputation for being cuddly, not cruel.
Perhaps the truth is that the progressive centre-left in the mould, but to the left, of Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to win an election for almost half a century) has won so emphatically that it is no longer that important who triumph in elections. When Labour fielded a traditional class warrior in Jeremy Corbyn, despite a host of popular (populist) economic policies, they lost badly, because Corbyn was too extreme on culture and foreign policy. They reacted by electing a more centrist leader in Kier Starmer, who has provided no opposition to the government’s lockdown tyranny and whose policies are largely indistinguishable from Boris Johnson’s – except for the culture wars, which is what will keep him out of Downing Street. Essentially, Labour can’t go right on culture because of their grass roots and the Tories can’t go right on economic policy without the risk of losing power. It provides for a strange equilibrium where we can look forward to decades of Conservative governments implementing big-government Labour policies with added eco obsession and a sprinkling of identity politics.