UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

[brucejoel99]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

[Pericles]

Another Covid error from the government that has been largely ignored-Boris overruled Gove to put London in tier 2 after lockdown The article suggests that London was treated more leniently than similar parts of the country due to economic concerns. Tier 3 probably couldn't have stopped the variant, but it might have mitigated the damage. So this could be another example of their relaxed attitude backfiring.

[Intell]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

?

[Silent Hunter]

They tend to favour strong prison sentences, for one thing.

[brucejoel99]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

?

Economically left-wing working-class voters with socially conservative instincts in the small towns of northern England, the Midlands, & Wales aren't exactly a new phenomena. It's just that BoJo's Tories presenting themselves as the stereotypical party of patriotic, tea-drinking, Brexit-supporting, football-lovers & Labour as the party of cosmopolitan students who've never left (let alone even spoken to somebody outside of) London put a newly-preeminent focus on them.

[Blair]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

I don't think this is true but it's very understandable how this is now seen as common knowledge. Tory MPs in these seats constantly claim the same thing- which is that 'my voters in [insert town]' have one universal view on all issues; the most recent debate on a deportation flight saw lots of Tory MPs standing up saying 'well my voters in [...] simply don't care about the government illegally deporting criminals'. There's a danger that both the media & the new Tory intake seem to be creating a myth around these seats & there voters.*

Labour for what it's worth still run campaigns that are focused on the same political issues; NHS funding, police funding, school cuts & the need for social housing- these were the four bullet points on our election leaflets & this was in a pro-remain London seat!

Local campaigns in the safe seats we lost in 2019 were focused on this even more; it was always an unfair criticism of Corbyn that his era of leadership was somehow only spent talking about issues that were seen as 'niche' (although this is not a new problem- Wilson thought that legalising homosexual acts would cost Labour 4 million votes!)

When we hear about the clash between Labours 'metropolitian' membership & its 'real heartland voters' it's worth remembering that this is a debate that the party has been having for decades. When the Leader of the party is trusted & the party/economy is doing well we don't hear about this being an issue because it's extremely possible for Labour to keep this coalition going if it is doing well- a rising tide & all that.

I mean the only issue where we can see Labour members actually changing the parties policy & costing us votes was with a pro-Kashmir motion that was passed by conference & which was used to spread a lot of anger into the British Hindu community.

This isn't at all to say that there aren't big problems for Labour in these seats; the party has on 3/4 of the last elections completely failed to win over voters in these sort of seats; I'd actually say that the issues that are often bought up was immigration & welfare/benefits- although Labour tried to run to the right on both ehse issues in 2015 and it completely failed.



*With the 'red wall' seats it's worth dividing them up into three groups 1.) Those which were historic marginals (Darlington) 2.) Those which have been losing chunks of their Labour majority for years & which are naturally hard for the party on paper (Mansfield) 3.) Those which have never given any hint as supporting the Tories (e.g Leigh)

[Silent Hunter]

See George Blake has died.

[The Dowager Mod]

Are the Tories really about to bring back the death penalty?

[brucejoel99]

Are the Tories really about to bring back the death penalty?

I honestly can't see it. Even among Tory MPs, it isn't that popular & Britain obviously isn't leaving the ECHR anytime soon either.

[Silent Hunter]

It would also severely damage UK-EU law enforcement cooperation.

[Alcibiades]

Between the abolition of the death penalty and some time in the 90s, there was an attempt in every Parliament to reintroduce the death penalty, all of which obviously failed.

Unfortunately withdrawal from the EU may embolden some Tories to try again, and it’s never been a secret that Priti Patel is a fan of executions, but I seriously doubt there exists anywhere near to a majority in either Parliament or the court of public opinion to pull it off (not to mention its current illegality under the ECHR, which is not linked to EU membership).

[The Dowager Mod]

I saw this so I wondered.
https://twitter.com/BameFor/status/1342495556732649478

[Blair]

I saw this so I wondered.
https://twitter.com/BameFor/status/1342495556732649478

FWIW I'd be dubious of this; re-introduction of capital punishment would be an issue for the Ministry of Justice not the Home Office and a 'policy paper' seems a strange way of phrasing it.

There's also a lot of much lower hanging fruit in the realms of law and order which they actually want to change & which they'd be required to work on in Parliament.

