This piece was co-authored with my colleague Pete Starkings and was originally posted on LabourList…

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Recent events in Birmingham illustrate the political trap that disputes over flags can create for Labour councils. The Guardian reported that the council’s failure to seek an injunction against Operation Raise the Colours (RtC) had given “free rein” to the anti-immigrant right. The Express presented the same dispute as a council “flag ban” directed against patriotic residents. Two contradictory characterisations in a fiercely partisan information space, with the council’s actual position missing.

Some RtC organisers have links to the far right, but they have chosen symbols most people regard as legitimate expressions of national identity. Responding therefore carries risks on both sides: giving agitators the row they want, or appearing to endorse the campaign and ignoring those who feel intimidated. At the same time, action can also be costly if flags are removed only to reappear, while at the extreme councils have faced threats and violence against those taking them down.

The difficulty for leaders is that different groups of residents can look at exactly the same flags and see completely different things.

With support from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Sonar spoke to council leaders across the country and ran four qualitative discussion groups in an area where RtC had gained traction: Supporters of RtC, Opponents, Waverers and Residents of Colour.

Participants also completed a Values Modes survey, which groups people according to three core motivations: security-focused Settlers, aspirational Prospectors concerned with esteem, and Pioneers motivated by ethics and inner fulfilment.

Among supporters, discussion was dominated by decline, insecurity and unequal treatment. Participants spoke about crime, immigration and rapid change, and saw RtC as a legitimate expression of pride and a way of pushing back against a system they believed was uncomfortable with English identity. Safety arguments were generally dismissed as bureaucratic diversions intended to stifle patriotism, with other rationales for removing flags treated as smokescreens.

Opponents, by contrast, typically saw the campaign as racism plain and simple. None objected to the Union Jack or St George’s cross in principle, but they wanted the flags removed. With this said, they were sympathetic to the council’s dilemma, and understood the risks of backlash. The important thing was that workings were shown – and that it was clear that decision-makers weren’t washing their hands of the issue.

Waverers are the decisive group, overlapping with British Future’s ‘anxious middle’. They were less engaged in the debate, and few knew RtC was a coordinated campaign.

Most Waverers had initially seen the flags as a positive statement, but many had begun to develop misgivings. They recoiled from deliberate division and had no sympathy with the far right, but their main concerns were how the flags made the area look and the cost of leaving them up versus taking them down.

Amongst Residents of Colour sentiment ranged from soft support to strong opposition – with older BME voters generally more positive. Few were big fans of RtC, but the balance of opinion was closer to Waverers than Opponents. Some felt threatened but opinion was not uniform.

The Values Modes breakdown really spelt out what was going on beneath the surface. As the chart below shows, supporters were overwhelmingly Settlers and Opponents were predominantly Pioneers. Waverers and Residents of Colour mostly held Prospector values, meanwhile – based on aspiration and success. Hence, they were especially concerned about ‘tatty’ and ‘ragged’ St George’s flags bringing the area down.

The sample here is small, but the pronounced pattern tells a story. Responses are driven as much by core values as by demography and politics.

For councils there’s an element of realpolitik here. Leaders operating in an area where Settler values predominate need to strike a very different balance to those in urban Pioneer strongholds. There is no one-size-fits-all.

However, there are limits – guardrails that must not be crossed. Whilst our groups showed that Opponents and Residents of Colour will put up with flags for a time – if there’s a process or rationale for auditing and removing them – certain things ought not to be up for debate. This includes flags erected with an obvious desire to provoke and those accompanied by overt racist intent. The same goes for threats to council staff or contractors taking the flags down. Zero tolerance must be shown.

There are also some universal lessons which applied across the four focus groups. The perception of ‘preferential’ treatment for one flag over another immediately divides the groups. Whatever the council’s policy, the same transparent criteria – such as permission, location, safety, condition and duration – need to be applied consistently to every flag.

The issue of money can also be divisive. Authorities should be wary of policies which sound expensive even if the amounts are small. Likewise, few residents want face-to-face engagement around flag sites. They doubt that the voices from their own side will be heard, and tend to see flying the flag as a binary choice anyway – not one where a compromise can be co-produced.

Similar disputes will continue to play out locally, and decision-makers will need to judge when to intervene, when to enforce clear rules and when not to amplify them.

Labour councils cannot cede English identity to far-right organisers, but nor can they ignore intimidation or allow provocative campaigns to dictate who belongs. The way through is consistent rules, clear guardrails and communication rooted in the values residents actually hold.

Shortly after Gareth Southgate left the England manager’s job in 2024, YouGov polled the public on their views of his tenure. Despite prior frustration in some quarters, the verdict was positive. Southgate’s record in major tournaments is hard to argue with, and 69% of those who knew enough about football to venture an opinion ranked him ‘good’ or ‘great’.

Yet the political cross-tabs in the data revealed an interesting sub-plot. As the chart below shows, Leave voters were less likely than Remain voters to rate Southgate positively. And this gap became more pronounced once you drilled down to individual party supporters – with 2024 Reform voters the most luke-warm and 2024 Lib Dems the most overtly positive.

This reflects a consistent pattern in terms of attitudes to the then England manager. This was evident before England lost to Spain in the Euro 2024 final, and in fact went back several years before that.

Leave voters were much more hostile than Remain voters about the prospect of a Gareth Southgate knighthood, for instance, when asked in 2021. And they were similarly sceptical about him getting the honour three years later, in 2024. In every available poll, including when Team England were at the peak of their powers, favourability towards Southgate among Leave voters lagged behind that with Remain supporters.

This skew is interesting to ponder during World Cup season – with James Graham’s state-of-the-nation drama Dear England regularly trailed on iPlayer, and with Southgate’s Lessons in Leadership topping the Waterstones bestseller list. But I think it carries wider implications about political leadership too, a decade on from Brexit. As Andy Burnham prepares to enter Downing Street, it’s worth considering why there would be such a strong political dimension to Southgate’s appeal – and what this says about the style of leadership needed to finally unite the 2016 divides.

Part of the answer to the Southgate conundrum is explained by the culture war debates after 2020, of course, which formed the backdrop to his time as manager. Southgate adopted a clear liberal position on questions like taking the knee, most famously with his 2021 open letter. And whilst his interventions were generally tempered by a support for the monarchy, the military and the nation state, there may be some on the anti-‘woke’ right who never forgave him for this.

Yet this is only part of the picture. England captain Harry Kane was at least as publicly supportive of Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights, for instance, yet when his favourability was polled by YouGov, alongside Southgate’s, the political patterns were much milder (as the chart above shows). A disdain among Reform supporters notwithstanding, favourability towards Kane barely correlated with politics.

The true cause of the Southgate disparity, in my view, is about style of leadership. How are results achieved by those at the top?[1] And what are the personal qualities which matter most in delivering them? People with contrasting politics often have dramatically different views about how you ‘get things done’.

To dig into this, it’s worth exploring a report published late last year, by Professor Tim Bale and colleagues, as part of the Party Members Project. Amongst many fascinating insights, the paper includes a section on the specific leadership traits which members of the five main parties look for.

This identifies stark differences between the attributes sought by members of right bloc parties (the Tories and Reform), and those sought by members of left bloc parties (Labour, Greens and Lib Dems). The former place much more emphasis on strength, ability to ‘stand up’ for Britain, and preparedness to break the rules. The latter are much more focused on their leader having a clear ‘moral compass’.

Indeed, the Party Members Project analysis explicitly asked about the so-called ‘dark triad’ of personality traits – sub-clinical psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. Members of the Conservative Party and Reform UK were much more likely than members of Labour, the Lib Dems or the Greens to see these characteristics as assets for a leader (see charts below).

This helps us make sense of the Southgate conundrum. Gareth Southgate was the antithesis of the ‘dark triad’ persona in question, of course (as Joseph Fiennes’s twitchy and self-effacing portrayal captures in Dear England). He rejected the spirit of national exceptionalism that he believed had hampered the national team up to that point, and sought to get the best out of his players by understanding them as people.

For those on the liberal left, the fact that this yielded results on the pitch was a vindication. But for those on the political right, Southgate was the wrong type of manager. A nice guy, many would agree. But not a leader.

Hence, I’d speculate, impatience set in more quickly amongst this political grouping, with performances on the pitch judged more harshly.[2]

Progressives may take the Party Members Project findings as proof that members of right-wing parties are immoral or irrational. And it’s true that some of their attitudes to leadership are hard to fathom. But in my view something subtler is going on.

Over the course of countless focus groups, one of the most common questions I have found myself asking swing voters is the ‘ideal leader’ question. “If you could choose someone from outside politics to be Prime Minister/ your local MP, who would it be?”

Tory- and Reform-friendly swing-voters are often the participants in these focus groups. And the ‘ideal leaders’ who they tend to choose have a standout trait in common: they’re exceptionally forthright, with big egos and a ‘warts-and-all’ approach which verges on the abrasive. Examples include Tim Martin, Piers Morgan, Alan Sugar and (at one point) Elon Musk.[3]

The selling point for these individuals is not that they’re likeable, so much as that they’re seen as the sorts of uncompromising characters who make things happen. They have the traits necessary to cut the Gordian Knot, voters think – the complex web of problems, to which there ought to be a simple solution. They have what it takes to bludgeon their way past a parliamentary committee, a council talking shop, or a barrage of red tape, through sheer force of personality.

These same traits are projected by socially conservative or right-of-centre voters onto some politicians – especially those who behave badly or spark outrage. Whenever I’ve heard Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or even Donald Trump praised in the past, it’s usually on the basis that, ‘love them or hate them’, they get things done.

Indeed, the offensive or corrupt behaviours which the left seizes upon as ammunition against these individuals are, in a sense, part of the appeal. This is not because these behaviours are seen as positive in themselves by those who are drawn to Farage and co, or because these voters embrace all misconduct. (It was the hypocrisy of Party-Gate which brought down Boris Johnson, after all). But controversial stances and glaring personal flaws can indicate, to a certain audience, that these types of leaders will not be cowed.

With Donald Trump, this perception is especially acute. 2024 pre-election polling in the US found that Trump trailed Kamala Harris for characteristics such as likeability, morality, trustworthiness, being ‘on my side’ and even ‘having [the] personality and leadership qualities a president should have’. But, as the chart below shows, Trump possessed a clear advantage over Harris when it came to ‘strength’ and ‘getting things done’. And for a certain group of voters in swing states, this was what counted.

Even for voters in the UK, this perception of Trump lingers. People may describe him as ‘dangerous’ or ‘unhinged’, but they often caveat that he gets things done.

Why do these differences between political leanings exist in the first place? My own hypothesis, which I wrote about a few years ago, was that they can be understood using George Lakoff’s psychological distinction, between ‘direct’ and ‘systemic’ causal reasoning. Social conservatives take an A+B=C approach, for instance, based on personal responsibility and not overthinking problems (i.e. ‘toughness on crime’). Liberals, by contrast, blame underlying factors and structural reasons (i.e. ‘toughness on the causes of crime’).[4]

At its worst, this can lead the right to take a ‘great man’ theory of history or a ‘strong man’ theory of politics. But direct reasoning is not always without merit. Sometimes, such as with Winston Churchill in 1939, leadership must display the clarity and gumption which the right prefers. In the immediate aftermath of a terror attack or natural disaster, direct causation is often vital before you can start to contemplate root causes.

At present, however, it seems obvious to me that the UK’s problems are complex, requiring long-term solutions and detailed structural changes. Successive governments have failed to fix these issues, despite large majorities. And, whilst a series of Prime Ministers over the past few years have presented themselves as men or women of action – ready to ‘get things done’ in the face of lily-livered opposition – they have generally found that willpower alone is not enough.

There is no way to cut our current Gordian Knot, in short. The type of leader we require right now is someone ready to sit down and start disentangling it.

In the end, Gareth Southgate’s time at the helm of England was highly successful, in spite of the deep misgivings among social conservatives which I’ve described above. Even among Reform voters, who were by far the least positive about him, more than half ultimately acknowledged that he’d been a ‘good’ or ‘great’ manager. They were kept onside for four tournaments, just about.

Football is not politics, but the reasons for this are worth examining before we conclude. Firstly, Southgate did not pretend to be the type of chest-thumping manager which certain sections of opinion might have preferred. In this he was authentic, and won grudging respect.

Secondly, he clearly had a diagnosis and a set of answers about the England team, about which he’d given very serious thought. Hence, he was able to manage expectations and explain where he was going – especially once the results started to go his way. Even those who did not particularly like his style of leadership could see a methodology at work.

Andy Burnham’s return to parliament came via Makerfield, a socially conservative and Reform-friendly seat, yet his political positioning has generally involved a direct appeal to left bloc voters and progressive values. This has given hope to many, that Burnham can unite these groups under a political agenda, in a way that Keir Starmer could not. The Southgate model offers a potential settlement, achieved not by aping the leadership styles of the right, but by demonstrating that there’s another way to ‘get things done’.

Notes

[1] The original poll cited also asked about the characteristics required by Southgate’s successor, for instance. It found that 2024 Reform voters were more likely than supporters of other parties to mention ‘desire to win’ as an important trait. They were less likely, meanwhile, to value technical attributes, like competence, experience and leadership skills.

[2] It is worth noting here that, whilst Tory members appear to admire dark tried traits, it’s not clear that their 2024 Tory voters feel the same way. Certainly, Tory voters are much less negative towards Southgate’s style of leadership than Reform voters.

[3] An outlier here is Martin Lewis. He also comes up very frequently, but I’d argue that he is trusted for slightly different reasons.

[4] It’s for this reason that I have generally spoken of ‘liberal-conservative’ rather than ‘left-right’ here. The realignment towards the former pole in recent years has run through the centre of both main parties, with the cleavage tending to be based on those who favour complex ‘systemic’ explanations versus those who favour simpler ‘direct’ ones.

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In an article during the first Trump ascendancy in 2016, the columnist Ed Smith wrote a passage which stayed with me:

Donald Trump is both the embodiment of political failure and the result of political failure – or perceived political failure. He represents political failure because he has accelerated the descent of political discourse: “They’re rapists, build walls, ban Muslims.” He is the result of political failure because he taps into a deep, subliminal anger: the conviction that “the system” has betrayed and abandoned the people.

Despite widespread political correctness, there is one group that it is perfectly legitimate to despise: politicians. When I worked for a newspaper, I was surprised one day to hear a reporter, usually so fair and mild-mannered, describe her hatred and contempt for politicians – ‘the worst people, just disgusting’. This is the kind of comment you hear from normally civilised and balanced people, who usually don’t know any politicians personally, but feel quite certain of the truth of their conviction.

When writing these ‘Notes on trust’ I’ve deployed a range of shorthands – cynicism, discontent, anti-politics – to describe the sentiment of which Smith wrote. Readers may disagree about whether ‘distrust’ is exactly the right word or even about whether ‘trust’ is a realistic aspiration for those in power. But whatever term we’re using, I think it’s unarguable that a situation where politicians are held universal contempt is a bad thing.

The debate about why this contempt exists is protected by a forcefield of preconceptions (hence my first piece addressed the red herring explanations we commonly hear). Those best-placed to restore faith in politics are often asking the wrong question: ‘How can we make ourselves more trusted than our opponents?’ rather than ‘How can we improve trust overall?’. And onlookers frequently blame factors which happen to coincide with their own interests and priorities.

My central argument is that low trust is the result of a context where our leaders have less agency, but are subject to more exposure and higher expectations. In particular, the intense scrutiny of the information age has caused politicians to shrink from the light.

The two most important skills needed to restore trust are explanation and argument. These muscles need to start being used again. Meanwhile, forms of tribalism which bring diminishing returns and – which unwittingly feed disillusionment – should be avoided.

The series has been largely diagnostic, and only really scratches the surface when it comes to the practical steps that can be taken. I may add more ‘notes’ in future. But the central point is that politicians need to develop the confidence to engage in a more grown-up relationship with voters – and voters with politicians. Those who manage to do this over the next few years stand the best chance of defeating populism, and of winning the public’s permission to make the big changes that are so obviously needed.

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I’ve written over the past few days about some of the reasons for low trust in politics – often expressing sympathy with the challenges of modern governance. In this final instalment, however, I’m going to look at an area where they politicians do themselves few favours.

The Blues and the Buffs

A useful place to start is Chapter 13 of Charles Dickens’s first full novel, The Pickwick Papers. Written nearly 200 years ago, this passage of writing drives at the essence of political cynicism.

In it, the book’s protagonists arrive at the fictional town of Eatanswill. The entire place is dominated by a rivalry between two parties, the Blues and the Buffs, who seek to run the local institutions and who bitterly loathe each other. Dickens describes this as follows:

Every man in Eatanswill…felt himself bound to unite, heart and soul, with one of the two great parties that divided the town – the Blues and the Buffs. Now the Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs, and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues; and the consequence was, that whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at public meeting, town-hall, fair, or market, disputes and high words arose between them. …Everything in Eatanswill was made a party question. If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market-place, the Blues got up public meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue inns and Buff inns – there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle in the very church itself.

During the rest of the chapter, the Blues and the Buffs are satirised for this partisanship. They barter, bicker, and are astounded that those visiting the town aren’t as invested in the rivalry as they are.

Dickens’ dim view of politics was echoed elsewhere. In Bleak House, Lords ‘Coodle’ and ‘Doodle’ – two interchangeable politicians – spar over minute differences, blind to the vast challenges facing society.

As an English Literature student with an interest in politics, I always found Dickens curious in this regard. He combined a deep interest in social reform with a contempt for politics which verged on the juvenile. Yet I’ve come to think that, in this, he captured aspects of the popular zeitgeist which more politically serious writers missed.

Politics as a game

Charles Dickens’ send-up of ‘the Blues and the Buffs’ is strikingly similar to the complaints we hear today. During hundreds of hours of conversations with voters of all persuasions, one of the most consistent themes is their contempt for negative campaigning by politicians. It prompts not just frustration but revulsion.

The kernel of this disgust is the sense of ‘politics as a game’. Voters observe awful and urgent challenges piling up in their news feeds and their own lives. They then look across to a political class smearing and sniping at one another, often appearing to turn real world challenges to political advantage. They are appalled.

This impression of constant point-scoring drains faith that politics can be a force for good. It removes the sense of objectivity which is vital for politicians to be taken seriously. It implies that politicians think government is easy; that the country’s problems come down simply to a question of whether the ‘bad’ party or the ‘good’ one is in power. And it cries wolf, attacking the other side so unvaryingly that by the time a true monster arrives on the scene voters have stopped listening.

All of these negative consequences become more exaggerated the smaller the true disagreements seem to be. With the Blues and the Buffs, the source of Dickens’ satire was not just that the two factions were kicking lumps out of each other, but that they were doing so on the basis of minimal differences.

‘Two swords and one inch apart’

This ties into an interesting aspect of UK politics’ trust challenge. As we saw in the third instalment, we’re not alone among developed nations, in having low democratic trust. Yet by looking at the nature of this, we start to see something interesting. Specifically, Britain underperforms compared to OECD averages when it comes to trust in politicians, but overperforms (a little) when it comes to non-party-political functions of government. The chart below, based on OECD analysis, shows the disparity.

This finding is backed up in other polls. It implies to me that the UK’s political culture plays a disproportionately large role in dampening trust, compared to in other developed countries. And I’d venture that our more attritional style of politics is a big part of this – rooted in a First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system, and in a chamber set up so that two parties can do battle, ‘two swords and one inch apart’.

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), which is the forum voters most frequently see televised, epitomises this abrasive culture. It comes up constantly in focus groups. Coupled with the impenetrable rituals in which the House of Commons is draped, the PMQs format steadily reinforces the public’s sense of ‘politics as a game’.

The voter ideal

What do voters imagine that politics should look like, if it’s not this type of fierce contest? Firstly, I think, they want the parties to stand for things which are distinct – a gap in the market which each seeks to fill. The party of fairness and public services; the party of business; the party of the environment; the party of traditional values, etc.

These parties should then debate the issues, in a way which is robust but respectful. This healthy dialectic improves the policies all parties arrive at.

Come election time, the parties should display their wares, talking us through the detail of how their policies will work, as a salesperson at a trade show might excitedly describe the features on a new product. They will tell you why theirs is the best on the market, for sure. They will hint that the alternatives don’t match up. But they won’t gratuitously bash their fellow vendors.

All the parties are expected to be proposing things which are doable, meanwhile – i.e. to be selling products which work. The numbers ought to have been totted up beforehand and the safety checks should have been made. If there are risks attached to a purchase these will be acknowledged.

Voters’ end of the bargain is that they will accept the trade-offs between different options and positions. Every ‘product’ has its limitations, after all – quality versus price, durability versus comfort.

This democratic idyll has almost never come to pass in real life, and probably never will. For one thing, whilst it’s in the interest of the political consumer for there to be a range of different options, it is often in the interest of the political parties to compete for terrain. For another thing, voters’ ability to accept trade-offs is limited; any politician who acknowledges the downsides of their own stance takes a risk.

Hence, for activists and party staffers, the above conception of politics may well seem hopelessly naïve. The other side are campaigning just as aggressively, after all. Failing to do so yourself is a dereliction of duty – like a footballer deliberately missing an open goal.

This non-sequitur – between the punter’s ideal of politics, as a marketplace of ideas, and the apparatchik’s idea of it, as a field of battle – underpins much of the public’s discontent with politics. It explains why so many modern politicians look to voters like the Blues and the Buffs, and why even during periods more conducive to trust than today’s, politicians have tended to be held in low regard.

Compensatory partisanship

Has politics become more of a ‘game’? And could this explain falling trust? Alan Milburn recently implied as much, stating that:

I think my generation thought more in argument. We tried to make an argument for how the world was, what we wanted to change, and how we were going to do it. This generation seems less intent upon that, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Maybe politics has become more tactical and less strategic.

To explore the underlying reasons for this, I want to look at a concept I call ‘compensatory partisanship’. This involves an interplay between three separate phenomena, each of which has emerged in line with our more professionalised and comms-savvy politics.

Firstly, mainstream parties of the right and the left have moved closer to each other. The reasons for this were covered in detail in my second instalment. But globalisation in particular has shrunk the room for manoeuvre in terms of policy, meaning that certain positions have become untenable. Growth, for instance, has become an elixir for all sides – a precondition whether you want to fund services or cut taxes.

Meanwhile, the decline of deference has reduced party allegiance, putting many more voters ‘in play’. The safest bet for strategists among the bigger parties has been to focus on the bread-and-butter issues everyone can agree upon, targeting the median voter.

From the outside, this causes the mainstream parties to look and sound more similar to one another. And it in turn makes them vulnerable to attack from fringe movements, who characterise the centre-ground as a single ‘uni-party’. The mainstream parties are aware of this, of course, and during the late 2010s both Labour and the Tories broke from the centre. But in both cases reality forced them to return.

Secondly, politicians have become less ready to challenge the public, with a ‘voter’s always right’ ethos becoming the norm.

This is healthy up to a point. It’s been particularly crucial in the case of Labour’s various attempts to modernise – given the left’s propensity to tell voters they’re wrong. However, it’s come at the expense of a willingness to set out hard choices, or to take on widely believed falsehoods.

For me, a crucial moment here was the Gillian Duffy incident in 2010. Prior to that, politicians had been more willing to challenge voters. But Gordon Brown’s foolish decision to call Duffy a ‘bigot’ became the defining story of that election. Arriving on the heels of an expenses scandal which had shocked the nation, ‘bigot-gate’ damaged MPs’ confidence’ to disagree with voters. A newly penitent political class emerged blinking into the 2010s. They saw their role as to ‘serve’ – not just by respecting the public, as Brown ought to have respected Duffy, but by deferring to them in a broader sense.

Thirdly, a whole range of factors mean that attack has become easier and more widespread. “Parties have become more partisan at the same time as the public has become less partisan,” Tony Blair noted in 2013.

24-hour news means a message framing an opponent can be pushed out, reaching a low-attention electorate through sheer repetition. The social media age means a meme or clip can go viral, animating supporters. Increased scrutiny means misconduct by rivals regularly comes to light; punching the bruise is simply too easy not to do.

Structurally, meanwhile, the increased involvement of party memberships in choosing leaders means the incentive to rally the base has grown. The loosening of party loyalties means politicians feel they need to guard their own territory or brief that they are ‘parking their tanks’ on the lawns of others’. Etc.

In other words, negative messaging is a relatively easy way of differentiating yourself, getting attention and inspiring loyalty. It may sap the average voters’ faith in democracy. But because everyone else is doing it too, there’s no immediate downside.

This, in a nutshell, is what I mean by ‘compensatory partisanship’. The substantive differences between parties get smaller and less visible; telling voters ‘no’ is placed off limits; hence MPs and leaders turn all their fire on their opponents, as a quick and low-risk way to frame the political choice.

Ultimately, this vicious circle of ‘compensatory partisanship’ makes everyday politics look like the Blues and the Buffs of Eatanswill. The net effect is almost the opposite of the voter ideal – an aggressive contest over seemingly small differences, rather than a civilised debate over meaningful ones.

Multi-party politics

‘Compensatory partisanship’ is, in its purest form, a vice of the political mainstream (i.e. of the two parties who’ve historically stood a realistic chance of governing).

Yet fringe and populist parties are an integral part of the story, too. They have increasingly occupied space at the margins since the start of the 2010s, posing as uniquely idealistic, and feeling none of the ‘constraints of the doable’ which affect the mainstream.

Labour or the Conservatives have found themselves forced further into the compensatory partisanship doom loop as a result. Needing to appease the voters on their respective flanks, but unable to embrace the policy radicalism which the Greens or Reform champion, they’ve instead used rhetoric to ramp up the threat of letting in their main opponents.

We are potentially reaching the end-game for this in the UK, with the much-vaunted arrival of multi-party politics. Five or even six parties vie for power; Prime Ministerships are shortening; governments are in perpetual campaign mode; new ‘shock’ polls come out daily, etc.

All of the parties within this are effectively engaged in ‘politics as a game’ at the moment. This applies whether they’re a fringe grouping claiming the big two are ‘all the same’, or a mainstream party using the prospect of its primary opponent winning to frighten people into voting.

A more proportional voting system would help this, I think, forcing smaller parties to stop peddling easy answers, and compelling larger parties to create a clearer articulation of what they actually stand for. But many of the answers go beyond this, and come down to political culture.

‘Country before party’

The tonic to ‘politics as a game’ is an ethos which puts ‘country before party’. This is something many politicians claim to do (often shortly before they launch a broadside against opponents for failing to do the same). But what does it actually mean?

Senior politicians are of course competing for a prize which is large – the right to run the country – so we must be realistic. Politics will at points be a contact sport, and passions will run high.

Yet there are a range of practices that are currently business as usual, but which fail absolutely the ‘country before party’ test. A non-exhaustive list is shown below, in no particular order:

• Criticising the policy of another party, when you know you don’t have a better plan of your own;

• Blaming another party for outcomes you know they’re not responsible for;

• Accusing another party of being driven by motivations you know they don’t hold;

• Claiming that opponents are planning things you know they don’t intend to do;

• Pursuing policies you know are intended not to improve the country, but to create a ‘trap’ for others;

• Telling the electorate they are right in an assertion which you know to be factually wrong;

• Telling the electorate that a choice which you know to be real is not an either-or dilemma.

Three milder vices I would add here are:

• Describing your own parties’ values and ideals in terms no one could disagree with, like ‘decency’ or ‘the many’;

• Suggesting that self-serving or corrupt behaviour by individuals is something your party is immune to – or which is restricted to your rivals;

• Framing policies based on outcomes (£X more a year in your pocket, Y,000 more nurses) rather than on levers pulled or choices made.

Disowning the practices above would, of course, be entirely voluntary. Without being able to look into the mind of a given politician or strategist, we cannot say what they ‘know’ to be real and whether an argument is truly disingenuous. So I’m not asking that rhetoric be policed or monitored.

But what I would say is that politicians genuinely serious about restoring trust – not just in their own party but in politics as a calling – could privately undertake to follow some of the above steps.

Doing so might not win them much credit at first. But it would cost them far less on the campaign trail then they fear. It would not prevent the heartfelt and sometimes angry debate which is the engine of politics. And it would ultimately help to bounce politics out of the ‘compensatory partisanship’ doom loop in which it’s currently stuck.

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Recently, I have written about the reasons for the 21^st century decline in political trust. In particular, I wrote about some of the ‘red herring’ explanations that exist, arguing that neither failure to deliver nor deafness to the ‘will of the people’ can fully explain the collapse.

In this penultimate post, I’m going to look at these issues further, using the cartoon in the New Yorker shown below as a jump-off point. Published in 2017, a year after Trump’s first election victory, the sketch made fun of mindless populism. Within it, a group of airline passengers storm the cockpit, convinced they can do a better job.

The premise of the cartoon attracted criticism – from the left as well as the right. Had politicians simply ‘flown the plane better’ they wouldn’t be subject to half as much hostility, many argued. One wrote that:

[The cartoon] assumes that the existing pilots have been doing a decent job. But what if they kept periodically crashing, and declined to repair the damage before taking off again? What if, due to operator negligence, the people in the cheaper seats were forced to hold on for dear life because some of their windows were shattered? … This rendering is much closer to reality. And it points to why many passengers might be eager for a change.

Both the cartoonist and his critics were being tongue-in-cheek, of course. But both embraced the idea that politics is, in some sense, comparable to flying a plane. The main point of difference was on the question of how well or badly it was being done in the first place.

This mirrors how many voters see politics; a hard job, maybe, but one which, done proficiently, should achieve outcomes which everyone is happy with. Politicians themselves collude in this, promising to ‘get the job done’ or to ‘clean up the mess’ left by their predecessors.

It’s perhaps no surprise, having been framed in this way so consistently, that a trust contest between pilots and politicians is a no brainier for most people. Airline pilots almost never crash or fly to the wrong destination, after all, whilst governments and politicians screw up at every turn. Correspondingly, 87% of us trust the former whereas just 9% trust the latter.

How is being a pilot different from being a politician, then? To understand why MPs and government ministers invariably prop up these types of lists, it’s worth giving serious consideration to this question.

There are two aspects to pick apart here. Both are, at one level, glaringly obvious. But they’re almost never acknowledged, and I believe they help us to understand two of the key skills which politicians need to rediscover in order to build trust.

The FIRST point of difference is about desired destination.

In almost all of the industries in the chart above – especially those which do best for trust – the goal is clear and uncontentious. The role of an engineer is to build a bridge which does not fall down. The role of a doctor is to accurately diagnose and to treat. Amongst some of the professions there is disagreement about how you achieve results – and sometimes there’s a political dimension to this. And there are a few professions which some people object to in principle. (A pacifist may always distrust a soldier, an atheist may always distrust a clergyman, etc).

But in most instances, there’s a strong sense of ‘what good looks like’. In the case of our airline pilot, everyone on the flight wants to go to the same place, and to do so safely, quickly and comfortably.

Politicians are almost the only profession on the list for whom this is not the case. Their first job is to set out a destination to get to. This destination will inevitably disappoint some of those taking their seats, and there will be a significant minority onboard any political ‘flight’ who really don’t want to go to the place the pilot is headed. It’s hard to identify a destination which enthuses enough passengers to get the plane off the ground, whilst winning the grudging consent of everyone else.

This has always been the case and is politics in its purest form. But, as I wrote in the second instalment of this series, one of the most significant changes in recent decades is that society has become both dramatically more heterogeneous and varied, and dramatically less deferential.

Rows of passengers now exist who have particular faiths, who have much higher or lower education levels than each other, who have strong interests in different foreign policy issues, who have wildly different experiences and perceptions of migration, etc. All of these passengers are better informed and more confident in speaking their minds than they once were. And many follow media platforms and channels which reinforce their views.

Finding a destination which this heterogeneous group can agree upon is therefore harder. And, in the face of this, politicians have tended to take two distinct approaches. The first approach is to choose a niche or highly ambitious destination, which enthuses around a quarter of the passengers, but has most of the rest up in arms. It might involve radical steps on immigration or major experiments on the economy.

Those who practice this often struggle to get into office. But they are trusted absolutely – adored, even – by those who support the proposed destination. Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are examples of this. Both have very high trust amongst their supporters – many of whom wonder why all politicians can’t be so authentic – but are toxic with large groups of other voters.

The second approach is to set out a destination which is modest and uncontentious enough that almost all of our hypothetical passengers, varied as they are, can agree upon it. This usually involves focusing on a set of ‘valence’ issues that all voters support – economic growth, a well-funded NHS, low crime etc – and not straying outside it.

This is generally considered the best strategy for winning, as it builds broad support, appeals to non-ideological swing voters and allows losers’ consent. But amongst the passengers on our heterodox flight, it will disappoint a large number, who wanted to go somewhere further away and more interesting.

Keir Starmer is an exemplar of this second approach, gaining a ‘loveless landslide’ in 2024 by playing it safe. The limitations of this are now being exposed, and unlike the Corbyn or Farage style pilot, Starmer does not have an enthusiastic base to fall back upon. Labour did, however, manage to win an election via the approach, and this cannot be overlooked.

What both models of pilot share, however, is that they do not make arguments in favour of a destination. Instead, they take positions, based on where different groups of passengers already want to go.

The former type of pilot – the Corbyn or Farage – takes one position stridently, animating the four of five rows of passengers who want to get to their chosen destination. Their USP is that they don’t budge on this, making little effort to persuade, reassure or explain their thinking, for the benefit of passengers who have reservations.

Indeed, moderating their position is risky for them. Choose a slightly less ambitious destination, and the cohort of passengers who backed you from the beginning may look elsewhere. (This is a challenge Nigel Farage currently faces, with Restore providing a full-fat option further to his right).

The latter type of pilot is incentivised in the opposite way: to take positions which ensure maximum consensus. They too avoid the sorts of concrete arguments – the efforts to inspire, the weighing up of honest pros and cons, etc – which might unite passengers behind a more ambitious destination.

If there’s a populist surge of some kind, for instance, the response for the second pilot type will be to try and ameliorate it with a shift in position – an extra control on migration, a new devolved power for Scotland, etc. But because the support base they are trying to hold together is broad, this cannot be done in a heartfelt way. It looks like a sop, and rarely works.

In conclusion, then, our ultra-varied electorate has led to two styles of leadership: one which undermines trust by animating the minority at the expense of the majority; and a second which undermines trust by appearing to have no set of fixed ideals. These two approaches, whilst in tension with one another since the dawn of politics, have increasingly become an either-or choice, the more strung-out society has become.

In a First Past The Post electoral system, the binary is especially stark, of course. Politicians who seek to blend the two frequently end up in a no-man’s-land – too little flexibility to build a broad consensus, too little conviction to engender loyalty.

The core skill missing, to reiterate, is the spirit of argument and persuasion, which might win around those who have reservations, without automatically compromising on position.

The SECOND point of difference is about competence versus delivery.

In almost all of the professions listed in the chart above, competence and delivery are close to one another. If an engineer is competent, the bridge will not fall down. If a pilot is competent, they’ll get all their passengers to the correct destination safely.

There are small gaps between competence and delivery – for instance, if a piece of equipment breaks or a storm hits. But generally speaking, an individual who is very competent will be able to deliver the best possible outcomes in these fields.

Going further down the list, the gap between competence and delivery grows a little. A business leader cannot guarantee perfect sales figures, for example. But for politicians, the gap between competence and delivery is largest of all. High technical competence does not guarantee delivery of perfect outcomes, nor even come close.

I always think here of the following quote by Douglas Jay, Clement Attlee’s economic adviser, in relation to the early days of the 1945 government:

My most vivid impression in all these months at No. 10 was the falsity of the illusion harboured by journalists, academics and others that something called ‘power’ resides in the hands of a Prime Minister. The picture drawn, or imagined, is of a great man, sitting down in his office, pulling great levers, issuing edicts, and shaping events. Nothing could be further from the truth in the real life of No. 10 as I knew it. So far from wielding great power, the PM at this time found himself hemmed in by relentless economic and physical forces, and faced with problems which had to be solved, but which could not be solved.

A range of factors have made this even truer in the decades since Jay was writing. As I wrote recently, for instance, globalisation has reduced contemporary leaders’ agency, especially on the economy and migration.

Yet the insistence of modern politicians is that competence and delivery are synonyms. A competent politician should be able to deliver the things we’re asking for. If they don’t then they must be incompetent. “In any other industry you’d be out of a job,” voters often complain.

Opposition parties, in particular, are guilty of playing to this this. The post-COVID, post-Ukraine war cost-of-living crisis, for instance, became the ‘Tory cost-of-living crisis’ in the mouths of Labour politicians, for much of the period running up to 2024. It was a problem which a competent government could quickly solve if it cared enough to do so, this implied.

Labour in office struggled to fix the issue, however, finding that they had less room for manoeuvre than they’d imagined. And this failure quickly came to be seen as a broken promise by voters. Both the Greens and Reform now attack Labour on this basis, even though they too would struggle to fix the problem.

How can the gap between competence and delivery be addressed, then, in a way that restores trust?

For one thing, the gap needs to be acknowledged by parties in opposition. In particular, the way in which policies are framed and campaigned upon exacerbates the problem. Parties lead with outcomes (‘immigration under 100,000’, ‘fastest growth in the G7’, etc). Yet they very rarely start with the ‘how’, or set out in honest terms the choices they will make to find the funding. Hence almost all discussion of policy comes to sound, to voters’ ears, like hollow promises. Hence, if they get in, they invariably disappoint.

But the real onus here is on governing parties. They could force the hand of opponents and expose easy answers, by showing their own workings. They could discuss in honest terms the dilemmas they are facing. They could show what’s under the bonnet or talk through the specific reasons why the small boats numbers increased as they did since 2019, or why the cost-of-living is so high.

Yet they invariably flinch at the weakness which this might signal, and instead rely on attack messaging. The adage remains that, to quote Ronald Reagan, ‘if you’re explaining you’re losing’.

Right now, for instance, the Labour government finds itself facing calls from the left to borrow more and not be ‘in hock’ to the bond markets. The tendency of some Labourites is to scoff at these ‘easy answers’ and the economic illiteracy they apparently reveal. Yet assuming they’re right about this, there’s an urgent need for a sincere, sustained explanation of the economic dilemmas the government is facing – which brings a lay-audience into The Treasury’s thinking.

As the Douglas Jay quote put it, the image of the leader ‘pulling great levers’ – as a pilot adjusts the controls in the cockpit – is a false one. Yet whilst the political class participates in this fiction, we can have only limited sympathy for the contempt in which they’re held.

To recap, the above sections point to two things which politicians should see as central tools for their trade.

The first is argument. Unlike a pilot, politicians must decide upon their own destination. With an extremely demanding and heterodox electorate, many in politics seem to have given up on the idea that you can persuade people. But by making serious arguments, rather than taking positions and landing messages, they will perhaps start to regain the respect of voters.

The second tool is explanation. At a time when challenges are so acute, politicians in government cannot guarantee perfect outcomes. Competency does not equal delivery, in the way that is does for a pilot. But by having the courage to explain the challenges they face, governments could start a more grown-up conversation with voters, rebuilding trust in the process.

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I recently wrote two pieces on trust. The first included the argument that falling trust is not down to rising misconduct and failure, but to a climate where misconduct and failure is more likely to be unearthed. The second built on this, suggesting that the collapse in trust is heavily influenced by the intense exposure of the information age.

This third instalment looks at this in more depth, using some international comparisons. In particular, it explores the idea of Moynihan’s Law, in relation to trust. Attributed to the Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan, this maxim states that:

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

Moynihan’s Law can be applied to fields beyond human rights. For instance, in parts of the world where health outcomes are better, studies often find that self-reported health is worse or that self-referrals to doctors are higher – as people become more health-conscious. Elsewhere, Steven Pinker had described the ‘violence paradox’: the less violent a society gets, the more concerned its members become about violence.

Disproportionate public discontent is, in these instances, the price paid for higher standards and a greater vigilance. Do the same principles apply to democratic trust?

The chart below offers one way to answer this question. It is created by comparing the data for trust in the government according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer (vertical axis) with the score attributed to each country by the 2026 Press Freedom Index (horizontal axis). It points towards a paradox which I believe has echoes of Moynihan’s Law: political trust is high in places with low press freedom scores, and is low in places with high press freedom scores.

This inverse correlation is not completely set in stone; some countries with high press freedom do better than others for trust. But the pattern is nevertheless stark. It applies to developed countries that are both to the left and to the right of the UK, politically. It applies to those which are better run and worse run than we are, and to those which are more and less corrupt.

The trend described runs counter to the rosy idea that high accountability goes hand-in-hand with high trust. And at one level it may seem baffling. Why would people have greater faith in governments who censor opposition or shut down the fourth estate?

