I'm not very convinced by this.
The Myth of Conservative England
The political battleground in England is changing rapidly and politicians and commentators risk being left behind
ADAM BIENKOV
Sure, some polling makes the public sound like lefties.
In fact if you look at polling about public spending, taxation, nationalisation, Brexit and even electoral reform, the UK public is significantly to the ‘left’ of both the current Government and Keir Starmer.
"Of course we want to pay more tax", say Great British Public. Yeah. They mean "of course somebody should pay it".
Anyway there's other polling that goes against this. Can't find it but lots of people intending to vote Labour think their tax is high and blame the Tories for it. I can't recall an ecstatic public cheering the rises in National Insurance under Bozo, even though nearly everyone agreed that health and social care were in a bad way.
Nobody ever puts prices in with nationalisation polling. Starmer's doing train services and building up energy supply to sell to the national grid, so he's not hopeless adrift on the right. But what's the cost of buying back the whole of electricity, water, gas supply? I don't know, but I reckon it wouldn't be difficult to set a poll question along the lines of "instead of spending £xbn now on buying back (whatever), we should spend it on (whatever) while regulating (whatever) more strictly", and get a very positive response.
Electoral reform is a fair point, but again there are barriers to that. Not least the big chunk of people who will "send a message".
The argument then tends to move onto suggestions that while there may be public support for some individual ‘left-wing’ policies, voters are not willing to vote for lots of those policies at the same time.
This is a difficult thesis to test. Are we really expected to believe that Labour’s defeats in the last two general elections was due to the party offering voters too much of what they said they wanted? Or was there perhaps some more obvious reasons for the public twice rejecting a party led by Jeremy Corbyn?
The answer to that is Corbyn was so unpopular that Bozo didn't even have to run on the economy at all. But it's certainly been a very good political strategy for other Tory leaders. (Thatcher, Major, Cameron), so I think there's probably some merit in it. Especially when you're scaring everybody with enormous spending figures (£500bn investment). And also telling them they can cut their working hours by 20%, No wonder people think that's too good to be true.
We are currently living through what has the potential to be the most politically tumultuous period of our lifetimes. Whether it’s the growing impact of climate change, declining living standards, multiple generations locked out of the housing market, post-Brexit economic stagnation, the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, or the coming global migrant crisis, the political landscape in just five years time is likely to be incredibly different to the political landscape in 2019.
Indeed. But Starmer's promised to spend a lot addressing climate change. I'm not really sure what he's supposed to do about AI. The public don't seem very leftwing on the migrant crisis, as Bienkov acknowledges elsewhere. There was an announcement on housebuilding this week, which wasn't small c conservative.
Everything else costs money. Funnily enough, Labour isn't at this stage running on taxing people and spending a lot more. Or indeed on borrowing a lot more, though one assumes that the climate spending would be borrowing. If people are spending a lot on rent or mortgages, where does that leave their feelings on paying more tax?
There was nothing innately Conservative about England when it rejected Labour in 2019, any more than there was something inherently socialist about England when it handed a landslide majority to Clement Attlee’s Government back in 1945.
If the only counter example you have is straight after the biggest war there's ever been, and nearly 80 years ago, I think we're struggling. We don't have an enormous 1945 Defence budget that we can reduce and spend on something else. A "1945" approach now would be all new spending (and tax, for most of the current spending, anyway). Good luck with that.
37.8 %
2.7 %
32.4 %
8.1 %
8.1 %