[Blair]

They also don't have a majority for this in the House of Lords (or in the commons, or even their own MPs)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

You might not be aware that you are doing it but you absolutely are. Fundamentally, anyone arguing that the differences between 'metropolitan' and 'non-metropolitan' Britain trump all other social cleavages does not understand the first thing about this country.

It is perhaps also a good idea to note that seats and votes are not the same thing. All reliable evidence points towards this fact: that what did the greatest damage to Labour in 2019 was not direct defections to the Tories,* but that a large chunk of its usual base vote decided not vote at all, and that a smaller section of it voted for a scattering of minor parties. I noticed this in my own family, which is very much one shaped by long-dead extractive industries and the subcultures those created: a remarkable number of people who always or usually vote Labour either did not or only did so extremely reluctantly. On top of this we add the strange impact of 2019 being an Issue Election and the simple fact that a lot of people who normally move their votes around were quite genuinely afraid of Corbyn. Which is where all this 'Red Wall' nonsense falls apart: you're actually dealing with a quite complex series of processes.

Whatever can be said of Labour in 2019 (and I would tend to diagnose the problem differently, even less sympathetically, but that all is all very much in the past now), Labour now is absolutely not focused on the concerns of its membership as opposed to those of the electorate. There has been, for instance, a heavy focus on the flawed and limited nature of the Treasury's covid support, that the self-employed have been treated shabbily, that people in the trades have borne a much heavier share of the load (in more ways than one) than is remotely fair.

'Social conservatism' also strikes me as something of a red herring - perhaps even, from certain commentators, as wishful thinking. I cannot say that I have ever noticed much demand from the people of West Bromwich or Blyth for the return of social stigma around births out of wedlock, I have never noticed people in Derbyshire or Durham gearing themselves up for a rearguard action against the normalisation of homosexuality. I'm not sure if defining 'finds the nostrums of the New New Left to be a bit bloody weird actually' as 'social conservative' is especially helpful, particularly as it would mean defining at least 90% of the country as being so. What is true is that most of postindustrial Britain was quite indeed quite 'socially conservative' back when there was no 'post' in front of the 'industrial' - a world of tight-knit, even clannish, extended families with Rules and social Order - but that society, that world, died many decades ago.

_{*What was damaging on that front was that though the number of Lab > Con switchers was low, there was almost no traffic at all in the opposite direction. Ordinarily there is an approximate balance between the two.}

[Silent Hunter]

They also don't have a majority for this in the House of Lords (or in the commons, or even their own MPs)

The opinion polls on this have support at around 55% for certain more heinous murders like children or police officers.

[CumbrianLefty]

They also don't have a majority for this in the House of Lords (or in the commons, or even their own MPs)

The opinion polls on this have support at around 55% for certain more heinous murders like children or police officers.

Which maybe isn't a guarantee of a win in any referendum. When the fact most judges, lawyers and even senior policemen are strongly opposed to its return would register far more strongly than now.

Anyway - and this really can't be emphasised enough - even most *Tory* MPs don't support it these days; and back when most did *and* they had a bigger majority than now, it was still well beaten in the summer of 1983 (widely seen as the last realistic chance to reverse abolition) Add to that the fact that it has *always* been a conscience issue with a free parliamentary vote, and that a strongly anti HoC could hardly be expected to OK a referendum on the subject, and the dooming from some on this in the last 24 hours looks all the sillier.

What this *does* show, IMO, is that some in the Tories realise they might soon need something to replace Brexit as the glue that basically holds their 40% coalition together. This isn't it, though.

[Former President tack50]

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

It is perhaps also a good idea to note that seats and votes are not the same thing. All reliable evidence points towards this fact: that what did the greatest damage to Labour in 2019 was not direct defections to the Tories,* but that a large chunk of its usual base vote decided not vote at all, and that a smaller section of it voted for a scattering of minor parties. I noticed this in my own family, which is very much one shaped by long-dead extractive industries and the subcultures those created: a remarkable number of people who always or usually vote Labour either did not or only did so extremely reluctantly. On top of this we add the strange impact of 2019 being an Issue Election and the simple fact that a lot of people who normally move their votes around were quite genuinely afraid of Corbyn. Which is where all this 'Red Wall' nonsense falls apart: you're actually dealing with a quite complex series of processes.