At another level, however, the pattern we can see makes perfect sense. In places where failings invariably end up in the public domain, trust in our leaders is liable to fall. The more alive we are to these political failings as a society – the more we know about them and the more likely they are to come to light – the more convinced we will become that we’re ruled in ways that are undemocratic, incompetent or corrupt. This is Moynihan’s Law in action.

It could, of course, be argued that this isn’t inevitable. If we were to eliminate failure and misconduct completely from our politics, there’d be nothing to expose. No sleaze, no lazy policy-making, no ineptitude, no absenteeism. However, this strikes me as unrealistic. If we want the country to be governed by people who are in some sense ordinary, we must accept that failures will sometimes happen – both in terms of professional competence and personal conduct.

Viewed through the lens of Moynihan’s Law, then, the 21^st century’s high political cynicism could be seen as proof that our leaders are more trustworthy. Or, at least, that untrustworthy behaviour is more likely to surface and be punished. High distrust indicates an independent fourth estate and the robust scrutiny that comes with it.

I believe the overall implication of Moynihan’s Law is more complex than this, however, in relation to political trust. The chart above may suggest that a mood of perpetual anti-politics is the price we pay for a more open democracy – and for the steady exposure of public wrongdoing. Yet unlike with human rights, healthcare or violence – where excessive vigilance comes with few obvious downsides – it is now abundantly clear that low democratic trust has negative consequences of its own.

Indeed, the lesson of the past few years is that once trust for our leaders moves below a certain level – from scepticism to cynicism, from cross-examination to contempt – it starts to corrode the open democracy which created it. Changing things becomes harder, as people assume prospective candidates are lying. The state shrinks, as people stop trusting politicians to spend their money. Instability and governmental churn becomes the norm, as dissatisfaction kicks in more quickly. The need to manage the media means that the tail starts to wag the dog, when it comes to policy. Sensible people choose to avoid running for office, because the intrusion and public loathing makes it miserable. Etc.

The beneficiaries of low trust, in short, are those who are thick-skinned to a fault; those who are the least democratic in their instincts, who place the least value on an open society, and who are readiest to apply double-standards.

And this will surely only become more exaggerated, the greater the scrutiny becomes. If high exposure reduces democratic trust then the implication, by extension, is that absolute exposure will reduce faith in our leaders absolutely. The 24-hour press and the social media age could grind trust down to nil unless politicians learn to respond in better ways.

The key question that follows is whether a new manner of doing politics exists, which is capable of fostering trust in a climate of relentless challenge and coverage. The answers lie, I would argue, in a greater willingness among politicians to show workings and join the dots; in a desire to persuade rather than just adopt positions; in a refusal to pretend perfect outcomes are possible; in a rejection of excessive partisanship; and in a willingness to demand that voters engage with tough choices.

Yet the Catch 22 is that, within the present high scrutiny environment, these simple steps are heavily disincentivised. They involve massive risk for little or no gain. Thus, the path of least resistance for a 21^st century politician is to keep your cards close to your chest and avoid the unnecessary exposure which these things would involve.

Finding a way to end this vicious circle ought to be, for those concerned about low political trust, the holy grail. In the next couple of articles I’ll start to explore some of the principles for doing this.

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I wrote previously about four ‘red herring’ explanations for the collapse of political trust during the 21^st century (exemplified by the chart below). My core argument was that trust has not declined for the reasons we often think it has: refusal to listen to the ‘will of the people’; failure to deliver; out-of-touch leaders; or political corruption.

Whilst these phenomena all exist and all undermine faith in our leaders, none of them are new, or became especially more pronounced in the period during which trust really tanked. We need to look at aspects of the wider context MPs and leaders are operating in, to understand the new anti-politics.

Below are four root causes which have, I believe, created a context where political discontentment is more likely. All four are things which are mostly welcome (with some exceptions). But they’ve each dramatically altered the trust climate.

The FIRST root cause is the decline of social deference. This describes a set of positive social changes, in terms of the public’s willingness to challenge its leaders. People have become less willing to submit to a higher authority; less willing to ‘know their place’; more willing to pride themselves on their discernment or to ask ‘how’ a decision-maker will do something, etc.

For instance, in a study a few years ago, ‘Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000’, academics described how growing socio-economic stratification in the 1980s had happened in line with the curious demise of class deference. People became less willing to submit to their ‘betters’, even as society itself became more unequal.

Factors driving the decline in deference would likely include rising education levels, growing prosperity and home ownership, and a range of positive cultural shifts, which foreground equality, the validity of lived experience and respect for the individual. These changes are natural and organic, I would argue, and are products of a more developed and informed society. But they mean scepticism is the norm and expectations of leaders are higher.

The decline of political tribalism is a corollary of this. The chart above, taken from the British Election Study series, shows a three-fold increase since the 1960s in the proportion switching their affiliation at each election. Voters no longer defer to political parties, any more than they defer to governments, experts or other decision-makers.

The fall of the deferential society is without question a net positive (as is the decline of political tribalism, I would argue). But a more individualistic electorate means that trust is no longer a given in any quarter. Leaders must engage with voters in completely different ways – and on a much broader range of topics – in order to earn their respect.

The SECOND root cause is increased exposure, information and scrutiny. This is mainly a media and social media phenomenon, linked to new technology. The chart below, taken from Our World in Data, shows the extent to which the internet became ubiquitous in the UK, from the mid-2000s onwards. There is a vastly greater amount of coverage now available. And more political and social failings end up in the public domain as a result.

This shift is reinforced by a range of newer – or more widely used – measures to hold decision-makers to account, such as FOI requests and Judicial Reviews. These again play out in the media environment.

The changes I’m describing will, of course, be familiar to most readers. Between 1990 and the present day we went from five TV channels to a 24-hour news culture. The camera-phone meant both that every gaffe was exposed and that genuine examples of appalling conduct came to light. The internet created ways for voting records to be interrogated and for expense claims and private WhatsApp exchanges to be pored over. Social media meant a new citizen journalism and an environment of constant commentary.

The level of scrutiny that exists in the age of the internet and the smartphone is completely new, therefore, and has undermined trust by systematically exposing failure. This exposure can take the form of a select committee grilling of Morgan McSweeney being live-streamed and televised, of an interactive data-blog showing misuse of public funds being published, or of a party activist being captured by a Ring doorbell saying something offensive.

The phenomenon correlates exactly with the period during which trust started to really fall. And it links directly to the decline of deference described above, giving populations who were already becoming more sceptical a daily reminder that their leaders have feet of clay.

Below are several specific aspects and phenomenon which relate to the above, each of which are worth pulling out in isolation:

· The decline of universally trusted information sources. Martin Gurri’s excellent book, The Revolt of The Public, sets out an argument that, beginning in 2000, the monopoly held over information by a few trusted sources began to weaken. This sounds like a good thing, and was initially taken as such. But Gurri argues that it was double-edged sword – often rewarding attention-seekers and conspiracy theorists, or offering angry sections of opinion an alternative truth.

· The atomised society. The technological age, particularly in the era of COVID and the cost-of-living crisis, has unmoored people from communal experiences, face-to-face interactions and shared debates. This links to the rise of exposure and scrutiny indirectly, because it means people go online and curate their own information environment.

· Steady accumulation of the negative. The information age means negative events are documented more fully. The more high-profile and frequent this documentation, the more it reinforces perceptions. Post-war scandals like the 1960s Profumo Affair might have been taken, by the average citizen at the time, as isolated incidents. But as these episodes began to be caught more often and exposed in more detail, it created the sense that misconduct is everywhere.

These arguments may sound staid, harking back to arguments about ‘post-truth’ politics in the late 2010s. But the news environment which the internet and the smartphone has facilitated does, I believe, create a climate where trust is harder to win and easier to lose.

The THIRD root cause is the heterogeneous society. There is far greater variation within the UK population, when it comes to life experiences and backgrounds, than there was in the past. The same is true in most developed countries.

The age range is greater, for instance, thanks to our aging society. Diversity levels are higher in terms of ethnicity and faith, thanks to migration. The spectrum is broader when it comes to education levels, thanks to larger proportions going to university (tending to mean a more complex mix in terms of social values). Economic experiences are more varied, thanks to post-industrialisation increasing regional inequality. LGBT communities are significantly larger. Etc etc etc.

The class system, in particular, once the main tribal faultline, has become much more complex. When a team of academics led by Mike Savage in the 2010s set out to create a new class structure fit for the 21^st century, for example, they identified no less than seven distinct groups – including ‘Emergent Service Workers’ and ‘the Precariat’.

These changes mean that consensus around political issues is harder to establish, with the space at the middle of the Venn diagram having shrunk. On a topic like the housing market or even immigration, lived experiences in London are dramatically different to those in the North East, in ways which would have been nothing like so pronounced sixty years ago. Political views vary accordingly.

On identity and social issues, meanwhile, a much larger number of issues exist with the power to divide opinion. Trans rights or the politics of the Middle East would have personally affected or motivated far fewer citizens in the 1970s or 1980s.

A mixed society is in my view a stronger one (inequality notwithstanding). But the net effect for politics has been a breadth of perspectives and issues, which makes it extremely difficult to build voter coalitions. It’s no coincidence that the most successful politicians of the 21^st century have tended to be demagogues, who divide popular opinion but enthuse small or geographically concentrated groups.

The FOURTH root cause is the impact of globalisation on governments’ agency. The interconnectedness of countries since the start of the 21^st century – illustrated in trade terms in the chart below – has reduced the ability of national politicians to enact the policies voters want (at least without inflicting major damage in the process).

Two particular voter demands have been made more challenging. The first is immigration, the primary concern of the right. Interconnectedness has made cutting immigration to the degree that some demand almost impossible. Setting aside whether doing so is desirable or right, it is difficult in practical terms without inflicting self-harm. The last Tory government is a good example. Sunak and co maintained high levels after Brexit, despite publicly pitching themselves as ‘tough’ on migration.

On asylum, meanwhile, which is frequently the true bone of contention, absconding from international agreements carries massive diplomatic side-effects. Indeed, the post-Brexit period has demonstrated that ‘unshackling’ yourself from global institutions actually reduces border control, all the while losing you respect and influence.

The left-wing equivalent example, meanwhile, is inequality – and the corresponding ability to regulate big businesses or tax the super-rich. The reliance on international trade and markets to deliver growth means that almost every developed nation has reduced corporation tax since the 1990s, and has sought to appear pro-business at some level.

Redistributive policies – such as the Green Party’s proposed 10:1 pay ratio within every organisation – are hard to achieve as a result, and generally bring unforeseen side effects, if pursued unilaterally. (The predicted impact on the Premier League being a case in point). Hence governing parties on the centre left often shrink from such ideas, once they’re faced with the reality.

In essence, sections of the population are asking our leaders for things which cannot be done without self-harm to the economy, for reasons which are extremely technical and complex to explain. Steps that the right or the left see as basic common sense – such as sending boats back or banning eight figure salaries, respectively – require significant extrication from the international system to be achieved. This is not to say we could not do more on wealth inequality. But it’s to say that room for manoeuvre has narrowed, forcing the main parties closer together.

To deal with the four shifts described, the traditional parties have professionalised, moderated and generally become more risk averse – creating a type of politics which infuriates many voters and further undermines trust.

Message discipline has become the norm, for instance, to manage an environment where errors can be magnified at an unprecedented scale. Electoral triangulation has been practised, to try and capture groups of swing voters who no longer defer to tribal allegiances. Valence issues have become the safety zone – to avoid straying into divisive questions which may split a heterodox electorate. Growth has become the policy lodestar, to fund services.

This situation has fuelled populist and oppositionist movements, who present themselves as insurgents against an identikit centre. And this in turn has led some mainstream parties – such as the Tories under Johnson and Truss – to mimic these populist behaviours. These political responses have, in the UK at any rate, brought diminishing returns, creating disappointment and accelerating the collapse of trust.

The four root causes I focus on above are largely irreversible. We could not get the toothpaste back into the tube when it comes to the internet or globalisation, even if we wanted to. Hence, modern politicians who are serious about rebuilding trust need to think about a whole new way of conducting themselves, which is fit for the 21^st century. Future articles will look at some ways of doing this.

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Trust in politics is at rock bottom. This is a widely accepted fact. It is a phenomenon that has fuelled the many populist uprisings in Western countries over the past two decades. And yet the underlying reasons driving it have often not been given the level of consideration they deserve.

I became interested in this topic having done countless focus groups, in which otherwise fair-minded voters spoke of politicians with a venom which was at points overwhelming. I subsequently studied some of the literature and data on where this venom comes from. My abiding sense is that – whilst there was no golden age of political trust – the current trajectory is hugely alarming. It can neither be brushed off as a passing fad nor tolerated as a new operating context.

The chart below, for instance, is made using average Ipsos satisfaction scores for all party leaders since the 1970s. It shows a collapse in respect for senior politicians in the past two decades. As I wrote when I published it in an essay last year, the direction it points towards is unsustainable for a democracy. The ‘all the same’/ ‘none of the above’ impulse is becoming the default.

In future articles I’ll set out some thoughts on the core reasons for this – and on what can be done. But first I want to look at four ‘red herring’ explanations, often put forward to explain the collapse in trust.

Although I call these ‘red herrings’, I’m not denying that they exacerbate and inflame cynicism. But as catalysts for the anti-politics of the 21^st century they’re heavily overstated. The nosedive in the chart above is not explained by any of them.

The FIRST red herring is the ‘will of the people’ being ignored. This blames the current contempt for politics on our leaders putting their own interests over popular ideologies and causes. (Or, conversely, putting their own ideologies and causes over the public interest). Getting past this seductive idea is an important first step for understanding trust.

The reading is most common with radicals and populists; among supporters of smaller parties or specific campaigns. It says that if only the government would full-throatedly pledge to repatriate migrants/ address the climate crisis/ tax the super-rich/ stop spying on us/ shrink the state/ leave ECHR/ stand up for Palestine/ protect the green belt etc, then they would be trusted again.

It’s true that for sections of the population these steps and others would increase trust. But for others they would reduce it (at least if pursued as stridently as supporters demand). Far from being deaf to the public, politicians are in fact listening intently. The problem is that on many of the more contentious issues they are hearing not a unified chorus they choose to ignore, but a noisy row between vocal sections of opinion.

By way of an example, the chart below shows trust in politicians during the Brexit period (courtesy of IPPR). Nigel Farage had described a ‘people’s army’ in the years before the referendum, whose anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic views had been shut out of the conversation by elites. No wonder trust was low, he suggested.

Farage was right, up to a point. Giving this people’s army what they demanded between 2016-19 did ultimately increase trust amongst its members. But it also caused trust to fall dramatically among opponents of the Brexit policy. There was a changing of the guard – with Leave voters trusting more and Remain voters less – but the net effect was not to allay cynicism. Quite the opposite in fact.

You can win the trust of all the people some of the time, or of some of the people all the time, to adapt the adage. But, contrary to the views of many partisans and ideologues, there is not a unified ‘will of the people’ which politicians choose not to deliver on.

The notion that there is has always been wrong, of course. But it’s especially flawed right now. Our society is the most varied it has ever been in terms of age, education level, wealth, faith, sexuality and ethnicity. Correspondingly, there is a broader range of values and viewpoints, meaning public opinion is less uniform than ever.

The SECOND red herring is failure to deliver. Leaders are distrusted because they’ve done a bad job across the dashboard of core metrics on which they’re judged, this says. Govern well and people will trust again.

This red herring is, to many centrists and supporters of mainstream parties, what the first red herring is to those at the fringes. It too subscribes to the idea that politicians are distrusted because they’ve not given voters things which it’s within their power to grant. But it focuses on ‘valence’ issues (i.e. bread-and-butter topics where there’s widespread agreement among voters about the desired outcome) rather than on left- or right-coded causes which animate supporters.

These ‘valence’ outcomes tend to include: low crime, low taxes, full employment, high growth, short NHS wait times, properly staffed schools and a clean public realm. Things that cut across ideology and which most people agree are good. Deliver on these fronts and anti-politics will wither, our second red herring proclaims.

The flaws in this idea are best articulated in the famous 2024 US essay, ‘The Death of Deliverism’. This gained popularity after the 2024 US election – which the Democrats of course lost, despite a decent record on jobs, the economy and the management of the COVID aftermath. ‘The Death of Deliverism’ questioned the assumption that government performance is noticed and credited to the ruling party.

A comparable example from this side of The Atlantic was the New Labour era. Good outcomes were achieved across the delivery metrics described above (the economy, the NHS, etc). Yet voters’ willingness to give credit was often limited. Labour strategists of the time describe now the “I was lucky” phenomenon. People had positive interactions with well-funded services, but concluded that their experiences were atypical.

In the long-term, then, there’s only a loose relationship between metrics like GDP or NHS wait times and public trust. And on certain measures – crime being the most obvious example – there’s almost no relationship at all. Satisfaction with outcomes may placate voters, but it does not necessarily engender deeper faith in our leaders.

To underscore this, it’s worth looking at the chart below – taken from an academic paper by Will Jennings et al in 2017. The solid line shows that discontentment with our politicians has risen steadily since the 1960s, only paying lip service to events. Distain for our leaders was the same during the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent than it was during the opulent noughties.

It goes without saying that economic growth and sustained improvements to public services will have a positive impact, all things being equal. But the above shows that delivery alone does not fully explain the political cynicism of the 21^st century – and is not a panacea for tackling the present mood of anti-politics.

The THIRD red herring is an out-of-touch political class. Our leaders do not look and sound like us, this says. They know nothing of our struggles and have few brushes with real life. No wonder they can’t understand our problems.

This is the explanation for low trust commonly set out by voters. But it’s an analysis which politicians themselves latch onto for partisan reasons, to attack their opponents or present themselves as uniquely grounded. It actually comprises two distinct critiques – a lack of representativeness amongst parliamentarians and a lack of engagement with ‘real life’ outside the Westminster bubble. But in practice the two are usually rolled together.

A widespread popular folklore surrounds this characterisation. Our ‘male, pale and stale’ class of ‘toff’ politicians don’t know how the price of a loaf of bread. They enjoy subsidised bars and tearooms at the Palace of Westminster. They snooze in the chamber. They know each other from the same set of elite schools. They only visit their constituencies every four years to beg for our votes. Etc.

There are doubtless some MPs who come from these backgrounds or behave in these ways. But in my experience there are less of them than exist in the public imagination. And, more importantly from the perspective of this article, the number has got steadily fewer over time.

The chart below, for instance, shows the proportion of MPs who went to private school falling steadily from the 1970s onwards, courtesy of Full Fact. Indeed, the UK Cabinet is fully state-educated, at the time of writing.

Representativeness in terms of race, faith and gender has moved in the same direction. And whilst politicians still don’t fully represent the cross-section of society – with specific groups over-represented (those who’ve worked in politics, graduates etc) – the direction of travel is clearly the right one.

On the latter part of this charge, meanwhile – the absentee politician in their ivory tower – the trajectory is similar. MPs became significantly more rooted during the 2010s, for instance, when it comes to their having prior ties to the local constituency. The politician ‘parachuted in’ is rarer.

Likewise, over the period since the 1960s, the expectation that MPs live in the constituency and spend time there became far more pronounced. Regular local surgeries are the norm, and the caseload has increased exponentially. All of these things are comparatively new, and mean that the average politician understands the reality of the local housing office or GP waiting room better than they once did – and better than large swathes of the general public.

The situation is not perfect, of course. Some of our political representatives really do inhabit another world. But they are becoming less common, however you look at it. The present crisis of trust has in fact occurred at a point where Britain has an unprecedentedly ‘in-touch’ political class.

One thing to point out here is that the many antiquated customs that exist in the Houses of Parliament work to mask positive changes. Voters see politicians going through obscure rituals and conclude, understandably, that they live in more of a bubble than they do. For instance, whilst the House of Lords has become more egalitarian during the past three decades, thanks to a range of reforms, the ermine and induction ceremonies persist. But even on this point, we must remember that trust was higher during the decades when the second chamber was even more antiquated.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that the politicians our cynical public seem to be drawn towards to ‘restore trust’ are often public schoolboys who’ve spent their lives in the bubble. Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have all managed to ride the mood of anti-politics in different ways, despite minimal ‘man on the street’ credentials.

Farage, in particular, is an embodiment of the absenteeism and privilege voters claim to hate. Yet he’s trusted far more by sections of the electorate than rank-and-file MPs who are hard-working and conscientious. So there’s a serious question about whether the electorate are actually looking for leaders who are in touch, or whether they’re in search of something slightly different.

The FOURTH red herring is corruption and misconduct. Our leaders are mistrusted because they feather their own nests, siphon money to friends, rack up bogus expense claims or engage in other sleazy antics.

This ‘pigs at the trough’ characterisation is again a common voter explanation for mistrust. And, once again, it is used by partisans and those in opposition, who promise they’ll be ‘whiter than white’ or ‘drain the swamp’.

Whether this is a true red herring is a tricky question. Party-gate and the Peter Mandelson scandal are just two recent examples of all-too-genuine misconduct. Both delivered blows to public trust. The 2009 Expenses Scandal, meanwhile, remains a sea-change moment; the year when trust really started to curdle.

The key question, however, is not whether these scandals have damaged trust, but whether the types of misconduct they unearth are more common than they once were. Are our leaders sleazier than in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, when trust was higher?

If the answer is yes, then we can conclude that cracking down on corruption and sleaze is a big part of the answer. But if it’s no then something different is going on. It may be that the levels of misconduct are stable or falling; that we are hearing about scandals more regularly for the precise reason that there’s greater accountability.

The long-term UK pattern is hard to discern. There were headlines last year when it was revealed by Transparency International that the UK had become notably more corrupt in the years following COVID. However, the UK’s overall position has fluctuated dramatically since the index was created in 1995, rather than falling steadily.

In the absence of clear historical data going back further, international comparisons provide an interesting counter-factual. The chart below is created by cross-referencing the 2025 anti-corruption score given by Transparency International’s index against ‘trust in the government’ according to the Edelman Trust Barometer’s analysis of 28 countries during the same year.

Clustered in the bottom right corner are a group of developed nations with low government trust according to the vertical axis, but with low corruption according to the horizontal one. The UK is amongst these, along with the likes of France, Japan and Germany.

These low trust, low corruption countries have their counterpoint in the top left of the chart, where a series of high trust, high corruption economies are clustered, such as China and Indonesia. There is also a set of countries with high corruption but lower trust, especially in South America and Africa.

Doubtless there are many nation-specific factors. But the above exercise gives lie to the idea that low corruption translates automatically into high trust. The UK has amongst the lowest levels of corruption in the world (ranked 20^th least corrupt of 181 countries overall, even after the Boris Johnson premiership). Yet cynicism about our leaders is higher than in nations where it’s endemic.

Returning to the UK’s trajectory, which is the all-important factor, my general impression would be that many more mechanisms exist to prevent and expose misconduct – certainly compared to 50 years ago. But increased inequality and the rise of big business mean that more money is flowing around politics. Sectors like lobbying have expanded hugely.

The extent to which these things cancel each other out requires a wider discussion. And my personal view is that reform of party funding would make a big difference, as would regulation of lobbying.

But the key factor which has really changed since the start of the 21^st century is not the behaviour of our leaders but the information environment and the level of exposure. This means that a story like party-gate or the freebie episode emerges more easily, more often and in far more detail. Whilst reducing corruption further can make a difference, the heightened scrutiny which means it is now invariably brought to light is the element which is genuinely new.

To reiterate, I call these four explanations red herrings because they don’t, in themselves, explain the country’s slide into political cynicism during the 21^st century.

Each of the red herrings of course provides, in their own way, a plausible and often genuine set of explanations for low trust, reached for by voters, commentators and politicians alike. Our leaders have become maligned because they’ve ignored the ideological clamour for X, Y or Z; because they’ve done a bad job of running the country; because they live in an ivory tower; because they’re too busy lining their own pockets; etc.

But the failures that each red herring points towards, whilst sometimes real, are not new. Politicians a few decades ago were guilty of the same failures – often to a greater extent – without being as despised as they are today. Hence, there is nothing to say that tackling the four red herrings will restore public trust to the extent we imagine. The root causes are both a deeper and subtler than the current go-to answers suggest.

I’ll look in the next article at some of the root causes which do explain why trust has fallen. And I will then look in follow-up pieces about the practical steps politicians can take.

Next piece >

Which areas of the UK get the rawest deal? Are they the places driving the Reform surge of the past year? Or are they in fact the ones turning the other way – towards the Greens and the radical left?

For a Labour Government caught between a rock and a hard place, this is a crucial question. And the Gorton and Denton by-election last week of course brought it into focus. Both Reform and the Greens presented themselves as the true party of the workers and the have-nots. And both managed to break through – pushing Labour into third place in a constituency which is the 15^th most deprived of 543 in England.

The ‘existential’ crisis this creates for Labour is not only electoral, but is about political identity. How can a party which sees itself as representing society’s poorest reconcile itself with losing a constituency so clearly at the economic sharp end? And does it need to tack left or right to avoid the same fate elsewhere?

Politics and deprivation

We’ll return to look at Gorton and Denton in a moment, but first let’s examine the broader link between deprivation and 2026 UK politics.

The English Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), which came out last year (and which have been deduced to constituency level by the House of Commons Library) lets us do this. We can compare the findings with the most recent MRP poll by More In Common (MiC), from January, which projects the constituency distribution of the Reform and Green votes.

The scatter chart below shows what happens when we do this. It compares overall deprivation levels (vertical axis) with the projected Reform vote in each constituency (horizontal).

This indeed reveals a correlation between deprivation and Reform enthusiasm (marked with the red line) – but a fairly mild one. The correlation partly occurs because the least deprived areas tend to eschew Farageism. The affluent dots at the bottom of the scatter rarely have an above average Reform vote.

The next chart, meanwhile, shows what happens when you do the same thing with the projected Green vote. The Green percentages are lower, hence the dots are further to the left. But, as with Reform, there is a mild correlation with deprivation. Again, this is partly because the best-off areas tend to snub the Greens, as they do Reform.

In fact, one general trend which comes through is that the poorer a seat is overall, at the area level, the more likely its electorate is to back newer or fringe parties. Amongst the 100 most affluent seats, the average combined Green-Independent-Reform vote is 40%, but it rises to 53% among the 100 most deprived.

At any rate, in summary both Reform and the Greens over-perform somewhat in deprived places, according to MiC’s polling. But only in some deprived places, in the case of each. The Greens have no traction in the case of Wolverhampton North East, for instance, marked on the map. And Reform are making few inroads in Queen’s Park and Maida Vale.

Before moving on, it’s worth quickly looking at how Labour does. The scatter to the left shows the 2024 General Election vote, and the scatter to the left shows the January 2026 MiC projection which we’ve been using up to this point.

As we can see below, there is again a trend towards more deprived seats for Labour – again with a large number of outliers. Obviously, the Labour vote has declined considerably. And it is worth noting, when we look between the two, that very deprived seats – the 100 that are infilled in black – seem to have particularly fallen back.

Types of deprivation

The above analysis only tells us so much. More light can be shed, however, using the IMD’s seven sub-domains. These are:

· Employment deprivation

· Education training and skills deprivation

· Health deprivation and disability

· Crime deprivation

· Income deprivation

· Housing and service deprivation

· Living environment deprivation

Each is produced and ranked using a robust selection of metrics, and each contributes to the overall score an area is given by the IMD.

By looking at these sub-domains we see something clearer. Places may be close to each other in the rankings for overall IMD score. But dramatically different things are happening beneath the surface.

For instance, Queen’s Park and Maida Vale in west London is 72^nd of 543 seats for overall deprivation and Wolverhampton North East is 76^th. The former has a projected Reform vote of 15% and a projected Green vote of 22%, however, whereas the numbers for the latter are 41% Reform and 5% Green respectively.

These seats may sit just a couple of rankings apart for how poor they are overall, then, but they have very different politics. And once we scratch the surface of the IMD data, we see how different they really are in socio-economic terms as well.

Queen’s Park and Maida Vale is much more deprived when it comes to the housing/ service access and living environment deprivation domains. Wolverhampton North East does far worse for educational opportunities, employment and health.

These two constituencies exemplify a wider pattern – with massive geographical differences in terms of how socio-economic challenges are experienced. The chart below shows the regional breakdown of the 100 poorest constituencies according to each IMD sub-domain, for instance. (England’s overall makeup of seats-by-region is shown to the right, as a benchmark).

The north and midlands are significantly over-represented in the top 100s for the health, education and employment sub-domains. And London is massively overrepresented in the top 100s for income, housing and living environment deprivation.

Flowing from this are political differences. The chart below looks at the average party support in each of the 100 most deprived seats for each sub-domain.

Places with high employment, education and health deprivation are more likely than average to back Reform. Places with housing and service deprivation, living environment and (to an extent) income deprivation are less likely.

Another way of looking at this is by drilling into the areas of greatest strength for the parties. The chart below picks out the average rankings for the 100 seats where the five main parties are projected to perform most strongly by MiC.

The constituencies where Labour and the Greens’ core appeal is concentrated are fairly similar. The Tories and Lib Dems are much more affluent in terms of their current ‘heartlands’, meanwhile, and barely compete in poorer areas at the moment. (An exception is on housing and service access, with the Tories’ appeal being in rural areas where the ‘service access’ aspect of the sub-domain is a barrier).

But the 100 areas where Reform is strong are the most distinct – characterised by much higher average deprivation in terms of employment, education and health, and much lower deprivation in terms of housing access and living environment. Farage’s primary appeal is in places with low house prices and a lack of jobs and training opportunities.

In-work poverty versus worklessness

Two of the sub-domains, in particular, are useful to look at further. Income deprivation and employment deprivation are the most important sub-domains in the IMD methodology, and tell us a great deal.

Income deprivation is based on levels of in-work benefits – including housing benefits – whereas employment deprivation is mainly based on out-of-work benefits. At first glance the two might be assumed to measure something similar. But there’s less overlap than you’d expect. And by analysing the differences we start to see something interesting.

In constituencies which are ranked higher for employment deprivation than for income deprivation (i.e. with issues like worklessness more pronounced), Reform UK tend to over-perform. In places ranked higher for income deprivation than employment deprivation (i.e. with issues like in-work poverty more pronounced) the Green vote tends to be above average.

The charts below show this. The first ranks all 543 English seats for the gap between employment and income deprivation – with plus scores on the vertical axis indicating a higher employment ranking than income (which I’m calling ‘worklessness’ as a shorthand), and minus scores indicating the reverse (which I’m calling ‘in-work poverty’). The chart compares this to their projected Reform vote (horizontal axis).

As we can see, places which are more deprived for employment than for income are much more likely to vote Reform – with few major exceptions. The average Reform vote is 37% in places where worklessness is the bigger issue, but only 26% in places where in-work poverty is more evident.

With the Green vote meanwhile, the pattern is reversed – as the next chart shows. Almost nowhere with higher worklessness than in-work poverty has a substantial Green vote.

The two examples picked out illustrate this. Hackney North and Stoke Newington is 136^th for employment deprivation, but is the seventh most income deprived seat in England – a score of -129 according to my deductions.

Nigel Farage’s own seat of Clacton, by contrast, is 120^th for income deprivation but 14^th for employment deprivation – a score of +106. It is a more affordable area to live if you have a job, but opportunities for work are scarcer. Its politics, as we know, are wildly different from Hackney’s. And it feels very different to Hackney as a place, partly for reasons which derive from these economic differences.

Income, employment and Brexit

The above is more than just an oddity in the numbers. If we look at the geography of in-work poverty and worklessness, we get a map that is eerily similar to the 2016 distribution of the Brexit vote. Places where in-work poverty is more acute are mostly in areas that voted Remain. Places where the opposite is the case tend to have been Leave-leaning.

The distribution also mirrors Brexit (as the chart below shows) – in that places where in-work poverty is more pronounced are less common, but the numbers are more extreme.

Poplar and Limehouse, for instance, is ranked 308^th for employment deprivation but 44^th for income deprivation – giving it a score of -264 according to my measure. You can potentially get a job if you live there, but may really struggle to make ends meet all the same.

There are more seats at the other end of the spectrum, by contrast (i.e. with more worklessness than in-work poverty). But the slope is less steep, and none have a ‘plus’ number as high as Poplar and Limehouse’s ‘minus’ number is low.

The interplay between income and employment deprivation is clearly not incidental, then. What it really points towards is a massive difference between places with more successful local economies – where it’s expensive to live off what you earn thanks to high demand and pressure on services – and places with less successful economies – where there are less jobs and fewer opportunities.

Gorton and Denton revisited

This brings us back to Gorton and Denton. The chart below shows the sub-domains for the seat, indicating an unusually flat set of rankings. It is deprived according both to the metrics which point to Reform-voting (education, health) and to those that point to Green-voting (living environment, housing). Income deprivation is worse than employment deprivation, but by a relatively small margin.

Deprivation is not destiny, of course, but this might help to explain why both the Greens and Reform managed to surge as they did in the seat – with the former coming out on top.

The bar chart above likely masks big internal differences, meanwhile, within the Gorton and Denton constituency. As Professor Rob Ford pointed out before the vote:

Gorton and Denton is a Frankenstein’s monster constituency... The seat is shaped like a battle axe, with the handle running Southwest through diverse and gentrifying wards in Manchester city council, while the head of the axe in the Northeast covers the three Tameside wards of Denton. Though both parts of the seat have long voted Labour, they are poles apart demographically… But the two chunks of the seat are not equally matched – about two thirds of the population live in the more diverse, graduate and student heavy Manchester wards.

(The map at the top of this piece, which is based on online estimates of the vote distribution, very much corroborates this).

Ford was primarily highlighting that the Gorton wards closer to central Manchester are younger and more diverse than the Denton wards further out. But the forms of deprivation are, correspondingly, very different as well. The more Green-leaning Gorton part of the seat has 38 individual neighbourhoods (or LSOAs) of which all but 4 have higher in-work poverty than worklessness. The more Reform-friendly Denton, by contrast, has 23 neighbourhoods, all but one of which have more pronounced worklessness.

This is only a small part of the picture in the by-election result. But even within a single seat we get a sense of how different types of socio-economic challenge end up being articulated via diametrically opposed politics.

The two deprivations

Taken together, the above analysis points to two types of deprivation. They embody different challenges, local experiences and living conditions.

The table below sets out the core characteristics, based on the analysis above as well as on some other public datasets I’ve cross-references against. I have called the two deprivation types ‘behind the glass’ and ‘back of the queue’, for speed, although I appreciate that these labels are themselves tricky.

A few years ago, ‘behind the glass’ areas gravitated towards Corbynite iterations of Labour and ‘back of the queue’ areas gravitated towards Johnsonite iterations of Toryism. But now, voters in these two types of place are moving beyond the main parties – to the Greens and Reform, respectively.

Below, to illustrate this, are two constituencies which in many ways exemplify the ‘two deprivations’ – despite being just six positions apart according to the overall IMD rankings.

The first, Islington North, has a clear left slant, at the expense of Labour. In its case the beneficiary is Jeremy Corbyn, of course, who held the seat in 2024 even after his expulsion. But the types of challenges there are exactly the sort of ‘behind the glass’ factors which are likely to produce Green wins in future.

Ashfield, meanwhile, is archetypally ‘back of the queue’. It was Labour for years, prior to Lee Anderson winning it for the Tories in 2019 and then for Reform in 2024. Poverty in this Red Wall constituency is of the composition – educational and health deprivation, combined with high worklessness and low housing deprivation – which seems to make a place more amenable to Anderson’s brand of politics.

A generation or two ago, Ashfield and Islington North would not have had quite such diametrically opposed politics – cultural differences notwithstanding. The chart below illustrates why the gap has opened up. It shows the average house prices for all nine English regions over time, taken from ONS data and adjusted for inflation to reflect January 2026 prices.

The vast differences in the economic centre of gravity in London compared with elsewhere – reflected in the capital’s skyrocketing house prices – have created massively different types of challenge in the respective places.

This means that, whilst not completely mutually exclusive, the two deprivations often tend to be pulling in opposite directions. Gorton and Denton is one of a number of hybrid seats where they combine – or, rather, are in tension – within a single seat. Hence why both the Greens and Reform increased their votes, and why it is so hard to extrapolate wider meaning from the result last Thursday.

Many of the other hybrid seats are in very poor parts of Birmingham or Greater Manchester; places which have the urban diversity of ‘behind the glass’ areas, but the lack of opportunities more commonly found in ‘back of the queue’ constituencies.

Caveats

There are limitations to my ‘two deprivations’ analysis, of course. Few seats fit the characteristics as neatly as Islington North of Ashfield, for starters; I’m talking only in terms of the broadest patterns.

And it’s worth also acknowledging that my analysis is about place characteristics rather than people and demographics. As Rob Ford pointed out, Gorton was amenable to the Greens in large part because of its student and Muslim populations.

On the latter point, however, I’d say that the people and place elements are hard to separate. A large part of the reason why ‘behind the glass’ areas tend to be younger and more diverse, for instance, is precisely because they are the places where new arrivals have headed in search of opportunities – often living cheek-by-jowl with better-off residents, or in highly transient communities.

There are diverse seats with the ‘back of the queue’ type of deprivation, such as Wolverhampton North East, mentioned above. But generally, the reason populations are older and less diverse in ‘back of the queue’ areas is because they have weaker centres of economic gravity.

Conclusion

A striking facet of the ‘two deprivations’ is how little each truly knows the other. I’m often struck, in focus groups with voters, by the gilded lives they imagine people live in other parts of the country.

This unknowability will only grow, if ‘behind the glass’ and ‘back of the queue’ areas move further apart. And it creates a fertile territory for the politics of grievance and caricature. This is embraced by populists like Farage, but indulged by mainstream figures too, when it suits them.

In response to the Gorton and Denton by-election, for instance, one Labour source allegedly said the party was ready to “sacrifice bourgeois support” in certain parts of the country, to retain backing in Reform-leaning areas. The analysis above illustrates how flawed this ‘bourgeois’ characterisation is.

It’s true, of course, from a Labour perspective, that there are more places with ‘back of the queue’ deprivation than ‘behind the glass’ deprivation. But it’s also true that ‘behind the glass’ places are the last stronghold Labour has that could be said to resemble a long-term base. Jettisoning this seems highly risky, and a more sensible approach would be to find ways to unite the two deprivations. This will probably not involve foregrounding immigration in the way the government currently is – given that this is a topic which seems certain to cleave the two apart.

The real implication of my ‘two deprivations’ analysis is a situation from which everyone loses. In the parts of the country where you can get a good job, you can’t get a good house; in the parts of the country where you can get a good house, you can’t get a good job. Whichever way around you have it, the pathways to success are blocked.

Unless politicians address this better in the next decade than they did in the last two, ‘behind the glass’ and ‘back of the queue’ areas will continue to move apart – making a political settlement which advances social justice close to impossible.

This piece is a deep dive into the psychology of debt, the metaphor of the household budget, and how this has come to affect social democratic politics in 2026. It is based on my observations from focus groups over several years.

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“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound and six, result misery.”

So speaks Wilkins Micawber, one of Charles Dickens’ great comic creations, in an elegant explanation of how household finances work. A relatively small amount makes the difference between a life lived in the black and one lived in the red, Micawber explains. Success depends on staying the right side of the line.

A perennial spendthrift, Micawber fails to live up to his own maxim. His problem is not that he can’t earn but that he can’t budget. For much of David Copperfield he’s in and out of debtors’ prisons as a result.

Micawber is kind, with liabilities the result of benevolent impulses. And he’s an irrepressible optimist, famously sure “something will turn up” to bail him out. (Indeed, this characteristic has seen ‘Micawber-ism’ become a shorthand, among political commentators, for the groundless economic optimism and short-termism of our leaders).

You might like to go for a drink with Wilkins Micawber, in other words – especially as he’d likely offer to pay. You might admire his generosity of spirit. But you wouldn’t trust him to guard your savings.

Micawber’s motto helps us to navigate one of the abiding metaphors of modern British politics: the household budget analogy for the national finances. This has been the subtext to almost all Conservative economic messaging in the modern era.

Margaret Thatcher repeatedly used the trope to describe her preferred political economy. “It’s taken a government headed by a housewife with experience of running a family to balance the books…with a little left over for a rainy day,” she said in 1988.

And David Cameron and George Osborne deployed it to great effect two decades later, via the ‘maxed-out credit card’ attack (see below). The national deficit – which in reality was due to a global banking bailout – was blamed on an over-lavish state. Austerity followed.

