Make no mistake, British politics is feeling the early tremors of an earthquake; This earthquake may prove to be much more powerful than the collapse of the Red Wall. The emotion that drives him is a mystery. This is not the “gross factor”, the visceral disgust that permeated Westminster discourse in the 2010s. It’s not populist “outrage” that drives Boomer voters to vote for Brexit and crush Corbyn’s Labor Party; A rebellious mix of anger and optimism. This is the white fire of moral outrage: an almost religious wrath to dispense justice to a fallen party. Simply put, Tory heartthrobs are bored. A full-blown revolution may be on the way. It could completely disrupt politics.
True, the first rule of British politics is not to attach too much meaning to local elections, and the second is to never underestimate the power of voter favoritism. But the scale and geographical distribution of the Conservative Party’s losses in local elections suggest that something unprecedented has happened. Labor took control of councils in Tory heartlands from Buckinghamshire to Hampshire. As well as defeating the Conservative Party in up to 100 rural constituencies in England, it is also targeting large areas of the south. The problem is also growing in Yorkshire. Pollsters whisper Labor has captured some of its safest strongholds such as Skipton and Ripon. It is no longer inconceivable that Rishi Sunak could become the first sitting Prime Minister in history to lose his seat in a general election. According to one estimate, he has a majority of 146 seats in the seat of Richmond.
I, too, felt the excitement starting to grip Tory England during my recent trip to the safe Lincolnshire seat of Boston, the seat with the most Leave votes in the country. A market town where shops flogging mobility scooters jostled with stalls adorned with “flowers of hope” and large groups of Romanians gathered playing ghetto blasters in front of the magnificent medieval church, Boston’s soul seemed even more pervaded by a mixture of defiance and defeat. More than I spotted at 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 to the fall of the Red Wall are uncanny. The political landscape is not only scarred by the same signs of collapse and erosion – the ominous canary in the coal mine – by midterm wipeouts and local election crushes. It is also being shaken by serious tectonic shifts, from demographic change to the existential collapse of class tribalism (though this time the latter stems not from deindustrialisation, but rather from economic slowdown and the exploding welfare bill in an aging society that has left the Conservatives unable to protect the middle class from tax rises).
Yet the most interesting thing about the coming revolution is the unprecedented anger fueling it. As Tory England feels hated and abandoned, like the Rust Belt in 2019, this is imbued with a deep sense of betrayal never seen before; even at the Red Wall. Traditional working-class politics never recovered from the industrial collapse and the demise of the unions. By contrast, Thatcher’s religion of self-reliance and low taxes had not been completely crushed by historical forces. Now it has happened, and the Tory base’s sense of betrayal is clear, as coolly as it is epic. A view has become clear that not only has the ruling party been catastrophically violating the spirit of conservatism, it is doing truly catastrophic damage to the country. Therefore, it is not possible for millions of Conservative Party supporters to vote for their own party with a clear conscience. Many would prefer to be a little poorer under Labour.
An unholy trinity of sins, especially those of the Conservative Party, are hurting traditional voters. First, the party authorized a referendum on Brexit, a project it never believed in and therefore handled terribly. Britain now finds itself facing the worst of both worlds, trapped in the EU orbit but excluded from the center of decision-making. Secondly, the Conservative Party’s huge gamble that it could get away with historic levels of mass immigration left Britain in two predicaments – both unmotivated to lift the country’s economy from one subsisting on low-skilled, low-wage activities, and (due to) limited GDP cannot meet infrastructure spending to meet migration increases. Third, he betrayed conservative instincts that favor freedom, personal responsibility and a cautious cost-benefit approach to the crisis when he imposed draconian lockdowns that devastated the economy and saved as few as 1,700 lives in the spring of 2020.
I suspect millions of Tory voters have flocked to Reform in the desperate knowledge that much of this damage caused by the Conservative Party is irreversible, and that it will be their children and grandchildren who will bear the brunt. After all, the EU has no incentive to heed Britain’s pleas to renegotiate the Conservative Party’s flawed Brexit deal. Higher interest rates mean the 15-year window in which the Conservative Party had to borrow heavily to finance tax cuts and infrastructure investment to lift Britain out of the productivity hole is now closed. The damage caused by the lockdown will have to be paid for not only by tax revenues but also, tragically, by the rates of school absences and young lives wasted. The recession is so advanced, the welfare state so entrenched, that it will be impossible to reduce migration figures without causing controversy and unbearable suffering. However, the hesitation of the ruling class to implement this decision will only pave the way for the far right. Conservatives then trashed this country on a mind-boggling scale.
Those who believe in the “wisdom of crowds” may also wonder whether the Conservative Party base has developed a strong intuition that the party must be pulverized almost to the point of extinction to transform it into a pro-growth party. compensate for all the damage. Because when you look at the numbers, it’s exactly true. Even if the Conservative Party were to suffer a significant defeat and be reduced to, say, 170 seats, the One Nation Conservative Party would remain the largest “wet” group, largely because David Cameron’s machine was so effective in parachuting liberal, centre-Left Conservative Parties into safe seats. . Rough arithmetic shows that this group’s dominance will end only when the party’s number of seats falls below 100.
In 2019, I was one of the few journalists who predicted the fall of the Red Wall. Conservatives better hope my instincts are off this time. As if I were right, then perhaps history is about to be made, with the Tories facing a situation as miserable as the country itself.