What the British Local Elections Can Teach Us About The Realignment
One conservative party is serious about helping the working class. The other is not.
What the British Local Elections Can Teach Us About The Realignment
It was a sweeping victory years in the making. But for the most part, it seemed inevitable. Last night, the British Conservatives won a special election in a decadeslong Labour seat, as well as city council seats up and down England. The sweeping victories in the 2021 British Council Elections cemented Conservatives’ status at the party of the working class. In 2019, a blue wave of Tory wins wrecked Labour’s Red Wall, a stretch of parliament seats held by Labour for decades across Northern England. Like the American Rust Belt, these seats are rural, working class, and were ancestrally liberal for decades. Until Boris Johnson’s Tories tore out Labour’s Red Wall, brick by brick. Republicans in America can learn a lot from their conservative counterparts across the pond, particularly in how to turn empty slogans into the transition into an authentic working class party.
What Caused The 2019 Blue Tsunami
For decades, seats like Blyth, Bassetlaw, Sedgfield and Don Valley were heavily Labour seats in post-industrial Northern England. These seats are deeply rural and working class, and voters are former factory workers, coal miners and farmers, who were left behind as globalization caused massive job loss. Poverty turned to despair in these communities. Most of the Labour Red Wall seats voted overwhelmingly for Brexit out of anger with the status quo. While these voters expected the Labour Party to remember them, the party ignored them. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour participated in interventionism in Iraq as towns like Ashfield suffered massive unemployment.
Unemployment and globalization are not the only causes for the working class shift away from Labour. Under leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour backed a second referendum on Brexit, angering the Red Wall’s working class majority of Brexit voters. What angered voters further was Labour’s attitude towards the fleeting backbone of its voter base, as many Labour bigwigs called Northern working class voters almost every derogatory name in the book. Labour MP Neil Coyle called Brexit voters “fat old racists” and “sh*tbags”. Labour MP Clive Lewis said these voters “have racism at their hearts”.
The new Labour rank and file, educated professionals in cities, often called Northern working class voters “gammon”, and hundreds of tweets taunted Brexit voters as “old people who will die from coronavirus”. Does this rhetoric sound familiar to what the U.S. Democrats do to their former base of working class voters?
After years of being ignored by Labour leaders, being taunted by its new base of wealthier, educated professionals in cities and mocked by leftist activists, working class Labour voters in the Northern Red Wall had enough, and took the plunge to vote Conservative for the first time in their lives, similar to the voters of Mahoning, Ohio for Donald Trump. It paid off massively for the Tories, as they gained net 48 seats in the 2019 Elections, many of which came from Labour’s heartlands. But the losses for Labour were just beginning.
Leveling Up
After the 2019 Elections, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservatives waltzed into Downing Street with 365 seats. The party got Brexit done, but also pursued soft policies of economic nationalism. Prime Minister Johnson has vowed to spend and reinvest in the very working class communities that Labour ignored. Johnson’s plan, which he calls a “leveling up”. The plan broadly shifts power and central spending from London to England’s regions, particularly rural ones that have been left behind. The “leveling up” policy plans to revitalize neighborhoods, building more housing, creating more apprenticeships and job opportunities, and massively spending on infrastructure.
At its heart, Boris Johnson’s leveling up policy is common good capitalism, much like Marco Rubio talks about in using muscular government to help the common good. While the Conservatives got Brexit done and described ambitious plans to spend in dying postindustrial towns, Labour were busy electing a boring new leader in EU Remainer Kier Starmer, and degrading working class voters as fat racists.
Labour’s new leader Kier Starmer was initially deemed a breath of fresh air after the toxicity of leftist Jeremy Corbyn. But Starmer almost makes John Kerry look like an easygoing personality. Dull, bland, and elitist, Labour choosing London based Starmer as their new leader was offputting to the very voters it lost in the 2019 Election. Starmer’s position on remaining in the EU did not help either. Between Johnson finalizing Brexit and Labour choosing the wrong new leader in Starmer, more disasters for the party were on the horizon.
Knockout Punch
In 2016, when Northern Labour voters voted for a right wing position, leaving the European Union, Labour should have been alarmed. Yet the party stuck to its old ways. In 2019, after leftist Jeremy Corbyn led the party to its worst result since 1935, conventional wisdom would’ve thought the party would see the writing on the crumbed red wall. It didn’t. The 2021 Hartlepool Byelection (special election) proved the realignment was not a fluke, but arguably a permanent new reality. Like the Labour to Tory working class seats of Ashfield or Bishop Auckland in 2019, the voters in majority Leave Hartlepool are working class, forgotten and on the ropes. The Conservatives swept to victory in yesterday’s election, winning 51.9% of the vote to Labour’s 28%. For context, the Conservatives only got 29% of the vote in 2019, so yesterday’s result saw their share increase by an incredible 23 percentage points.