During the Corbyn years, meanwhile, Labour was relentlessly mocked for its supposed belief in a “magic money tree” to pay for ideas like free broadband. This was a charge which stuck.

Labour, the Conservatives thus say, are the political equivalent of Wilkins Micawber: generous to a fault and, therefore, unable to balance the books. Labour politicians know, like Dickens’ character, that you must budget in theory. But their big, foolish hearts lack the discipline to carry it through in practice.

This, in a nutshell, is Micawber’s Law. And it’s a perception which Labour often reinforces by mistake. The best example here is Liam Byrne’s infamous note upon leaving the Treasury in 2010: ‘I’m afraid there is no money!’ Written in jest, as part of a tradition amongst outgoing ministers, it was cruelly leaked in the early days of the Coalition government. The episode, which is brought up in focus groups to this day, spoke to voters of the Micawber mentality writ large. Unforgivably profligate, and cheerfully so.

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Labour’s failure to deal with Micawber’s Law is a big part of the reason why UK political history has been dominated by Tory governments. Indeed, social democrats’ struggle to rebut the accusation shapes the entire policy architecture of the country.

Labour politicians who are serious about power invariably feel that they must match Tory spending pledges, just to be given a hearing. They must rule out borrowing of all kinds and put a notional price-tag on every item.

If they fail to do these things – if they permit themselves even a little leeway – then they fear, with good reason, that they will end up back where Labour always seems to find itself: as Micawber, the benevolent spendthrift.

Hence Rachel Reeves’ focus before the last election, quite sensibly, was on the ‘iron clad’ rules that would govern her tenure as Chancellor. “Every penny mattered,” according to Reeves, thanks to lessons learned from her mother at the kitchen table.

The fact that the household budget metaphor chimes with a conservative economic prospectus is a stroke of good luck on their part – not the product of clever messaging or ideological brainwashing. This is important to understand, and is rarely explored by the left, even amongst those who argue thoughtfully and correctly against the analogy.

The household budget metaphor is, for better or for worse, deeply intuitive. It is how most voters who do not have direct dealings with the government finances conceive of the economy. Money is almost always experienced in our own lives, after all, as something zero-sum, and this is applied automatically to the Treasury. Hence, we talk about the ‘public purse’ without thinking; we refer to leaders ‘balancing the books’, to the government ‘coffers’, and to money found ‘down the back of the sofa’ by the Chancellor.

To demonstrate the potency of the household budget analogy, it’s worth considering the alternative metaphors on offer, amongst those who back a Keynesian economic model. The most famous motif here is the idea of ‘digging a hole to fill it back in again’ – which was used by Keynes to explain how governments could stimulate a recovery during an economic slow-down.

Keynes deliberately non-intuitive allegory may be astute. Building, making and doing things can help the cogs of growth to turn again when times are tough, and it’s in the government’s interest to make this happen. But the metaphor, with its celebration of pointless and unnecessary work, does not cohere with any of the common-sense lessons which voters take from real life. It is the antithesis of the household analogy, in fact, and even on a good day it would struggle to compete with the simple idea that governments, like the rest of us, must live within their means.

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Crucially, according to the household analogy, the sizes of the figures at stake are largely irrelevant. Any amount bigger than that which voters are used to dealing with in their daily or professional lives is seen in roughly the same way – be it an online public health campaign costing a few hundred thousand, a government commission coming in at a couple of million, or a multi-billion-pound hospital-building programme.

A good illustration of this is the public’s attitude to council ‘waste’. Voters despise waste and see it everywhere. Hence, the Reform right have made a populist ‘war on waste’ into their lodestar in local government.

Yet voters’ dislike of waste does not, for the most part, come from a detailed analysis of local authority accounts. They’re not calling for an overhaul of procurement policy or proposing smarter ways that a council’s social care budget could be spent.

Instead, it derives from people’s day-to-day observation of low-level misspending and folly. A small piece of public art. A set of roadworks suspected to be unnecessary. A new BoxPark that sits empty. A zebra crossing repainted with a jazzy design. An unnecessary consultation exercise. Etc etc etc. Each of these things illustrates, for many voters, a Micawber-ish lack of hard-headedness at the top of their council.

To an economist, such trifling examples may demonstrate the idiocy of the household budget analogy. Perhaps so. But they also reveal its powerful internal logic. The original Micawber quote emphasises, after all, that a small amount can make the difference. It only takes a tiny overspend to move you from black to red. Choosing to prioritise an unnecessary set of road markings or an expensive mural suggests – at a point when budgets are known to be tight – that you don’t understand this.

For many voters, Micawber’s Law is a way of reconciling their lack of fiscal knowhow. It offers a lesson from real life, to evaluate policy choices. Hence, it has thrived in an era where mainstream parties have learned to focus on bread-and-butter policy issues and to leave ideology at the door.

If Labour is promising 5,000 more teaching assistants and the Tories are promising 2,000, for instance, then the parties’ reputations for money management becomes an important rule of thumb. Often the undecided voter concludes – with regret – that the more modest offer is the more credible one.

Thus, Micawber’s Law is ultimately a question not of economics but of character. It is an error to equate voters’ faith in the household budget metaphor with a conservative ideology. Those who buy into the characterisation of Labour as Micawber are not hawks and monetarists, desperate to shrink the state.

Rather, they tend to be medium engagement, low-to-middle-income voters. Poor enough that life feels like a struggle, but ineligible for benefits and perhaps with enough savings that they have something to lose if things really go wrong.

They support the idea of a cradle-to-grave state and a safety net for those who genuinely need it. They want a fairly interventionist government and higher taxes on the very rich. And they want public services properly funded. But, for all this, they are terrified of arrears, spiralling inflation and the ball-and-chain that is debt. They worry that their taxes will be wasted, or else will be spent paying interest to creditors.

In this respect, Jon Cruddas’s 2015 characterisation of swing voters as ‘fiscally conservative but economically radical’ was a perceptive one. Those prone to Micawber’s Law believe governments should run a budget surplus at all times (as the rest of us try to do). And they expect to be told where every penny of proposed investment will come from. But they do not necessarily oppose redistribution, financial regulation, public ownership or a progressive tax system.

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In 2025 we saw many of these questions come to a head. I wrote in October about the government’s reluctance to put down the ‘Ming Vase’ it had carried into the 2024 election. A large part of this early caution was rooted in a need to neutralise Labour’s historic reputation for overspending. Go into the election with an expensive promise hanging over your head and Micawber’s Law could strike once again.

The best practical example here was the decision, six months before the contest, to get rid of Labour’s £28bn borrow-to-invest plan for the rollout of clean energy. Prior to being scrapped, this was the biggest growth lever in the Starmer offer. The question of whether our economy and ability to fund public services would have fared differently had the pledge remained is an interesting counter-factual.

Alongside these sorts of policy decisions, fear of what I’m calling Micawber’s Law made the government place deep rhetorical emphasis on the Treasury’s Fiscal Rules. These rules do not, in themselves, block Keynesian efforts to stimulate the economy, via targeted spending on infrastructure. But without high profile efforts to do so – and alongside cuts to benefits like the Winter Fuel Allowance once in office – they have created a sense of deep gloom. A rhetoric which seemed, before the last election, like a necessary step to mitigate Micawber’s Law, now gives the impression of a technocratic government, straight-jacketed by its own thrift.

In the context of a majority of 174, this fuels the sense that mainstream parties either can’t or won’t act in our interests – fuelling populism.

It’s worth pausing here to remember that tax – not borrowing – was the real bone of contention within the November 2025 budget. Rachel Reeves spent the months before the budget being quizzed about whether she’d raise taxes, and the week afterwards debating whether she had technically broken Labour’s manifesto pledge not to do so.

This poses an interesting question: where does taxation fit within the household budget analogy and Micawber’s Law?

Clearly, tax is another area of historic brand weakness for Labour – and for parties of the left more generally. Any veteran of the 1992 election will likely recall the Conservatives’ notorious ‘Tax Bombshell’ poster of that year (see below), which some believe won John Major his surprise majority.

Yet the reasons for tax being a Labour brand weakness are not necessarily rooted in the household budget analogy. Rather, they stem from the separate view that progressive parties oppose aspiration. Labourites and left-wingers will instinctively punish success and stamp out entrepreneurial spirit, the charge goes.

This is an interesting voter perception, but shouldn’t automatically be conflated with Micawber’s Law. It is possible for a progressive government to be accused of overspending, for instance, without being seen as practicing the politics of envy. (See here: the public’s recollection of New Labour – which ‘got’ aspiration but is nevertheless remembered as having lived beyond its means).

But this is not to say there’s no link. The ultimate swing voter fear is that tax increases are the last resort, for an administration which has blown its budget. A Micawber-ish government eventually has to go cap-in-hand to its public and ask them to bail it out, when ‘something’ does not turn up. It’s always the voter who foots the bill in the end, our cynical electorate assumes. It’s always me and you.

Thus, two distinct things – the household budget analogy and the perception that Labour will tax you ‘till the pips squeak’ – can easily end up converging. Margaret Thatcher’s 1976 assertion that “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” is the best rhetorical example of this dovetailing.

To avoid this, progressive parties need to make it crystal clear that extra money levied from voters won’t be spent on debt, interest, or ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. It will go towards something worthwhile, which benefits those who are paying in.

In this light, Labour’s focus since the election on the ‘£22bn black hole’ is an error. This is especially true in a context, 18 months into Labour’s time in office, where it’s become evident that the public need to contribute more, to sustain public services and fix the country.

The ‘black hole’ rhetoric may at first glance seem consistent with the household budget analogy. And from a partisan Labour viewpoint it is doubtless pleasing, casting the Tories as the true party of Micawber. But as a ‘country over party’ justification for greater tax contributions it is problematic. It implies that the electorate are being asked to pay for the Treasury’s profligacy.

Labour may have expected that this profligacy could be pinned on the previous Tory administration. But the public – who really do put country before party – simply observe money being hoovered into the abyss, and dig their heels in.

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For years it has been said that the UK is trying to run ‘Swedish public services on US tax rates’. For years it has been acknowledged that, for social democracy to function, this equation needs to be rebalanced. And for years, social democrats have looked at this problem with trepidation, usually choosing to duck it. Most recognise the political risks attached, thanks to their parties’ reputations for economic mismanagement. All they can do, they feel, is project frugality to the markets and hope for growth.

The result for the country, ironically, is very similar to the Micawber mode of running a household: enjoy the fruits of a world-class NHS, but put off the attendant tax increases for another day. Indeed, as the academic Jo Mitchell points out, the ‘black hole’ in fact describes a simple shortfall between the government’s income and its outgoings. If it had been explained in this way, then perhaps voters would have been less hostile to the tax increases the country needs.

I believe that there are ways around this in the future: by separating Micawber’s Law from the idea the left doesn’t ‘get’ aspiration; by blending fiscal conservatism and economic radicalism. The need for progressive taxes can be met – if the psychology of Micawber’s Law is properly understood.

There are four steps here, I believe. The first is to link the revenue raised by taxes to an immediate and popular outcome, so the public are clearly getting something in return – i.e. a universal service we all need and use, improvements in which are noticed. This must, as I have said, be separate from debt, black holes, arrears and the public accounts.

Secondly, the more that Treasury money can be ring-fenced, earmarked and hypothecated towards specific policies and causes, the better. A tax rise can only override Micawber’s Law if money moves directly from one place to another, demonstrating an ability to prioritise and a transparency about where taxes are going.

Thirdly, there needs to be a clear sense that revenue is being well-spent. Public sector reform should not be seen as something right-wing or even ‘centrist’, if it’s simply about making public money go further.

And fourthly, growth should be stripped from the language and the assumptions on offer, and treated as a welcome bonus if it happens. The promise of growth can in fact make a government appear like Micawber, hopeful that a dramatic uptick in GDP will ‘turn up’, and ready to price this uptick into your calculations before it’s happened.

An extremely good example of these steps being taken was Gordon Brown’s 2002 increase in National Insurance. This was badged as going directly towards the NHS, and was broadly accepted as a result by the public – especially as waiting lists did in fact fall. It was an alternative to borrowing (remaining consistent with Brown’s Golden Rules). It was accompanied by New Labour’s NHS reforms, creating a clear imperative that the money was spent well. And it did not rely on a dubious promise of growth (although growth did in fact happen, partly thanks to a healthier population).

A more recent case study is the removal of tax exemptions for private schools by Keir Starmer – proceeds of which were earmarked for state education. Right-wing attempts to portray this as an attack on aspiration did not stand up because it was obvious that need was greater elsewhere.

Both examples borrow a little of the zero-sum logic of the household budget. In each case, policy-makers transparently move cash from one column to another, without dipping into the red. Hard-earned taxes aren’t absorbed into the Treasury vortex or spent paying off someone else’s debts. ‘Fiscal conservatism and economic radicalism’ align.

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Micawber’s Law ultimately guides the tempo and pattern of UK politics. In a focus group I once did, a voter put this as follows: ‘The Tories usually win. But after a while you need Labour to go and chuck some money at things. Then you bring the Tories back to sort out the mess.’ As an epigram for the historic cycle of British politics this is hard to beat.

There were two things which particularly struck me about the comment – and the round of nods and murmurs of agreement which greeted it from the other focus group participants.

The first is that Labour’s alleged overspending is often priced in. The party’s largess is deemed necessary for short stints, when Conservative penny-pinching has become too much to bear. But afterwards people usually go back to the Tories – who, for all their faults, they trust to apply restraint. Prolonged periods of Tory drought, after which Labour is briefly permitted to turn on the taps.

In this light, Labour’s continued focus on fiscal rectitude after coming into office in July 2024 has potentially thrown voters. They want Labour to show it is not the reckless party of Micawber before it gets in. But they nevertheless assume there is more money to be found within the government coffers, once a party with more generous instincts is ensconced.

This is not to say the answer in 2024 should have been to throw caution to the wind or rip up the fiscal rules. But the extent to which Rachel Reeves meant what she said – and the extent to which this has limited the scope for the ‘change’ promised – goes someway to explaining the brevity of the Labour honeymoon.

The second aspect of the above quote which struck me was its reliance on a two-party system. Labour and the Conservatives are often viewed by swing voters as two weathermen, one overly wasteful, the one overly frugal. Labour exists – very unsatisfactorily from the perspective of its own supporters – to sporadically compensate for the necessary meanness of the Tories.

In a context where the latter have sunk without trace (albeit with recent signs of life), there is a serious question about what the new dynamic looks like. Assuming the Conservatives do properly return, it’s unclear whether this will be as the flag-bearers of fiscal responsibility or as something completely different. In the meantime, Labour holds the crown of prudence, but seems to take little pleasure in wearing it. Voters on Labour’s left may once have supported the party, knowing that its focus on budgetary discipline – whilst never going to set their own pulses racing – was necessary to win. Now, they wonder what it’s all for.

Both of these points mean we are at a critical moment for the household budget analogy and Micawber’s Law. Starmer and Reeves have an opportunity to shed, once and for all, their party’s unhelpful reputation for profligacy. But there are serious questions about whether Labour can retain its progressive and traditional bases at the same time, in a context where there is not a harsher and more austere alternative waiting in the wings, in the form of the Tories. Can Labour be the primary champion of fiscal rectitude, whilst mobilising the emergent left bloc in British politics?

To conclude, it is worth thinking of the 1945-50 Labour government. This is a better case study than either of the more recent examples mentioned above, when it comes to the elusive combination of ‘fiscal conservatism and economic radicalism’. The NHS was founded, the welfare state was created, and the first generation of social housing was rolled out. Yet this happened against a backdrop of rationing and Crippsian austerity. Nye Bevan, the most prominent left-winger in the cabinet, heralded the ‘language of priorities’ as his guiding light.

This building of a New Jerusalem was of course helped by the fact that tax rises had been introduced before the Labour government was voted in, during the war years. It was also helped by a pre-globalisation context, where the economy was perhaps a little more like a discrete ‘household’ than it is today.

Yet the achievements of 1945-50 do, I think, hold lessons for modern leaders. They prove that the zero-sum politics of scarcity and sacrifice can co-exist with the sense of an active and progressive government, making positive choices on behalf of the public.

As the current government enters a make-or-break year, it needs to consider carefully the lessons this holds in the modern context. Through a detailed and forensic understanding of the household budget analogy, there are ways to overcome Micawber’s Law once and for all.

This is the third in a series of four articles, collectively titled ‘Putting Down the Vase’. It is about populism, trust, and how Labour can stop Reform. The central argument is that, in a climate of low trust, risk-aversion at the centre must be overcome. The series includes 30 suggestions, in total, for how you do this. The full paper can be downloaded by clicking here:

Putting Down The Vase October 2025

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The first in the series introduced the concept of the vase and looked at what ‘putting down the vase’ means in relation to communications, making nine initial suggestions. The second installment looked at what it means in relation to electoral strategy, making a further five suggestions. The third installment looked at what it means in relation to policy in general, making ten further suggestions.

This fourth and final installment looks at putting down the vase in relation to migration policy. There are six suggestions in total, and they are followed by a recap and conclusion, based on the whole series.

MIGRATION POLICY

Migration is the final part of the picture here. It is Reform’s signature issue and Nigel Farage can only be stopped by Labour neutralising it.

The ming vase approach, in this domain, is based on a terror of public opinion and the media. It represents the belief that you must be seen to be doing something, for fear that immigration will sweep your legs from beneath you. It tends to categorise cutting immigration as a ‘valence’ issue like NHS funding – around which there is a public consensus and upon which you can ‘deliver’. Good money is often thrown after bad in this undertaking.

Before going into the suggestions, below are four things which in my view are critical to understand about this policy area.

Firstly, migration is a topic which, if it’s seen to be out of control, can eclipse all other issues. More people means less to go round, anti-immigration voters believe. Hence, it doesn’t matter how good a job you’ve done on the NHS or housing if the flow of people is perceived to be out of control.

The best analogy is a nightclub at capacity, which continues to let people in: the queue for the bar, the wait for the toilets and the chaos in the cloakroom can all ultimately be explained by the door policy. This analogy may be flawed. But it’s how many people see migration, and explains the current salience of the issue.

Secondly, strange as it may sound, the public are as liberal on migration and race as they’ve almost ever been. Immigration has begun to de-couple from ethnicity and culture, over the past 20 years, and has increasingly become an issue purely of numbers and capacity.

As polling expert Peter Kellner points out, the overall thrust of public opinion can be summed up as ‘immigration, no thanks, immigrants, yes please’. ‘Delivering’ on this kind of sentiment is not straightforward.

Thirdly, attitudes to immigration are almost completely unmoored from voters’ day-to-day reality – unlike with GP wait times, the cost-of-living or even crime.

There are exceptions, such as in a town with a large ‘asylum hotel’, or a place with little history of inward migration which experiences a sudden wave. But at a national level attitudes to the issue are only loosely connected to material experience. The government could cut net migration to zero tomorrow, and if there was still footage of small boat arrivals on the news then the salience would remain high.

Fourthly, migration quickly becomes an identity issue. It’s not like tax or public spending, where you can twist the dial and potentially find a level that satisfies everyone. It’s a non-negotiable question for many, about the type of country we are.

Ignoring this could lead to a nightmare scenario for Labour at the next election, whereby the whole of inner London defects to the Greens or Lib Dems and the whole of the Red Wall defects to Reform.

With all of this said, below are six suggestions in this area, each of which aim to square the above circle.

1. When it comes to all legal migration not related to asylum, be governed simply by fairness and the national interest. 9 in 10 migrants aren’t asylum seekers. Trying to cut numbers here is a wild goose chase, if the goal is to stave off the anti-immigrant right. By way of example, net migration fell from 860,000 in 2023 to 431,000 in 2024. This did not reduce the salience of migration one iota. Of course, there may be genuine reforms needed under-the-bonnet, to create a system that’s balanced and fair. But it’s a big mistake to think barring care workers or foreign students will have any impact on public opinion. Labour should instead celebrate the contribution of migrants, avoid the numbers trap, and not allow migration per se to be conflated with the discrete issue of asylum and irregular arrivals.

2. Make small boats the first key metric. Then be guided by what works, rather than assuming methods must come from the right. Small boat arrivals make up less than 5% of inward migration. But the increases, from a starting point of zero in 2018, have been broadcast constantly by the media, and tap into a sense of crisis and scarcity – almost single-handedly driving migration salience. What matters here is what works, to reduce the crossings and the accompanying news coverage. If this can be done via additional settlement schemes for certain nationalities then this should be considered. Likewise, if humanely processing claims on French soil or automatically offering visas for women and children means less boats, then these ideas should be on the table.

3. Make hotels the other key metric. Focus again on what works to eliminate usage, especially in places where tensions are likely. The housing of asylum-seekers in hotels currently tends to happen in towns where resources are stretched or anti-immigrant feeling is already high. It has become an open sore and, along with boat crossings, the coverage which resulting tensions generate drives salience nationally. Liberal solutions should again be considered. By paying more could we limit asylum accommodation to already-diverse inner-city areas, where conflicts are less likely? Would letting asylum-seekers earn while they wait reduce the need for hotels? Would block acceptance of those from certain war-torn countries cut the backlog? If these ideas could work, they should be considered.

4. Rule out withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or any other legal convention. International laws like ECHR have almost no bearing that I’m aware of on small boat numbers and hotel usage. (Ditto Indefinite Leave to Remain). These laws generally just prevent the UK doing things we should not consider anyway – and which the public would not tolerate – like send people back to the Taliban. Labour could end up haemorrhaging votes to its left – and becoming an international pariah in the process – for the sake of policies which would not address voters’ actual concerns. For both electoral and moral reasons, the government must hold the line on these points.

5. Make the choice about control versus numbers reduction. Control and numbers reduction are not the same. By demonstrating control, I believe you gradually build confidence in the system – winning the right to make the positive case for migration. Labour should emphasise control – as exemplified by ID Cards, a liberal policy that exists across Europe – as an alternative to the indiscriminate deportations of Reform. ID cards have got off to a bad start, but remain more popular than Reform’s flagship number-cutting policy. Farage is happy to kick out hundreds of thousands of established residents, the argument should run, yet won’t take basic steps to monitor who is in the country.

6. Reject harsh rhetoric, degrading policies or language which dehumanises. This means going no further down the route of high-profile hostile environment policies, televised deportations or ‘island of strangers’ rhetoric. Thankfully, a corner seems to have already been turned here. But any return to this terrain will only serve to burn Labour’s bridges with its base, without any discernible benefits among Reform considerers. Labour’s general tenor must be supportive of migration and the principles of diversity on which Britain is built, whilst isolating and addressing the two particular issues which are causing all the problems (small boats and hotels).

(One issue I have not included in the above list is community cohesion. This is not because it doesn’t matter – quite the reverse. But I think it’s a policy which plays out over a longer time-frame than the one we’re talking about in this paper).

Conclusion

I have covered a lot of ground here, so let’s recap. My central argument is that ming vase politics – once restricted to opposition leaders on the cusp of government – has become a permanent mode of existence for mainstream parties. The trip-wires, news cycles and polling collapses that were formerly associated with the short campaign are now ever-present.

‘Parties of government’ like Labour, for whom populism is not available, shrink from a landscape which appears fraught with risk. Yet this ‘ming vase’ response brings diminishing returns, amongst a public which craves authenticity and is disillusioned with politics as usual. Populists will eventually push the vase out of your hands.

There are four specific areas where I’ve argued that the dynamic plays out:

· On communications, the ming vase represents ultra-positive messaging that no one could disagree with, alongside a party line which blames the other side for everything. Putting down the vase means a warts-and-all approach, which levels with voters and is rooted in explanation and argument. (The full blog on this can be read here).

· On electoral strategy, the ming vase represents survival based upon being less bad than the alternatives. Putting down the vase means establishing a more positive sense of who and what you stand for, fit for the multi-party era. (The full blog on this can be read here).

· On policy in general, the ming vase represents the promise of delivery, funded by growth, across a narrow band of valence issues. Putting down the vase means going beyond this, to establish a platform based on clear choices and values. (The full blog on this can be read here).

· On migration policy, as I say above, the ming vase represents a desire to be seen to be doing something. Putting down the vase means making the case for policies which are fair, consistent with the national interest and address the discrete issues voters are actually concerned about.

Some of the suggestions I’ve made are unorthodox, or go against received wisdom about how you win elections. Others are less controversial or are already happening. Few readers will agree with me on all 30 of them.

However, the crucial point, which cuts across all the ideas in different ways, is a relatively simple one: to beat populists you need to make the running, offering absolute clarity about what you believe in and where you’re taking the country.

The ming vase prevents this from happening. It slows you down and means you’re always hedging your bets and responding to others. It served a purpose, in guaranteeing Labour victory in 2024 and giving Starmer his massive majority. But it now needs to be put down, so that the country can be fixed and the forces of populism can be taken on.

This is the third in a series of four articles, collectively titled ‘Putting Down the Vase’. It is about populism, trust, and how Labour can stop Reform. The central argument is that, in a climate of low trust, risk-aversion at the centre must be overcome. The series includes 30 suggestions, in total, for how you do this. The full paper can be downloaded by clicking here:

Putting Down The Vase October 2025

565KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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The first in the series introduced the concept of the vase and looked at what ‘putting down the vase’ means in relation to communications, making nine initial suggestions. The second installment looked at what it means in relation to electoral strategy, making a further five suggestions.

This third installment looks at what putting down the vase means in relation to policy in general (setting aside migration policy, which is covered in the final installment). There are ten suggestions in total.

GENERAL POLICY

The logic of the ming vase electoral strategy is that you focus on swing voters. These voters then opt for whichever party will simultaneously put the most money into their pockets and into the services they rely on.

This leads to a policy approach based on: a) keeping tax low, whilst b) funding the NHS, the education system, defence and the police. Elections are fought based on abstract numbers, which parties use to demonstrate that their offer is better: £X00 a year more for your family, £Ym more for the NHS, Z,000 extra police officers, etc.

There is nothing especially wrong with this; it prioritises things everybody cares about, using money raised through growth. But it is a safety zone for a centre left party – a ming vase. It does not engage with the real texture of people’s lives. And it is very difficult for voters to engage with, as it’s based on outcomes delivered rather than choices made.

It thus contains no proper argument, and instead assumes credit will be given for material improvements to people’s lives. In reality, these improvements tend to be small and incremental, and are often put down by voters to coincidence or luck. As the 2024 US paper ‘The Death of Delivery’ explained, credit is rarely as forthcoming as those in politics expect.

This is especially true right now, not just because there is low economic growth in the UK, but because the approach described above delivers very little on the most important issue of the day, the cost-of-living.

Below are ten further suggestions for how Labour can overcome this. They are not at the expense of ‘valence’ policies, like cutting waiting lists. It’s taken as read that these remain vital. But the suggestions are about being less transactional, and injecting a clearer sense of choice and agency for the government.

15. Don’t obsess over the manifesto. Labour currently treats its 2024 pledges with reverence, hoping that fidelity here is the route to trust. Voters, however, have mostly forgotten the details – if they ever knew them – and evaluate based on whether a policy feels like something they expected. Hence, there’s little credit given to Labour for sticking to its fiscal rules, yet the Winter Fuel policy is seen as a blatant broken promise. In the end, Labour won’t be judged against its 2024 manifesto, but against what voters were hoping for at the time.

16. Say what happens after the ‘black hole’. Filling the gap in public finances may be necessary, to get cheaper borrowing and spend less on servicing debt. But it cannot be an end in itself. The idea that tax rises or welfare cuts are happening to satisfy an accounting shortfall is as uninspiring as it gets. If there really is no alternative, then a clear narrative is needed: when will the black hole be closed? Will there start to be more money for other things at this point? What will these things be?

17. Tax more rather than less to fill the hole. Then hypothecate as much as possible of what’s left over back to people. Voters have lost faith that what goes into the system comes back. The ‘black hole’ framing inadvertently adds to this, with every effort to find revenue seeming like a gratuitous confiscation. The temptation for The Exchequer may be to shrink from this, opting for small stealth taxes to get it across the line. But in the current context this will likely create pockets of uproar, as happened with the Winter Fuel Allowance, for minimal revenue. The Exchequer should instead focus on large wealth taxes – on land, property, the top layer of inheritance, capital gains etc – which raise significant money beyond that needed for the black hole. There will be media blowback. But each stream should be ring-fenced and funnelled – either towards the black hole itself or towards a specific extra service – so the question becomes not the justification for the levy in question, but what the country is getting to show for it.

18. Focus on new, universal institutions which are recognisably Labour. By 2029 there needs to be a list of 5-10 achievements which: a) no other party would have been expected to do, b) are ‘new’ in a clear before-and-after sense (i.e. not just additional funding for the NHS or minimum wage increases), and c) really touch people’s lives, so swathes of the population have either used them or know someone who has. Labour has policies that partially fit this bill: the Employment Rights Act, GB Energy, Best Start Hubs, Young Futures Hubs, Breakfast Clubs, etc. The party must start talking about these things. But it could implement other, more ambitious policies too – such as free, wraparound services in the fields of mental health, childcare or adult social care. These are very expensive but are desperately needed. They would change the whole conversation.

19. Level up. Tackling regional equality should be central. Yet much of Labour’s focus, in its dash for growth, has been on policies in the south that deliver quick wins, like the Heathrow expansion. Regional policy has tended to focus on devolution measures, meanwhile, which are obscure to voters. In my view there must be flagship industrial strategies for each of the following four types of town: former mill towns; former coal and steel towns; ports and seaside towns; and early wave New Towns. Each of these place types has distinct challenges. Each could, for example, be assigned an industry of the future, like software design or green power, which is concentrated there.

20. Continue to be progressive on clean energy. Polling this year found that ‘Reform curious’ Labour voters are differentiated from the 2024 Reform vote, in that they support practical policies on the environment and energy. With the obvious exception of car-related policies (e.g. ULEZ), Labour should not be afraid of the populist right on these issues. It should stick with new initiatives on clean power, and trust that this is not going to become the next culture war divide.

21. Be the party of the consumer. Historically, the left speaks for the worker and the right for business. Right now, however, voters are mainly suffering in their capacity as consumers. The cost-of-living crisis isn’t in the government’s gift to fully solve. But it should promote a suite of simple regulations to stop customers being fleeced. For instance, ‘shrinkflation’ could be tackled via a ruling that any business which reduces product size without a price drop must put temporary signage on the packet. Ideas like this are sometimes dismissed as ‘anti-business’ or as gimmicks. But I think that a high-profile package of measures like this could be crucial, in siding with consumers at a time when they feel under immense pressure.

22. Develop a vision for the future of high streets. The death of the high street is a cause of deep sadness for voters. It reflects a society which feels atomised and lost. Labour has enacted good politics, like the Pride in Place initiative. But the party should start to promote a broader high streets vision too, based on a new, post-retail function. This could build on ideas like those in the 2011 Grimsey Review, which proposed a reinvention of town centres as community spaces. It would mean leading a serious national conversation, about how we restore communal life in the age of Amazon and working from home.

23. Provide reassurance on AI. To the average person, AI looks more like a threat than an opportunity. Roles in customer service, IT, and countless other tertiary jobs are at risk. I don’t doubt that there are big opportunities too. But this is not an area which Labour should approach with any hint of utopian zeal. For now, AI should be treated as something akin to the shifts which led to 1980s de-industrialisation: a technological change to be understood, managed and mitigated.

24. Follow a middle path with Trump. Those who say we should boycott the US President are wrong. But so are those who say we should publicly flatter him in the hope of better tariffs. The UK’s influence is important on foreign policy. But the general approach between now and 2028 ought to be to treat Trump like a very abrasive colleague who you’re not in a position to fire. Apply professional courtesy, in other words; neither cold shoulder nor red carpet. By the time of the next UK election, Trump will hopefully be gone, and can be criticised more readily. But this relies on getting the balance right in the mean time.

On some of the points above, the government has much better policies than is generally known. I’ve tried to acknowledge this. But part of the problem is that these positive policies remain very low profile.

Changing this requires a stronger narrative, which puts them front-and-centre. But it also involves tackling the issue of immigration, which currently drains all oxygen. The fourth and final installment looks at how Labour can do this. It can be read here.

This is the second in a series of four articles, collectively titled ‘Putting Down the Vase’. It is about populism, trust, and how Labour can stop Reform. The central argument is that, in a climate of low trust, risk-aversion at the centre must be overcome. The series includes 30 suggestions, in total, for how you do this. The full paper can be downloaded by clicking here:

Putting Down The Vase October 2025

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The first in the series introduced the concept of the vase and looked at what it means in relation to communications, making nine initial suggestions. This second installment looks at what ‘putting down the vase’ means in relation to electoral strategy, making a further five suggestions.

ELECTORAL STRATEGY

Since the 1970s there has been a steady shift away from tribal party allegiances. The factors underpinning this are well-known – de-industrialisation, globalisation, rising higher education, individualism, etc. The eventual denouement is likely to be an electorate completely untethered from habitual voting patterns.

When this process was at its early-to-mid-stage, a couple of decades ago, parties were able to rely on their traditional base whilst courting the growing slice who were swing voters. This was a sensible tactic, but it was never a long-term answer if the de-coupling continued, as it has done. Once every voter is a swing voter then no one is.

This has been brought into greater focus by the plight of the Tories. In one of the best analyses after the 2024 election, Maria Sobolewska described how the lack of a competitive second party – i.e. the forgone conclusion of a Labour victory – had liberated many to vote on identity issues.

The failure of the Conservatives to recover since then means that this dynamic looks like part of a longer trend. A two-party system is giving way to a one-party system – which, in reality, quickly becomes a multi-party free-for-all. If you do not have a clear USP within this – if you are no one’s first choice – you will really struggle.

(NB: The view that two-party politics can carry on, with antipathy towards Reform subbing in for hatred of the Tories, does not really stand up in my view. They are a challenger party – created in 2020 and holding five seats – and are thus very different to the Conservatives).

The ming vase approach, in this domain, assumes that old loyalties will hold. Some parties, it supposes, are too big to fail. Countless ‘shocks’ – for the Lib Dems in the West Country in 2015, for Labour in the Red Wall in 2019 and for the Tories in the Home Counties in 2024 – have proven how weak these loyalties in fact are.

There will, of course, be a necessary focus on undecided voters within any electoral strategy. But mainstream parties must present a much better positive case for what they stand for, rather than assuming they can rely on the electoral dynamics which have traditionally favoured them.

Below are the five suggestions in this area.

10. Be willing to challenge public opinion. Polling and focus groups can answer many important questions: what the public really think of you, how an idea should be framed, and which policies shouldn’t be touched with a bargepole. But the public are also restless, contradictory and quick to pour scorn; no focus group right now will enthusiastically green-light a policy idea. To achieve something meaningful by 2029, Labour should articulate a clear path of change, and be ready to argue for it.

11. Take no voter for granted. The Runcorn by-election saw the bottom fall out of Labour’s vote in one of its safest seats. In this context the aim should be simple: to persuade everyone who voted Labour in 2024 to do so again. Ambitions shouldn’t extend to anyone who didn’t vote Labour (the possible exception, given low turnout, being first-time-non-voters). And Labour should neither prioritise Reform temptees within this, nor imagine it will be possible to ‘squeeze’ anyone to its left based on the Labour brand. Instead, the approach should involve a laser focus on what those in the 2024 coalition share – regardless of prior voting history. Whether they’re currently weighing up defection to the Greens, Reform or staying at home, we should be trying to identify the ‘middle of the Venn’ policies which will encourage them to vote Labour with some enthusiasm.

12. Understand young non-graduates. There’s a clear and present risk that established parties become obsolete. To build a long-term base, Labour should begin work now to understand and track opinion amongst 18-40 non-graduates of all political persuasions and none. This group has been missing in the culture war and Brexit debates of recent years – which took place between young degree-holders and older non-graduates. Young non-graduates are often casually liberal, asset-poor, low-paid, aspirational and politically unenthused. They have more skin in the game than most. If Labour is to have a long-term future it must start to act on the concerns of this group, and get them voting again.

13. Start thinking about how to switch to an Alternative Vote (AV) voting system. FPTP is failing. It could, in 2029, elect a Reform government which is actively opposed by most voters. The best alternative would be AV, whereby voters can express second and third preferences. This would incentivise all politicians to broaden their appeal, and would put a brake on divisive or puritanical parties. This is the most contentious of my suggestions so far, both for the valid reason that the public rejected AV in 2011, and for the less valid reason that Labour traditionally benefits from FPTP. But it would be a bold, surprising move, allowing the centre to hold.

14. Behave as if this will be a one-term administration. Labour ran in 2024 on the promise of a ‘decade of national renewal’. This assumed the norms of the past applied: a 174 majority guaranteed a second term. It’s now clear that this isn’t true. The government should therefore be much more gung-ho, focusing everything on creating a progressive social record to run on at the next election. If the party is to be voted out then what do we want the lasting achievements to be? The biggest error of all, right now, would be to waste 2024’s massive majority, by pursuing a ming vase strategy in preparation for 2029.

The next installment looks in more detail at what this last point means in practice. It can be read here. It includes ideas which would help to fix the country in a long-term sense, and which I believe would be popular across Labour’s 2024 support base – creating a situation where, by 2029, the government is making the weather.

This is the first in a series of articles, entitled ‘Putting Down the Vase’, about how Labour can respond to populism across four distinct areas. The full paper can be downloaded by clicking here:

Putting Down The Vase October 2025

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This installment introduces ‘the vase’ and looks at the first area, communications. The subsequent installments, in the next few days, will explore electoral strategy, policy in general and migration policy, respectively.

Introduction

The Ming Vase

It was Roy Jenkins who coined what’s become one of the most quoted analogies in politics. Jenkins compared Tony Blair before the 1997 election to a curator carrying a ming vase across a polished floor. Move slowly, make no sharp movements.

Blair certainly exercised caution. But it was during the Keir Starmer ascendancy 27 years later that the ming vase metaphor went mainstream. The prospect of a Labour victory was again being treated with excessive caution, commentators said. The vase was back.

After moderating hundreds of focus groups for Labour in the years running up to the 2024 General Election, I came to see why. I can’t claim to have been privy to decisions at the top table. But the cynicism of public opinion – combined with the speed at which Labour was trying to turn perceptions around – made me agree that unnecessary risks weren’t worth it.

This remained my view until 10pm on 4^th July 2024, when polls closed. At which point the precious cargo could of course be set down.

Strangely, however, this didn’t happen. The vase remained. The media opprobrium that followed relatively modest early policies; the ‘loveless’ nature of the landslide; the absence of a 1997-style honeymoon; the victory of Trump. All these things seemed to make Labour freeze. A year on, the party was still clutching its porcelain freight – by this time diminished to about the size of a domestic teapot, according to opinion polls.

Meanwhile, the country faces a prospect so dreadful it’s taken a while to look it properly in the eye: Prime Minister Nigel Farage. At Labour’s annual conference, Keir Starmer demonstrated the passion necessary to step up to this. But the fear is that the ming vase re-establishes itself – leading Labour to pigeon-step towards catastrophe.

Populism, trust and risk

One man who does not look like he’s carrying a piece of pottery is Farage himself. Like many populists, he’s thrived in an era when mainstream politicians are held in contempt.

I am in the shrinking minority who believe this contempt is undeserved. Modern politicians work harder, spend more time in their constituencies, are more demographically representative, and are less prone to sleaze than in the past. Yet they face the hyper-scrutiny of modern media and the internet, have less room for manoeuvre in terms of policy, and must cater to an electorate which has fragmented, polarised and become much less patient.

The distrust of politicians comes mainly because of the ways leaders have responded – or failed to respond – to the new context. They’ve tended to keep their cards closer and closer to their chests, as scrutiny has intensified. We seem to be living through an extraordinary moment, as a result, in which the impossible demands of the information age have come to a head.

The collapse in Keir Starmer’s approval ratings, for instance, is unprecedented and totally disproportionate after just a year in office. It bears little relation to Starmer himself, whatever you think of him.

The chart below shows this. It’s deduced by averaging Ipsos’s net approval ratings, for all major party leaders in each year, going back to 1977. It shows a slow-motion collapse, which Starmer is at the tail-end of. This has coincided with big changes in the media environment, and began in earnest after the expenses scandal. The direction it points towards is unsustainable for a democracy.

The difference with the past is not just that the lows are lower, but that the ‘none of the above’ state-of-mind is more common. Drilling into the data you can see this. Previously, when one leader was in a rut there was usually someone else who voters liked. Major’s unpopularity in 1996 was offset by the popularity of Blair and Ashdown, Brown’s in 2009 was mitigated by the high ratings of Clegg and Cameron, etc. This is no longer the case. By way of example, in just 32 of the 476 Ipsos party leader survey questions since the start of 2011 has any leader scored a net approval rating above zero.