While turnout was down in 2019, the decrease was minimal though? 2019 doesn't seem to me like a low turnout UK election unlike say, 2001?

For turnout to stay stagnant while (some) Labour voters stayed home; that would imply there was also another group of non-voters came out to vote in 2019 but not 2017; presumably for the Conservatives.

[parochial boy]

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

It is perhaps also a good idea to note that seats and votes are not the same thing. All reliable evidence points towards this fact: that what did the greatest damage to Labour in 2019 was not direct defections to the Tories,* but that a large chunk of its usual base vote decided not vote at all, and that a smaller section of it voted for a scattering of minor parties. I noticed this in my own family, which is very much one shaped by long-dead extractive industries and the subcultures those created: a remarkable number of people who always or usually vote Labour either did not or only did so extremely reluctantly. On top of this we add the strange impact of 2019 being an Issue Election and the simple fact that a lot of people who normally move their votes around were quite genuinely afraid of Corbyn. Which is where all this 'Red Wall' nonsense falls apart: you're actually dealing with a quite complex series of processes.

While turnout was down in 2019, the decrease was minimal though? 2019 doesn't seem to me like a low turnout UK election unlike say, 2001?

For turnout to stay stagnant while (some) Labour voters stayed home; that would imply there was also another group of non-voters came out to vote in 2019 but not 2017; presumably for the Conservatives.

Or Labour voters went elsewhere. Or turnout drops in some areas (old Labour seats) were compensated by jumps elsewhere (Putney). The interesting thing is to dive in and look at the raw vote counts in some of the so called "red wall" seats. As a poignant example, you have somewhere like Don Valley, where the Conservative vote increases by about 500, but Labour's vote collapses by a full 9'000.

That said, from my vantage point, it does often seem that the Conservative party are engaging in a very deliberate and conscious effort to try and import US culture war politics (to a degree the online left too, but that can probably mostly be chalked up to "twitter is not the real world" and subsequently ignored). See for instance Liz Truss's, er, interesting comments about education in Leeds in the 1980s, or the scrapping of the gender recognition act, or the fights about the proms, or statues, or whatever Priti Patel has to say about black people or irish travellers or whatever.

It may be irrelevant to most people, but I do get some sense that a large chunk of the British right would quite like to turn the UK's political culture into a poor parody of the US's.

[IceAgeComing]

This is a very simplistic way of looking at things and a deeper analysis is needed but its worth noting: seats held by the Conservatives in 2017 went from a 70.8% turnout in 2017 to a 69.9% turnout in 2019 (the Conservatives gained around 300,000 votes, Labour lost around 1.2 million votes, around 30,000 more votes were cast) while seats held by Labour in 2017 went from a 66.6% turnout in 2017 to a 64.0% turnout in 2019 (Labour lost 1.3 million votes, Conservatives gained around 30,000 votes, 300,000 less votes total were cast).

To me this would suggest that Al's point is correct: not only does there appear to be a clear difference in turnout between Conservative and Labour seats (down 0.9% in 2017 Tory seats, down 2.6% in 2017 Labour seats) - and that's possibly including a few Labour seats where there wasn't the same depth of feeling against the Labour Party that there was in some of those Northern seats - but also the raw vote pattern does show that Labour->not voting seems to be the strongest vote trend in 2017 Labour held seats with Labour>Conservatives one of the weaker ones - at least from the raw vote totals.

[CumbrianLefty]

Anecdotal evidence confirms that quite a few pro-Brexit Labour voters abstained in 2019 (having told canvassers previously that they would vote Labour, in many cases)

And even in stereotypical "red wall" seats, some previous Labour voters went LibDem/Green.

Direct 2017 Lab to 2019 Con switchers were indeed fairly small in number (many of those cited in media "safaris" to these areas had actually gone Tory before then)

[Zinneke]

But then the re-alignment happened in 2017 not 2019.

[CumbrianLefty]

Well that's pretty much what I said (previous Labour voters going UKIP in 2015 then Tory in 2017 was far from unknown)

[Zinneke]

Well that's pretty much what I said (previous Labour voters going UKIP in 2015 then Tory in 2017 was far from unknown)

Yeah but some are denying that it ever happened.