Labour has tried to appeal to voters in this longtime stronghold on the northeastern English coast, but the party has undeniably shifted from its working class roots to the woke, urban elite. Labour MP Khalid Mahmood realized this, saying after the election, “The party is a London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party”. Commentator Calvin Robinson acknowledged “Labour turned their nose up at our country. British people are naturally patriotic. We tend to have a deep unspoken love for our country. Labour sneered at that, to their loss.” Even lifelong socialist and controversial politician George Galloway, knows the reality of where things stand.
Labour is where the Democrats were after the 2016 Election: shocked, confused, adrift and at war with itself, while always remembering to lash out at its former voters by calling them derogatory names. Much like the Democrats, the Labour Party has nobody to blame but itself. But there is a bigger picture as it relates to connecting the British Conservatives and the Republican Party.
Boris Shows How to Really Build Back Better
Boris Johnson and Joe Biden may be ideologically different, but they both ironically shared the election slogan “Build Back Better” in their respective campaigns. As mentioned earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson easily won the 2019 Elections, got Brexit done, and pursued his “leveling up” program to shift power and spending away from London towards England’s forgotten working class. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the Republican Party. After Donald Trump shocked the world in 2016, neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans actually thoroughly committed to Trump’s policies of economic nationalism. Yes, there were tariffs, and yes, some manufacturing returned from Asia.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy claimed on March 27th, 2021 that Republicans “are the party of the blue collar worker”. This is definitely happening in steps, but not nearly as fast as needed. The GOP is stuck to their same decades long policies of “limited government, economic liberty, free markets, fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and supply side economics”. Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans did not use their power to the extent they could have to reinvest in American working class communities that have been ruined by globalization, like Macomb, MI or Eastern Kentucky. A plan similar to Johnson’s leveling up program, which directs spending to these very communities, would have seen Republican cries of “wealth redistribution” or “socialism!” Nikki Haley, the AEI and the National Review would’ve had a conniption at any Republican led leveling up plan in America, because they believe, wrongly, that the working class can easily just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and if they can’t find a job, former factory workers can just go back to school at age 57.
While the British Conservatives are directing millions into revitalizing working class towns they flipped like Bolsover, any use of government spending to help American towns with very similar profiles and voters would be unthinkable to the supply side dinosaurs that still hold sway in today’s post Trump Republican Party. To them, corporate tax & spending cuts is the only answer, no questions are allowed. Unfettered free markets are the be all, end all answer, and any Republican voter who wants reinvestment in their communities can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Common good capitalism be damned, according to the forty year old Reaganite consensus that needs to die. A bold new consensus similar to Boris Johnson’s “leveling up” vision must be built.
Strategist Gray Connolly noted on Twitter, “No one is voting Conservative in the British heartland because of Thatcher or privatisation or some dead Austrian economist. The Conservatives are winning because they, finally, repudiated Thatcher, as well as the dead consensus on Europe. Whenever the Conservatives have been a Tory party - protecting the British realm & its people - the more electorally dominant the Right has been.” Republicans can learn from this strategy, and must follow it if they want to win America’s next generation. The Tories saw their opportunity with forgotten voters, swooped in, and now likely have Britain’s significant rural and working class Base for a very long time to come.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives show us another conservatism is possible. The British Tories show Republicans how to actually be the Party of the Working Class, not just scream about how more corporate tax cuts for Amazon are needed. The British Tories show Republicans that dominant electoral victories in formerly left wing, postindustrial heartlands are very possible, with the right messaging. The old thought process of corporate tax and spending cuts and allowing an unfettered free market will not revitalize working class communities. Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher tried this supply side strategy, and it left shuttered factories, dying Main Streets and deprived towns in its wake. Working class voters in Labour’s postindustrial former seats did not vote Conservative for the first time in their lives because of the economics of Hayek or Milton Friedman. If anything, it was the opposite; they voted for a center right party that actually pledged to look after the forgotten voters.
The British Conservatives are actually doing something to help these deprived towns; they’re using government power to reinvest in these communities, create jobs, rebuild downtown centers, spend heavily on infrastructure and shift power away from London to these working class communities. The Republicans can do the exact same thing: Use their power where we have it to actually invest in communities, realize big spending is not a bad thing if it helps people, and use the power of a more muscular government to reinvest in job training, infrastructure and growth for the left behind. This is the way Boris Johnson can teach Republicans to Build Back Better. Republicans can learn the lessons from the British Conservatives’ transforming into an actual working class party in action, not in platitudes like Republicans have been. Republicans can learn from Boris Johnson’s electoral results to win hearts and minds. This is the way Republicans can Build Back Better: to build a stronger, more secure and more resilient electorate and country. The British Conservatives did. Across the pond, American conservatives can too.