(Interestingly, the pattern is not the same if you look at satisfaction with the government – which Ipsos has collected over the same period. This has waxed and waned and been well into the minus numbers much of the time. But it hasn’t fallen off a cliff in the same way. It seems to be politicians themselves who the public have really turned on).

Populists are the great beneficiaries of this. They too are unpopular overall. But unlike many mainstream leaders, they have pockets of strong public support (offset, of course, by deeper loathing in other quarters). And, more importantly, they have much less to lose in the battle for attention. They can preach to the converted, offend people, court negative publicity and make hostages to fortune, without fearing any consequences. The age of social media in fact rewards these ‘authentic’ behaviours.

In the face of this, mainstream politicians freeze. They hate the new environment as much as populists love it. As members of aspiring parties of government, much of the populist playbook is unavailable to them. They cannot afford to thumb their nose at business or alienate swathes of the electorate, as populists can. Hence, when these mainstream parties have experimented with their own versions of populism in recent years – as the Conservatives did under Johnson and Truss and Labour did under Corbyn – it’s ended badly.

The approach many settle upon is to instead lean into their role as ‘the grown-ups’, believing this is their selling point. Focus on delivery. Offend no one. Emphasise professionalism. Promise growth. Offer tough rhetoric and technical tweaks on immigration. Squeeze smaller parties. Remind the public of how much worse things could be. And hope, when push comes to shove, that voters opt for the devil they know.

Labour’s vase

In this context, leading an ‘establishment’ party like Labour has become quite a miserable business. It seems to be a case of permanently carrying a ming vase, unloved, whilst populists gleefully try to push you over from different angles. If and when they succeed in this you smile, ever the grown-up, before sweeping up the pieces. With Reform on track to win the next election from a standing start, according to some polls, this sorry dynamic may be reaching its end-game.

Labour was able to hide from the above reality whilst in opposition – and even to play upon it a little. But the party must now think very hard about whether there is an alternative to the ming vase scenario. Is there a route for parties of government, which engages seriously and honestly with the spirit of anti-politics, but which does not involve becoming a populist yourself?

I believe there is. Many aspects of ming vase politics arise from a cautiousness at the political centre which is unnecessary and counter-productive. It holds voters at arm’s length and inadvertently inflates populism.

This series makes 30 here-and-now proposals for how Labour should ‘put down the vase’ in relation to its fight against Reform. (This email includes the first nine). Some are things which, since the Labour conference, have already begun to happen and must continue. Others are more radical or new.

The suggestions are divided into four areas: communications, electoral strategy, general policy and migration policy. They are primarily driven by my analysis of public opinion, but I’ve tried to take seriously at every juncture the policy parameters the government is working within.

COMMUNICATIONS

The past four or five decades have increased exponentially the scrutiny which politicians are subject to. 24-hour news, the internet and the smart-phone have all changed the media context. Everything is known and seen, every failure magnified. And a population which is now fiercely non-deferential is intolerant of each slip-up.

In this sphere, the ming vase approach is characterised by spin and a fear of reputational damage – seeking to remove lines of attack, avoid ‘gaffes’, promise the very best possible outcome, and stick to media ‘lines’ with which few could disagree. The fear of what happens if you fail to do this is particularly acute for Labour – a party which is scarred by perceptions of amateurism in the 1980s, and which made significant steps to professionalise in the decades after.

This professionalisation was clearly necessary, but has brought diminishing returns over time, as an age dominated by mass media has given way to an era of social media. (Peter Hyman’s article on why the grid no longer functions illustrates this change).

Voters are increasingly annoyed by ‘everyone wins’ messaging, hate the inability of leaders to say what they think, take a ‘believe it when I see it’ approach to shiny policy announcements, and demand to know what you will actually do differently. They’re drawn to politicians who are distinctive enough to command attention, and would now perhaps quite like a leader who flipped a defiant V-sign at journalists on Brighton beach.

Below are nine initial suggestions for Labour in this area. Several of these focus on the excessive partisanship of modern politics – which I see as one of the most under-priced reasons for low trust. Others are about creating a more authentic voice and a more adult relationship with voters.

The suggestions are as follows.

1. Admit what we don’t know or can’t do. The reflex of the political centre, faced with populism, is often to pose as omnipotent – admitting no fault or weakness. The Winter Fuel U-turn was spun as something planned all along, for instance. And Labour went into the last election talking about the ‘highest growth in the G7’ – which could never be guaranteed. Labour should instead level with voters: these are choppy waters but we’re the best party to navigate. We should hold our hands up when things don’t go as planned, and make a virtue of admitting what we don’t know or can’t yet be sure of.

2. Show your workings. Ronald Reagan famously said ‘If you’re explaining you’re losing’. This truism has mistakenly been absorbed by parts of the centre left who, for fear of bombarding people with facts, instead believe they must always focus on pithy messages. In a world where information is everywhere, this must be re-evaluated. Labour frontbenchers should see explanation as a key part of their toolkit. This should involve honest discussion of the trade-offs at stake. Rather than just reiterating how ‘iron-clad’ her fiscal rules are, for instance, Rachel Reeves could do a video explainer, setting out what each rule actually is and what happens if she breaks it.

3. Find ways to foster authenticity among MPs. Labour has foregrounded an ethos of ‘service’ as its answer to rebuilding trust. This is welcome. But even if the standards promised had been met it wouldn’t have been enough. Yes, the electorate are angry at MPs allegedly ‘on the take’. But they’re at least as frustrated with ‘career politicians’ who appear scripted or evasive. Hence many are willing to overlook the countless misdeeds of Farage, because he at least seems to speak his mind. If Labour is to be a party of ‘big beasts’ who can take on Reform, then back-benchers and front-benchers alike must feel able to shoot from the hip and be themselves. Some sort of internal party line is still needed. But this should be stripped of party-political attacks and verbatim soundbites. It should instead present a distilled rationale for government decisions, which MPs can engage with, articulate for themselves and have some licence to deviate from.

4. Stop blaming the ‘mess we inherited’. Yes, the last government was awful. But the effort to hammer home ‘Tory failure’ feeds directly the impression of politics as a game. This is especially true with things which weren’t really their fault. Before the last election, for instance, Labour often characterised the cost-of-living crisis not just as something the Tories exacerbated, but as their deliberate creation – as though getting rid of them was all it took. Voters are angry that this proved false. Continuing to blame the legacy only serves to undermine what should be the central, ‘country over party’ narrative: that this would be a tough period to try and govern for anyone, but that Labour is approaching it with the right priorities.

5. End the search for a killer attack on Reform. In general, ‘attack’ occupies a bigger place in mainstream parties’ minds than it should. This is especially true in relation to Reform – a new kid on the block, which is held to a lower standard by voters. Flagging the threat Farage poses to the NHS may help, as few are aware of this. But my suspicion is that most of the risks attached to Reform are already priced in for voters. This is not to say Labour shouldn’t argue forcefully against what Farage stands for, or show how we’re different. But Reform won’t be stopped by a clever, ‘Miliband in Salmond’s pocket’ style attack. The only way to beat them is by building up sufficient clarity and momentum that they can be brushed aside as armchair critics.

6. Minimise ‘growth’ in the messaging. Economic growth is an abstract idea for many voters. It’s a distraction from the main economic issue people care about, the cost-of-living. It’s not regarded as something a government can take credit for and is not something voters expect to personally benefit from. It’s clearly of seminal importance within government, but its public-facing role should be small. Unpopular policies should not be pursued if their sole purpose is to signal ‘toughness’ to the markets in the hope of getting growth. And positive things, like housebuilding or transport infrastructure, should be talked about in terms of how they help people buy homes or travel to work – not as vehicles for growth.

7. Acknowledge as often as possible that Brexit failed – and could never have worked. This is incontrovertibly true and widely accepted, and it’s very positive to see Labour now making the point as stridently as it is. It goes without saying that Leave voters should not be guilt-tripped, and that the distraction of rejoining should remain off-limits. But the bald fact is that the goal Farage spent decades agitating for turned out to be a dud. This should be said as often as possible. Not as an excuse or a way to win back liberals, but as a serious proof-point in the argument for why right populism does not work.

8. Make fairness the governing principle. As many have pointed out, Labour seems to lack a guiding vision or set of values. It’s unclear what the party is ‘renewing’, going ‘further and faster’ towards, or looking to ‘change’. Without this, popular policies seem smaller than the sum of their parts. This is where fairness comes in. The word should feature on every lectern and leaflet, and serve as the yardstick against which every policy is judged. No sane voter will think we are swivel-eyed communists for talking about fairness. It’s about re-connecting effort to reward, closing gaps in life chances, and putting resource where need is greatest.

9. Retire the term ‘working people’. The phrase ‘working people’ applies to the chief exec of a water company as much as to a street-cleaner. It distances Labour from its working-class roots, yet hopes a little of the egalitarian brand will still rub off. It implies the lack of a core purpose. The answer is not to go back to social class, as the class structure has fragmented and the traditional working-class is now small. But Labour should replace its talk of ‘working people’ with a willingness to speak the language of priorities – in relation to ‘low- and middle-income’ voters or ‘those without inherited wealth’ to fall back on.

Whilst the final two points above are about communications, they also link to deeper electoral questions, about core appeal, constituency and purpose. The next installment will examine this in more detail. It can be read here.

What do we mean by ‘elite’? In a populist age – or perhaps a post-populist one – the term has become increasingly slippery and laden. This is exemplified by Matthew Goodwin’s recent spate of articles on ‘the new elite’ (used to trail his book), and by the hostile online responses to them.

To begin with, below are four ways in which the word ‘elite’ can be used. These are sequential, each one blurring into the next. And they are, with the exception of the first, pejorative, each one more so than the last.

1. Elitism as specialism. When we talk about elite sportsman or even elite scientists, it is not usually negative. ‘Elitism as specialism’ describes people who have mastered a skill, often in an environment which lets them hone their craft. The more a profession relies on representing or understanding the public (MPs, journalists, novelists etc), the less this type of elitism is legitimate, hence the dislike of SpADs and ‘professional politicians’. But society, in some sense at least, needs people who have specialised and excelled – including in policy-making and governance.

2. Elitism as privilege. The next definition describes those with a privilege they do not deserve. Eton is referred to as an ‘elite school’, usually as an insult; those attending are correctly thought to not be there on merit. Being elite in this sense involves occupying a lucky or cosseted bubble, separate from the realities of life. This can be economic (e.g. those in the 1%), or intellectual (e.g. those in an academic ivory tower). This sort of elite is high-handed and inaccessible to outsiders, not because it is intentionally malicious but because it is unrepresentative and insulated from real life. The more unequal a society is, the more prone it is to an elite of this type forming.

3. Elitism as membership of a clique. The third version of elitism is based on networks. This is partly an extension of the second definition – except in this case it transfers its privileges to others. This can be done accidentally or deliberately – via the ‘old school tie network’ or through the ‘weak ties’ available to the children of those in the arts and the media. The cronyism of the Conservatives in the pandemic is an example of the bad place it leads to. But it also happens fairly naturally in most walks of life, and is difficult to stop.

4. Elitism as power. The fourth and most pejorative meaning refers to a group which undemocratically wields power. Elitism here is a conscious act; a powerful few take steps to manage a powerless public, whether to stifle egalitarian impulses or to trample socially conservative views. The elites identified are more competent and self-serving than the rest of us, and evidence of their work is everywhere to be seen. Often, those referring to this definition of ‘elite’ come from the ideological fringes. Elites, they believe, stifle political views they hold, which would otherwise be more popular. Indeed, the populism of the 2010s was built upon hostility to the fourth version of elitism – be it Corbynism’s account of a system deliberately rigged against the poor, or Farage’s call-to-arms against one allegedly stacked against British culture.

There are differences of degree, within this fourth definition. And, at its far end, is the jump-off point to full fat, tinfoil-hat lunacy. (Hence why Corbyn, Farage and many others besides tended to attract cranks). When a sincere conviction that we’re subject to Type 4 elitism comes up against the bald reality that we live in a democracy, it must either reassess the extent of its diagnosis, or find a way to conclude that the true extent of elite power is hidden.

One interesting difference between the four definitions is about how many elites each one allows to exist. Type 1 involves hundreds, in different fields of specialism – from football to epidemiology to human rights. These do not necessarily interact.

With Types 2 and 3 there are fewer elites, but there is still the possibility of more than one. These are built around different planes of privilege, which again do not necessarily overlap. Thomas Piketty’s analysis has traced out the emergence of two major elites – one economic, one cultural – and an excellent recent piece by James Marriot discussed the “diffusion” of the 1950s establishment into smaller tribes.

The connotation of Type 4 elitism, lastly, is singular, with one group ruling all that it surveys.

These variations stem from the level of power that each definition imagines its respective elites to have. The more powerful they are, the less they will permit rival elites. The four tiers therefore operate like the tributaries of a river basin, as people move from believing in one type to believing in the next; converging at a single point before disappearing into the deep blue sea of explicit conspiracy theory, where ideology comes barely to matter.

Only thin membranes separate these four, sequential elites from each other. Hence, we frequently slip between them. Colloquially, for example, we often throw together ‘privilege and power’ – i.e. Type 2 and Type 4 elitism – as though they were the same things, whereas the overlay is in fact far from perfect.

Indeed, because most of us do not consider ourselves elite, it is easy for us to imagine that one form of elitism is another, more overt kind. If you look at the political journey of someone like Russell Brand, you see an individual going up through these gears very fast. Many on the left who joined Brand in bemoaning Type 2, 3 or 4 elitism have come to look with despair at his susceptibility to the most extreme and pernicious anti-elite narratives. He is now out in open water, from where he may never return, and spends his time telling others to join him.

Not all populists think like Russell Brand, of course, or will take it as far as him. But a primary effect of the populist continuum is to usher people from believing in one type of elitism to believing in the next. Michael Gove’s infamous dismissal of expert opinion is a good example. It implied that Type 1 elites – those with a technical or economic understanding of the implications for Brexit – were in fact Type 2 elites, lecturing us from a place of unearned privilege.

A book like The Establishment by Owen Jones, meanwhile, is full of selectively chosen examples of Type 3 behaviours, from naked nepotism to professional backscratching. But the book’s thesis encourages readers to believe these are instances of Type 4 elitism – proof of a wider plot to “manage democracy” so that popular socialist views are suppressed.

And Donald Trump, who believes unapologetically that a Type 4 elite is conniving against him, ushers his followers to go further still – to plunge into the wild waters of violent conspiracism.

Believing that Type 1 elitism dominates our society is obviously naïve. But attributing everything to Type 4 is credulous in its own way. So how do any of us get the balance right and avoid being sucked out to sea? Given that different nations are run differently in different time periods, only empirical analysis can capture the true state of affairs, when it comes to how coerced, manipulated or oppressed we are as a society. And only very precise language can stop the four definitions of elitism from merging.

These are the traits we look to academics for, which brings us back to the strange case of Professor Matthew Goodwin. As it happens, I have a little time for the idea, touched upon by Goodwin, that the discourse on the liberal left risks its own form of elitism – according to a strictly Type 2 definition. Much of its language and expectations come most naturally to those who start out with significant educational advantages and high cultural capital. And there are various unspoken assumptions and conversational elephant traps that this creates for the uninitiated. The phrase ‘Go away and educate yourself’, occasionally featured on placards, incapsulates the worst element of this. At a more mundane level, I can imagine that someone who had voted Leave might feel a need to hide this fact on their first day of a publishing internship.

Yet Goodwin, at least in the articles I have read, seems to encourage people towards the idea of an insidious and singular elite (Type 4) – a group wielding major anti-democratic influence, rather than just inhabiting one bubble among several. Over the past decade he appears to have gone on a journey to believing this himself. And he now, like other populists cited above, invites others to chase waterfalls as he has.

Goodwin’s role here is a dangerous one, especially when egged on by the tabloid press. Whether or not fear of Type 4 elites is justified, it is clearly gaining traction. An Unherd MRP poll from before Christmas suggested that large numbers believe ‘the world is controlled by a secretive elite’, across constituencies as different as Blaenau Gwent, Rochdale, Peterborough and Brighton Pavilion. Whilst I would wager that the elites these voters have in mind are often not the same as each other, the finding nevertheless points to low trust and widespread disillusionment.

Such concerns about democracy and power cannot and should not be ignored. They come from somewhere, and are notably more pronounced in deprived areas. But addressing the reasons for anti-elite grievances in these places will require a much more precise and serious conversation than Goodwin’s caricature permits.

The sustained polling gap between the two main parties has held up for some time now. Recently it has led to a discussion about the historical template for what will happen in 2024. Will this election be a repeat of 1992, when long-running leads for Labour flattered to deceive? Or will it be more like 1997, when the electorate were as good as their word? One piece argued that the outcome could be even worse than this, from a Tory perspective – akin to Labour’s loss in 1931. More recently, commentators have begun to predict the opposite – that Sunak could rescue victory from the jaws of defeat.

This article isn’t seeking to put forward an alternate prophesy. Rather, it looks at a British sub-region which is itself, from an electoral perspective, deeply portentous: the Thames Estuary. If an earthquake is about to happen, then its first tremors could be felt there.

‘Both harbinger and bellwether’

It was an Estuary constituency, Basildon, which foretold Labour’s disappointment in 1992. When it was announced that the seat had been held by the late David Amess at 11.22pm on April 9th of that year, it signalled the start of an unexpectedly bad evening for Labour. Indeed, Basildon’s nose for an electoral winner subsequently led the think tank Demos to publish a 65 page report in 2001, seeking to understand the town.

Five years later, Labour gains across north Kent and south Essex ensured that 1997 would not be a re-run of that night. Among the seats switching from blue to red was Dartford, the UK’s longest-running bellwether – which has voted for the winning party at every election since 1964. Even Castle Point shifted, albeit for just a single term, to Labour. Such results helped to deliver a thumping landslide for Tony Blair, and many of the other constituencies along the Estuary, like Chatham and Aylesford, stayed red for the precise length of time that Labour was in office – returning to the Conservatives in 2010.

I have spent a quite a bit of time in this part of the country. But I became interested in it from an electoral angle a couple of years ago, when I was asked to proof an article by geo-demographic expert Richard Webber (creator of the ACORN and MOSAIC segmentation tools). His piece, which is well worth reading in full, referred to the role of the Thames Estuary as “both harbinger and bellwether” – a phrase that stuck with me. It prompted me to see what happened if you traced things back further.

The chart below shows the result of doing this, depicting the swings to and from Labour and the Tories, during three seminal moments for post-war British politics: 1935-1945, 1974-83 (which I treat as a landslide in two parts) and 1992-1997. It takes the national swing, for each of these electoral shifts, and compares it to the swing in the Estuary sub-region.

(The Estuary swing is deduced by aggregating votes in the 10-15 seats in the area, effectively treating them as one constituency. The seats I’ve classified as ‘Estuary’ for each election are listed at the end of this piece, and generally run from Barking to Southend and from Woolwich to the Isle of Sheppey. I include only those constituencies which physically touch the Thames or its biggest tributary, the Medway, at the time of the respective votes. In a few cases the shifting boundaries mean there is not a perfect comparison of like with like, but the overall Estuary electorate is large enough that I think the outcomes hold up).

As we can see, at each of the three turning points the Estuary swung much more dramatically towards the eventual winner than the UK as a whole. In 1945, in particular, seats arrayed along the north and south banks of the lower Thames delivered a swing to Labour which was more than half again the national average. Estuary electors can take disproportionate credit for the landslide which Attlee, Bevan, Bevin and co were granted.

Fast forward to 1979 and 1983 and we see a curious reversal of this. Margaret Thatcher’s great success in those two elections was in winning over upwardly mobile voters in working-class constituencies. And nowhere was this more pronounced than on the Thames Estuary. Constituencies like Hornchurch – which at that point ran all the way down to Rainham Marshes and the river – saw successive shifts towards the Tories which eclipsed the national swings, pushing the Conservatives into new sociological territory.

Eighteen years later, this corner of England again changed its mind more fervently than anywhere else. The Estuary, it appears, was particularly swayed by the promise of Third Way social democracy. The electoral pen portraits who the New Labour project made famous (such as ‘Mondeo Man’) were, perhaps, particularly abundant on the lower Thames.

And nor does the story end in 1997. The EU Referendum result in 2016 arguably represents a fourth major sea change in post-war politics. It was a revolt against the forces of globalisation, a revenge for ‘left behind’ Britain, a rejection of the liberal norms in cities, or a plebiscite on immigration – depending on who you listen to.

Here, once again, the Thames Estuary presented to us in caps lock what the rest of the UK was quietly jotting down. As the chart below shows, the aggregate Leave vote, in the 12 local authorities downstream from the Thames Barrier, was 65% – 13 percentage points higher than the national figure.

The area therefore seems to have a sort of ‘kingmaker’ quality, its thumb wavering when the rest of the country has already made up its mind – impulsive and judicious all at once. It is no more beholden to one ‘side’ than the other, and is not a heartland for either party. As 1992 showed, the Estuary holds out later than other parts of the country; it requires more persuasion, its Tories are ‘shy’. But once it shifts it really shifts, stridently and without pausing further. With the polls poised as they are, this makes it an interesting place to think about.

Like everywhere else, but more so…

Why are national shifts magnified on Thames Estuary? It is traditionalist, yes, but not so traditionalist as to be above unceremoniously ditching Winston Churchill in 1945. It is collectivist and working-class in many areas, too, but not so much so as to balk at voting for Thatcher’s brand of individualism. It is exercised in some quarters about immigration and English culture. But not so exercised as to turn its nose up at Tony Blair in 1997 – who at the time seemed enthusiastic about joining the Euro.

Even on Brexit, the area is hard to pin down. A recent MRP poll for Unherd suggested that Estuary seats are now, like most of the country, prone to ‘Bregret’ – despite, as we’ve seen, heavily backing Leave seven years ago. Dagenham and Rainham had an estimated Leave vote of 70%, for example, making it the 17th most Eurosceptic seat. Yet according to Unherd’s poll it’s now in the top half of UK constituencies for ‘Bregret’ (309th of 632).

Unlike Lincolnshire, and a scattering of socially conservative strongholds on the east coast – where buyer’s remorse is still in relatively short supply – the Thames Estuary electorate does not appear to have stuck to its Leave-voting guns. It is, perhaps, as unsentimental about Brexit as it was about the Attlee, Thatcher and Blair projects, once their times had passed. It will not, it would seem, be in this part of Britain that the Brexit flame is kept alive.

In a certain respect, the Thames Estuary is like the UK as a whole, only more so. Its experiences of World War Two were as acute as anywhere in Britain, for example, with the prevalence of munitions factories meaning that large areas further upstream were heavily bombed, and that communities downstream remain to this day punctuated with pillboxes and other concrete fortifications. You can understand why Attlee’s notion of ‘winning the peace’ might have been resonant for a part of the country which had been central to the war effort, and which had seen its population and landscape decimated. New Towns like Basildon and utopian architectural projects like Thamesmead epitomise, in many ways, the brave new world that followed.

The economic and industrial changes which Britain underwent in the latter part of the 20th century are also, for better and worse, very apparent in this area. Upstream, the Millennium Dome and Docklands are within touching distance. Downstream you find the remnants of the Ford factory and the port at Tilbury – not to mention an array of seaside towns and villages, the resilience of which has been severely tested by budget air travel.

This economic landscape may come with additional challenges, not currently faced in many northern or Midlands towns, thanks to a housing market and living costs which are broadly in line with London. Yet the story here is more complicated than in other industrial and post-industrial areas. Thatcherism gave to as well as took from Estuary communities; proximity to London and the new sectors opening up there meant a totally different experience of the 1980s to South Yorkshire or the Welsh Valleys. The result is that a large number of Estuary seats are what I termed in a previous piece ‘deprived bellwethers’ – places that have the socioeconomic profile you’d associate with Labour, but without a historic loyalty to the party. (In a certain respect these ‘deprived bellwethers’ are the opposite of the Red Wall – a term which, as Anthony Wells points out, was intended to denote areas that are “less Conservative than you would have expected given their demographics”).

Added to this, the Thames Estuary has seen some of the most rapid inward migration anywhere in Britain, during the past two decades – partly due to the expansion and expense of London. This has happened in places with non-diverse histories, and the radical or populist right has succeeded at points in using such changes to stir up local tensions. The BNP and UKIP gained the same fleeting traction, in parts of the Estuary, as other political movements had done beforehand here – rearing their heads and then fading away.

Still a harbinger?

Does this area retain its power to forecast? A brief Guardian article after the 2005 election described Gravesham as a ‘broken bellwether’, after the seat bucked the national trend for the first time in many years, and some might suggest more broadly that the Estuary’s time as an electoral compass has passed. Perhaps the Red and Blue ‘walls’ are now the primary sites of political interest.

Certainly, the swings required for Labour to win in some Estuary constituencies would be enormous. Dartford’s current Tory majority over Labour is 19,160, for example. Gravesham’s is 15,581. Yet this partly reflects the blunt fact that Labour spent so much of the 2010s so far from power. If the party is going to overturn a Tory majority of 80 within one term at the national level, as some are predicting, then this will involve dramatic swings in individual seats like these.

There are short-term elements to factor in here. Another Unherd MRP analysis, from just before Christmas, looked at agreement with the statement ‘I worry about affording basic necessities, such as food and energy’. Thames Estuary seats registered, almost without exception, amongst the highest levels of agreement in the UK. The deep economic challenges which this suggests the area is experiencing could push cultural questions like Brexit to the back of the queue, despite the best efforts of the Conservatives to keep these issues live.

In a more long-term sense, meanwhile, there may be deeper trends afoot, which could help the lower Thames to retain its ‘harbinger’ status. The factors which have given the Thames Estuary its seer-like qualities are, after all, heavily rooted in demographic shifts in and out of London – e.g. the settlement of pre-war Londoners to New Towns – and further such changes may be afoot.

A piece in 2018 by pollsters Ian Warren and Chris Curtis, for instance, described the voting patterns among ex-Londoners in the south of England as a “timebomb” for the Conservatives. The article talked partly of the Labourisation of leafier climes (such as the Remain-voting ex-Tory areas subsequently dubbed Blue Wall). But it also name-checked Thurrock, Medway and Dartford as areas experiencing among the highest influxes of former London residents. These often comprise pro-EU voters in white collar jobs – fleeing not the capital’s inner-city problems or rates of crime (which past generations might have moved to the Estuary to escape) but its high house prices.

To understand this better it’s worth reading the property pages as much as the politics sections. Zoopla published a list, immediately before the pandemic, of the ten ‘best value commuter towns’ near London – almost all of them on or near the Estuary. The comparative affordability of the area thus makes it an attractive proposition for older graduates and aspiring home-owners, unable to buy in the capital yet needing to work there. COVID-19, which introduced hybrid working to a whole range of new sectors, will surely have accelerated this – especially given the cost-of-living crisis and the state of the housing market. And more specific factors, from Southend being awarded City status to the Elizabeth Line opening a fast service to Abbey Wood, may have amplified it further.

All of this follows hot on the heels of the diversification of the lower Thames in the past few years, described above, meaning that the area’s social and economic profile will increasingly look Outer London in years to come. These factors could, taken together, contribute to yet another twist to the social and electoral story of the Estuary.

Demographics are not destiny, of course. And there is no preordained rule that any place should hold the fate of the UK in its palm. Perhaps 2024 will be the first time that Dartford and co find themselves out of kilter with everyone else. But, given past form, you wouldn’t bet against the lower Thames region again backing the winner.

Rishi Sunak was derided recently for his alleged mockney-isms. But perhaps he’s onto something. It may well be, after a period of intense focus on other areas as the barometer of electability, that 2024 will again be won by whichever party has the best grasp of Estuary English.

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Seats used in the above analyses:

1935: ESSEX ROMFORD, ESSEX SOUTH-EASTERN, KENT DARTFORD, KENT FAVERSHAM, KENT GRAVESEND, ROCHESTER CHATHAM, ROCHESTER GILLINGHAM, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, WOOLWICH EAST, WOOLWICH WEST

1945: BARKING, BEXLEY, DAGENHAM, DARTFORD, ESSEX HORNCHURCH, ESSEX SOUTH-EASTERN, ESSEX THURROCK, KENT FAVERSHAM, KENT GRAVESEND, ROCHESTER CHATHAM, ROCHESTER GILLINGHAM, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, WOOLWICH EAST, WOOLWICH WEST

1974 (Oct): BARKING, BASILDON, DAGENHAM, DARTFORD, ERITH AND CRAYFORD, FAVERSHAM, GILLINGHAM, GRAVESEND, HORNCHURCH, ROCHESTER AND CHATHAM, SOUTH-EAST ESSEX, SOUTHEND EAST, SOUTHEND WEST, THURROCK, WOOLWICH EAST, WOOLWICH WEST

1983: BARKING, BASILDON, CASTLE POINT, DAGENHAM, DARTFORD, ERITH & CRAYFORD, FAVERSHAM, GILLINGHAM, GRAVESHAM, HORNCHURCH, MEDWAY, ROCHFORD, SOUTHEND EAST, SOUTHEND WEST, THURROCK, WOOLWICH

1992: BARKING, BASILDON, CASTLE POINT, DAGENHAM, DARTFORD, ERITH & CRAYFORD, FAVERSHAM, GILLINGHAM, GRAVESHAM, HORNCHURCH, MEDWAY, ROCHFORD, SOUTHEND EAST, SOUTHEND WEST, THURROCK, WOOLWICH

1997: BARKING, BASILDON, BEXLEYHEATH & CRAYFORD, CASTLE POINT, CHATHAM & AYLESFORD, DAGENHAM, DARTFORD, ERITH & THAMESMEAD, GILLINGHAM, GRAVESHAM, HORNCHURCH, MEDWAY, ROCHFORD & SOUTHEND EAST, SITTINGBOURNE & SHEPPEY, SOUTHEND WEST, THURROCK

2016 (local authorities): BARKING AND DAGENHAM, BASILDON, BEXLEY, CASTLE POINT, DARTFORD, GRAVESHAM, HAVERING, MEDWAY, ROCHFORD, SWALE, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, THURROCK

With Labour achieving enormous poll leads following the Tory chaos over the summer, many have revised or disparaged the idea that British politics has undergone a realignment. Below are a few thoughts about this, as someone who still has some time for the idea.

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What is/ was the realignment?

My understanding, when people talked about a UK political realignment in the 2010s, was that they described a sea-change shift — away from economics as the central fault line of the Labour-Tory divide, and towards social attitudes.

Brexit was regarded as both a catalyst and a consequence of this, creating new tribes — i.e. Labour Leavers and Tory Remainers — who lacked clear representation. And the Red and Blue ‘walls’ were the battlegrounds where this played out. Voters in the former tended to be economically left-wing but socially more conservative (and pro-Brexit). Those in the latter were roughly the reverse.

Brexit was pivotal, because it forced the Conservatives to decide between social conservatism and economic pragmatism; between ending free movement and staying in the single market. They prioritised the former — relinquishing the economic upsides of integration with other countries and surrendering in the process their claims to be the party of economic growth, risk aversion and ‘sound money’.

(It’s worth noting that many of Brexit’s strongest Tory advocates did not believe this was what they were doing. They were economic libertarians, and mistook the referendum result for an endorsement of their niche ideology).

Labour, meanwhile, faced choices of their own — about where they stood on immigration, and on broader ‘values’ questions like the Union Jack. These had lingered for some time thanks to the overtures of Ukip, but moved centre-stage post-Brexit.

The Tory Party were generally seen as net beneficiaries of the realignment, because the socially conservative voters they were attracting are spread in a more electorally ‘useful’ way — outside big cities. The 52% who voted Leave translates, in our First Past The Post system, into 64% of constituencies.

Hence, while the the tectonic plates were moving anyway,  the Conservative goal became, post-2016, to accelerate the shift. The Boris Johnson strategy relied on creating and amplifying divides based on social issues (e.g. the Rwanda policy). These aimed to further break apart the Labour coalition of cosmopolitans and communitarians. Consciously or unconsciously, this approach accepted as collateral damage the departure of liberal Tories.

The table below tries to show this, in the roughest of terms. It uses 2016 Brexit vote as a very crude proxy for where a constituency sits on the social axis, and 2019 deprivation score as an even cruder proxy for where it might be on the economic gamut (by assuming that more deprived places are generally more left-wing).

It therefore identifies four groups of seats:

• economically left, socially liberal (above average deprivation, below average Leave vote);

• economically left, socially conservative (above average deprivation, above average Leave vote (e.g. Red Wall));

• economically right, socially liberal (below average deprivation, below average Leave vote (e.g. Blue Wall));

• economically right, socially conservative (below average deprivation, above average Leave vote).

The table shows the cumulative swing to and from the main parties for each of these groups, between 2010 and 2019. It shows that social values, insofar as they can be assumed on the basis of Brexit vote, have been fairly instrumental in determining which direction seats have moved. More instrumental than economics.

This, in a nutshell, is the realignment as I understand it — an increasing emphasis on social attitudes as a fault line between the parties

How did the realignment affect politics?

Let’s rewind a bit. The diagram below (Diagram 1) illustrates the political spectrum as it’s often represented, with the vertical axis showing social attitudes and the horizontal axis showing economic positions. It envisages (in a very simplified way) where the two parties might have presumed to draw their traditional support.

It depicts the Tories attracting both socially conservative and socially liberal voters from the economic right, and Labour doing the same on the economic left. The Red and Blue ‘walls’ are sketched in. (I mention these ‘walls’ throughout this blog, as a shorthand for the socially conservative left and the socially liberal right, respectively).

The next diagram (Diagram 2) shows where the new basis of support for the parties was expected to lie, in a fully ‘realigned’ politics. It depicts the Tories as the party of social conservatism, regardless of economic interest, with Labour the party of social liberalism.

This is the end-point which many academics charting the realignment foretold— and which a few became deeply invested in. And it’s what Tory populists like Boris Johnson (and before he left Dominic Cummings) seemed to be shooting for. Theresa May was also aiming for this, but lacked the ruthlessness, recklessness and charisma to deliver it.

Between these two situations (Diagrams 1 and 2) there exists a period of flux in which the realignment is/ was actually happening. This period began in earnest in June 2016 — the point when Labour Leave and Tory Remain voters started to be ‘up for grabs’. These two groups were to become completely un-moored from their former political representatives in the coming years, as the 2019 European Elections showed.

The next image therefore (Diagram 3) depicts political reality in the medium term, post-referendum. Both top right and bottom left areas are highly fluid here. In particular, the Conservatives were actively courting pro-Brexit Labourites in the Red Wall.

This part of the spectrum was indeed open to capture, as we saw in December 2019. And Boris Johnson was an asset to the Conservatives here, annexing the bottom left quarter in a way that few Tories could have done. The ‘levelling up’ slogan comprised the economic part of his effort to lock these seats in, post-election. And the ‘culture war’ fixation comprised the social element.

The Conservative hope was that, having done this, they could shore up the top right section . This would give them a huge coalition to draw on, penning Labour into metropolitan enclaves. It was a hope which looked, before party-gate, to be being realised.

The next image (Diagram 4) illustrates how the realignment appeared to be going between Summer 2019 and Autumn 2021. This time-frame starts when Johnson becomes Conservative Leader, and includes the 2019 election. It continues throughout 2020 — with daily politics paused by COVID-19 and with Keir Starmer’s ‘under new management’ message yet to cut through.

The 2021 Hartlepool by-election was arguably the apogee of this. It seemed to signify that the Johnson strategy was working.

The under-priced (or perhaps over-priced) factor in Boris Johnson’s strategy was Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s social and international attitudes were toxic for many Red Wallers,  and drove a significant number to the Conservatives. But he was also economically terrifying enough (and, in fact, Eurosceptic enough) to stop Blue Wallers from playing their own role in the realignment. Instead, many voted Tory through gritted teeth in 2019.

Corbyn’s presence and its aftermath therefore masked how fragile the coalition in Diagram 4 really was. It made a fleeting alliance seem impregnable, and gave many Tories a false sense of security.

In particular, Blue Wall disillusionment with the Conservatives remained strong. This was thanks to the party’s “f**k business” ethos, but also to commuter belt areas getting younger and more diverse. Liberal Tories weren’t necessarily all so exercised about refugee policy or trans rights that they’d change their vote on the basis of these issues alone. But they could tell that the Conservatives were abandoning economic pragmatism to fight battles which Blue Wallers didn’t much care about.

Hence, the Johnson strategy was risky. It jeopardised part of the historic Tory base, to pursue hard Brexit and an attendant set of social policies. It did this to attract voters who were electorally lucrative, but who had no residual loyalty to Toryism. By leaning so heartily into this, Johnson put not one but two quarters of the spectrum ‘in play’ (top right and bottom left). And, having believed they could capture both, the Tories didn’t allow for the possibility that they might end up with neither.

Following Johnson’s departure and the election of Liz Truss, this came to pass. Truss effectively played the role of a reverse Corbyn, repelling Labour Leavers and Tory Remainers in equal degree.

Indeed, Truss’s mini-budget was perfectly pitched to achieve this: tax cuts for the rich to enraged Red Wallers, alongside a lack of fiscal restraint to panic Blue Wallers. Cultural issues could no longer mobilise the former; lingering hopes that the Tories were ‘on their side’ in economic as well as social terms were extinguished. And the latter had their own suspicions confirmed: that the Conservatives had become socially conservative culture warriors and economic isolationists.

Labour, in the meantime, had done enough work that they were a viable opposition for both tribes. The image below (Diagram 5) visualises the consequence of this, with Keir Starmer making major in-roads with top right as well as bottom left, according to polls.

If an election happened tomorrow, the Conservatives could be left with only a small patch of the spectrum to rely on — an economically and socially right-wing section of opinion, which is itself shrinking over time. Talk of a 1997 style wipe-out for them is not unrealistic. And, whilst Rishi Sunak seems more likely than his predecessors to steady Blue Wall nerves, the rhetoric of Suella Braverman and co could offset this.

Indeed, part of the problem for parties navigating the realignment is that you can go from expansion to contraction very fast. (Herein lies a lesson for Labour). The Conservatives were, not so long ago, winning Red Wallers through conservative cultural stances and holding Blue Wallers through non-re-distributive economics. They’re now losing the former group thanks to the latter policies and the latter group thanks to the former. They moved, in the course of less than 18 months, from dominating three quarters of the spectrum to being guaranteed just one. It is only through a double-edged capitulation of this type that a party can go, in less than three years, from a 90 seat commons majority to an electoral forecast of just 61 seats.

A pet theory?

Labour’s recent dominance in the polls is not, in my view, proof that the realignment was a pet theory. Rather, both main parties have been involved in a rotating courtship with different voter groups since at least 2016, motivated by an awareness of how important (and potentially divisive) differing social values have become.

This was based on perpetual trade-offs between economic and social approaches; on continually revised deductions about whether to ‘lean into’ the realignment or try and reverse it. The present Conservative predicament is the consequence of Johnson betting the ranch on one aspect of the realignment, and leaving his party high and dry in the process.

The image below (Diagram 6) shows how, I would say, Labour and the Tories are now aligned. (As with the other spectrums, it depicts where their core support lies, rather than vote share). This is different from the first spectrum (Diagram 1), because it’s no longer primarily economic. But nor has it become purely social (as per Diagram 2).

Labour’s areas of greatest strength are now inner-city areas, but specifically those which are socially liberal and economically left-wing. Between 1997 and 2019, for example, Hackney South and Shoreditch went from being Labour’s 130th biggest English majority over the Tories to being its 6th. Leave-voting Easington in County Durham, by contrast, went from first to 111th.

The Tories, meanwhile, are increasingly strong in areas which were socially conservative as well as economically right-wing. Between 1997 and 2019, Rayleigh and Wickford went from being their 150th biggest English lead over Labour to being their first. Remain-voting Winchester, conversely, dropped from third to 57th.

The next table again takes the ultra-crude measures of Brexit and deprivation, to look at movements between the parties since 1997. It compares the two parties’ 20 biggest leads over one another in 1983, 1997 and 2019, looking at the averages for Leave vote and deprivation score.

This is very simplistic, as we’re applying data from the late-2010s to seats as they were 30 years before. But (insofar as it shows anything) it suggests that, while Labour’s base became much less Brexit-inclined and the Tories’ a little more so during this period, there was a lot less change in terms of deprivation.

The two charts below cover the same timescale. They look at 350 English seats which were contested, on their current boundaries, at every election between 1983 and 2019. The first shows the rankings of the 100 safest and least safe among these for Labour in 1983, and how they have shifted since then, in terms of where they ranked.

