Most conservative part of the UK?

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lol why are people voting England

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the first answer that comes to me is Surrey: absolutely no Labour tradition (the county has never elected a Labour MP, and even the areas of the county that were absorbed into London contains some of the most anti-Labour regions of the capital), no real Liberal tradition (they returned 3 Liberals in the 1906 landslide and Guildford ramdomly returned a Lib Dem in 2001; they've enjoyed some local success, but as small c-conservatives), no radical tradition before then (well, unless you go to like, the Diggers, who weren't exactly popular locally). It basically transitioned seamlessly from sleepy gentry-controlled rural fiefdom to favoured domitary of the most well-off of London commuters, with little of the more working-class/lower middle-class towns that dot many of the other supposed "bourgeois" Home Counties. Of course, in the supposed realignement of Brexit, the Lib Dems desperately tried excising Tory domination, but their efforts proved fruitless.

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the first answer that comes to me is Surrey: absolutely no Labour tradition (the county has never elected a Labour MP, and even the areas of the county that were absorbed into London contains some of the most anti-Labour regions of the capital), no real Liberal tradition (they returned 3 Liberals in the 1906 landslide and Guildford ramdomly returned a Lib Dem in 2001; they've enjoyed some local success, but as small c-conservatives), no radical tradition before then (well, unless you go to like, the Diggers, who weren't exactly popular locally). It basically transitioned seamlessly from sleepy gentry-controlled rural fiefdom to favoured domitary of the most well-off of London commuters, with little of the more working-class/lower middle-class towns that dot many of the other supposed "bourgeois" Home Counties. Of course, in the supposed realignement of Brexit, the Lib Dems desperately tried excising Tory domination, but their efforts proved fruitless.

It's not an accident that J.K. Rowling located Harry Potter's hyper-conservative abusive stepparents in a fictitious London suburb called Little Whinging in Surrey. (Although I'm not an expert on the UK, Harry Potter seems to draw a lot on stereotypes about place and class when it comes to its characters' backgrounds.)

Yeah, the Dursleys are pretty much stock characters of a certain breed of the English middle-class that is often associated with the area (also with Royal Tunbridge Wells, a Kentish spa town bordering Surrey). Moreover, the area is often used in culture as the embodiment of conformism and the status quo: HG Wells has aliens invading Dorking to drive in how easy the veneer of cosy civilization could collapse, The Jam's hit A Town Called Malice is about the angst of being a middle-class youth in Woking and (perhaps mocking the sentiments of the former) Ali G's pretensions of being part of the Staines Massive is part of the joke.

In fact, the county's stereotypes just made me wonder whether I was unfairly lumbering it with cultural baggage, but on reflection, the county lacks many of the quirks that create non-Conservative (or non-conservative) forces in other seemingly solid blue counties. The massive growth of London obliterated any regionalism or religious non-conformity in the era that such things defined whether you were Tory or not; but the fact that Surrey continued to exist means it could view itself as separate to the riff-raff, unlike the vanished Middlesex. So no reason to indulge in the sort of regional liberalism you get in more distant counties (their county government didn't even bother moving outside of Greater London when the borders changed), but you also don't need (or want) the urban politics of the city itself.

As I said, the lack of New Towns and Garden Cities (for whatever reason) is also really important: the idealistic and planned nature of these projects mean that counties full of them like Hertfordshire have a fair amount of council estates and social housing, which often are politically relevant at least at a local level. Nor do they have any random ethnic enclaves like Luton, pockets of extreme poverty like Jaywick in Essex (the most deprived village in the entirety of England) or much in the way of an industrial tradition, which exists in Kent (Kent even had a few small collieries near Dover, although I don't think they were ever large enough to mimic the more famous coal mining areas of the country). The leftward turn of university towns (most notably seen in the Kentish town of Canterbury) has not been seen in the campuses of Surrey Uni in Guildford, as far as I am aware; I don't know enough about that institution to comment.

Even the supposed metropolitan shift induced through Brexit is probably less relevant here than it is elsewhere, because I highly doubt most residents of Surrey considered themselves metropolitan or even urban, even the ones that quite blatantly are.

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• Pretty much every village in Surrey, as is the norm for southern England, has some council housing and had significantly more three decades ago before RTB. They will have been solidly Labour back in the day, much less so now (though still capable of doing so on occasion) but won't have been enough to vote out the rest of their villages. You've also got a couple of towns with that kind of demographics - Camberley still fits the pattern and Redhill did before it got drowned out by commuters.

all fair points, but I think it's fair to say that Surrey's level of council housing is lower than its neighbours, even if it would be hyperbole to say that it doesn't have any at all:




As for Cornwall, it strikes me as a bit too weird to be a bulwark of anything; and plus you have the areas of Labour strength around Camborne, Redruth etc that swung to Labour heavily in 2017, as freakish an election as that was. If we're talking the SW, how about Dorset? The Bournemouth-Poole area has to be one of the most conservative conurbations in the country; and outside S Dorset, which has been once or twice in very good Labour years, the rest has been reliably blue for years.