Make no mistake, British politics is feeling the early tremors of an earthquake – one that could prove even more of a spectacular leveller than the crumbling of the Red Wall. The sentiment driving it is an enigma. It isn’t the “ick factor” – the visceral disgust that seeped into Westminster discourse in the 2010s. It isn’t populist “anger” – the rebellious mixture of ire and optimism that propelled boomer voters to vote for Brexit and crush Corbyn’s Labour. It is the white heat of moral rage: an almost ecclesiastical wrath to mete out justice on a fallen party. Put simply, the Tory heartlands have had enough. A full-blown revolution may just be afoot. It could upend politics for good.
True the first rule of British politics is not to read too much into local elections, and the second is to never underestimate the power of voter clientelism. Yet the scale and geographic distribution of Tory losses in local elections suggests that something unprecedented is happening. Labour has taken control of councils in Tory heartlands from Buckinghampshire to Hampshire. It is not only on course to beat the Tories in the most 100 rural constituencies in England, but is also targeting large swathes of the south. Trouble is also brewing in Yorkshire. Pollsters whisper of Labour snatching some of its safest strongholds like Skipton and Ripon. It is no longer unthinkable that Rishi Sunak himself may become the first incumbent PM in history to lose his seat in a general election. One projection has him scraping a majority in his Richmond seat with 146 seats.
I myself got a sense of the ferment that is starting to grip Tory England during a recent trip to the safe Lincolnshire seat of Boston – the most Leave-voting seat in the country. A market town where shops flogging mobility scooters jostle with stalls adorned with “flowers of hope”, and large groups of Romanians congregate outside its splendid medieval church playing ghetto blasters, Boston’s spirit seemed to be suffused with an even more potent melange of defiance and defeat than I detected in the Red Wall in 2019. One local told me: “Boston has been Tory all my life and I’m 75. It’s time to give them a warning.”
The parallels with the build up to the Red Wall collapse are uncanny. Not only is the political landscape scarred with the same signs of subsidence and erosion – the ominous “canary in the coal mine” by-election wipeouts and local election drubbings. It is also being rocked by severe tectonic shifts, from demographic change to the existential collapse of class tribalism (though this time the latter is not down to deindustrialisation, but rather an economic slowdown and exploding welfare bill in an ageing society that has left the Tories unable to protect the middle class from tax rises).
Still, the most interesting thing about the impending revolution is the unprecedented anger fueling it. While Tory England feels loathed and abandoned, just like the Rust Belt in 2019, this is intermingled with the sense of deep betrayal that has never been seen before – even in the Red Wall. Traditional working-class politics never recovered from industrial collapse and the death of the unions. In contrast, the Thatcherite religion of self-reliance and low taxes had not quite been crushed by historic forces. Now it has, and the Tory grassroots’ sense of betrayal is as coldly lucid as it is grandly epic. A view has crystallised that the ruling party has not only cataclysmically violated the spirit of conservatism, but that this has wrought damage on the country on a scale that is truly awesome. It is thus impossible for millions of Tory faithfuls to vote for their party with a clear conscience. Many would rather be slightly poorer under Labour.
In particular, an unholy trinity of Tory sins gnaws at traditional voters. First, the party granted a referendum on Brexit – a project it never believed in and thus handled abysmally. Britain now finds itself with the worst of both worlds, trapped in the EU orbit yet excluded from its decision-making core. Second, the colossal Tory gamble that it could get away with historic levels of mass migration has left Britain in a double bind – both unmotivated to upgrade the country’s economy from one that subsists on low-skilled, low-paid activity, and (due to the limited GDP generated from such a weak growth model) unable to afford infrastructure spending to accommodate migration surges. Thirdly, it betrayed those conservative instincts that favour liberty, personal responsibility and a cautious cost-benefit approach to crisis when it enforced draconian lockdowns that wrecked the economy and saved as few as 1,700 lives in the spring of 2020.
I suspect that Tory voters are flocking to Reform in their millions in the desolate knowledge that much of this Tory-inflicted damage is irreversible, and those who will bear the brunt are their children and grandchildren. After all, the EU has no motivation to heed Britain’s pleas for a renegotiation of the Tories’ flawed Brexit deal. Higher interest rates mean that the 15-year window the Tories had to borrow big to fund tax cuts and infrastructure investment to get the UK out of its productivity hole has now closed. The damage of lockdown will have to be paid, not just in tax receipts but tragically, judging by school absenteeism rates, wasted young lives. Stagnation is so advanced, the welfare state so entrenched that it will be impossible to cut immigration numbers without unleashing unassailable controversy and unbearable pain. And yet the ruling class’s hesitation to follow through will only pave the way for the far-Right. The Tories have then trashed this country on a scale that is utterly mind-blowing.
Those who believe in the “wisdom of crowds” might also well wonder whether Tory grassroots have developed a powerful intuition that the party will have to be pulverised almost to the point of obliteration in order for it to be remoulded into a pro-growth party to make up for all the damage. Because when you look at the numbers, that is exactly correct. Even if the Tories suffer a significant defeat and is reduced to, say, 170 seats, the One Nation Tory “wets” will remain the biggest faction, largely because David Cameron’s machine was so effective at parachuting liberal, centre-Left Tories into safe seats. It is only when the party is reduced to less than 100 seats that crude arithmetic suggests this faction would cease to be dominant.
In 2019 I was one of the few journalists who predicted the fall of the Red Wall. The Tories had better hope that this time my instincts are off. As if I am right then maybe history is about to be made, with the Tories facing as wretched a plight as the country itself.
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