The second shows the same thing in reverse: the 100 safest and least safe for Labour in 2019, and how they had progressed in the safeness rankings since 1983. It is hard to argue, on the basis of these, that there’s been no realignment at all— although at what point it began to really snowball is hard to say.

Will the changes shown above fully reverse at the next election, thanks to the cost-of-living and the reassertion of economic priorities over social ones? Will Easington and Winchester respectively go back, in 2024, to being among Labour and the Tories’ very strongest seats?

Personally, I suspect not. Whilst the realignment was seized upon by the Conservatives as a political solution — an audacious, back-door alternative to Cameronism — it is in fact rooted in social, economic and geographical factors which go far deeper and have existed for far longer. These include, in no particular order:

• industrial decline from the 1980s onwards;

• the growing regional inequality between big cities and everywhere else;

• high rates of migration, occurring in the first instance in urban centres and happening much more gradually elsewhere;

• gentrification and the growing appetite for city living among young professionals;

• the rapid ascent of post-materialist values (especially among the rising number of middle-class graduates).

These sorts of factors create very different life experiences, attitudes and priorities in different places. Housing deprivation is acute in cities but comparatively much less so in towns, for example. Employment deprivation follows the reverse pattern. Hostility to migration is lowest in the places where migration has been a fact of life for longest. Etc etc.

Thanks to these sorts of shift, Labour’s ‘heartlands’ have moved from industrial strongholds to educated inner-cities in the past few years. This may be academic if the party is winning everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer true.

Critics of the realignment idea are right to say that it has died as a successful populist strategy for the Tories. Indeed, the Conservatives’ pursuit of it has painted them into an electoral corner that it’s hard to see a way out of for them. But the factor which made this strategy viable in the first place — namely an electoral map increasingly influenced by regional inequality — remains very much alive.

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Executive Summary

This paper helps to address the question that many in Labour and on the left in general have been asking in recent years. With people’s attitudes swinging in our favour on a range of social issues — and even, post-pandemic, on economic intervention — why do we keep failing to win a General Election?

Such a question will never have one definitive answer. But the analysis here suggests we must pay greater attention to the role of education in the recent political realignment. If we do, we can tailor our policy and messaging to appeal to the broad swathe of constituencies, in England in particular, who have abandoned Labour. And we can do this without compromising our values or vision as much as many fear we have to.

I. The realignment in UK politics is rooted in education levels

Analysis of swings over the last decade shows constituencies with low formal education and high educational deprivation swinging to Tories.

This realignment favours the right in terms of electoral arithmetic, because non-graduates are more evenly distributed across constituencies.

II. The split is between direct and systemic reasoners

The cause of the divergence between voters with different education levels does not come down to values as much as we sometimes imagine; it relates to differences in logic and language. This lies at the root of many ‘culture war’ issues.

Voters with higher formal education are more likely to favour systemic logic. Labour has increasingly appealed to those who see things in this way. Those with fewer qualifications prefer direct logic. The Conservatives, especially under Boris Johnson, have captured this audience. As the American linguist George Lakoff puts it, “Direct causation is dealing with a problem via direct action. Systemic causation recognises that many problems arise from the system they are in and must be dealt with via systemic causation.”

The distinction does, it is true, point to genuine differences on some policy positions (e.g. ‘Toughness on the causes of crime’ (systemic) versus ‘Toughness on crime’ (direct)).

But the so called culture war debates in the UK are often not divides about core values or existential questions like abortion or climate change, as they are in the US. Instead, they are frequently about definitional questions, exposing rifts in analysis and logic.

(The focus on direct and systemic causation is a hypothesis. Despite making extensive use of secondary research, the topic would benefit from additional primary research).

III. The 2010s have seen rising education levels and growing political complexity

Voters with higher formal education are more likely to favour systemic logic. Labour has increasingly appealed to those who see things in this way. Those with fewer qualifications often prefer direct logic. The Conservatives, especially under Boris Johnson, have captured this audience.

The causes of this realignment relate to rising university access and the complexities thrown up by globalisation. These factors divide direct and systemic reasoners.

IV. Boris Johnson is a master of direct reasoning

Boris Johnson has pioneered an ultra-direct approach, based on metaphors (e.g. “bung Brexit in the microwave”) and on the ridicule of systemic reasoning as ‘woke’.

This lets him attack his opponents in ways that seem authentic, yet which are consistent with socially liberal attitudes on some issues (he is not culturally conservative, as such). But it is a fundamental departure from Cameron’s attempts to modernise the Tories, which sought to recognise the role of society and the complexity of international relations.

Labour must see what is attractive about ‘Johnson-ism’ — in that it promises actions not words, and bestows agency upon voters — as well as what is wrong with it.

V. Some progressives mis-use systemic logic

Conversely, an ultra-systemic approach has been adopted by some leftist groups in recent years. This takes the form of language which implies everything is linked (e.g. “climate justice is social justice”) or which equates complicity in a system with direct harm (e.g. through references a range of behaviours being “acts of violence”).

These approaches alienate directly minded voters, making the progressive critique of ‘the system’ more confusing rather than less. They also have a negative impact on wider systemic thinking, guiding it into non-progressive cul-de-sacs.

VI. There are three steps for Labour to address this

Labour must win back direct reasoners, to avoid becoming a party which speaks solely to university towns and urban hubs. There are three steps to closing the gap:

1. Labour must acknowledge the value of direct reasoning. There are times when A plus B really does equal C. We must ditch the idea that direct and systemic logic are in competition. We will demonstrate our competence through being willing to speak directly when we need to.

2. Labour must distance itself from those who misuse systemic thinking, or render it woolly and impenetrable. We should avoid culture war slogans, which make structural arguments more confusing rather than less.

3. Labour should use the post-COVID period as a moment, like 1945, to argue for big systemic and societal reforms. To bring direct reasoners along, this needs to be done in a practical way, which is crystal clear about what the changes are, why they matter and how exactly we will make them.

Introduction

In South Thanet, during the 2015 General Election, I remember a conversation with a potential Labour voter. We were at an event in a community centre and I was the press officer for the Labour candidate. It was a very working-class area, and was also at risk from UKIP. The man, who was out of work, had come with his young family — partly to see our celebrity guest, Labour-supporting Ross Kemp.

During my short chat with the man I referred to the estate as being a ‘poor area’ — one which needed the extra resources that only a Labour government could offer. This was true — the neighbourhood was subsequently listed among 206 ‘left behind’ wards identified by Local Trust[1] — but it didn’t feel right to say it. I quickly corrected myself that the estate was ‘more deprived’ and then re-calibrated a second time, stating that it was ‘less affluent’. Finally, I settled on a formulation of words I was happy with: ‘It may or may not be less affluent than other areas’.

The man stared at me, bewildered by a sentence which had been diluted into meaninglessness, and we parted ways. I had come across as mealy-mouthed and weird.

The recollection came back to me in September 2021, as I watched Keir Starmer triangulate on the spot when asked about the difference between ‘women’ and ‘people with cervixes’. Like me, Starmer’s lack of confidence on the topic imposed a set of linguistic riders and caveats, causing him to seek refuge in labels and jargon.

This tendency is widespread. And it is often driven, albeit obliquely, by a desire to acknowledge the wider ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ factors behind an issue. My description of areas which ‘may or may not be less affluent than other areas’ came — when I think about it — from the ‘society’s fault’ thinking which drove my politics. I was frightened of appearing to so bluntly describe an area as poor, in case it looked like I was saying its poverty was of its own making.

The result was that the individuals in both scenarios appeared hopelessly out of touch: unable to call a spade a spade, and more interested in identifying the right terminology than in solving the problem. As I’ll go on to argue, I think this explains Labour’s woes in the 2010s, and helps us to answer a question which has plagued the Labour Party in recent years: why, in an increasingly progressive country, have progressive parties increasingly struggled? [2]

One can debate exactly how progressive we are in Britain, but I would argue that people today are, on balance, more committed to equality, sustainability and fairness than they were ten, thirty of fifty years ago — including on questions like immigration and crime. Yet a curious cocktail of factors means we’ve been unable to capitalise on this. Indeed, Labour have done particularly badly at the polls in the past decade, during the period when progressive advances in social attitudes were accelerating fastest.

This was demonstrated by the decision to leave the EU in 2016, as well as by the Tory landslide in 2019 and the loss of the Red Wall. The 2021 local elections and the accompanying Hartlepool by-election implied that many of the central dynamics were in action post-Corbyn. The party needs to find a way of correcting this if it wants to win.

At the time of writing it should be said that the Conservatives look far from hegemonic. They have been trailing Labour in the polls and Boris Johnson’s personal ratings have been tanked by the ‘party-gate’ scandal. When I began looking into what made him such an effective political force (which I explore in Part IV of this essay), the blind spot he clearly holds when it comes to his own behaviour was not quite so clear and perhaps didn’t seem so relevant. It remains to be seen if Johnson can fire up voters again, or if such rank hypocrisy will finally tarnish his brand once and for all.

Of course, Johnson’s unpopularity is partly down to the efforts of Keir Starmer, who is doing an excellent job of reforming his party. But there’s a risk that, with Labour’s lead over the Tories extended by the ‘party-gate’ scandal, we fail to ask some of the key questions which the past decade has thrown up.

What was it that put Johnson in such an electorally unassailable position in the first place? Why have the increasingly egalitarian attitudes of the UK population not been reflected by our politics? Why did Blackpool South, the third most deprived constituency in England, defect in 2019 to an Etonian who had won the Tory leadership by promising tax cuts for the richest? What has driven the realignment of the past few years? And how can we ensure that it is Starmer, not Boris Johnson’s successor, who comes to occupy the terrain that the Tories so effectively moved in on during the 2010s?

This essay seeks to answer these questions. It begins with a premise, based on my own data analysis, which is that education levels are the primary driver of the political realignment in the past decade. It then forms a theory about why education has become such a key electoral fault line — based on ideas about communications and causation. And from here it makes an argument about what Labour can do to reverse the realignment, if my theory is right.

Ultimately, this paper is a rebuke to the idea that the UK is polarised beyond salvation, or that our culture war debates are akin to those in the US (although I don’t deny that we could move in that direction if progressives play their cards wrong). It contests the notion that substantive divides on social issues now form the basis for our politics. And it challenges the comparisons that some have made with the 1980s, when deep reservoirs of cultural conservatism needed to be navigated and challenged by Labour, on issues like gay rights.

Thus, I hope, the arguments below provide reason for optimism for Labour and other progressive parties. Illiberal social conservatism and tooth-and-claw libertarianism are not popular. We’re not looking at sizeable majorities who favour the politics of Jacob Rees-Mogg. And we are not witnessing a yawning ideological chasm.

Rather, we are seeing a disconnect in communications and logic, partly of our own making and partly thanks to wider factors. Addressing this does not require huge policy concessions. But it does demand that we explain our ideas more clearly and work harder to understand our opponents.

PART I: The realignment in UK politics

The start-point for this essay is a simple question: ‘The country is more progressive, so why is the left losing?’

The UK population has become more egalitarian in recent decades, on questions like gender,[3] race[4] and sexuality.[5] On the environment — traditionally an issue which preoccupies liberals more than conservatives — attitudes have become much greener.[6] And research shows that both main parties’ voter bases moved gradually to the left on economic positions too, between 1992 and 2019.[7]

These general trends apply across age groups and social grades. So this is not a case of different groups diverging beneath the surface; there are not large sub-sets of people growing dramatically more reactionary.[8] The gradual tendency, across society, has been towards left liberalism.

Explicitly racist ‘Blacks Out’ campaigns by mainstream parties, like the one run in Smethwick in the 1964 General Election, would be wholly untenable now. Likewise the sorts of homophobic by-election run in Bermondsey in 1983, which asked electors to choose the ‘straight candidate’.

Yet this shift towards socially liberal values is not the story of our politics in recent years — insofar as left-of-centre parties have been unable to capitalise. The late 2010s saw, by way of illustration, a supporter of the death penalty become ensconced as Home Secretary, at a point in time when the public appetite for hanging criminals was the lowest it had ever been.[9]

In short, the populace is not shifting right-wards in the way that many feel, and nor is it as polarised by social issues as some claim. Yet positive changes in attitudes within the population aren’t being reflected in the makeup of parliament. The public moved to the left culturally, during the 2010s, yet the right of the Tory Party were the electoral beneficiaries.

Some liberals — including those on the centre right — might say this doesn’t matter. James Kanagasooriam describes a process where, on issues like gay marriage, “the final leg of the progressive relay race is often run by someone in a blue vest.”[10] True cultural conservatives observe a similar process, but see it much more negatively: “Conservatives keep winning elections, but really it feels like we’re governed by the Critical Race Theory department,” complained one Spectator article in 2021.[11] And some on the left sporadically make a similar claim. They suggest that Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn can take credit for moving the ‘Overton Window’ from opposition, even though neither became Prime Minister.

It is true that the modern Tory Party now tends to talk a good game on some of these issues, with David Cameron using the language of social liberalism and Boris Johnson deploying the rhetoric of the economic left. And there have been some positive steps.

But if you look at UK policies on the Ukraine refugee crisis, the universal credit rollout or international aid, it is hard to argue that we have a progressive government in conservative clothing. And, either way, it is a betrayal of Labour values for the party to reduce itself to the status of a pressure group.

Geography and culture

So, why are the progressive values of the country not reflected in our politics? Two elements explain the apparent contradiction: a geographical realignment in the country, accelerated by Brexit; and a culture war debate, played out online and in the media. Both of these phenomena undermine at the ballot box the egalitarian shifts in public opinion.

Underlying the first element is the fact that, while almost every part of the UK has moved in a progressive direction, many areas are only a bit more progressive than they were a couple of decades back, whereas a few are significantly more so. The ‘mean average’ constituency is, I think, decidedly more socially liberal. But the ‘range’ between the most and least liberal has grown.

As Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford point out in their book, Brexitland, those in less liberal parts of the country “are much more comfortable with diversity than their parents or grandparents. They often resent accusations of racism and xenophobia…as they feel they have moved away from the prejudices of their parents.” These advances are not appreciated by the most liberal groups, “whose attitudes have moved further and faster.”[12]

The result of this expanded range is that Westminster politics is more polarised, despite all parts of the population moving in the same direction. When an issue falls on a cultural fault line, it has more capacity to divide the ‘very liberal’ from the ‘quite liberal’ — Brexit being the prime example. There were 6 English seats in 2010 where Labour led the Tories by over 20,000 votes, and 83 where the Tories led Labour by the same amount. In 2019 these figures had increased to 39 and 145 respectively (see Chart 1).

How much is this parliamentary polarisation down to the attractiveness of Corbyn and Johnson respectively? I would say not very much. Neither were especially popular going into the last election. But there were clearly growing sections of the country who simply could not stand one or the other, and were willing to vote en masse to stop them becoming Prime Minister.

Overall, the Conservatives benefit most from the growing gap between very and quite liberal parts of the country. The reason for this is that places which have become a bit more liberal in the past couple of decades outnumber those that have become a lot more so — the latter having pulled away from the former. This, in turn, is because the most pronounced types of left liberalism increasingly coalesce in a comparatively small number of urban centres. In particular, younger graduates have migrated towards cities.[13] Bohemian enclaves and networked hubs of this kind now seem to talk a different language to other areas. Labour speaks this dialect fluently, but the Tories have been better at communicating with everywhere else.[14]

The second element, the culture war, describes a set of very aggressive public arguments. These function on the basis of talk radio style ‘debating points’, many of them so trivial as to barely matter. Yet they create a ‘narcissism of small differences’, percolating into everyday conversations and evoking deep, existential questions about who we are as a country.

Kirsty McNeill and Roger Harding argue, in a pamphlet for the Fabians, that “the culture wars should best be understood as an elite strategy rather than a public opinion reality… Even the term itself is a frame pushed by culture wars peddlers.”[15] While I fundamentally agree with this, it’s important to stress that the differences within the country are not baseless. There must be reasons why certain groups of voters would take one view on a culture war debating point and those in another area would take another — even if the differences are far milder than the culture warriors on both sides claim.

Generally speaking, the basic structure of the geographical changes at play are mirrored by the ripples which the culture war creates. The latter element works to inflame the former, meaning that each cultural wedge issue reinforces the wider rift, inviting people to take either-or positions. And, because the arithmetic of this generally favours the right, it is in the Tories’ interests to amplify these wedge issues.

This results in gimmicks like the ‘war on woke’ — led by many senior Conservative MPs — which aim to create schisms between the quite liberal and the very liberal. Such strategies zero in on debates at the extreme end, like the pulling down of statues, which divide the two. This approach has worked fairly well in the past few years, from the perspective of the right.

The net effect of the above is that the most progressive parts of the population have become estranged from everyone else, geographically and in the media, at precisely the point where they need to bring others with them. The resulting challenge for Labour is both to bridge an electoral chasm which many have come to regard as inevitable, and to find a position for itself in an increasingly binary set of culture war debates.

‘Very liberal’ votes stacked tall, ‘quite liberal’ votes spread wide

Let’s look in more detail at the geographical element. The 2010 and 2019 elections were both bad nights for Labour — although 2019 was obviously worse. But what we saw, during the intervening nine years, was a dramatic re-ordering, beneath the surface, in terms of which parts of the country Labour could rely on and where its appeal lay. Universal swing has become a thing of the past, with some constituencies moving dramatically in one direction and others going in the other. The changes that occurred, in the nine intervening years, went far beyond the additional seats which were lost by Labour.

To reiterate, the shifts that have occurred generally harm the left. It is true that there are a number of Tory held seats which might be attainable for Labour or the Lib Dems in the not-too-distant future — the ‘Blue Wall’, as analyst Steve Akehurst has dubbed it.[16] But the socially conservative right have, overwhelmingly, been the beneficiaries.

Chart 2 shows part of the reason why, reiterating the point made above. It visualises the structure of the 2016 Remain vote across all UK constituencies, as estimated by Chris Hanretty.[17] Whilst I think Brexit is a symptom rather than a cause of the realignment, Remain voting is generally associated with social liberalism, and can be used as a rough proxy for the distribution of what I describe as ‘very liberal’ attitudes.

As we can see, there are many more majority-Leave seats than majority-Remain. Whereas the Leave-Remain ratio in 2016 was 52%-48% in terms of votes cast, it was 64%-36% in terms of Westminster constituencies.[18]

The Remain campaign triumphed in fewer seats, but won by more handsome margins in those it did win — hence the steep incline once you get into ‘majority Remain’ territory. If you take Scotland out of the equation, this pattern gets even more pronounced.[19]

Chart 3, below, depicts the seat-by-seat cumulative swing from Labour to Tory and vice versa, in English parliamentary seats during the 2010s. It essentially treats the period between 2010 and 2019 as if this were a single electoral term, rather than three. The chart looks, for reasons of consistency, at English seats only (as do the charts which follow on, later in this section). This is primarily for reasons of consistency as some data, such as that for deprivation, is not directly comparable with that in other parts of the UK. But it is also an acknowledgment of the different political contexts within the other three nations.

The seat with the biggest cumulative swing from Labour to the Conservatives is Mansfield (23% points). The seat with the biggest cumulative swing the other way — once you set aside the slightly unusual case of Bradford West, George Galloway’s old stamping ground — is Lewisham West and Penge (22% points).

Despite both experiencing massive shifts, only one of these seats changed hands. Mansfield saw a 6,012 Labour lead over the Conservatives in 2010 become a 16,306 Tory majority in 2019. In Lewisham West and Penge, by contrast, Labour’s 7,012 advantage over the Tories at the start of the decade had trebled by the time of the last General Election, to become a thumping 21,543 majority.

This points to Labour’s wider problem. In total, 304 English seats swung cumulatively to the Tories between 2010 and 2019, whereas only 227 swung towards Labour (the Conservatives having started the 2010–19 period in government, let’s not forget).[20]

To focus on the extreme ends of the spectrum, 75 English seats swung Tory by 10% points or more during the 2010s, whereas just 49 swung to Labour by the same degree. The former are listed below and the latter further down. And the subsequent map shows how they’re spread across the country.

An interesting one to spot, among those swinging most dramatically to Labour, is Putney. It was gained by Labour in 1997, at the party’s high water mark, with a majority of just under 3,000, yet was retained at Labour’s electoral nadir in 2019, with a majority of nearly 5,000.

The fact that Labour increased its vote share in many areas during the 2010s is sometimes overlooked, during a decade that is seen as one of all-out decline for the party. But all that this dynamic really does is explain how vote share can be misleading. Labour’s late surge and high vote share in 2017 is now lauded as a near victory for the left. Yet the fact that the party was still so far from a majority demonstrated how concentrated and cosmopolitan its vote had become. Data journalist Ben walker tweeted, in early 2022, that a 2001-style vote share would, in 2022, yield 312 Labour seats rather than the 412 it won the party at the time.[21]

The simple truth is that, if Labour continues to pool its votes in cosmopolitan hubs, it will be consigned to eternal defeat elsewhere and will continue to be decimated at the ballot box. The overwhelming majority of the seats the party needs to win to gain a majority at the next election are in towns, rather than cities, according to the Fabians. And most of them are currently held by the Tories.[22]

There is no route to power for Labour that does not involve a significant number of these seats starting to swing back the other way. Keir Starmer has taken a string of essential steps to start turning around the tanker since becoming Labour Leader. But it will require discipline and ruthlessness to reverse the realignment to the extent needed.

The progressive alliance mirage

The idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ often acts as a balm here. It implies that liberal progressives of all kinds can club together and win. Assuming that this idea goes beyond case-by-case cooperation, then there are many practical questions to be inquired of it. These have been asked by others and I won’t go into them here.[23] But the chief objection I can see — even if the arithmetic panned out perfectly and the genuine policy differences between left parties were overcome — is that the ‘progressive coalition’ notion does not seek to reverse the realignment above, or even to properly acknowledge it.

Former Labour heartlands have not been lost to the Greens and the Lib Dems, nor thanks to the Greens or Lib Dems splitting the progressive vote. The Greens did not stand in Mansfield in 2019, and the Lib Dems won just 1,626 votes.

There are some seats, with small swings to the Tories, where the amalgamated votes of progressive parties outnumber those of the Conservatives. And there are also serious questions to be asked about how Labour can appeal to Tories without, for example, alienating Labour-Green swing voters.

But the progressive coalition idea accepts, by implication, that many of the country’s poorest communities — those who are supposed to benefit from egalitarian politics, and where Labour used to be strongest — are now lost to the Conservatives forever. According to this strategy, the progressive left acts in the interests of those whom it cannot convince to vote for it. This may suit some. But we should remember that Labour is not just a progressive party; it is also one which aspires to be of and for the interests of the people it was created to represent.

The underestimated role of education

One can immediately see, from the above lists of constituencies, that those swinging to the Tories are distinct sorts of places from those going to Labour. But what makes them different? What is it, exactly, which means that Mansfield has become an impregnable Tory fortress whilst, over the same time span, Lewisham West and Penge has become a place which weighs the Labour vote? And why are culture war strategies so successful at separating the former from the latter?

Does the difference come down to deprivation? Not really. Mansfield is the 117th most deprived English seat, of 533, and Lewisham West and Penge is the 192nd. Seats swinging to the Tories are, it is true, more deprived. But there are countless outliers. Manchester Central is the 17th most deprived constituency in England, but has seen a 7% point cumulative swing to Labour. The explanation is not simply about poverty and wealth.

Chart 4 looks at the proportion of people with no qualifications and with no university degree in all English seats. It then breaks this into quintiles, and shows the average 2010–19 cumulative swing in each of the quintiles. The top quintiles for no qualifications and no degree — i.e. the 20% of English seats that score highest for each — have seen big cumulative shifts towards the Tories (over 6 points in each case).

This pattern plays out neatly as you go down the quintiles. The lowest 20% of seats for no qualifications and no degree — i.e. the fifth of constituencies with the highest levels of formal education — have swung towards Labour in a similarly dramatic fashion (by more than 5 point in each case). This certainly helps to shed some light on the ‘Mansfield versus Lewisham’ conundrum: 16% have a degree in the former, compared to 37% in the latter.

When we compare education with alternative explanations for the realignment we find, at a constituency level, that low formal education correlates with high Tory swing more than other potential metrics. Chart 5 shows the ‘no degree’ figures from Chart 4 (in green), next to datasets which provide four other potential explanations for the factors driving the realignment: social class (blue), ethnicity (orange), age (brown) and deprivation (pink).

Deprivation correlates only slightly with high Tory swing. But in the case of class, ethnicity and age, there are also strong parallels. If a seat has:

a) a below average number of graduates

as well as

b) an above average proportion in social grades C2DE

c) an above average proportion of white British heritage and

d) a higher than usual average age

then odds on it will be Tory-held or moving in that direction.

Of 123 English seats which fit this description, 99 are now Tory-held (as of the Hartlepool by-election in April 2021), compared to 67 in 2010. And, in total, 107 of these 123 places have swung towards the Conservatives since 2010. The 16 places that are bucking the trend and swinging to Labour are mostly in the South West — where the collapse of the Lib Dems has created an unusual dynamic. And a few are in Merseyside — the part of England where the working-class aversion to voting Tory is most ingrained.

It is important to stress, however, that degree education correlates more strongly than class, ethnic makeup or even age. If we were to draw trend lines onto Chart 4 for these metrics, they would all be a little flatter than the green trend line for ‘no degree’.[24]

Indeed, I wonder if education pre-empts some of the other relevant factors. C2DE voters swinging to the Tories are less likely to have high academic qualifications, for example. And older voters are more likely to have left school at 16 or earlier, having grown up in an era when very few went to university.

Electoral consequences of regional inequality

Chart 6 corroborates the central role which education plays, using a different dataset. It looks at the seven ‘domains’ identified by the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). These are the specific types of deprivation which the IMD monitors in order to form its deprivation scores for each area.[25]

One of these domains is ‘educational deprivation’. Again marked in green on the chart, this definition of deprivation is based on attainment across different school key stages, as well as on school standards, absence rates, adult skills, literacy, access to training, routes into further education, etc.

The correlation is the same. Constituencies in the top quintile for educational deprivation have seen a cumulative swing of 5.19% points to the Tories, on average. Seats in the least deprived quintile for education have seen a 3.70% point swing to Labour, on average.

There are also correlations with a swing to the Conservatives when it comes to employment deprivation (in yellow), and to income deprivation and health deprivation (in blue and grey respectively).

By contrast, two of the other IMD domains — living environment (red) and housing/service access (purple) — exhibit the precise opposite dynamic. Places which are deprived according to these definitions have been swinging to Labour in significant numbers since 2010. Areas with more ‘crime deprivation’, as the IMD would define it, are also a little more likely to be swinging to Labour.

Within this, we can see a dynamic which is heavily informed by the relationships between city hubs and everywhere else. This is the product of a country with big economic imbalances, and is part of the reason why Labour must seize the initiative on ‘levelling up’.

In essence, deprived communities who live away from our city hubs have significantly worse employment prospects and life chances, with a lack of skilled jobs and few opportunities for training or other types of progression. Your likelihood of being on benefits or income support will probably be higher, and your life expectancy may be lower.

But deprived groups who live within city hubs do not necessarily enjoy a gilded life either: they inhabit crowded, built-up areas, with an impossibly competitive housing market, high homelessness and a lengthy queue for the library or the doctor’s waiting room. They are slightly more likely to be the victim of a violent crime and much more likely to be hit by a car or experience pollution.

Put very crudely, poorer communities in about two thirds of the country cannot get a decent job and those in the other third cannot get a decent house. The former are swinging Tory and the latter Labour.

Ashfield, Redcar and Barnsley East, for example, are all in the top quintile for educational deprivation and for employment deprivation, but in the bottom quintile for housing/service deprivation and living environment deprivation. These places have seen cumulative swings to the Tories of 13% points, 14% points and 10% points respectively. In Streatham, Chelsea and Fulham and Bristol West, by contrast, roughly the reverse is true: acute housing deprivation, but a wealth of opportunities. These constituencies have seen swings to Labour of 7% points, 9% points and, in the case of the latter, a whopping 21% points.

These questions point to quite big questions about who Labour is really ‘for’ — given that the nature of deprivation is so different in different parts of the country. As the academic Glen O’Hara wrote, in a 2017 blog, “Whose thinking is really, really ‘Labour’? The seventy-year-old ex-factory worker in Lincolnshire who owns his own house outright, or the thirty-year-old graduate mortgage broker renting out a tiny room in South-East London?”[26]

Educated, not ‘right’

Educational deprivation, however, remains the most interesting element — and the one which we’ll focus on most in the rest of this essay. It seems to consistently overlay almost perfectly with cumulative swing to the Conservatives, at least among English seats.

The level of educational opportunity in an area is a primary driver — if not the primary driver — of our electoral realignment. And it seems likely that it impacts on the sides which people take in the so called culture war, too. Those who are not degree-educated are less likely to have heard of the term ‘woke’ or to identify with it, for example.[27] And they are more likely to feel that the pace of cultural change is too fast.[28]

Clearly there is no necessary relationship between educational levels and cultural attitudes. Many of the architects of contemporary British right-wing populism (be it Nigel Farage or Dominic Cummings) are anything but educationally deprived. But, as academic Paula Sturridge notes, “It has long been established that those who have experienced higher education are more liberal” as a rule, when it comes to “issues of authority, tolerance, and the rule of law.”[29] Meanwhile, work by Elizabeth Simon into why the educational divide overlays with Brexit loyalties finds that it primarily comes because attainment levels translate into a certain set of cultural attitudes (rather than because different educational experiences translate into different economic interests).[30]

Surridge goes on to point out that “the effects of education on voting behaviour at general elections has received very little attention.” And it’s for this reason that I think it’s particularly important to look at it here. Why should levels of formal education carry such sway over whether groups are ‘quite liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ when it comes to social issues?

We’ll go on to explore this question in Part II. But just in case it needs to be said, before we do, the above findings don’t vindicate or ‘prove right’ those who support liberal and left-wing causes. Education and intelligence are fundamentally different, and the electoral instincts of graduates are no loftier — no more prone to accuracy, perspective or a concern for the public interest — than those of people who leave school at 16. It should be seen as an indictment of the progressive approach that we’ve lost so many voters in the seats with the fewest opportunities and the worst life chances.

Indeed, if being more formally educated did mean being cleverer, then degree-educated progressives would have done a much better job of bringing others with them. As I argue later on, part of the problem is that left-of-centre graduates have adopted a corkscrew logic to some of the big social questions — failing to think in straight lines and explain ideas properly, and instead relying on a new campus vernacular which only makes sense to the initiated.

At any rate, a huge question which progressives must ask is precisely why this educational disconnect has opened up — and why now? The phenomenon is not unique to Britain or the British left — although ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP) means it’s arguably more electorally challenging. But it’s as acute here as anywhere, and the shifts in the past decade are particularly striking.

Policy priorities have played a part. See, for example, the preoccupation under Jeremy Corbyn with free higher education, rather than with adult skills or early years — a choice which would, in practice, have expanded the educational gap. Yet the biggest divide, I think, is about how people think and talk. Increasingly in the past decade, the UK has come to feel like a country divided by a common language.

The rest of this essay focuses on how this can be overcome. With the Tories in crisis after ‘party-gate’, there is an opportunity for Keir Starmer’s Labour to re-connect with the groups lost, and to escape from the electoral corner which the party finds itself painted into.

PART II: Direct and systemic causation

Writing after the 2021 local elections, the former Tory MP David Gauke described the difficulty of finding the ‘correct vocabulary’ for the electoral realignment that’s taken place:[31]

It is not a matter of ‘left’ versus ‘right’; ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ worked quite well but is now outdated; ‘populist’, ‘authoritarian’ or ‘nationalist’ sounds pejorative; ‘social conservative’ does not really reflect Boris Johnson’s approach to life; ‘culturally conservative’ is better but not perfect. A consensus on neutral terms to describe the two sides of the new political divide would be a small step forward.

New terms have been proposed before. These relate, for instance, to divides between communitarians and cosmopolitans or between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’. And they have a lot to them.[32] But each of these alternative distinctions also, I think, risks overstating the extent of the core values divide.

‘Cosmopolitans’ in Hackney or Brighton, for example, might spend their weekends tending community gardens or ‘buying local’ — pursuits, surely, which ‘communitarians’ would approve of. And many Brexit-supporting ‘somewheres’ have articulated their rootedness by voting for those who champion ‘Global Britain’ — a slogan which sounds tailor-made for ‘anywheres’ and ‘citizens of nowhere’.

There is also an a priori question about why education feeds values differences in the first place — regardless of how broad or narrow these differences are.

More that unites than divides us

Hence, it is not obvious that the realignment at play stems from deep divisions on policy, nor even that an impassable chasm now exists when it comes to cultural attitudes. Unlike America, British society does not contain high levels of pro-life social conservatism, or significant minorities who oppose free healthcare and deny the existence of climate change. As Kirsty McNeill and Roger Harding point out, “there is no evidence of anything remotely close to a US-style religious right in the UK.”[33]

Rather, the present ‘polarisation’ can feel like a gigantic non-sequitur: two sides with more in common than they realise, constantly misunderstanding each other and frequently being mischaracterised by high profile culture warriors on either side.

There’s plenty of evidence to support this idea. Analysis by UK in a Changing Europe finds that Tory voters are dramatically to the left of Tory MPs in economic terms — closer, in fact, to the Labour electorate and to the MPs they abandoned in 2019 than to their new Conservative representatives.[34] Likewise, insights from the Tony Blair Institute show that voters who left Labour in 2019 supported the idea of “A mainly socialist society in which public interests and a more controlled economy are most important,” yet plumped for the Conservatives at the ballot box.[35]

And the same is true on social issues. Polling from Red Wall seats shows that electors there — who supposedly abandoned Labour on cultural grounds — in fact have views on immigration, diversity, climate change and even trans rights which are a) not dramatically different from the country as a whole and which are b) fairly progressive.[36] They may be less liberal than those in inner London, but they are not moving in the opposite direction.[37]

If attitudinal rifts are overstated, then why do we appear to be in the midst of a culture war? And why do progressives appear to be losing that culture war at the ballot box — with Labour heartlands going Tory and Britain leaving the European Union under the hardest terms possible.

I have put forward (in Part I) education as a lens through which to view electoral geography, and to understand why ostensibly progressive voters are not choosing progressive governments. But there is a further question: why is one party so much more effective at appealing to groups with high levels of formal education, while the other appeals so much more to everyone else?

I would suggest that we start by looking at variations in analysis and language — i.e. factors which are rooted in education — rather than focusing on ideology. In many of the political debates which are most contentious, this appears to be the true source of difference.

Crime is a good example here. Most of us share basic values on this, and would agree that crime is bad, justice is good and the weak should be protected. Yet the kinds of policies we advocate to achieve this vary wildly, depending on our life experience and the extent to which we see individuals or social systems as primary agents in the world. Depending on our analysis, we can end up with answers at one end of the spectrum which focus only on the responsibilities of the perpetrator, right through to those at the other end which regard poverty and social conditions as solely culpable.

Direct and systemic

A 2016 blog by the psychologist and linguist George Lakoff sheds further light on this.[38] Foreshadowing the victory of Trump, Lakoff described the political divide in modern America as coming down to two essential types of causal reasoning: ‘direct’ and ‘systemic’. “Direct causation is dealing with a problem via direct action. Systemic causation recognises that many problems arise from the system they are in and must be dealt with via systemic causation.”

In the US — where a culture war has raged for some time — conservatives favour the former and liberals the latter. Whether this would have been the case in the era of Lincoln, Eisenhower or Lyndon B Johnson is another question. But, according to Lakoff, it certainly is now.

As an example of direct reasoning, Lakoff describes the antics of “the Republican Senators who would go out and make snowballs in Washington in winter and then say, ‘What do you mean about global warming? It’s snowing here!’.”[39] Whilst this direct logic may obviously be faulty to a liberal eye, Lakoff notes that it is also deeply intuitive.

As he elaborates elsewhere:

From infanthood on we experience direct, simple causation. We see direct causation all around us: if we push a toy, it topples over; if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation.

Any application of force to something or someone that produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

Lakoff identifies several sub-types of systemic causation, by contrast. And he emphasises that all of these are, unlike direct reasoning, at odds with how our brains process things. They are cases where A plus B does not equal C. And, like exceptions to a grammatical convention, they must be learnt rather than felt.

One interesting factor, picked up on by George Lakoff, is that systemic thinking often requires us to discuss propensities and likelihoods, whereas direct thinking is more concrete. You can use systemic logic to identify a correlation between deprivation and crime, for instance. But there will be anomalies, outliers and exceptions to the rule. Only over a sustained period will the link between deprivation and crime come to feel like ‘common sense’. This is not true of direct logic, which deals in absolutes.

Lakoff goes on to describe how Donald Trump tapped into these divides. The policy of building a wall on the Mexican border horrified systemically minded Democrats, for instance. But it was seen as a sensible policy to secure the border by direct minded Republicans. Other, less controversial questions boiled down to the same distinction.

Through taking the ultra-direct, ultra-literal approach that he did, Trump was able to win over direct minded former Democrats in Rust Belt states. He lost, in the process, the support of some systemic thinking Republicans — those in the Mitt Romney mould. But, from his point of view, the trade-off was worth it.

The direct-systemic gap can lead to different policy positions on certain issues — such as immigration or fiscal responsibility. So it isn’t simply about language or presentation. It is not fully ‘policy agnostic’. You could say that the direct approach to issues like crime is itself a type of socially conservativism. And to a degree you’d be right. But we are not, ultimately, talking here about the sorts of yawning ideological chasms that progressives sometimes imagine.

The table above sums up some of the oppositions, in terms of decision-making and policy formation, which might flow from the direct-systemic split.

(The Appendix at the end of this essay engages in more detail with the Lakoff analysis, and references some of the key passages he’s written about direct and systemic causation).

Causation and UK democracy

Does this divide, described by an American linguist, hold water in the UK context? In my view it increasingly does.

I would argue that the direct versus systemic distinction derives in large part from educational attainment — and that it’s created many (although not all) of the divides which have opened up in Britain. It now forms the underlying basis of the so called culture war and plays a major role in determining which way seats swing and which side of politics individuals are drawn to.

The EU Referendum of 2016 is a good example. Brexit created a festering wound in our politics for the latter part of the 2010s, and turbocharged the educational realignment described in Part I.

The original Leave-Remain divide did, it’s true, have a genuine values difference at its core. But a great deal of the rancour during the five years following the vote was not based on competing visions of what sort of country we should be. Rather, it was between those who saw Brexit as a simple process wrongly presented as complex by its opponents, and those who saw it as a complex process wrongly cast as simple by its supporters.

The deepest fury from Leavers was with the apparent disregard, by ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘bean-counters’, of a direct instruction from the people. And the strongest anger from Remainers was with the ‘demagogues’ and ‘liars’ heading up Vote Leave, for having pretended that withdrawal from an immensely complex system could be done easily and without compromise.

The distinction between direct and systemic reasoning can help with other questions too, such as voters’ often paradoxical attitudes to tax. Why is it that many of those who are best off seem to be most worried about wealth inequality, for example, or that middle-class voters are more relaxed about progressive tax increases?[40]

Chart 7 shows a nuanced distinction in terms of how these sorts of questions are framed, based on polling by Ipsos MORI. It reveals that those with degrees are more likely to support the statement ‘The gap between rich and poor is too large in the UK and a wealth tax would help to reduce it’. Those with no qualifications are more likely to agree that ‘The rich have got richer in recent years. It’s time for them to give something back’.[41]

The differences are subtle but important, especially given that the two statements were tested back-to-back with the same sample. Those with less formal education may be exercised about the behaviour of the rich or the treatment of the poor, according to this. But they’re more likely to see the actual distance between the two (the ‘gap between rich and poor’) as second order question. It is rooted in a systemic notion, after all — one based on the wider structure of society — not on the immediate interactions between people and groups.

I’m going to use the distinction between direct and systemic causation in the rest of this paper, to make an argument about the true source of the British political realignment — and to try and think about how Labour can challenge it.

I believe more formally educated groups are more likely to be systemic reasoners, and less formally educated groups are more likely to be direct reasoners. As the size of the former group has grown, Labour has both wanted and needed to appeal to it more. The party has lost in the process much of its ability (at least at the national level) to communicate with the direct thinkers who once comprised a significant part of its base.

Systemic reasoners remain a minority — and an increasingly geographically concentrated one at that — hence, the more Labour gears its appeal solely to them, the more it’s at the mercy of the FPTP arithmetic.

Is ‘directness’ pejorative?

