In December 2019, Boris Johnson won a UK general election, taking 365 seats. This was the Conservative party’s best performance since 1987 and its (joint) third best since the second world war. Despite his present troubles, Boris stands in the same rank as Margaret Thatcher and Harold MacMillan as a pre-eminent election winner.
Crucial to Boris’ victory were big swings to the Conservatives in Northern constituencies that had loyally (almost robotically) voted Labour for nearly a century, such as Don Valley or Bassetlaw, dubbed the ‘Red Wall’ by commentators. The largely white, working-class voters of these areas voted Conservative for the first time in their lives, abandoning decades of loyalty to the opposition Labour party. They appear to have done so because of their general support for Brexit and their general dislike of then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Meanwhile in Scotland (which voted against Brexit, unlike England) the Conservatives, never terribly popular with Scottish voters, lost over half of its remaining seats. But it’s what happened next that is really interesting.
The Conservatives have been in power since 2010, and the next election will be in (or before) 2024. Another Conservative win, keeping them in office likely until 2029, would be historically unprecedented: No party has held office for 29 years since the Whigs dominated government in the mid-eighteenth century, long before modern democracy in the UK. With their eye on this prize, the Conservatives have revealed they are willing to do almost anything to keep those new Northern seats in the Conservative fold. Michael Gove, the new minister for ‘levelling up’ in the North of England, has unveiled an ambitious set of proposals which, although unfunded, has won the grudging approval even of staunch critics of Conservative governments such as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.
By contrast, the Conservatives have shown no willingness at all to do much for Scotland, which is seen as an electoral lost cause. Perhaps particularly revealing was the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, dismissing his colleague Douglas Ross, the leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, as ‘a bit of a lightweight’ at a recent press conference.
What can voters everywhere take away from this turn of events? The vital, counter-intuitive answer is: Change your party vote from time to time. The rewards may be great. The alternative, to keep voting on tribal lines for the same old parties, guarantees being ignored by everyone, even when your tribal party wins. This advice is contrary to standard political wisdom, which says that parties reward their base when they win office. But Boris’ love affair with the old Labour Red Wall shows that the standard political wisdom is now, and perhaps always was, wrong: Groups of voters who turn their coat at the ballot box can anticipate great rewards from their grateful new representatives.
The political coalitions of the Western democracies are now in a state of flux, due to the endless decline of the old white working class, both as a demographic and as an important economic player. This is a decline that has been going on for my entire life. Once the lynchpin of society, white working-class voters, though still very important, are no longer the dominant political force they were in the 1960s and 1970s. This offers opportunities for all other groupings everywhere. What is more, this group of working-class voters are now ‘in play’ in a way they haven’t been since the 1930s. You can be sure aspirational politicians of all parties are uncomfortably aware of this new state of affairs.
Who could benefit most from a one-time, one-off switch of allegiance, just to show they are in play and should not be taken for granted? One obvious candidate is the African-American vote of the Deep South of the USA. Loyal Democrat voters since the 1960s, Southern African-Americans have received no tangible benefits from Democrat Presidents or Congresses since the 1960s. They’re still poor, still worse educated, and worst of all for them, mostly ruled by Republicans most of the time, who give them nothing precisely because they never vote Republican. Neglected by both parties alike, as their allegiance to the Democrats is taken for granted, a new political strategy is desperately in order for African-Americans.
One need go no further back than the 2020 election as a case in point. African-American voters in Georgia in 2020 were pivotal in delivering two Senate victories that handed control of Congress to President Biden. Did Biden respond by making the central plank of his first two years a promise to reform America to guarantee the permanent betterment, a ‘a levelling-up’, of African Americans? No, he didn’t. The attitude of the Democrat elite after the stunning victories in Georgia was very much: Thanks, but don’t call us, we’ll call you. And the phone hasn’t rung. And it won’t ring.
But why would a politician hungry for office wish to ignore people who might vote for him or her? If African-American voters in say Alabama would take a leap of faith and vote just once, en masse, for a Republican candidate, I predict that instead of being subjected to neglect, they would be actively courted by future would-be Republican Congressmen. A change in Southern African-American voting patterns would do nothing less than alter the political balance of power in the US for decades to come, entirely to the benefit of African-Americans.
Democratic politicians are simple organisms. They have to be. Winston Churchill said (quoting others) ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, and he was right. But if we as ordinary people struggling to get a bigger share of the pie, even to grow the pie, want their undivided attention, we need to use all the weapons available to us. Former Labour voters, much to their own surprise, have discovered that if they vote Conservative they can have it all. In doing so, they may have taught all of the rest of us a very timely lesson in the use of power.
—Publius writes ‘The Politics’ column for John’s Newsletter.