A quick question here, before we move on: is the distinction I make offensive to direct reasoners, especially given my point about the role of formal education? This question matters because social categorisations should avoid disparaging one side more than the other.

I do not intend it to be pejorative, but the answer to this question ultimately depends on whether those described as ‘direct reasoners’ would see it as a negative label. And the truth, on this point, is that I simply don’t know (any more than I know what systemic thinkers would make of my description of them).

But I suspect that many would not see it as an insult, and would wear their directness as a badge of honour. Being a direct reasoner means saying it as you see it, after all, which is only an insult if you pride yourself on looking where the problem is not. To many direct reasoners, I think the label would be taken to mean being practical rather than theoretical — ‘real world’ rather than abstract.

For my own part, I certainly see the value in both models of causation. I tend to think that systemic reasoning is a more sustainable and ethical way to run a society. But I also think it can be woolly and frustrating if mis-used or over-used. Direct reasoning is often necessary to get things done and to think through either-or questions. This is especially true when systemic approaches to a problem (which often happen upstream of the problem itself) have not had time to have an impact, have not yet been initiated in the first place, or have failed.

UK politics and the ‘direct versus systemic’ distinction

Looking back, the UK’s electoral range has always been defined, in part, by George Lakoff’s two ways of reasoning. The Tories are historically prone to champion direct approaches, based on individual responsibility. Labour supporters tend to blame society — proposing policies which aim to fix the system.

You could clearly tie this in with deeper elements of political philosophy. A cornerstone of left liberalism for example, is the idea that people are products of society — of the wider system which they emerge from, in other words — and that their behaviour and life outcomes must be understood in this light. Conservative ideologies place far more emphasis on individual responsibility.

Crime is again an obvious example. Following the 1993 murder of Jamie Bulger, John Major famously said that “Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.” Tony Blair, by contrast, framed his 1990s youth crime policies on the basis that “If you create a group of people who believe they’ve got no stake in society it’s hardly surprising if they behave anti-socially.”[42] Major and Blair were both relatively moderate by the standard of their parties, but a core, qualitative distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘systemic’ attitudes to crime still separated them (at least in the early days of Blair’s leadership).

Despite being ideologically drawn to different types of causation, however, both main parties in the UK have traditionally held a coalition of both direct and systemic reasoners within their voter bases. Direct thinking can lead to left-wing conclusions and systemic thinking to right-wing ones. Indeed, the two parties have tended to do best when appealing to both.

The Tories, for example, traditionally appeal strongly to lower-middle-class, home-owning directly minded voters, who believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance. But they have also tended to attract systemic thinkers: business people, and the readers of centre-right broadsheets. These latter parts of their electoral bloc vote Tory on the basis that, in their view, a global capitalist system involving freer markets and fewer regulations is the best way of achieving a prosperous society.

The ideological premise of the Labour movement, meanwhile, is more aligned with systemic approaches — at least in terms of how the party’s members and politicians tend to view things. Government intervention in the economy represents an acknowledgement that social conditions definitively influence life outcomes and must be equalised or regulated. Yet a great many members of the party’s traditional base are likely to have been direct reasoners, for whom voting Labour was a simple case of protecting their jobs or getting money into their communities.

Historically, both parties have understood and accepted elements of the other perspective. David Cameron was a conventional, directly minded Tory in some ways, promising to reward those who’d ‘done the right thing’. But his stances on the environment, international aid and income inequality, in the early days of his time as Tory leader, were an acknowledgement that his party could not ignore social and structural factors (aka systemic reasoning) if it wanted to win.

Meanwhile, Labour have historically embraced elements of direct reasoning. The 1945–51 governments signed up to the principle of a nuclear deterrent, for example — in an acknowledgement that realpolitik approaches were sometimes necessary on foreign policy. And New Labour’s ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ slogan represented an almost-too-perfect example of how the party has successfully woven together direct and systemic parts of the electorate. However much you concede the underlying systemic factors behind crime, Tony Blair effectively said, you must be serious when it comes to the direct question of public safety.

The key change, during the 2010s, was that these uneasy coalitions broke apart. The Conservatives increasingly spoke to direct causation, and Labour spoke to systemic causation.

The ‘direct versus systemic’ distinction in politics and culture

Example 1) Tabloid and broadsheet

There is an interesting moment in Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, where he discusses the appointment of Alastair Campbell as his Director of Communications. Having considered potential candidates from the Independent and the Guardian, Blair explains that he chose Campbell because “I wanted a tabloid person.”[43]

As I wrote in April 2021, in a blog entitled ‘Against their Interests’, Labour’s 1997 victory came, in large part, from appealing to deprived seats without a cultural history of voting for the party.[44] These included seaside towns, New Towns and a range of other places which do not quite fit Labour’s idealised version of a working-class community. As Peter Kellner puts it, “Tony Blair’s Labour Party attracted millions of instrumental, non-union working-class voters with jobs in the private sector.”[45]

This success stemmed, in part, from the New Labour project’s lack of squeamishness about tabloid language. Tabloid publications, after all — and particularly the red-tops — speak in a fundamental way to direct causation. The Sun’s right-wing stance comes from a sledgehammer appeal to ‘Pull your socks up’, ‘A+B=C’ reasoning. They emphasise simple, ‘no nonsense’ answers to almost every type of problem.

Through a greater willingness to couch things in this way, New Labour was able to speak to the voters it had been losing during the 1980s. Progressive social policies were framed as the removal of arbitrary hurdles, or as efforts to improve fairness and help people to get on. And the focus was on specific, everyday issues, such as those listed on the famous 1997 pledge card.

The image below shows two tabloid headlines from the past few years. Both are from newspapers which many progressives hate. Yet both are also rare instances where these papers take the progressive side of a given quarrel.

The first headline, in the Daily Mail, is a great example of how the direct, tabloid approach tends to treat issues around racism. The piece is written in praise of a young British Asian woman, who stood up to the leader of the English Defence League (EDL).[46]

I suspect that a great many Daily Mail readers would applaud her unreservedly, and would view the EDL’s overt brand of bigotry as contemptible. Hence why the Mail covered the story in this way. But these readers would also see no contradiction between opposing what the EDL stands for and wanting to see immigration figures cut (as a ‘common sense’ measure in tough times).

This is the consequence of a more direct mentality — one which tends not to construe things in terms of a complex network of cause and effect, or to see a particular link between tabloid rhetoric and EDL-style racism. To a systemic reasoner, or someone who subscribes to a much more structural definition of racism, these links may be obvious — hence why few of those with this mind-set read the Mail.

The Sun headline is an even more interesting case study.[47] It identifies a form of discrimination that’s subtler — based on Islamophobic biases in the algorithms of car insurance websites. This is a far more sophisticated type of inequality than the Mail example, and the paper covers it in a very direct way. Their focus is on basic fairness and the removal of barriers. Car insurers “cannot say Mohammeds are worse drivers than Johns,” a source is quoted as saying.

These two stories are interesting. They’re obviously outliers, compared to the thrust of both publications’ editorial line. But they show that direct mentalities do not automatically mean taking the right-wing side.

There are lessons here for Labour in 2022. Despite falling print circulations, after all, the major tabloids continue to have big readerships, comprised mostly of those who are not degree-educated. The Mail Online is the UK’s most read and recognised news brand.[48] Yet a mutual antipathy has grown up, over the course of the 2010s, between several of the major tabloids and the Labour Party membership. This goes back far beyond 2010 in historic terms, of course, but it’s as strong now as ever.

Perhaps this has partly happened thanks to the Labour membership’s post-2010 ‘reassessment’ of Blairism, which ultimately led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader. But I would argue that it has also occurred because Labour has become a much more systemically minded party in the past few years, which does not speak the direct language of the tabloids and, often, does not seem to wish to. When Keir Starmer wrote a column for The Sun in 2021, he was widely criticised by the left, for example, even though his message was a progressive one.[49]

For the party to win, this needs to change. Progressives must remember that the tabloids are, at core, commercial entities, selling a product of which their political leaning is only a small part. There is much to be learned from how they communicate with their audiences and understand their readers’ priorities.

It is notable, for example, that a tabloid paper (the left-leaning Mirror) was so instrumental in exposing ‘party-gate’ — a scandal based on a clear affront to direct reasoning, rather than on more complex systemic failures in how the Government handled the pandemic.

Example 2: ‘You’re fired’

In Beyond the Red Wall, Deborah Mattinson’s exploration of attitudes in Red Wall seats, working-class ex-Labour supporters are asked to cite individuals from outside politics who would make an ideal national leader. Three people emerge.[50]

One of the three, Wetherspoons founder and Brexit fanatic Tim Martin, subscribes to many of the stereotypes which some left liberals might have about the Red Wall — at least in terms of the political positions and the cultural preferences Martin represents. But the other two — Alan Sugar (of The Apprentice) and Martin Lewis (of MoneySavingExpert.com) — are more unusual choices.

Alan Sugar is particularly surprising, given what many think they know about Red Wall voters. Sugar is a London-based billionaire and philanthropist, most commonly seen on the BBC in a helicopter, circling The Shard. He appears to be pretty socially liberal, and presents himself as a globally minded businessman with fingers in many pies. He was a former favourite of Margaret Thatcher, converting to New Labour in the 2000s and becoming a member of the House of Lords.

Moreover, he is a staunch Remainer — criticising what he calls the “posh boys’ Brexit.” He went so far, in 2018, as to demand that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove be prosecuted for lying about the ‘£350m for the NHS’ figure, and even suggested that the referendum result could be declared void.[51]

It is hard, on this basis, to see why this would be the chosen candidate of ‘Somewheres’, living away from the country’s economic hubs. Or of collectivists, in post-industrial ex-Labour heartlands. Or of social conservatives, hostile to cosmopolitan and individualistic values. Or of those hurt worst by Thatcher in the 1980s and allegedly betrayed by New Labour. Or of those who are suspicious of Westminster bubble politicians. Or of staunch Leave voters who are exercised about Brexit.

Yet Mattinson’s research finds that he is. And perhaps this supports the idea that we progressives are imagining rifts within the country to be much deeper, when it comes to policy substance and social attitudes, than they really are. So much of the impasse instead comes down to language, logic and how the left explains itself.

Alan Sugar is, after all, an exemplar of direct causality. “He gets things done,” one Red Wall voter tells Mattinson. This explains, perhaps, why few would badge him as a member of the ‘London metropolitan elite’, despite the evidence.

“I don’t do nonsense, I don’t do time wasters,” Sugar explains in the opening credits of The Apprentice. “The one who sells the most will win. The one who sells the least will lose. And on the losing team one of you will get fired.” His performances in the boardroom are characterised by a series of refrains which appeal explicitly to directness and common sense. “Who’s responsible for the failure of this task?” “Why shouldn’t I fire you?” “I don’t do time wasters.”

The show’s understanding of prejudice and discrimination, meanwhile, is very much a direct rather than a systemic one, with any overt bias regarded as an idiotic distraction from the hunt for the ‘best candidate’. Although he has strayed into dinosaur opinions about gender on Twitter at points, his persona on the programme (which is how most people encounter him) is fairly consistent on this point. When Apprentice contestants at one point used sexist stereotypes to sell products, they were severely reprimanded by Sugar — as well as by his deputy, Karen Brady — on the direct basis that such stereotypes were old-fashioned and stupid.

The Apprentice is, of course, a pastiche of the business world. It often strays into the downright ridiculous. Many left liberals would be horrified at the idea that we have anything to learn from an arch-capitalist like Sugar — even at the level of language. But perhaps, if Labour wishes to do well in the seats it could once rely on, we need to overcome this type of squeamishness.

The third Red Wall candidate for ‘ideal national leader’, meanwhile, is Martin Lewis, of the website MoneySavingExpert.com. Lewis is perhaps the most interesting choice, in that he’s the most middle-class, at a surface level. But the enthusiasm for him is clear, within Mattinson’s research, with one Red Wall voter going so far as to describe Lewis as a personal hero.

The thing about Martin Lewis which stands out is his emphasis on demystifying complex ideas around finance and big business, and boiling them down in an accessible way. This is driven by a goal which is, in its essence, egalitarian — namely that of protecting ordinary consumers’ wallets, and of giving them the insight and agency to make choices for themselves.

If we look at Lewis’ video[52] and explainer[53] from before the 2016 EU Referendum, we see this approach in action. The pros and cons are broken down and deciphered, from a place which is as close to neutral as most could manage. Only at the end does Lewis say how he himself intends to vote: “I’m generally risk-averse, and that pushes me just towards an IN vote for safety, maybe 55% to 45%. Yet just as my dream holiday isn’t necessarily yours, no more is my choice of what’s right a call for you to follow me. Far better is follow the logic.”

The Martin Lewis approach assumes minimal information but maximum intelligence. It breaks complex issues into their constituent parts, bridging the gap between the systemic and the direct. And it explains options and ideas to people, rather than telling them what to think.

PART III: Drivers of the shifts taking place

To recap, each of Britain’s two main parties have, in the past decade, specialised in a distinct type of reasoning, articulated via their communications, policy and culture. Labour has increasingly become the party of the uber-systemic and the Conservatives that of the ultra-direct.

This has caused both parties to lose a slice of their traditional electoral coalitions to the other. But its electoral consequences have been particularly dire for Labour. Direct thinking is more intuitive to start with, even for many who are instinctively drawn to progressive ideas. And those who deploy it are both more numerous and more geographically spread out to start with. The result is that an increasingly socially liberal country votes in growing numbers for a Conservative party tacking to the right on cultural issues.

By trawling through historic YouGov polling on criminal sentencing, we can roughly chart the change that’s happened. As the table below shows, 2010 Tory voters were around 10% points more likely to agree with statements favouring toughness in the criminal justice system than 2010 Labour voters. 2017 Tory voters were around 25% points more likely than 2017 Labour voters, and 2019 Tory voters were around 35% points more likely than 2019 Labour voters. The questions and contexts are different, so the levels of agreement vary. But the gap clearly grew.[54]

It would be fascinating to have polled the country, at either end of the 2010s, on the more exact question, “Do you ultimately believe that ‘toughness on crime’ or ‘toughness on the causes of crime’ is the best approach to reducing criminal activity?” This is as good a proxy for direct versus systemic as I can think of. And I believe it would have revealed significant changes in terms of voting behaviour, with those who are ‘tough on crime’ now overwhelmingly grouped around the Tories, and those who are ‘tough on the causes of crime’ increasingly drawn to Labour.

Certainly, if we look at support for Brexit — a key factor in the electoral realignment described earlier — we find a polarity on this issue. Remainers tend to register between 50–60% support for ‘harsh’ prison sentences, whereas Leavers poll between 80–90%.[55] Blue Wall Tory Remainers are more likely to be systemic thinkers, this suggests — at least when it comes to criminal justice — who find the bluntness of the Tories under Boris Johnson unattractive. Red Wall Labour Leavers, by contrast, may applaud his straight-talking style as a breathe of fresh air.

So, why have the two political parties, in each case a coalition of different styles of thought, ideology and material interests in the 20th century, started to polarise around a direct and systemic distinction? And why now?

Rising levels of formal education

The first part of the answer relates back to education levels. Chart 8, below, reminds us of how important this is. It visualises, for all English seats, the proportion with no qualifications on the vertical axis. And it shows the cumulative 2010–19 swing to or from the Conservatives on the horizontal axis. The colour of each dot signals the party which currently holds the respective seats.

As the trend lines show, for both Tory and Labour held seats, fewer qualifications means a greater swing to the Tories. At present, 63 of the 75 seats swinging to the Tories by 10% points or more have at least 25% with no qualifications. This is true of just 5 of the 49 seats swinging to Labour by the same margin.

There have always been more and less formally educated parts of the country, of course. So what has suddenly prompted attainment to determine voting patterns?

I would say that, in a nutshell, significant increases in education have created a larger section of the population who are systemic reasoners. The expansion of university access is a factor here, of course, exemplifying the more recent manifestation of this shift and perhaps explaining the ultra-liberal attitudes of many in ‘Generation Z’. But rising education levels cannot be defined in these terms alone. We have also seen, over consecutive decades, extensions of how long people stay in education and improvements in the quality of education itself. Alongside this there have been wider increases in how easy it is to access information (e.g. the advent of the internet) and in the breadth of experiences that the typical person has (e.g. increased foreign travel).

Each of these steps are likely to have amplified the number of systemic thinkers in our society. And in recent years, with over half of young people now going to university, this has reached a sort of critical mass. This is not sufficient for systemic thinkers to be the majority (although they may be starting to form a majority among young people). But it is such that they now represent a sizeable minority, and have a political voice which cannot be ignored. They are increasingly dominant in the media and among political opinion formers.

In short Britain, like most developed countries, now has a large and growing minority who are degree-educated, post-materialist in their values and, almost certainly, fairly sceptical about overly literal policy solutions.[56] Middle-class younger adherents may be second or third generation systemic thinkers, for whom the idea that problems are ‘society’s fault’ comes as second nature and does not need to be examined or unpacked.

Over time, this means that more people are ‘tough on the causes of crime’ and less are ‘tough on crime’. In the US, the 1994 preference for toughness on crime had already reduced by 2002.[57] And the appetite for tough sentences continued to fall in subsequent years.[58] On this side of the Atlantic, the direction of travel is the same — with harsher attitudes to sentencing becoming less popular even in the past couple of years.[59]

If there is as much overlap as I suspect between the cohort who are young, degree-educated and middle-class and those who are systemically minded and ‘tough on the causes of crime’, then it is important to stress that this group will not be spread evenly — for all of the reasons discussed earlier. Systemic thinkers will be more likely to live in cities and to have moved away from their home towns.

This represents a significant change. A few decades ago, we might imagine, society as a whole would have subscribed to patterns of reasoning that were closer to one another (and that were generally more direct). But the expansion of higher education — and the uneven class, age and geographical distribution of those who have accessed it — means this is no longer the case.

To put it simply, our higher rates of university education mean that some areas have been moving towards systemic reasoning much faster than others. And the interplay between these groups and the direct reasoners in other parts of the country is creating new political conflicts. The latter are kicking back against a new set of systemic rationales which, to them, seem like vacuous nonsense. The former are infuriated by direct approaches to social issues which, to them, appear hopelessly over-simplistic and reactionary.

Hence, we’re not seeing a whole chunk of society slide right-wards on social issues. But we are seeing a significant new group of better-off and better-educated groups shift to the liberal left, with a growing disconnect emerging between the systemic explanations and definitions which they favour and the direct ones upon which older and less affluent non-graduates have traditionally relied. Hence the divide, discussed in Part I, between the quite liberal and the very liberal.

A complex world

The second factor explaining the schism between direct and systemic reasoners is complexity. Vast shifts, driven by globalisation, have made the world more overwhelming.[60] This has drawn into relief the distinction between direct and systemic reasoning — with the latter a harder and harder sell.

Brexit is, of course, the ultimate example, with the 2016 vote effectively acting as a plebiscite on globalisation. The Leave campaign’s ‘Take Back Control’ slogan was an appeal to direct reasoning, and a primary issue underpinning the referendum was immigration — a policy area where direct and systemic divides are particularly acute.

The well-known ‘lump of labour’ fallacy, for instance, is the epitome of how direct causal reasoning is applied to migration policy.[61] It suggests that more immigration means less jobs to go round. Studies have repeatedly debunked this, yet the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy is also deeply intuitive. It subscribes to a clear rationale, which makes sense according to its own logic. You wouldn’t let more people into a jam-packed football stadium or onto an over-full night-bus — why is a country any different?

If you interpret the world in a very direct way then the chances are that you buy into the ‘lump of labour’ idea. You do not have to be a nativist, a xenophobe or even a social conservative to do so, and thus to be sceptical about rising migration during straitened times.

The Conservatives’ austerity policies are another example of direct reasoning winning the day. The idea that the 2008 crash was caused by Labour ‘maxing out the national credit card’[62] was central to the logic behind the Tory spending cuts that followed in the early 2010s. If you work up a debt in real life it’s usually because you’ve spent too much. And even if you have not, and the debt is the result of bad luck, you often have to take it on the chin.

The size of the national debt was, in fact, the result of a global crisis and the massive bail-out that followed; a complex, international domino effect, which required governments around the world to step in. The UK was more vulnerable to this, as a result of its large financial sector. But every developed nation saw major fallout.

Yet explaining this was hard. Failure to do so meant that Labour struggled to set out what was wrong with austerity, despite the obvious hardships it caused. For the average direct thinker, for whom the notion of spending your way out of debt was a contradiction in terms, the outrages of austerity were simply the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of ‘tightening your belt’ in tough times. The moral arguments made by Labour could only have carried weight had the party explained, in direct and non-judgemental language, what the alternative was and why it made sense.

Interestingly, after the 2015 election defeat, Jon Cruddas MP described the electorate as “both economically radical and fiscally conservative.”[63] He pointed out that 60% of voters agreed that ‘The economic system in this country unfairly favours powerful interests’, but that 58% also agreed that “We must live within our means, so cutting the deficit is the top priority.” This blend of economic radicalism and fiscal prudence represents a very ‘direct’ view, interpreting the money in the economy as a zero-sum proposition, but wishing to see it distributed fairly. Labour never really grasped this, and instead saw the 2015 election result as a vote for winner-takes-all Thatcherism.

As well as seismic events like Brexit and the 2008 crash, there have been countless smaller fissures in the past few years, where an interconnected world has created extra complexity.

Chart 9 shows the percentage of residents in each English constituency who signed a petition calling for the government to ban citizens who’d fought for ISIS from returning to the UK.[64] It came following the high-profile debate in 2019 about Shamima Begum — a radicalised British teenager who had her citizenship revoked after she joined ISIS.

As we can see, seats where high numbers signed the petition have, overwhelmingly, swung towards the Tories. This is interesting because the statement at play corresponds almost perfectly with direct logic. Why on earth should someone who has left the UK to go and fight for a death cult be allowed back, a direct reasoner might ask? A national poll for Sky News showed that 78% of Brits agreed with the decision to revoke Begum’s citizenship.[65]

Indeed, to disagree with the statement — or, at least, to disagree strongly — requires you to be a confident advocate of two types of systemic analysis. Firstly, there is in the conventional liberal belief that people are products of the socio-economic systems from which they emerge; that Begum joined ISIS when she was still a child and thus was not responsible for her actions; that children’s development is determined by wider social factors; and that even a radicalised ISIS fighter should be regarded as a product of their surroundings.

And secondly, there is the internationalist understanding that no country acts in isolation; that a stateless individual must be the responsibility of someone; and that the UK must comply with the laws of the global system even when we don’t much like it, or risk other countries doing the same to us.

Whether on the EU referendum, the 2008 crash or the particular case of Shamima Begum, we’ve thus seen a number of events, in the past 10 or 15 years, where global interconnectedness has created intensely complicated problems. The progressive answers to these challenges have been far harder to boil down than the conservative ones. And my hunch would be that, with each of these events, a sliver of direct reasoners have swung right-wards in party political terms, and a sliver of systemic reasoners have swung left.

PART IV: Direct reasoning and ‘Johnson-ism’

Conservative dominance in the 2010s has been enabled by the geographical realignment described, and has been helped by the gap between systemic and direct causation. But political nous has also been needed, to turn these raw ingredients into electoral success.

In particular, the Tories have been excellent at appealing to direct reasoners over the past decade. Even before the 2010 election, George Osborne was speaking eloquently to this group, as we’ve already seen, via the devastating accusation that Gordon Brown had ‘maxed out the nation’s credit card’. But the strategy reached its apex in 2019, when Boris Johnson’s Conservatives battered Labour with a promise to ‘bung Brexit in the microwave’. During the 2019 campaign, Dominic Cummings allegedly told Tory strategists to frame their pitch as “Blairism without caring about the causes of crime.”[66]

Johnson’s success came from his willingness to prise apart direct and systemic reasoners. He appealed solely to the former, in ways that his predecessors had not been willing to. And he was happy to jettison the latter in the process — hence the effective abandonment of Remain-voting Tory seats, and the ejection from the parliamentary party of many systemically minded Conservative MPs.

The London Riots

The story behind Johnson’s approach to direct reasoning can be charted back to summer 2011, I think. Specifically, it can be traced to 6th August, the first day of the London Riots.

The riots were a curious phenomenon: four days of directionless chaos, devoid of any political agenda but disproportionately carried out by those living in acute deprivation among the UK’s most unequal inner-city areas. They created a perfect dividing line between direct and systemic explanations.

On the conservative right, Max Hastings wrote a Daily Mail op-ed which included some quite unbelievable language. Hastings referred to the rioters as “wild beasts” reliant on “animal impulses”. His conclusion, while less incendiary than the rest of the article, was telling: “Those at the bottom of [contemporary] society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want. When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative.”[67] His point was that no direct barriers existed, and that the rioters essentially wanted for nothing in tangible, material terms.

On the left, by contrast, the Guardian’s Gary Younge explained that: “This tinder in the box was lit at least as much by the long arm of the law as the invisible hand of the market.”[68] Younge set the riots in the context of progressive uprisings which took place that year, including the Arab Spring. He and others on the left linked these events to one another, and pointed to socio-economic conditions, poverty and early austerity policies as explanations for what had happened in London. They argued that relative inequalities mattered, because they determined whether people had an equal stake in society or a fair shot at life.

The Younge analysis may have more to it than the Hastings one, but it was a hard sell for anyone not fully convinced by the systemic approach. As we saw in Part II, the gap between rich and poor is less likely to be regarded, by those with fewer qualifications, as a problem in and of itself. A direct reasoner might see why a starving person has no option other than to steal bread, why the 1960s colour bar was a moral affront, or why the victims of an Egyptian despot might wish to topple that despot. But they would be less likely to understand why a teenager who’s just seen their nearest children’s centre close has no choice but to burn down the local corner shop. When a systemic thinker writes that the London Riots were ‘inevitable’ given the social context, what a direct thinker may hear is that they were ‘justifiable’.

In the debates following the riots, we thus saw a dynamic within the commentariat which was increasingly based on non-sequiturs and misunderstandings. Direct reasoners observed motiveless wrongdoing by people who needed to be taught a lesson. Systemic thinkers saw the young and the poor, fighting against a society rigged against them.

If we again ransack the YouGov polling archive, we find the seeds of a realignment already in evidence, just one year into the decade. The table below shows agreement with various statements about the London Riots, taken from a single poll. It depicts the proportion of those in agreement with each statement that voted Labour in 2010 — along with the proportion that said, as of August 2011, that they intended to vote Labour at the next election.

The rows in yellow reflect statements aligned with systemic reasoning — i.e. those which emphasise wider social causes, or which express scepticism about the effectiveness of harsh punishments and vigilante actions. The rows in grey emphasise statements aligned with direct reasoning, emphasising choice and agency, and an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ approach to justice.

Differences, in the case of each sentiment, are small — often too small to be of statistical significance. We must remember, after all, that this was extremely early in the decade. The two party leaders on offer were David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

But all of the shifts in question point the same way. Systemic sentiments garnered more support from those planning to vote Labour than from those who had done so the year before; direct sentiments garnered less support. If we look at pretty much every YouGov poll from around this time, the same pattern holds true.

‘Johnson-ism’

At the political level, David Cameron responded to the riots using his favoured blend of direct and systemic explanations, at a ratio of around 2:1. His general response was initially very ‘tough on crime’ but was subsequently also fairly ‘tough on the causes of crime’. The Tories promised to address the causes of ‘broken Britain’ by providing support for troubled families.[69]

The most interesting figure, however, was Boris Johnson — The Mayor of London. He was not, at this point, seen as a future Prime Minister. But I remember watching on the news as he showed up in Clapham with a broom, to defy David Cameron’s party line and proclaim that “It’s time we heard a little bit less about the sociological justifications for what is, in my view, nothing less than wanton criminality.”[70] His words were booed by the liberal, London audience. But he elevated his voice over the crowd to reiterate his point. He repeated the sentiments later, to a bystander.[71]

The scene was a telling one (especially with the benefit of hindsight, as we watch Boris Johnson undergo a spectacular fall from grace, two years into his premiership). It showed that the then London Mayor, who’d presented himself to voters as a liberal Conservative, was a Thatcherite at heart. He had no time at all for structural or systemic arguments. Whether or not he rode a bike to work, this set him apart from the modernisation project which the Tory Party had undergone during the previous few years, which relied on hugging tight both direct and systemic voters.

To the extent that Johnson has principles, they can be boiled down, I think, to an unswerving faith in direct reasoning and individual efficacy. This is especially true in relation to himself. I would not be surprised if it had genuinely never occurred to him that he had a privileged upbringing, or that his achievements owe anything to factors other than his natural talents. This is not something I would say of David Cameron or George Osborne.

Johnson’s famous quote about his time as a young journalist in Brussels is telling here: “I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I’d listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect.” Reading this back it is worth recalling George Lakoff’s description of direct causation in its purest form (‘punching someone in the nose is direct causation, throwing a rock through a window is direct causation’).

This enjoyment of direct reasoning is the closest thing that exists to ‘Johnson-ism’. It marked his political career over the decade following the London Riots, and particularly his behaviour when it came to Brexit. Slogans like ‘Take back control’ and ‘Get Brexit done’ emphasise blunt, ‘A+B=C’ reasoning, of the kind that plays well with tabloids. They are appealing to a direct reasoner but appear deeply irresponsible to those of a systemic bent.

Direct answers to systemic challenges: Brexit and COVID

Johnson’s alleged optimism, meanwhile — which is always reliant on a negative reading of present society (as pliant and pusillanimous by comparison to what it could be) — is based on a sense of Britain’s limitless agency as a nation. His Brexit metaphor of an “oven ready deal”[72] which he would “bung in the microwave”[73] corresponded to direct voters’ emphasis on common sense and getting things done. You have as much efficacy when negotiating with a trading bloc of 27 countries, he told voters, as you do in your own kitchen.

By returning once again to the initial Lakoff description of direct reasoning (‘if our mother turns a knob on the oven, flames emerge’) we see why metaphors like this are so powerful. They draw a link between big, complex social issues and the normal, everyday actions through which we navigate the world. They cohere with ideas of common sense as a result, helping to reduce inherently intricate questions to simple processes of cause-and-effect.

Steps like the proroguing of parliament were an attack on those who suggested things might be more complicated. Indeed, Johnson’s conversion to all-out right-wing populism came from a clash between direct rhetoric and a democratic structure which was inescapably systemic.

On COVID-19, meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s trajectory followed the same logic. His big technical failings in relation to the pandemic came through the ultra-direct thinker’s strong sense of personal efficacy. An invisible, airborne virus, after all, is hard to take seriously for someone of an extremely literal bent. As former Tory MP Rory Stewart puts it, “To be good at lockdown, you need to be very detail-orientated, very concerned with getting to the bottom of the science, very attentive to what’s happening in other parts of the world.”[74]

These systemic ways of thinking are characteristics which Johnson simply does not have. The British Prime Minister consistently implied that we could front the virus out or brush it off, and this led to a chaotic and unscientific approach, with lockdowns routinely announced several weeks too late.

Conversely, the Government’s sole success in relation to COVID-19 was the decision to buy the vaccine and roll it out quickly. How much Johnston had to do with this is another question. But the outcome was that, while other European countries were more cautious about health approvals, the UK ethos allowed us to push through our programme of jabs at speed. The vaccine rollout provided a story of actions trumping words. This carried weight long after other countries’ rollout rates had caught up, because of what it symbolised.

In the instance of the vaccine, the direct approach paid off. Polling towards the end of the pandemic, in summer 2021, showed where it had and had not born political fruit. Johnson’s approval rating was +17 among those with no qualifications, and -26 among those educated to degree level.[75] Up until ‘party-gate’ it looked like this would be the abiding takeaway from COVID-19, and that Johnson’s popularity with non-graduates would mean he had the last word.

The idea of the ‘Great Man’

Boris Johnson’s faith in direct reasoning may stem from ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcherism, but it also taps into something different — namely the ‘Great Man’ theory of history. Whereas the former uses direct reasoning to emphasise prudence and individual responsibility, the latter uses it to understate systemic explanations of events — boiling everything down to the agency of immense and far-sighted individuals.

Johnson seems to see himself as one of these ‘Great Men’, with his apparent adulation of Winston Churchill stemming from an effort to cast himself in this mould.[76] His indifference to rules — including those he’s set himself — comes as a result of this. So too his attraction to vanity projects, which was a defining feature of his time as Mayor of London.

In The Churchill Myths, by the academics Bill Schwarz, Richard Toye, and Steven Fielding, the authors describe in detail how Boris Johnson’s own book, The Churchill Factor, plays upon this idea.[77] Johnson’s biography sets out its stall from the very outset, the authors explain, by proclaiming that:

He [Churchill] is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

Schwarz, Toye and Fielding go on to paraphrase Johnson’s version of events at the start of World War II: “A political stalemate prevails, abetted by party foot soldiers who lack fire in their bellies. A man of destiny intervenes, realizing that to abide by the norms of political conduct would do nothing to break the crisis. He discovers, further, that reasoned argument can’t do the job. Salvation lies in abandoning ‘reason’ and ‘intellectual restraint’.”

The great strength of Churchill, as a talisman for the likes of Boris Johnson, is the idea that a political actor can have limitless agency. The folklore around Churchill suggests that A plus B can be made to equal C through sheer willpower.

It is this blend of ‘no such thing as society’ direct thinking and ‘Great Man’ direct thinking which explains Johnson’s political coalition. It enabled his appeal both to a right-wing Tory membership who despise the ‘nanny state’ and to Red Wall Leave voters who crave common sense. It allowed him to evoke Thatcher to one audience and Churchill to the other. And it let him pose as a man of the people — despite all his public school trimmings — when he dismissed as “hogwash” or “piffle” the perspectives of those who looked at societal factors, encouraged restrained language, or said things were more complicated than they seemed.

Indeed, Johnson’s instincts on the environment, up until a couple of years ago, had a clear echo of the snowball-throwing Senators described by George Lakoff. They were the very embodiment of direct reasoning. As the Independent journalist Andy Grice reminds us, as recently as 2013 Johnson denied the existence of climate change, on the basis that: “I am speaking only as a layman who observes that there is plenty of snow in our winters these days.”[78] In 2012 he lambasted windfarms, which “would barely pull the skin off a rice pudding,” and in 2015 he declared that “There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong — but they don’t include global warming.”

Johnson’s views on this particular topic appear to have changed. But in him we nevertheless see the political architecture of the right-hand side in the culture war. His leadership is characterised by a preference for direct thinking on every point — prizing brute force, gut instinct and the limitless agency of the individual.[79]

Serious concerns about racial equality or the gender pay gap can be dismissed as liberal hand-wringing (as “bunk” or “guff”). And the government can pursue protectionist, ‘lump of labour’ policies on growth and immigration, which fall apart as soon as they’re subject to any scrutiny, but which seem to make sense when squinted at from afar.

By relentlessly flogging these ultra-direct notions, Johnson’s government was able to (as Peter Kellner puts it) “ride high in the polls when their party has been in power for 11 years, when petrol is scarce, food rots in the ground, supermarket shelves have large gaps, gas prices are rocketing and Christmas is threatened.”[80]

Indeed, the populist (but flawed) economic argument put forward by Boris Johnson at the 2021 Tory conference was based on a direct and intuitive set of ideas. These presented our economy as finite, with fewer migrants meaning more jobs and with collapsing supply chains allowing our domestic industries to step in and flourish. The national economy could be ‘levelled up’ at the same time as migration was reduced.

You don’t need to be a raging authoritarian or an avowed isolationist to vote for many of these ideas. And nor do I think, at a deep level, that Johnson is driven by bigotry or nationalism. The present realignment has simply created battle lines between those who favour simple, direct solutions and those who favour complex, systemic ones.

‘Party-gate’

When I began writing this essay, Boris Johnson looked indestructible. His subsequent undoing, during the six months culminating in ‘party-gate’, has turned this on its head. Rarely has a political leader looked weaker or been less liked.

Yet no matter what eventually happens, his fall should not cause progressives to ignore the root of his appeal. His draw was his ability to embody very direct approaches to policy-making, diplomacy and general life, without appealing explicitly to prejudice or nationalism. He hereby spoke to a raft of voters, many of whom held no candle for the racist politics of Nigel Farage (who often saw themselves as socially liberal, in fact) yet who felt sick of a world where words did not mean what they said, and where every question turned out to be more complicated than first thought.

Johnson’s use of relatable metaphors and his veneration of bish-bosh-wallop ‘common sense’ made him a formidable opponent, at his peak. He was able to pose as the guardian of direct reasoning and native wit, against forms thinking which, when articulated by the left, appeared cosseted and woolly.

The success of ‘party-gate’, in bringing Johnson down, came because it was as literal a story as could be conceived. Revelations about suitcases full of booze required no visual metaphor to bring them to life. The form they took in the public imagination was based on direct and uncomplicated breaches of the rules.

Ultimately, if we are to take one key lesson from ‘Johnson-ism’, it is that individual efficacy matters. We are all, to some extent, direct reasoners. We all believe in our power to act on the world. Advertising slogans like ‘Just Do It!’, ‘This girl can’ or ‘It does what it says on the tin’ are successful precisely because they dismiss external barriers and advise against the perils of over-thinking things.

I am not convinced that working-class voters swinging away from Labour see themselves as ‘oppressed’ or feel downtrodden by austerity — concerned though they may be that society is unfair or that their children won’t get a fair crack. And I suspect that many have become impatient with the language of victimhood more generally. Johnson’s gung-ho style was more attractive in 2019 than the I, Daniel Blake condescension of the Corbyn years.

If the great New Labour take-away from Thatcher’s success with working-class voters was the importance of ‘aspiration’, then the primary lesson from Johnson’s destruction of the Red Wall should be about the importance of ‘agency’. (“There’s no such thing as ‘No’ in his vocabulary,” one ex-Labour voter in the North East explains to Sebastian Payne, in his book Broken Heartlands).[81] If and when the Boris Johnson premiership combusts, Labour must not lose sight of this, if it wishes to win back the voters he so successfully courted.

PART V: Problems with systemic thinking

The course taken by the progressive left has, in many ways, been an inversion of the ultra-direct route chosen by the populist right. Always ideologically well-disposed to systemic thinking and messages, left and progressive parties have increasingly become the preserve of those who favour this logic.

As the number of systemic reasoners within society has grown, Labour in particular has often pitched itself explicitly or exclusively to this group. By the time of the 2019 Election, the Labour Leadership appeared to be as contemptuous of direct logic and language as Boris Johnson’s Tories were of systemic analyses.

The Corbyn era saw the idea of a ‘rigged system’ put forward as an explanation for almost everything, as a pretext to shy away from many of the hard questions of government. Systemic thinking under Corbyn effectively boiled down to an ‘I wouldn’t be starting from here’ approach. It did not provide a description of how the constituent parts of the system related to each other or a genuine analysis of how the structure itself could be reformed.

The result was that Labour was regarded as the preserve of woolly thinking — good at pointing out problems but bad at solving them. Direct reasoners, many of them in frontline or manual jobs that relied on their ability to ‘think in straight lines’, did not feel able to vote Labour.

From ‘bread and butter’ to ‘red wine and cigarettes’

Also in ascent, during the past decade, has been a brand of US-born leftism which trades in hyper-systemic analyses. This type of post-liberal activism highlights important causes, but can also be very divisive. It does not simply extend systemic reasoning, but amends and re-purposes it in a number of ways. Labour under Starmer has often not known whether to hug tight or hold at arm’s length the social justice movements which have emerged out of it.

Many of these movements are themselves hostile to Keir Starmer, and are quick to point out when he’s failing to back them. Yet to the average direct reasoner, who is watching politics casually, Labour remains more closely aligned with these activist groups than any other major party.

In particular, the words ‘systemic’ and ‘structural’ are increasingly the favoured terms of the left, at a point when overtly hateful or hierarchical attitudes have become rarer. Yet these words are seldom unpacked or broken down, and are often assumed to require no further explanation.

In their book Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay trace these new social justice movements back to the post-modernist ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. Epitomised by French academics like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, these types of theory favoured ‘structural’ critiques, questioning science and refuting the existence of objective truth or meaning. They argued that systems which benefit the powerful were written into language, thought, and even into concepts like time and space.

A basis within these modes of critique has led, according to Pluckrose and Lindsay, to forms of ‘activist scholarship’ in the 2010s and 2020s which are wholly different from the liberal, modernist and rational approaches previously favoured by progressives, such as during the civil rights movements. They refer to this as the ‘post-modern turn’, casting it not as an extension of progressive liberalism but as a departure from it. Through channelling the post-modernist idea that objective truths are impossible to attain, the authors claim that types of identity politics have emerged which undermine the concepts both of a universal human nature we all share, and of individual agency to enact change.[82]

The result, Cynical Theories argues, is a styles of politics which focuses on ‘deconstructing’ language, which reads complex power dynamics into every interaction within the system, and which see improvements in material conditions as second order questions. A raft of formerly sturdy concepts are now dismissed as ‘constructs’, and statements as basic as ‘water is wet’ can be cast as functions of ‘privilege’.

Pluckrose and Lindsay are not alone. The influence of post-modernism on politics has been criticised from a range of different perspectives, including by Liz Truss MP (a right-winger),[83] by the journalist and activist Paul Mason (a left-winger)[84] and by French President Emmanuel Macron (a centrist).[85]

I share much of the Cynical Theories authors’ concern, in large part because of the damage which these post-modernist ideas do to systemic arguments. They substitute one form of structural critique with another. A scientific systemic analysis — which looks for the chains of cause-and-effect that hold back equality — is replaced by an ethereal systemic analysis. The latter cannot be properly pinned down, and floats beyond your grasp as soon as you think you’ve understood it.

Many direct reasoners are open to structural explanations of the former kind — to the notion, for example, that a car insurance algorithm could have an Islamophobic bias written into it, and that this is wrong and should be changed. But once we get into forms of activism which draw on the ‘red wine and cigarettes’ deconstructionism of the 1960s New Left — based not on rational and material concerns but on a perpetual interrogation against the grain of linguistic structures seen as innately oppressive — then I think we’re likely to drive people into the arms of our opponents.

To be clear, these post-modern manifestations of systemic thinking are only pursued by a small sub-set of activists. But I would argue that they’re as unhelpful to progressive causes as using a snowball to disprove global warming.

I will go on to argue that Labour needs to get more comfortable using direct reasoning and language. But systemic thinkers on the left also need to be confident in identifying when systemic and structural analyses are being misused. Below are a couple of examples of places where we can do this.

Overwhelming challenges

Systems are large and complex. Useful systemic reasoning demystifies our social, political and economic structures, and thinks about how we can change them. Ultimately, this approach embodies egalitarian liberalism in its purest sense: a philosophy which regards social systems as an immensely powerful force, shaping who we are as people and how our lives turn out.

Unhelpful systemic reasoning, however, does something different. It suggests that all social problems are so linked, bundled together and conflated that they’re insurmountable.

A video from mid-2021, released by the Green New Deal campaign, epitomises the way in which some activists use systemic thinking. (The thumbnails below show a series of stills from the opening 30 seconds). The video weaves together footage of library closures, COVID-19, Brexit food shortages, police brutality, homelessness, climate change and wealth inequality. “This is no accident,” a voice-over explains. “The system is designed this way. It’s built to exploit.”[86]

Individuals as politically diverse as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Nicola Sturgeon and Priti Patel are subsequently depicted as the architects of this malign system. And resistance takes the forms, within the video, of activists campaigning about Palestine, of protesters at the vigil for Sarah Everard, and of green energy suppliers installing solar panels.

Everything that is socially harmful is knitted together, according to this way of thinking, forming an interlinked web of oppression. Global warming is racism.[87] Climate justice is social justice. Civil liberties infringements are a function of ‘neoliberalism’. Progressive advances that have already been made are downplayed or dismissed, because of their failure to change an impossibly large super-structure. And there is little on offer for an electorate who, as the strategist James Kanagasooriam notes, tend to view each policy issue in isolation.[88]

This kind of thinking can lead left-wingers in several directions. Firstly, it can result in despair, with people deciding that the system is too large and broken to fix. Secondly it can lead to conspiracism — to the assumption that a world so corrupt must be rigged by malign forces. Thirdly, it can lead to the utopian idea that conventional, democratic politics is pointless in the face of such powerful systems.

None of these conclusions are progressive or positive. When the Labour Party is associated with them the result is that, as Jon Cruddas MP and academic colleagues put it, the party “delivers voters only a missionary gospel of doom and gloom on the doorstep.”[89]

Not saying what we mean or meaning what we say

Another facet of this hyper-connected analysis is that it links forms of oppression which are thematically similar but which differ dramatically in scale, character and origin. A systemic thread can link a man calling a woman he does not know ‘darling’, the existence of the gender pay gap, and the crimes of Harvey Weinstein — all three being part of a misogynistic or patriarchal structure.

This in turn allows words which are traditionally used to describe the most extreme offenses to be applied much more broadly, as part of a wider ‘system of oppression’. Examples of this ‘term inflation’ include references to ‘acts of violence’, feelings of being ‘unsafe’ and instances of ‘triggering’. These words are frequently used to describe phenomena which don’t directly relate to physical attacks or to diagnosed cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

To be clear, one can build a reasonable theory about the role of systems, institutions and their complex interactions with individuals and real world events. And this can allow you to see links between things that are disconnected in a direct sense.

My decision to purchase a garment made, I suspect, in poor conditions in the developing world may have detrimental repercussions for people I have never met, as well as for the environment. This is something which I should reflect on and change, if I can. But it is not, in itself, the murder of an individual, the killing of the planet or an act of racism. If it is then what do we call it when one person slays another with a knife, when an oil company spills thousands of tonnes of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or when someone on the far right shouts racist slurs?

This may sounds like I’m straying into philosophy, or that I’m trying to let myself — as a participant in systems — off the hook. I am not. What I am trying to avoid is the conflation of terms, in ways which make problems seem insurmountable, which undermine the severity of the most extreme issues, and which create communications barriers with direct reasoners.

This last point is perhaps the most damaging. It happens almost inevitably when highly systematic theories about how the world works butt up against the need for quotable slogans.

A particularly good example, which to be fair had only a little traction in the UK, was ‘defund the police’. What this slogan technically described was the re-balancing of funding, away from frontline police and towards social and mental health services. It referred to a “demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country,”[90] as one Democratic Congresswoman put it, when Barack Obama questioned the usefulness of the term.

Yet to a direct reasoner the phrase means what it says, describing the immediate reduction of police funding to zero and the cancellation of all police officer employment contracts.

Ammunition for right populists

Progressives should not abandon their understanding of events and systems as connected. But we must resist disproportionate language and the conflation of things that are not the same or are not linked. Instead, we must identify the specifics of who or what needs to change within the system for progress to occur.

Failing to do this hands ammunition to the right, who can imply that those advocating progressive positions are playing politics or crying wolf. At its most counter-productive, the misuse of systemic logic taps into the worst fears and deepest suspicions of direct reasoners: that young people are ‘snowflakes’; that the goalposts of what is progressive are continually moving; that political correctness has gone mad; and that social campaigners secretly want to instigate a revolution.

This presents easy fodder to an ultra-direct reasoner like Boris Johnson, who thrives on a situation where he can diminish the claims of his opponents as “claptrap” or “rubbish”. He will often be able to discredit in the same breath wider arguments for social reform, or to crank further open the political realignment described in Part I.

PART VI: Next steps for Labour

The above interplay hands the advantage to the likes of Johnson or Trump — whose mastery of direct logic and language poses as competence. Through setting themselves in contrast to the ultra-systemic jargon of the left, these right-wing populists are able to cast themselves as swashbuckling men of action. And, because they have the electoral arithmetic on their side in the first place — their opponents’ support tending to pile up in cities — they have an inbuilt advantage.

Labour’s discomfort with thinking and communicating directly meant, in 2010s Britain, that large parts of the population were drawn towards a party that promised to “slap Brexit in the microwave,” and away from one whose approach they regarded as abstract and obscure. Although Keir Starmer is turning around the tanker, Labour has continued to lose ground in areas where the absence of life chances, educational opportunities and job prospects is most acute.

These parts of the population are distributed in such a way, geographically, that without them it’s very hard for Labour to govern. But, above and beyond this, they are groups whom the party aspires, in an emotional sense, to represent. Without their backing, Labour has lost its raison d’etre.

Managing the debate between the hard-core direct and systemic camps — which has become a central strand of the culture war — will be essential if Labour is to win these groups back. A More In Common report from 2021, entitled ‘Dousing the Flames’, suggested that modern leaders must neither “align with cultural arsonists in inflaming conflicts” nor “stick their head in the sand and hope that the culture war simply pass them by.”[91] Clear third positions need to be taken, they argued.

What might these third positions look like? I believe there needs to be three separate components to answering this.

A) Acknowledging the value of direct reasoning

The first element is that Labour must be genuinely comfortable with situations where direct logic is correct and proper — rather than treat the direct-systemic fault line as an either-or choice.

One of the earliest errors of the Corbyn years was when the then Labour leader refused, in 2015, to advocate ‘shoot to kill’ as a policy in the case of a terror attack on UK soil. He instead advocated “preventative” approaches. This was a statement which haunted him throughout his tenure as Labour leader, with The Sun unearthing the clip for a second time two years later, after the London Bridge attack.[92]

Corbyn’s words were a classic case of systemic reasoning being pursued irrespective of context. At the point of a terror attack occurring on British streets, preventative approaches have, by definition, failed.

The same was true of Corbyn’s stances on foreign policy over the years. These have, without exception called for ‘debate’ and ‘diplomacy’, even when dictators were mobilising and negotiations had failed long ago.

All of this was noticed by voters. At the Stoke by-election in 2017, for instance, the Guardian’s ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series captured a scene which summed up the response to Corbyn. It featured a Labour door-knocker talking to a young man on a housing estate (see image below). Despite calling for investment in his community, the man dismissed Corbyn out of hand as “a dick”. When pressed on why, he cited Labour’s position on national security: “If someone comes over here and starts blowing us up what are you going to do? Pour them a tea and tell them to crack on?”[93]

There are many situations — on policing, defence, security and even on the management of natural disasters or emergency infrastructure projects — where direct logic is necessary and right. This is why questions around these topics, despite often being hypothetical, remain politically important. In the light of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine in February 2022, they have become more real.

You can bemoan underlying factors or favour long-term preventative steps, while acknowledging that there is a time for ‘no nonsense’, ultra-literal thinking. If there is a sense that you would prevaricate at these junctures, then direct reasoners will not vote for you.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought this home. It is telling that, despite the Tories’ poor management of COVID-19 — not to mention Labour’s historic and entrenched advantage on the NHS — many voters believed, as late as March 2021, that Labour would have handled the crisis worse.[94] This is because Labour had come to be seen as a party focused entirely on systemic factors; on words not on actions. Twelve years out of office have added to this impression, with Labour having few opportunities to show it can deliver.

Thus, I do not think that the voters of Stoke or Mansfield are looking for a patriotic conversion to pounds and ounces from Keir Starmer — or that they want Labour to ape the Tories at the level of policy. But, after five years of Corbyn, it needs to be crystal clear that Labour is not a wishy-washy party, and can think in straight lines when it matters.

Labour will always, ultimately, aspire to fix the system. But we must recognise that direct approaches are needed when that system has failed. We should never think that prison is the answer to deterring crime or rehabilitating criminals. But we must acknowledge that there are occasions when it is necessary.

Likewise, it needs to be clear that we on the left know that a police force will always be needed, however much we might want to reform it. Likewise, that we understand that there are certain circumstances under which the military might need to be deployed, even if we disagree with how they’ve been used in the past. Likewise, that we have the capacity to deal operationally with a natural disaster, before we start to talk about the environmental factors which caused it. And, again likewise, that we know that revenue from the exchequer is ultimately finite, even if we advocate a much more Keynesian position on the economy.

Keir Starmer’s 2021 Conference speech began this job, but many of these points will need to be reiterated again and again over the next two years. Labour’s Leaders in regional and local government have a particularly important role to play here, in demonstrating that the party can handle the very direct either-or questions which governing throws up.

B) Distancing Labour from left-wing abuses of systemic reasoning

Whilst Labour can cover its bases in terms of direct causation, its analysis and ideology will always mean it is the most systemic of Britain’s two main parties. For this reason, it is vital that Labour distances itself from approaches which, as we saw in Part V, discredit systemic thinking.

The risk — in an environment where a tweet by an activist can quickly make it into a national newspaper — is that mainstream progressive stances end up being crowded out of the so called culture war debate. In the best case scenario, eccentric positions get undue attention. In the worst, because they share some DNA, they are taken as the preferred policy of all progressives, including the Labour Leadership.[95]

Perceptions of Keir Starmer’s ‘wokeness’ are striking, within this. According to YouGov polling from 2021, he is seen as more ‘non-woke’ by the ‘woke’ but as more ‘woke’ by the ‘non-woke’. Both sides think he’s in the other camp. This divergence exists neither for Boris Johnson (regarded as very ‘non-woke’ in all quarters) or for Jeremy Corbyn (regarded as fairly ‘woke’ by both audiences).[96]

As Tony Blair put it, in spring 2021, “The [cultural] battle is being fought on ground defined by the right because sensible progressives don’t want to be on the field at all.” Labour’s message, according to Blair, is “being defined by the ‘woke’ left, whose every statement gets cut-through courtesy of the right.”[97]

In practice, the path this tends to take is as follows. A sometimes reasonable (sometimes not) piece of ultra-systemic thinking will be distilled into a mantra or slogan. This will initially be confined to a small group of online or offline activists. As we’ve seen, it will often very poorly represent the ideas it supposedly champions (as with ‘defund the police’), and will be seized upon by right-of-centre media outlets as soon as it gains any traction.

Labour frontbenchers will then be asked to comment on the issue, and will be put in an impossible position, where they are castigated as ‘woke’ by loud voices on the right if they support the activity, and are condemned as reactionaries by loud voices on the left if they do not. Each petty furore provides grist for the Tory campaign mill, and lets them lever the political realignment open further.

To short-circuit this process, Labour needs some organising principles, so that the party knows what side it falls on when it comes to each campaign, cause or slogan that emerges from the activist left. This will let it sift bold, positive ideas which society may not quite be ready for (but which Labour can engage with and develop) from stances which are counter-productive or regressive.

Below are four questions which Labour might ask — of anything from a single tweet to a rally to a funded campaign to a public comment from a celebrity — to help us decide our position.

1. Are the ends achievable? By ‘achievable’ I don’t mean that everything must be fully costed or doable in an electoral term — just that the cause should have a goal in sight, after which its aims can be said to have succeeded.

2. Are the goals socially just? More often than not, the answer here will be yes. But this is not the case on all points. The logic underpinning certain campaigns can move you into territory which runs counter to progressive ideas.

3. Is the problem real and important (according to the language being used)? This relates to how genuine the injustice is — especially if ‘term inflation’ means it is described in language which isn’t proportionate to the scale or nature of the issue.

4. Are the tactics helping the cause? Cause and tactics are inextricable for many on the modern, activist left. Yet there are many cases where the chosen tactics demonstrably fail to advance the wider goals.

It goes without saying that there is an element of judgement in answering the four questions in a given case. This ultimately needs to come down to Labour’s leadership, who will not always get it right. But I would say that, if an activity fails several of these four tests, then the party should distance itself in strong and uncompromising terms. We should be confident here that a sensible majority of systemic reasoners will back us in doing so.

C) Explaining why and how we will fix the system

The final element requires us to set out plans to fix aspects of the system — and, just as importantly, to make the case for why and how we will do this.

George Lakoff writes that “Direct causation is easy to understand, and appears to be represented in the grammars of all languages around the world. Systemic causation is more complex and is not represented in the grammar of any language. It just has to be learned.”

This suggests that systemic reasoning is not innate to human beings. And it explains why higher levels of formal education might correlate with an attraction to systemic diagnoses. Systemic reasoning has, perhaps, only become widespread in the post-war era — among the most developed and educated parts of the most developed and educated nations.

In this sense, progressives are at an inbuilt disadvantage. If someone is on an over-full train carriage and is shoved by a fellow passenger, then it’s natural that their immediate irritation will be directed at the person who shoved them. Getting them to focus on the overarching failures of the rail company, the Department for Transport, the regulator or the wider macro-economy will always be a harder ask. And, let’s not forget, they will sometimes have a point about the behaviour of the passenger who has shoved them.

The goal of the systemically minded left, seen this way, should be to bring with us those who lean towards direct thinking, by persuading, explaining and reassuring. If Labour is able to do this, then we can argue for genuinely radical answers to faults in the system.

COVID-19 creates an opportunity here, allowing the party to make the case for once-in-a-lifetime reforms. Conservative pledges to ‘level up’ and to ‘build back better’, empty though they often are, provide a mandate of sorts for this. Labour should pledge not only to make real on these empty promises but to go much further. And, thanks to Brexit, Johnson’s party have less of a fiscal high ground from which to criticise them.

This is not to say that we should advocate a ‘spend, spend spend’ mentality. But the national debt will not be paid off overnight and, unlike after the 2008 crash, it is harder for the Conservatives to pin it on a profligate government or a work-shy population. Keir Starmer can promote this as a moment for rebuilding — as long as there is clarity about where the priorities for this lie and how Labour will pay for each item.

The echoes of 1945 here have been commented on before: an understated and underestimated Labour leader; a bombastic Tory Party who suddenly look like the past; a public who think that maybe Britain could do better; and a nation in the financial red through no fault of its own. But the element of the parallel which is arguably missing, for Labour, is a clear equivalent of Beveridge’s ‘five giants’. What are the faults in our system, at home and abroad, which we think are fixable? And how would we mend these if we got the chance?

This could seek to address adult social care, homelessness, racial disparities, prison reform, regional inequality, the gender pay gap or social mobility. It might relate to refugees and our asylum system, or to sustainability and our approach to climate change. Nothing should be considered too radical.

Labour has already begun to sketch out its ideas here, with the Green Transition front and centre. Other solutions might be found via reforms, such as the introduction of a Land Value Tax. They might be identified through the creation of institutions — such as a national network of mental health and wellbeing hubs, or full-time, state-funded childcare for all children aged 0–5. They may be sought out using progressive targets, on climate change or on the number of refugees the UK takes — or using regulations, subsidies and taxes in inventive ways. There might be Keynesian opportunities — to stimulate growth in new areas and in so doing rebalance the UK’s economic geography — at a point in time when people are suddenly much less bound to their workplaces by geography. Or there may be infrastructure projects, which would link up the country better or find new, non-retail uses for high streets and town centres.

Policy experts will have more imaginative and thought through ideas here than I do. And, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we try and execute all or most of the above at once. But it is vital that Labour knows what it ultimately wants to change about the system — and that it sets out how and why it will do this.

Analogies and metaphors will be extremely important in making this happen. Linear explanations are needed, for any of the policies above. These will have to be clearly relatable, and must not be seen as partisan. Rather than falling back on emotions and morals (which to us are self-evident but to others are not), they should aim to join the dots and show our workings.

If we look at the popularity of Martin Lewis among Red Wall voters, we see at once an appetite for the unpacking of ideas in an accessible way. It is true that the rationale behind progressive policies sometimes takes longer to explain than the right-wing alternatives. But, if we can get this right, then the Tories’ monopoly over direct thinking can be broken.

Conclusion

Research from 2021 revealed that Labour voters were three or four times as likely as Conservative voters to support a range of campaigns associated with contemporary left-wing activism (such as Extinction Rebellion).[98] However, when the questions were reframed — in terms of support for substantively progressive positions on equalities and the environment — the gap between Labour and Tory voters closed almost entirely.

These sorts of findings have occurred elsewhere, and they support the central argument of this essay. So called culture war debates, and the political realignment which they reflect, are not about big, substantive gaps in the sort of society people want to see. Voters who have gone elsewhere are not permanently lost to Labour. The electoral divide is down to vocabulary at least as much as values.

Yet this positive conclusion should also give us pause for thought. The implication is that we on the left have become unnecessarily estranged from many who share our basic ideals.

I have set out my theory for why this is. Systemic thinking and messaging, which is always going to be part of any left programme, has been used in such a way that it excludes those who favour more direct types of causation. We’ve been so busy trying to convince people that ‘social justice is climate justice’, for instance, that we have failed to register that majorities of our fellow citizens support progressive social policies and sustainable environmental policies. They just don’t see the two things as linked, and are baffled by our insistence that they are.

In other words, the ideas and communications emerging from the Labour machine have not sought to explain how the system is broken or how we’ll fix it. Rather, we have worked on the basis that structural and societal critiques are self-evidently right. Direct, practical problem-solving has come, as a result, to be seen as something the Tories do — not us.

Of course the electoral shifts we have seen cannot be solely explained by any one element, and that is not what I am claiming here. Many factors have driven people towards and away from Labour over the last ten years. But I do think my analysis has implications for our future success in places which have come to feel beyond reach.

Ultimately, when it comes to policy, the pills to be swallowed are not as bitter as many on the left fear. Nor is the road back to power as long as it’s been in the past. If we can speak people’s language again then they will return. We simply need to find our way out of the linguistic and intellectual wormholes which lead us to turn majority positions into minority ones. We need to start thinking in straight lines.

Appendix: A note on George Lakoff

George Lakoff has achieved a cult following among parts of progressive politics — with his book Don’t Think of and Elephant having become required reading in some quarters. In particular, his theories about framing are increasingly common and widely used among NGOs and activist organisations.

Lakoff’s arguments feed into the debates about tactics and strategy which perpetually divide the left. They are important and they are complex. They can be deployed by the far left, to critique ‘centrists’ for caving in and using the frames of the right. But they can also be used by moderates, to critique radicals who adopt positions that will never gain majority support.

I should be clear that, in using the fault line which Lakoff identifies (around different types of causation), I am not seeking to apply the wider Lakoff doctrine to British politics. Nor am I aiming to present myself as an expert on linguistic framing. There are several elements of his argument which I think are wrong, or which do not translate from the US to the UK. And on certain issues the political right is caricatured by Lakoff in ways I’m uncomfortable with.

On the other hand, Lakoff’s arguments allow us to consider how thought and language influences ideology, and how metaphors (e.g. the ‘maxing out of the national credit card’) can guide the public discourse. For me, one of his most interesting contentions is the idea that progressives of all shades share something deep — as do conservatives of all hues. As he puts it, there is “no ideology of the moderate”. His focus on perception and understanding — the idea that our politics are based on how we conceive the world — is also a central ingredient for pluralism.

Important though it is to his body of work, the distinction between direct and systemic causation is, in fact, a relatively small part of the Lakoff argument. But I within it I think we see a crucial divide. By understanding this we can comprehend why the prognoses and preoccupations of educated, post-materialist voters have come to differ so dramatically, in political terms, from those of other social groups — especially from those who once voted Labour but who no longer do.

The hypothesis in this essay is based on extending the implications of this direct/ systemic distinction, and applying them to the context of British politics in the 2010s.

The way I use the distinction departs from how Lakoff himself might in two key ways. Firstly, I do not tend to think that all direct thinking is right wing and all systemic thinking left wing. Instead, I think that the state of affairs where direct thinkers lean one way and systemic thinkers lean the other is a relatively new one — emerging in a context of high regional inequality, expanded university education and growing political division. On a related point, I do not think that direct and systemic reasoning are automatically at odds with each other (as the idea that one is conservative and the other is progressive would imply). I think you can use both.

Secondly, I explicitly argue in this essay what Lakoff intimates: that systemic reasoning is a modern concept, new to the 20th and 21st centuries, and that it is qualitatively different from direct thinking in this regard. In my view, direct thinking will always be more psychologically intuitive. Systemic reasoning translates much less easily into the metaphors which, as Lakoff points out, are so integral to how people understand things. The successes of the conservative right are in large part to do with direct modes of thought being inherent to human logic.

Bibliography

Direct and systemic causation — key passages

‘Understanding Trump?’, George Lakoff, University of Chicago Press, August 2016.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, ‘Chapter 4: Systemic causation’, George Lakoff, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014 (first published 2004), p.36–41.

Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, ‘Chapter 7: Causation and freedom’, George Lakoff Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006, p.111–130.

Moral Politics: How liberals and conservatives think, George Lakoff, University of Chicago Press, 2016 (first published 1996), p.433–434.

Other texts

Beyond the Red Wall, Deborah Mattinson, Biteback, 2020

The Churchill Myths,Bill Schwarz, Richard Toye, and Steven Fielding, 2020

Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing, August 2020.

Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England, Sebastian Payne, Macmillan, 2021

Brexitland, Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press, October 2020

[1] https://localtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/local_trust_ocsi_left_behind_research_august_2019.pdf

[2] The ‘left’ and ‘progressives’ are not the same thing in theory or in practice but, in the context UK politics at an electoral level are effectively synonymous with (and united within) the Labour Party. In this essay we will be mainly concerned with Labour and its electoral performance, so for that reason will sometimes characterise the two groups together. Both can be taken to mean ‘left of centre’.

[3] https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39248/bsa35_gender.pdf

[4] https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/attitudes-race-and-inequality-great-britain

[5] https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39358/5_bsa36_relationships_and_gender_identity.pdf

[6] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-08/issues-index-august-2021-charts.pdf

[7] https://twitter.com/p_surridge/status/1396492796467552259

[8] For example, between 1991 and 2017, agreement with the statement “A man’s job is to earn money, a woman`s job is to look after the home and family” fell across all gender groups, age groups, class groups, income groups and income brackets (https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39248/bsa35_gender.pdf)

[9] https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media-centre/archived-press-releases/bsa-32-support-for-death-penalty.aspx

[10] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-conservatives-win-social-progress-gold-qr3tft5bx

[11] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-british-airways-banning-ladies-and-gentlemen-

[12] Brexitland, Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press, October 2020, p.1–4

[13] https://www.centrefortowns.org/blog/16-the-unequal-distribution-of-an-aging-population

[14] The same phenomenon has occurred in other Western democracies. But a combination of Brexit, the UK’s greater regional inequalities, and the arithmetic of First Past The Post (FPTP) means it’s hit British progressive parties especially hard

[15] https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FABJ9000-Fabian-Ideas-pamphlet-210628-WEB.pdf

[16] https://strongmessagehere.substack.com/p/the-blue-wall

[17] https://medium.com/@chrishanretty/final-estimates-of-the-leave-vote-or-areal-interpolation-and-the-uks-referendum-on-eu-membership-5490b6cab878

[18] This perhaps explains why, in countries with Proportional Representation (PR), it has been harder for right populists to capitalise. This is not to suggest that PR is the answer; it would not change the fact of Labour’s fall in working-class support. But it would remove some of the geographical factors.

[19] If we look at the 2019 General Election, we can see the party political incarnation of this. 24 English seats had gaps of more than 30,000 votes between the two main parties. Despite the Tory landslide, however, 17 of these were won by Labour.

[20] The two speaker seats, Chorley and Buckingham, aren’t included here.

[21] https://twitter.com/bnhwalker/status/1490649389224062978?s=20&t=05Xa_XTciaa_zQICtFkp6g

[22] https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Another-Mountain-to-Climb.pdf

[23] https://softleft.substack.com/p/easy-answers-are-far-from-easy

[24] Another question here, which it would be interesting to examine in more detail, is the role of place. Do non-graduates in graduate-heavy areas vote differently to their counterparts in graduate-light areas, for example? Do ‘educated’ voting norms percolate through or ‘rub off’? And is it simply the fact of studying which changes attitudes at the ballot box, or is it down to the wider fact of having moved towns to a more transient, big city community?

[25] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/2011censusanalysissocialandeconomiccharacteristicsbylengthofresidenceofmigrantpopulationsinenglandandwales/2014-11-04#qualifications

[26] http://publicpolicypast.blogspot.com/2017/10/general-election-2022-open-battlefield.html?m=1

[27] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-05/culture-wars-in-the-UK-how-the-public-understand-the-debate.pdf

[28] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-05/culture-wars-in-the-UK-division-and-connection.pdf

[29] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-education-effect/

[30] https://ukandeu.ac.uk/educational-attainment-referendum-voting/?mc_cid=176b8a8a56&mc_eid=288f7e89bf

[31] https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2021/05/david-gauke-these-results-show-the-conservatives-set-for-success-in-the-2020s-unless-their-opponents-can-adapt.html

[32] The full list of segmentation approaches here might include: Somewheres and Anywheres; Communitarians and Cosmopolitans; Pioneers, Prospectors and Settlers; Liberals, Centrists and Authoritarians; Identity Liberals, Necessity Liberals and Identity Conservatives; Bridged and Bonded communities; Open and Closed approaches to globalisation; and Post-materialist and Materialist values. It would also span research into the six moral taste buds, the ‘big five’ personality traits and plenty beside. My exploration of ‘direct’ and ‘systemic’ thinking does not look to contest these, but rather aims to supplement them, examining an aspect of the story (causation) which is based on language rather than ideals, and which is talked about less.

[33] https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FABJ9000-Fabian-Ideas-pamphlet-210628-WEB.pdf

[34] https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mind-the-values-gap.pdf

[35] https://institute.global/policy/red-walls-red-bridges-rebuilding-labours-voter-coalition

[36] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/05/17/stereotypical-image-red-wall-residents-accurate

[37] Other recent studies — including Dr Frank Luntz’s work with the Centre for Policy Studies, More In Common’s ‘Dousing the Flames’ report, the Fabian’s ‘Counter Culture’ paper, and a major research piece by Ipsos MORI and Kings College London — reveal an array of findings which are quite similar.

[38] https://georgelakoff.com/2016/03/02/why-trump/

[39] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/americas-linguistics-how-we-talk-about-climate-change-politics-morals/

[40] https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/j9x8nbtks7/TimesRedBoxResults_150318_taxation_Website.pdf

[41] https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/britons-support-paying-more-tax-fund-public-services-most-popular-being-new-net-wealth-tax (https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2020-10/public-attitudes-to-wealth-tax-tables-ipsos-mori.pdf)

[42] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/major-on-crime-condemn-more-understand-less-1474470.html

[43] A Journey, Tony Blair, p.75

[44] https://warringfictions.medium.com/against-their-interests-26b8968a1bc4

[45] https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-peter-kellner-on-the-labour-party-crisis-7960234/

[46] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4400844/Woman-hijab-abused-EDL-meets-woman-came-aid.html

[47] https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/5393978/insurance-race-row-john-mohammed/

[48] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9950857/MailOnline-UKs-engaged-news-brand.html

[49] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/16311673/keir-starmer-op-ed-pm-incompetent/

[50] Beyond the Red Wall, Deborah Mattinson, Biteback, 2020, p.138–140

[51] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-alan-sugar-boris-johnson-michael-gove-imprisoned-lies-350m-nhs-vote-leave-apprentice-a8601891.html

[52] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwRmz7kQIhc

[53] https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2016/06/how-to-vote-in-the-eu-referendum/

[54] There does not seem to have been any YouGov polling on this during the 2015–17 electoral term, and for the sake of consistency I have not used data from other polling companies.

[55] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/legal/trackers/sentencing-for-criminal-offences

[56] Brexitland, p.21–24

[57] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/CJI-Poll.pdf

[58] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx

[59] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/legal/trackers/sentencing-for-criminal-offences

[60] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/29/trump-brexit-society-complex-people-populists

[61] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/21819/concepts/lump-of-labour-fallacy-immigration/

[62] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/dec/18/uk-public-borrowing-record-high

[63] https://labourlist.org/2015/08/labour-lost-because-voters-believed-it-was-anti-austerity/

[64] https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/231521

[65] https://news.sky.com/story/shamima-begum-78-of-britons-support-revoking-is-brides-uk-citizenship-sky-data-poll-11643068

[66] Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England, Sebastian Payne, Macmillan, 2021, p.25.

[67] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html

[68] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/reasons-riot-uk-protest-study

[69] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/15/david-cameron-riots-broken-society

[70] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-14462001

[71] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/video/2011/aug/09/boris-johnson-heckled-riot-clapham-junction-video

[72] https://m.facebook.com/borisjohnson/videos/weve-got-the-deal-its-oven-ready-vote-conservative-tomorrow-to-get-brexit-done-/845444842570629/?_rdr

[73] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_qOagBxujg

[74] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2021/07/rory-stewart-road-again

[75] https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2021/06/20/the-more-educated-voters-are-the-less-likely-theyll-be-satisfied-with-bojo/

[76] https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2014/11/one-man-who-made-history-another-who-seems-just-make-it-boris-churchill

[77] The Churchill Myths,Bill Schwarz, Richard Toye, and Steven Fielding, 2020, p.19–26

[78] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/boris-johnson-climate-change-cop26-b1946935.html

[79] Many but not all of these features are shared by the Prime Ministers former advisor Dominic Cummings who, though arriving late on the scene must been seen as an important influence on ‘Johnson-ism’. As a result of his reams of published writing on the art and science of politics we have a clearer idea of what he thinks and clearly is not in tight lock stop with the PM. But, in understanding the centrality of a clear and direct messages and action — as well as through his faith in the ‘Great Man’ theory of history — there are large areas of overlap.

[80] https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/immigration-drives-growth-so-why-is-johnson-pretending-otherwise

[81] Broken Heartlands, p.70.

[82] Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing, August 2020, p.257.

[83] https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/sections-of-a-liz-truss-speech-on-equality-erased-from-government-website-after-being-labelled-bonkers-and-gratuitous-provocation

[84] Clear Bright Future, Paul Mason, Penguin, 2019, p.167–190.

[85] https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-president-emmanuel-macron-a-1172745.html

[86] https://twitter.com/GreenNewDealUK/status/1423190566565781507?s=20

[87] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2016/sep/06/black-lives-matter-airport-protest-climate-change-is-a-racist-crisis-video-report

[88] https://www.stackdatastrategy.com/posts/theres-nothing-woolly-minded-about-centrism

[89] https://www.academia.edu/63462681/Culture_Wars_and_Class_Wars_Labour_Between_Post_Corbynism_and_Johnsonism

[90] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/02/barack-obama-criticizes-defund-the-police-slogan-backlash

[91] https://www.moreincommon.com/media/q43lim5p/dousing-the-flames-uk-mic-report-july-2021.pdf

[92] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3721190/video-of-corbyn-saying-he-opposes-shoot-to-kill-policy-rises-to-the-top-of-bbc-website-in-wake-of-london-attack/

[93] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGis5Wf8_eQ

[94] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/6t6wsor71y/YouGov%20-%20Labour%20COVID%20handling.pdf

[95] The problem is not helped by the fact that in recent years many of the most extreme abuses of systemic reasoning have been adopted by official Labour figures and their outriders.

[96] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/05/18/what-does-woke-mean-britons

[97] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/tony-blair-without-total-change-labour-will-die

[98] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/17/voters-in-west-divided-more-by-identity-than-issues-survey-finds

The country is more progressive. So why is the left losing?

According to most measures, the UK population is further to the liberal left than a generation ago. Social attitude polling would attest to this — on questions such as gender, race, sexuality and the environment. And research by Paula Surridge finds that both main parties’ voter bases moved gradually to the left on economic issues too, between 1992 and 2019. People are, on balance, more committed to equality, sustainability and fairness.

Yet a curious cocktail of factors means that, in spite of our more liberal electorate, social conservatives appear to be winning. This was demonstrated by the decision to leave the EU in 2016. But it has also led to the near-hegemonic position which Boris Johnson’s Conservatives now hold at Westminster. The increasingly progressive attitudes of the UK population are not being reflected by our politics.

The same is true of a number of other Western democracies, with many social democratic parties out of power. But a combination of Brexit, the UK’s greater regional inequalities, and the arithmetic of First Past The Post (FPTP) means it has hit British progressive parties especially hard. Our politics has shifted to the right, culturally — just as the populace has shifted to the left.

Two intertwined elements help to explain the apparent contradiction at play: an electoral realignment within the country, accelerated by Brexit; and a ‘culture war’ debate, played out online and in the media. Both of these phenomena undermine progressive shifts in public opinion.

The first element describes the fact that, while almost every part of the UK has moved in a progressive direction, many areas are only a bit more progressive than they were a couple of decades back, whereas a few are significantly more so. The ‘mean average’ Westminster seat is, I think, decidedly more socially liberal. But the ‘range’ between the most and least liberal has expanded (although even the least liberal is, I suspect, more liberal than a generation ago).

Places which have become a bit more liberal electorally outnumber those that have become a lot more so, thanks in part to demographic shifts. The most pronounced types of left liberalism increasingly coalesce in a comparatively small number of urban centres. In particular, younger people have migrated towards cities.

Bohemian enclaves and networked hubs of this kind now seem to talk a different language to other areas — even when they mean the same thing. Labour speaks this dialect fluently, but the Tories are better at communicating with everywhere else.

The second element — the culture war — creates perpetual debates around talk radio style ‘issues of the day’. Many of these are so minor as to barely matter, or else highlight differences so marginal, in the grand scheme of things, as to be academic. The discussion a few years ago about whether Jamie Oliver was guilty of ‘cultural appropriation’ for selling ‘jerk rice’ is a good example.

Yet these debates create a ‘narcissism of small differences’, percolating into national newspapers and day-to-day conversations and magnifying divides. And the left is again at a disadvantage here. Unlike the Tories, Starmer’s party has been unable to find a place for itself in the aggressive social media debates which the culture war often entails, without cutting itself further adrift from the seats it needs to win back.

The second factor effectively works to amplify and inflame the first. Each cultural wedge issue reinforces the wider realignment, inviting people to take either-or positions and dividing the quite liberal from the very liberal. This means that ultra-progressive parts of the population have become estranged from everyone else, geographically and digitally, at precisely the point where they need to bring others with them.

The challenge for Labour, therefore, is both to reverse an electoral readjustment which many now regard as inevitable, and to ‘bridge’ an increasingly binary set of culture war debates.

The analysis below is an effort to map out Labour’s current predicament— as the party gathers for its first in-person conference since the 2019 General Election. It looks, first and foremost, at the electoral realignment, but has clear implications, I think, for the question of how Keir Starmer approaches the culture war.

Mansfield to Lewisham

UK politics is undergoing a dramatic change. Labour lost its ‘Red Wall’ in 2019. And the 2021 local election results saw the party cede further ground in its heartlands — while making some surprising gains in liberal middle-class areas.

The shifts at play generally harm the left. It is true that there are a number of Tory held seats which might be attainable for Labour or the Lib Dems in the not-too-distant future — the ‘Blue Wall’, as analyst Steve Akehurst has dubbed it. But the socially conservative right have, overwhelmingly, been the beneficiaries of the realignment.

Chart 1 shows part of the reason why. It visualises the structure of the 2016 Remain vote across all UK constituencies, as estimated by Chris Hanretty (figures here). Whilst I think Brexit is overstated as a primary cause for the realignment, looking at the makeup of the referendum vote is helpful, as a proxy for the distribution of liberal attitudes.

As we can see, there are many more majority-Leave seats than majority-Remain. Whereas the Leave-Remain ratio in 2016 was 52%-48% in terms of votes, it was 64%-36% in terms of Westminster constituencies (according to Hanretty’s deductions). The Remain campaign triumphed in fewer seats, but won by more handsome margins in those which it did win — hence why the final result was so close. If you take Scotland out of the equation, this pattern becomes even more pronounced.

Chart 1 is an indictment of FPTP. But it speaks to more than just a critique of our voting system. It illustrates, at a deeper level, that the strongest liberal attitudes are not spread evenly across the country.

Chart 2, below, depicts the seat-by-seat cumulative swing from Labour to Tory and vice versa, during the 2010s. It essentially treats the period between 2010 and 2019 as if this were a single electoral term, rather than three. (This is based on the data behind my ‘Against their interests’ article earlier this year. It looks, for reasons of consistency, at English seats only — as some data, such as that for deprivation, is not directly comparable with the other UK nations).

There are 533 constituencies covered, the swing for each of which is shown in the chart. The seat with the biggest cumulative swing from Labour to the Conservatives is Mansfield (23% points). The seat with the biggest cumulative swing the other way — once you set aside the slightly unusual case of Bradford West, George Galloway’s old stamping ground — is Lewisham West and Penge (22% points).

The 2010 and 2019 elections were both, we should remind ourselves, bad nights for Labour — although 2019 was obviously worse. But what we have seen, during the intervening nine years, is a dramatic re-ordering, beneath the surface, in terms of which parts of the country Labour can rely on and where its appeal lies. This extends far beyond the 43 additional English seats which had been lost by 2019.

The differences in trajectory are immense, in many cases. Mansfield saw a 6,012 Labour lead over the Conservatives in 2010 become a 16,306 Tory majority in 2019. In Lewisham West and Penge, by contrast, Labour’s 7,012 advantage over the Tories at the start of the decade had trebled by the time of the last General Election, to become a thumping 21,543 majority.

In total, 304 English seats swung to the Tories between 2010 and 2019, whereas only 227 swung towards Labour — the Conservatives having started the 2010–19 period in government, let’s not forget. And 75 seats swung Tory by 10% points or more, whereas just 49 swung to Labour by the same margin. Both of these lists of places are shown below.

The fact that Labour increased its majorities in a large number of areas during the 2010s is overlooked, during a decade that is seen as one of all-out decline for the party. These advances should not be underplayed or taken for granted, but they also provide scant comfort.

The simple fact is that, unless a significant number of the seats that have been shifting Tory for the past few years begin to swing back towards Labour, then there is no route to power for the party in the foreseeable future.

It was hoped that by choosing Keir Starmer — a less contentious leader than Jeremy Corbyn — the divergence at play could be averted and the Red Wall won back. While things have improved, this has not happened so far. The risk, if the present realignment continues, is that Labour racks up ever more votes in an ever smaller number of cosmopolitan centres, and is consigned to eternal defeat elsewhere.

The idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ often acts as a balm here. It implies that liberal progressives of all kinds can club together and win. Assuming that this idea goes beyond case-by-case cooperation, then there are many practical questions to be asked of it. These have been made by others and I will not go into them here. But the chief objection I can see — even if the arithmetic panned out perfectly and the policy differences between left parties were overcome — is that the ‘progressive coalition’ proposal does not seek to reverse the realignment above, or even to properly acknowledge it.

Former Labour heartlands have not been lost to the Greens and the Lib Dems — or even, in the main, thanks to Green and Lib Dem parties splitting the progressive platform. The Greens did not stand in Mansfield in 2019, and the Lib Dems won just 1,626 votes. There are some seats, with very small swings to the Tories, where the amalgamated votes of progressive parties outnumber those of the Conservatives. But, generally speaking, the progressive coalition idea accepts by implication that many of the country’s poorest communities — those who are supposed to benefit from progressive politics, and where Labour used to be strongest — are now lost to the Conservatives forever. According to this plan, the left acts in the interests of those who will never vote for us.

The role of education

You can immediately see, from the above lists of constituencies, that those swinging to the Tories are distinct sorts of place from those going to Labour. But what makes them different? Why are certain sorts of place likely to be pushed in one electoral direction by the so-called culture war, while others go the opposite way? What is it, exactly, which means that Mansfield has become an impregnable Tory fortress whilst, over the same time span, Lewisham West and Penge has become a place which weighs the Labour vote?

Does the difference come down to deprivation? Not really. Mansfield is the 117th most deprived English seat, of 533, and Lewisham West and Penge is the 192nd. Seats swinging to the Tories are, it is true, more deprived. But there are countless outliers. Manchester Central is the 17th most deprived constituency in England, but has seen a 7% point cumulative swing to Labour. So, the explanation for the realignment is not purely about poverty and wealth.

Chart 3 looks at the proportion with no qualifications and with no degree in all English seats. It then breaks this into quintiles, and shows the average 2010–19 cumulative swing in each of the quintiles. As we can see, the highest quintiles for no qualifications and no degree — i.e. the 20% of English seats that score highest for each — have cumulative shifts towards the Tories of 6.46% points and 7.08% points, respectively. Whichever of the two definitions we are using, the least educated areas have swung Conservative in the most extreme way.

This pattern plays out neatly as you go down the quintiles. The lowest 20% of seats for no qualifications and no degree — i.e. the most educated fifth of constituencies, according to these two definitions — have swung towards Labour in a similarly dramatic fashion (by 5.24% points and 5.68% points, respectively).

Polling elsewhere has found this, with Boris Johnson’s appeal, in particular, being heavily swayed by education level. His approval rating, at the end of the pandemic, was +17 among those with no qualifications, and -26 among those educated to degree level.

This certainly helps to shed some light on the ‘Mansfield versus Lewisham’ conundrum: 16% have a degree in the former, compared to 37% in the latter.

When we compare education with other factors we find, at a constituency level, that low education correlates with Tory swing more exactly than other potential metrics. Chart 4 shows the ‘no degree’ quintile figures from Chart 3, next to datasets which provide four other potential explanations for the factors which might be driving the realignment: social class (blue bars), ethnicity (orange), age (brown) and deprivation (pink).

Deprivation correlates only slightly with Tory swing. But in the case of class, ethnicity and age, there are also strong parallels. If a seat has:

a) a below average number of graduates

as well as

b) an above average proportion in social grades C2DE

c) an above average proportion of white British heritage and

d) a higher than usual average age

then odds on it will be Tory held or moving in that direction.

Of 123 English seats which fit this description, 99 are now Tory held (as of the Hartlepool by-election in April), compared to 67 in 2010. And, in total, 107 of these 123 places have swung towards the Conservatives since 2010. The 16 places that are bucking the trend and swinging to Labour are mostly in the South West — where the collapse of the Lib Dems has created an unusual dynamic. And a few are in Merseyside — perhaps now the only part of England where the working-class aversion to voting Tory remains strong.

It is important to stress, however, that degree education correlates more strongly than class, ethnic makeup or even age. If we were to draw trend lines onto Chart 4 for these metrics, they would all be a little flatter than the green trend line I have mapped on for ‘no degree’.

Indeed, I wonder if education acts as a sort of a priori to some of the other factors. C2DE voters swinging Tory are less likely to have high academic qualifications, for example. Older voters are more likely to have left school at 16 or earlier, having grown up in an era when very few went to university. And the same dynamic may even be at play with the ‘white British heritage’ metric (at the last census foreign-born residents were found to be better qualified, on average, than those from the UK).

Chart 5 corroborates the central role which education plays, using a different dataset. It looks at the seven ‘domains’ used by the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). These are the specific types of deprivation which feed into the IMD score for each area.

One of these domains is ‘educational deprivation’. Again marked in green on the chart, this definition of deprivation is based on attainment across different school key stages, as well as on school standards, absence rates, adult skills, literacy, access to training, routes into further education, etc. (Detailed explanations of the 2019 IMD domains are here).

We can see, once again, the same pronounced correlation. Constituencies in the top quintile for educational deprivation have seen a cumulative swing of 5.19% points to the Tories. Seats in the least deprived quintile for this metric have seen a 3.70% point swing to Labour.

There are correlations, too, with a swing to the Conservatives when it comes to employment deprivation (in yellow), and to income deprivation and health deprivation (in blue and grey respectively). But none of these are as strong as that for educational deprivation.

It is also worth noting, by way of a contrast, that with two of the IMD domains — living environment (red) and housing/service access (purple) — there is the precise opposite dynamic. Places which are deprived according to these definitions have been swinging to Labour in significant numbers since 2010. Areas with more crime deprivation are also a little more likely to be swinging to Labour.

Within this, we can see a national dynamic at play which is heavily informed by regional inequality and by the dominance of city hubs. In essence, deprived communities who live away from these hubs have worse employment prospects and life chances, with a lack of skilled jobs and few opportunities for training or other types of progression. Your likelihood of being on benefits or income support will probably be higher, and your life expectancy may be lower.

But deprived groups who live within city hubs do not necessarily enjoy a gilded life either: they inhabit crowded, built-up areas, with an impossibly competitive housing market, high homelessness, pollution and a lengthy queue for the library or the doctor’s waiting room. They are slightly more likely to be the victim of a crime and much more likely to be hit by a car or experience pollution.

Put crudely, poorer communities in about two thirds of the country cannot get a decent job and those in the other third cannot get a decent house. The former are swinging Tory and the latter Labour.

Ashfield, Redcar and Barnsley East, for example, are all in the top quintile for educational deprivation and for employment deprivation, but in the bottom quintile for housing/ service deprivation and living environment deprivation. These places have seen cumulative swings to the Tories of 13% points, 14% points and 10% points respectively. In Streatham, Chelsea and Fulham and Bristol West, by contrast, roughly the reverse is true — acute housing deprivation, but a wealth of opportunities. These constituencies have seen swings to Labour of 7% points, 9% points and, in the case of the latter, a whopping 21% points.

This points to quite big questions in terms of who Labour is really ‘for’ — given that the nature of deprivation is so different in different parts of the country. As Glen O’Hara wrote in a blog back in 2017, “Whose thinking is really, really ‘Labour’? The seventy-year-old ex-factory worker in Lincolnshire who owns his own house outright, or the thirty-year-old graduate mortgage broker renting out a tiny room in South-East London?”

However, the aspect which I think is most interesting here remains education. This seems to consistently overlay almost perfectly with cumulative swing. Chart 6, which visualises the above data in a slightly different way, reiterates the point. It shows, for all English seats, the proportion with no qualifications on the vertical axis. And it shows the cumulative 2010-19 swing to or from the Conservatives on the horizontal axis. The colour of the respective dots indicates the party which currently holds each constituency.

As the trend lines show, for Tory and Labour held seats alike, fewer qualifications means a greater swing to the Tories. At present, 63 of the 75 seats swinging to the Tories by 10% points or more have at least 25% with no qualifications. This is true of just 5 of the 49 seats swinging to Labour by the same margin.

Just in case it needs to be said, none of these findings vindicate or ‘prove right’ those who support liberal and left-wing causes. Education and intelligence are quite different from each other, and the electoral instincts of degree-holders are no more important to the makeup of our democracy those of voters with no qualifications.

Conclusions

The level of educational opportunity in an area appears to be a primary driver — if not the primary driver — of our electoral realignment. And it seems likely that it impacts on the sides which people take in the resulting culture war, too. Those who are not degree-educated are less likely to have heard of the term ‘woke’ or to identify with it, for example. And they are much more likely to feel that the pace of cultural change is too fast.

A huge question for progressives is precisely why this disconnect has opened up — and why now? Wider analysis reveals a similar pattern in a number of Western democracies. So the phenomenon is not unique to Britain or the British left — although it is arguably more electorally challenging. But it is as acute here as anywhere, and the shifts in the past decade are particularly striking.

Policy priorities have perhaps played a part — see, for example, the preoccupation under Corbyn with free higher education, rather than with adult skills or early years. Likewise, the academic and public sector leaning in the party’s membership may have contributed.

But to my mind basic communication is the biggest issue. Labour’s pitch to non-graduates has been uniquely tin-eared and high-handed, during the past decade. There has been little effort to persuade or bring others along, with progressive ideas regarded as self-evidently superior.

The grating activist demand that people “go away and educate themselves” epitomises the worst of this tendency. This phrase has echoes, to my ear, of Norman Tebbit’s call for the unemployed to ‘get on their bikes’ and go off to find work — placing responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the individual. If you are of the view, as I am, that a central responsibility of the state is to educate people to the best of their capacity, then this phrase should not sit comfortably with you.

The image at the top of this article shows the thrown finger of Alan Sugar, in the board room of The Apprentice. Research by Labour strategist Deborah Mattinson, for her book Beyond the Red Wall, identifies Sugar as one of several public figures favoured by working-class ex-Labour voters as an ideal national leader — were they to pick someone from outside politics. As a wealthy Remainer, a member of the House of Lords and a man who appears to spend his time circling The Shard in a helicopter, Sugar should not, on paper, be appealing to Brexit voters, communities in former industrial heartlands, or those suspicious of the ‘Westminster bubble’. But his straightforward way of explaining himself is a world away from the jargon which some progressive have been drawn to, and the fact that Red Wallers are so much more positive about him than about anyone related to the Labour Party should give us pause for thought.

It is a terrible indictment of Labour that it has alienated parts of the country where the absence of life chances, educational opportunities and job prospects is most acute. I am sure that many would have other explanations besides mine for why it has happened. But the question, as delegate descend on Brighton this week, is what Labour can now do, to re-connect with the groups lost and to escape from the electoral corner which the party is currently painted into.

‘Nowhere to go’

A contention from the far left, so common it’s now seldom contested, is that Labour in 1997 ‘abandoned its base’. The argument is that, under Tony Blair, the party ‘took for granted’ the electors it was created to represent. New Labour assumed that the core vote in its heartlands had ‘nowhere to go’, and instead appealed to affluent seats in middle England. This is said to have denied working-class communities a voice — creating voter apathy, allowing in the far right and catalysing the collapse of the Red Wall. Just last month, Ian Lavery wrote a piece for Tribune which included this charge.

I was always puzzled by this account of things. I remember working for the Labour candidate in South Thanet in 2015, for example. The seat is the 113th most deprived constituency of 533 seats in England. Having been gained by Labour in 1997 and held in 2001 and 2005, it was lost in 2010. By the time I was working there it was effectively beyond reach. The Tories won it by more than 10,000 votes in 2019.

The analysis below looks at data for all General Elections from 1983 to 2019, gauging how well Labour did with its base in each one.

There are different definitions of the Labour base, of course. So I’ve used seven metrics, each of which could potentially describe those the party sees itself as representing. These are:

· Deprivation score, as Labour tends to regard itself as the champion of society’s poorest;

· Proportion in social grades C2DE, working-class voters being Labour’s traditional social constituency;

· Proportion that are social/ private renters, as the left sees itself as a protector of those without property and those living precarious lives;

· Average weekly salary, as progressive politics aims to equalise economic outcomes and pay;

· Average house price, as we hope to represent those with less social status and fewer economic assets;

· Unemployment rate, as Labour aims to champion those denied opportunities;

· Percentage in mining/ manufacturing jobs, as the party speaks, historically, for communities in industrial and unionised sectors.

There is considerable overlap between seats scoring highly for these things, but they are not, automatically, the same places. Only 76 seats are not in the more deprived half of the country for a single one.

The charts below look only at seats in England.[1] They are based on an attempt to trace constituencies’ back to 1983.[2] This is an inexact science, as boundaries have changed significantly in some cases. But there are 496 seats that have existed, in some recognisable form, across all ten elections during the period.

Chart 1 looks at constituencies which are in the top half of English seats for each of our seven metrics — i.e. the 260 or so that are above the median average for deprivation, proportion C2DE, number of renters, etc. (The dates in brackets signify the year the data was taken from). The chart shows how many of these seats Labour won over the course of the ten elections that took place — excluding abolished or newly created constituencies.

Each metric follows the same rough pattern. Labour starts from a low base in 1983, wins steadily more of the seats that might constitute its base in the 1987 and 1992, and does extremely well in 1997 and 2001, with a little momentum lost in 2005. The party falls back dramatically in 2010 and 2015, has a minor uptick in 2017, and then does very poorly indeed in 2019.

The exceptions to this are ‘proportion unemployed’ and ‘proportion renting’. With these two measures the above pattern also exists, but Labour has not, by 2019, fallen to the same levels as in the 1980s. The reason for this is largely the party’s solidification of a number of inner-city seats. Westminster North and Streatham, for example, have large numbers both of social and private renters. Both are safely Labour now but were Tory in 1983.

Chart 2 shows the same thing as Chart 1, except that it focuses only on constituencies which are in the top 50 seats for each metric — rather than the top half. As we can see, the patterns are much the same, although the differences between the years in government and those in opposition are less pronounced. Labour’s solidification of seats with high numbers of renters is even more evident.

Of course, it may be that what critics of ‘triangulation’ are talking about is the overall makeup of the Labour vote — rather than the number of deprived seats won. Compass’s Neal Lawson (who I had a very enjoyable published email exchange with in March) argued this a few years ago. In the New Labour years, he wrote, “the tent was too big and [Tony Blair] spent the next 10 years trying to keep the wrong people in it.”

In other words, it could be that New Labour’s abandonment of its base came about by winning richer seats — and thus ‘diluting’ its appeal — not by losing poorer ones. This proposition is, in my view, pretty shaky, raising tough hypothetical questions. Should Labour even field candidates in affluent constituencies, for example, if winning them represents a capitulation? Nevertheless, the ‘dilution’ premise is worth investigating.

Chart 3 shows the composition of the seats won by Labour in all ten elections (removing, once again, those which cannot be traced all the way through the period). It illustrates the breakdown in terms of seats won in the top half for deprivation versus those in the bottom half. As we can see, Labour won an extra 67 less-deprived seats in 1997, as well as an extra 63 more-deprived seats.

Charts 4 and 5 show the same thing for class and pay, respectively. Labour in 1997 won an extra 63 of the more middle-class seats, for example, in addition to 67 of the more working-class ones. Likewise, the party won 80 extra better-paid seats, in addition to 50 worse-paid ones.

This does, indeed, mean that the average seat held by Labour was more affluent in 1997 than before — particularly on the pay metric. But it’s hard to see why this is an issue. If Labour had been losing working-class seats at the same time as it gained middle-class ones then there might at least be an argument to be had. But, given that the party was gaining both at a roughly equal pace, it’s hard to see that the ‘dilution’ critique carries much water.

One thing to point out, meanwhile, is the result in 2005. In this election, with Blair at his least popular, the seats lost were mainly those furthest from Labour’s base. The party lost 21 less-deprived seats compared with 15 more-deprived ones; 22 of its more middle-class seats compared to 14 of its more working-class seats; and 26 of its better-paid seats compared to 10 of its worse-paid ones. Essentially, the non-traditional, more affluent parts of the 1997 coalition started deserting the party — not the working-classes.

Also of note is the makeup of the seats won by Labour in 2017, at the high noon of Corbynism. Of 19 net gains, for example, 16 were at the more middle-class end of the spectrum. Unlike in 1997, Labour was winning middle-class seats at a much much faster rate than it was winning working-class ones — a ratio of around 5:1, in fact. (Indeed, when we look at actual numbers instead of net change, we can see that six more-deprived seats were lost in this election — such as Stoke-on-Trent South and Walsall North — compensated for by gains in better off places, like Leeds North East and Sheffield Hallam).

Chart 6 looks in more detail at seats lost. It takes the number of seats won in 1997 as the high water mark, and analyses the composition of those lost in subsequent elections — including by Tony Blair himself. It uses five of the seven metrics (removing those that are difficult to compare on a single chart).

Of the three tranches of seats lost, those that were Labour in 1997 but had been lost by 2005 were, on average, those furthest from Labour’s base. And those that were Labour in 2015 but not by 2019 were closest to the party’s historic core vote. The 43 seats lost by Blair between 1997 and 2005 had an average deprivation score of 20.6, for instance. The 41 lost between 2015 and 2019 had an average score of 28.8.

The only exception to this is the percentage renting, where the proportion is lowest among the Blair losses. This reflects, once again, Labour’s steadily strengthening support, during the 2010s, among young, inner-city private renters. This group are locked out of the housing market, especially in London, and may have spent much of the decade struggling to find skilled work. Termed ‘educated left behinds’ by Tim Bale, this was, in a certain sense, the core Corbynite vote.

The chart below shows the figures for the two metrics not shown on Chart 6. Again, we can see the same pattern in place, with the seats lost by Corbyn tending to have lower property prices and worse pay.

The Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh wrote a few years ago that “New Labour was always misread as a middle-class takeover of a working-class movement. It was something close to the opposite.” Charts 1–6 appear, in different ways, to corroborate this. It’s hard to see much basis for the idea that the seeds for Labour’s present woes were sown during the party’s time in office.

Of course, there are factors beyond the simple test of the number of seats won. Enthusiasm for New Labour was Luke warm in the party’s traditional heartlands, it’s sometimes argued — reflected by the low turnout at the 2001 election.

I tend to think the meaning of turnout is in the eye of the beholder, here. 2001’s low turnout could be the result of a radical electorate denied a ‘real choice’. But it could also indicate a contest with very little jeopardy, and a voter base who were fairly happy with the direction of travel. So I don’t think turnout alone can be used as a measure.

However, the number of votes going to Labour in deprived seats does matter, as does the party’s vote share. It could be that disillusioned communities in working-class seats voted Labour out of habit during the 1990s and 2000s — without enthusiasm and with increasing numbers opting to stay at home. In this light it’s worth examining the size of the Labour vote in the heartland seats we’ve been looking at, as well as who won.

One major caveat here is that we need to also chart the performance of the Conservatives. If we look at seats which are in the more deprived half for at least four of our seven metrics — of which 241 can be traced throughout the period — we can see why. Labour got an average of 19,533 votes per seat across these constituencies in 2001, whereas in 2017 the average figure was 24,241. However, the Conservatives also got many less votes in these seats in 2001 than in 2017 — an average of 11,094 in the former election and 18,351 in the latter. Presented with a ‘real choice’ in 2017, an average of 4,708 more voters per seat chose Labour than in 2001, but an additional 7,257 per seat were motivated to vote Tory. If the ‘real choice’ you’re proposing is driving people in deprived seats to vote for the other main party in greater numbers than for your own then you have a problem.

It seems like the most sensible thing to look at here is Labour’s average majority — or, rather, at the party’s lead over the Tories (this being where the primary battle lies). Chart 7 shows this, for the 241 seats in the top half for four or more of the seven metrics. Seats that cannot be traced through the duration of the period are again removed. And the red line indicates the mean average.

What this shows, firstly, is that the patterns observed in Charts 1–6 essentially hold out when you look at vote share — albeit in a flatter way. Secondly, the range of vote shares in these deprived constituencies is much narrower during the Blair elections and much broader during the Corbyn years. Across the 241 seats, Labour’s biggest leads over the Tories in 1997 were around 30,000. Its smallest were around minus 15,000. By 2017 Labour was beating the Tories by about 40,000 in its safest deprived seats, but losing to them by as much as 25,000 in others.

Chart 8 examines this using a narrower definition — the 82 seats that are in the 50 poorest for at least two of our metrics. Here, Labour’s 2017 average performance is slightly better, but the sawn-off shotgun effect post-Blair is even more pronounced. Whereas Labour won all 82 of these deprived seats in 1997, 2001 and 2005, by 2019 there was no discernible pattern. 25 had bigger Labour leads over the Tories than in 1997. But many more had seen their majorities fall substantially. 21 are now Conservative-held — rising to 22 as of yesterday.

The deprived seats where Labour saw significantly increased majorities post-2015 are interesting to look at. These are poor and working-class areas where there appears to have been a genuine appetite for Corbynism. In some cases these constituencies had a significant, left-leaning Lib Dem vote, which overwhelmingly converted to Labour.[3]

If we return to our list of 241 deprived seats (examined in Chart 7), we find that there are 48 Labour-held seats where a) 2017 Corbyn got a bigger majority than 1997 Blair, AND b) 2019 Corbyn a bigger majority than 2005 Blair.[4] These radical working-class areas fall into several sub-groupings:

· Seats in Merseyside (e.g. Knowsley);

· Seats with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage populations (e.g. Blackburn);

· Seats with student populations (e.g. Portsmouth South);

· Seats in parts of inner London with a radical history (e.g. Tottenham).

Although it’s worth noting that the party was also doing poorly in these areas pre-Blair, these 48 seats are the closest thing I can see to a genuine example of working-class areas clamouring for Corbyn-style socialism. I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the constituencies in question were tub-thumping fans of the then Labour leader — any more than the poorer swing-seats won by Blair were vocal advocates of the Third Way — but they certainly became more tribally Labour in the 2010s. They were not alarmed by the perceived radicalism of the party post-2015, or else were so hostile to Boris Johnson’s Tories that it didn’t register.

These 48 seats do not represent working-class communities per se, any more than Red Wall constituencies, historically Tory-voting areas with rural poverty, or anywhere else does. But they are an interesting sub-set to be aware of, and should not be dismissed.

The problem for Labour was that, for every seat like this there were several other deprived constituencies that went in the opposite direction. Chart 9 returns to seats won as the primary metric of success, and shows the electoral consequences of this, in our first-past-the-post-system. It reveals the overall pattern among the 241 more deprived seats looked at in Chart 7 (including only those that can be traced all the way through). Whereas just 30 were won by a party other than Labour in 1997, 121 were in 2019.

All of the above is relatively crude, and big demographic shifts in the past 40 years mean there are limits to how much you can infer the further you go back. Also, the absence of Scotland and Wales in the charts has probably not been kind some of the former Labour leaders on there, such as Michael Foot and Gordon Brown.

Moreover, it’s important to be aware that we have started at a low point for Labour, 1983 being an especially bad election for Labour’s working-class support. The Blair years are flattered a little by this in the charts.

So, to be clear, I didn’t write the above because I think Keir Starmer’s Labour needs to revert to the New Labour template, or that Tony Blair would somehow magic back the Red Wall were he to become leader again. I’m just trying to point out that the narrative preferred by the far left, whereby ‘centrists’ robbed the working-classes of their only political mouthpiece, is some way off the mark. Also, more importantly, I want to underscore that the idea of poorer and more working-class voters as a politically homogenous group is dangerous for the left — particularly if our approach to that group is to romanticise or stereotype it.

To the extent that the modern Labour Party can learn from the 1990s, it’s in the desire to listen to these communities rather than align them with our own assumptions. Projects like ‘Southern Discomfort’ — or the much-derided use of focus groups, for that matter — sought to think about the types of seat we’ve looked at above in a more nuanced way, rather than mythologizing them. Tony Blair’s use of ‘aspiration’ was an attempt to speak to poorer voters who wanted socio-economic divisions to be removed — rather than turned into the battle lines for a ‘class war’.

Instead of the automatic belief that working-class non-Labour seats are voting ‘against their interests’ progressives need to ponder what those ‘interests’ actually are, in the hugely varied range of places which might plausibly constitute the party’s base. The second section of this article assesses this a little more.

‘Deprived bellwethers’

Once you include the seats which cannot be traced back for the entirety of the period we’re looking at (which adds 11 constituencies), there are 252 seats in England which are above the median average for at least four of our seven metrics. 122 were Labour-held prior to the Hartlepool result.

Chart 10 shows the cumulative swing in these places, between the 2010 election and the 2019 one. Neither of these were good results for Labour, but the cumulative swing data shows how much worse things got between the former at the latter, under the surface. Of our 252 ‘more deprived’ places, 169 swung to the Tories and 83 to Labour. When you look at very significant swings — over 10 points one way or the other — the disparity is even greater. 68 ‘more deprived’ seats swung Conservative by more than 10 points (e.g. Bassetlaw, Amber Valley, Cannock Chase and Waveney). Just 15 had a similarly pronounced shift in the other direction (e.g. Manchester Gorton, Birmingham Hall Green and Bradford East).

This shows the extent to which Labour rowed away from its base — whatever definition of the term we’re using — during the 2010s.

If we look at the same thing for our list of very deprived places (i.e. those looked at in Chart 8, which were in the top 50 for at least two of our seven metrics) the pattern is a less pronounced. Of these 85 seats 45 swung to the Conservatives (24 by more than 10 points) and 40 swung to Labour (14 by more than 10 points). However, given that these are places with acute poverty — the likes of Middlesbrough, Oldham and Blackpool South — this more mixed picture is hardly cause for celebration.

The collapse of Labour’s Red Wall has attracted a great deal of debate and speculation and, important though this is, there’s a risk that it masks the wider haemorrhaging of a range of deprived seats, over a much longer period. The swings taking place even since the 2010 electoral defeat are profoundly worrying.

Hence, rather than regarding of the collapse of the Red Wall as a distinct phenomenon, it’s important to think of it as a sequel to the loss of deprived constituencies in 2010, 2015 and 2017. In this timeframe 48 ‘more deprived’ seats went to other parties.

Likewise, we need to see it as a potential prelude — if we’re not careful — to further backsliding. There are 21 places which are currently Labour-held but which a) have leads of less than 5,000 over the Tories AND b) have seen cumulative swings to the Conservatives of at least 5% since 2010. Examples include Wentworth and Dearne and Hull East. Hartlepool was not among these, its cumulative swing to the Tories being 3% during this period, yet was lost last night.

Chart 11 roughly categorises the political allegiances and voting histories of all 252 seats that are in the top half for at least four metrics. It divides them into seven sub-groups:

· Strong Labour, socialist leaning/ reclaimed bellwether. These are ‘Always Labour’ or ‘Mostly Labour’ seats, but ones where — as was mentioned in the previous section — there appeared to be a genuine enthusiasm for Corbyn’s leadership. (Examples: Liverpool Riverside, Blackburn, Brent Central). Also included here are a handful of ‘reclaimed bellwethers’, which were relatively marginal historically but were won in 2017 and held in 2019. (Example: Brighton Kemptown, Bedford).

· Almost always Labour. These are solid Labour seats, which are currently held by the party and which elected Labour MPs for at least nine of the ten elections we’ve looked at. The profile of Labour’s support varies from one to the next, but they were not so hostile to Labour’s direction after 2015 as to join the Red Wall — nor so enthusiastic as to be classed as ‘socialist leaning’. (Examples: Jarrow, Coventry North East, Bristol South).

· Mostly Labour. These seats have voted Labour for between six and eight of the ten elections and are currently held by the party. They are somewhat miscellaneous as a group, but have not followed the same clear pattern as the Red Wall. (Examples: Southampton Test, Rochdale, Ipswich).

· Red Wall. These seats have got a lot of attention in the past eighteen months. They were strongly Labour until 2017 or 2019, but were lost for the first time under Corbyn. I used Steve Rayson’s Red Wall definition here, with one or two tweaks. Hartlepool is sadly now among them. (Examples: Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Wakefield, Mansfield).

· Deprived Bellwethers (broad definition). This is a category of seat we’ll look at in more detail. They are places which returned Labour MPs for between two and five of the ten elections covered in this analysis, including at least two of the three Blair elections. (Examples: The Wreckin, Pendle, Nuneaton).

· Deprived Bellwethers (narrow definition). This set of constituencies are very similar to the group directly above, but they fulfil a purer version of the definition. They are places which Labour won in all three of 1997, 2001 and 2005, but not before or since. (Examples: Great Yarmouth, Tamworth, Dover).

· Almost never Labour. These are places held continuously by the Tories (often in rural parts of England) or by the Lib Dems (in the case of the South West). Some were won once by Labour, anomalously, during the ten election period looked at here. (Examples: Yeovil, Louth and Horncastle, North East Cambridgeshire).

There has been a bit of ‘rule of thumb’ involved in categorising some places. But the groupings, while inexact, let us see a more granular breakdown of England’s deprived seats.

As Chart 11 shows, around half of the deprived seats in question are ‘Strong Labour/socialist leaning’, ‘Almost always Labour’ or ‘Mostly Labour’. Of the 122 deprived seats currently held by Labour, 82 are still what might be termed ‘safe’, with a 2019 majority of at least 5,000 (although post-Hartlepool I’d be cautious of classing anywhere as safe).

Just under a sixth are in the Red Wall, meanwhile, and a similar proportion are ‘Never Labour’.

This leaves 52 seats that I’ve classified as one or the other type of ‘deprived bellwethers’. These are listed below. Also shown, in the third column below, are bellwethers that are a little less deprived — sitting in the top half for two or three of our seven metrics, but not for four or more. Of the 52 seats listed in the first two columns, 45 have swung towards the Tories during the past decade.

Within this ‘deprived bellwether’ group there are several interesting types of place, which repeatedly crop up.

Firstly, a large number of seaside towns are deprived bellwethers. This includes Blackpool North and Cleveleys, Cleethorpes, Morecambe, Sittingbourne and Sheppey and Waveney. Within this group are some of the poorest communities in the UK — Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, for example. Many have distinct types of social issue, such as significant pensioner poverty and high numbers of drug deaths.

These resorts are geographically less connected. They often have older, non-diverse populations, with a strong sense of cultural loss, rooted in genuine economic decline. The predominance of informal job sectors and service-based economies means workforces are less likely to be unionised or organised.

Secondly, there are a number of ports or maritime centres, including Dover, Chatham and Aylesford and Portsmouth North. If we include slightly less deprived places then other seats, such as Brigg and Goole, feature as well.

The nature of work may be a determining factor in these places not being safer Labour. Historic jobs in ports, while unionised, will often have been less skilled, or else have been solitary occupations — such as operating cranes or forklifts — with less sense of collective endeavour. In some of these seats, furthermore, immigration is very much a ‘live issue’.

Thirdly, there are numbers of new towns within the ‘deprived bellwether’ grouping. This includes Harlow, Corby, Telford and Redditch. Again, if we broaden the definition to add slightly less deprived bellwethers (those in the top half for 2–3 of the seven metrics) then Crawley and Milton Keynes can be included.

New Towns often have large amounts of social housing and significant populations of older residents, many of whom grew up in bigger cities but migrated out in the post-war years. More recently, low property prices and good transport links have made New Towns a destination for younger and less well-off people looking to get on the property ladder. Fewer community assets and shared institutions exist — like pubs or football clubs — and, historically, the ‘newness’ of these seats may mean they’re beholden to neither party, even when deprivation is acute.

Fourthly, we come across a clutch of market towns and small cities: Gloucester, Worcester, Lincoln, Shrewsbury, Stourbridge. These areas would not automatically conjure images of deprivation; but they tend to be in the more deprived half for a number of our metrics, without being in the top 50 for any.

A lot of the market towns and small towns in question have universities, but they’re not strong enough academic centres to be hubs for left-liberalism — in the ways that Cambridge or York would be. Meanwhile, although industrial jobs exist, such seats are not so reliant on manufacturing as to be died-in-the-wool Labour.

Lastly, there are a group of towns which I’ve called, for want of a better label, ex-industrial multi-towns. This includes Keighley, Camborne and Redruth, Cannock Chase and Pendle. The most notable factor with these places is that a mining or manufacturing history exists, and that there are two or three smaller towns stung together, in an otherwise non-urban part of the country.

Levels of deprivation here vary. The towns in Pendle, for example, are very deprived, whereas in Calder Valley they’re only a little poorer than the median average. But what ‘ex-industrial multi-towns’ seats have in common is that they’re less cosmopolitan or urban. We might infer that rural and industrial traditions vie for political primacy here, creating a blue-red tug-of-war at the ballot box.

In addition to the above, we find some broader characteristics that occur across our deprived bellwethers. A number, for example, are characterised by lighter or more modern forms of industry. This includes brewing and shoemaking in Kettering and Burton, and car-making in Swindon. Often, industrial decline may be a more recent or gradual factor, with the strife of the 1980s not scorched on the memory in the same way as in Yorkshire or Wales.

Moreover, although the ‘deprived bellwethers’ are scattered across the UK, there is a distinct southern, eastern and Midlands slant. This may reflect areas which are more culturally Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic, with stronger cultural attachments to English identity. It could also be due to wider differences, again relating back to experiences during the 1980s.

This leads on to the question of diversity. The ‘deprived bellwethers’ tend to have smaller non-white populations than other parts of the country, without the collective memory of migration that you might find in urban centres. However, this is changing in many such seats. According to a Webber Phillips report last year, 26 of the 52 ‘deprived bellwethers’ are Newly Diversifying (i.e. experiencing rises in migration that are faster than the national average, from a start-point which is lower). This compares with 105 of 533 seats across England. It may help to explain the salience of migration in these places.

A final interesting element of these ‘deprived bellwethers’ is specific geographical position. Almost none are in the centre of large conurbations, but several are situated in the edge of major cities: Bolton West, Dudley South, Keighley, Thurrock, Harlow, etc. One or two others, meanwhile, are what you might, perhaps pejoratively, call ‘second seats’ — the poorer and less prestigious constituency in a two or three seat city.

This tells us a lot. One of the defining traits of our ‘deprived bellwethers’ is that they are marginalised in national debates, and do not quite ‘fit’ the preferred groupings of left or right. Many are places without a great deal of glamour and status attached to them, which exist in the shadow — metaphorically and sometimes physically — of our city hubs.

Chart 12 illustrates this. It shows the number of clusters which our ‘deprived bellwethers’ fall into the top half for (bearing in mind that being in the top half for at least four is a prerequisite for the category). It reveals that 49 of our 52 ‘deprived bellwethers’ are below the median average for house prices. This is particularly striking, given that a number are in the south east, where property prices are higher.

This makes me think a focus on ‘place’ is really important for understanding ‘deprived bellwethers’. If I was Labour I’d focus, in a nuanced and granular way, on some of the ‘deprived bellwethers’ mentioned above — seaside towns, ports, New Towns, etc — to understand what they’re looking for from the party. Working groups could be set up to engage, within each type of place, with former Labour representatives, unsuccessful candidates in past elections, Council group leaders, local activists, etc.

Speaking for myself, I only know a small number of the ‘deprived bellwethers’ well. But my hunch would be that appealing to ‘deprived bellwethers’ does not require progressives to jettison all they hold dear. Perhaps there would be specific policy demands, on immigration or crime, that might make the average Labour member squeamish. But more likely, I suspect, the answers lie in changes to our language and culture, and in a focus on policies which are practical and constructive.

It’s often assumed that debates over ‘the flag’, for instance, are about demonstrating Labour’s patriotism. Yet the reality is that these discussions are, to a much greater extent, about showing that Labour is professional and no nonsense. Being comfortable singing the national anthem or bowing to the Queen is the political equivalent of wearing a suit to a job interview. You’re not expected to love wearing suits in your spare time, but if you have trouble doing it when it matters then you’re clearly not a serious candidate.

As things stand, Keir Starmer sitting next to a Union Jack provokes an extended period of soul searching and hand-wringing among progressives. As a result Labour is regarded as unserious — obsessing over gestures and stances rather than focusing on the things that matter.

Conclusion

In late 2019 I released a book, Warring Fictions. Subsequently republished as The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master, it criticised several myths inherent within left populism, including what I called the Dark Knight myth (the tendency to categorise politics into good and bad) and the Golden Era (the tendency to idealise the past).

A lot of the discussions I subsequently had with Labour members about the book focused on its moral and intellectual implications. Was I defending the architects of austerity as decent and well-intentioned people? Was I trying to say that ‘neoliberalism’ hadn’t happened?

Yet the wider aims of The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master were just as much about electoral cul-de-sacs as ethical ones. It critiqued the self-defeating habit of romanticising our own ‘side’ and caricaturing opponents. The progressive tendency, after all, is often to idealise Labour’s electoral base, imagining it as some mix of the Durham Miner’s Gala, Notting Hill Carnival and I, Daniel Blake. Conversely, we assume that those who vote for the Conservatives are stock-brokers and property developers, who only leave their gated communities to attend Ascot and Henley Regatta. (I myself am probably guilty of caricature here, but only slightly!)

The analysis of Labour seats over time reveals how baseless many of our assumptions here are. It shows that working-class is not an automatic synonym for left-wing, and that tacking away from conventional left-wing policies is not necessarily the same thing as abandoning the base. The misty-eyed recollection of Labour heartlands betrayed by Tony Blair does not, for the most part, stack up.

The focus on ‘deprived bellwethers’ meanwhile, points to a whole set of places which defy simple categorisations. There are southern seats with ‘northern’ problems, home-owners who are financially struggling, deprived communities voting ‘against their interests’ and working-class towns with a strong sense of upward mobility. By deploying the morally-charged, ‘Dark Knight’ language of villains and victims, Labour is unlikely to appeal to people in these places, and will probably end up putting noses out of joint.

Looking at these ‘deprived bellwethers’ — rather than at the Red Wall — may be a strange thing to do on the morning after an electoral defeat in Hartlepool. Yet if we look at Labour’s lead over the Conservatives in the seat prior to the 2021 by-election we can see that it follows very much the same pattern as many of our ‘deprived bellwethers’, as chart 13 shows.[5] The collapse of the Red Wall is emblematic, but is a symptom of something far deeper.

I don’t know what the answer for Labour is here. But we need to start by analysing accurately what has actually happened and is happening. The aim, as much as possible, must be to think beyond archetypes and stereotypes. This will help us to define Labour’s purpose as a political party, to think through what our ‘base’ might possibly look like in 2020s Britain, and to understand how we can re-connect with that base.

—

[1] This is because the electoral context in the other three nations is different, and also because comparable Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish data does not exist for several of the metrics (the Index if Multiple Deprivation, for example).

[2] The data on deprivation, social grade etc used is mostly from the 2010s. Accurate constituency data is harder to find the further back you go. And the truth is that, while the gaps between places have narrowed and widened at certain points — and there have been changes affecting all areas — there are not that many cases of dramatic shifts in the ordering (e.g. of an area going from the 100 highest seats for deprivation to the 100 lowest). With than said, there is a degree of weakness in the method, in that data for our seven metrics during the earliest elections covered is likely to be a bit less accurate than that for recent polls. With the two metrics based around housing this is most true.

[3] This could be seen as a weakness of my analysis, insofar as Corbyn was competing in a largely two-party system, unlike any other leader in our ten elections; of course his majorities were larger — they were not split by smaller parties. However, engaging with different electoral contexts is simply the nature of the beast, I think. Blair did not have the complex trade-offs of Brexit allegiances to content with, for example. Brown did not have the additional threat of Ukip which his predecessor Ed Miliband faced. A political leader can only beat what is in front of them.

[4] There are about 40 more seats which fulfil this criteria once we include places in the top half for just two or three criteria. These are overwhelmingly university cities like Exeter and inner London seats like Hackney South or Vauxhall.

[5] It’s worth pointing out here that The Conservatives were not the second party in 2005 and 2015, the Lib Dems and Ukip running Labour closest.