No matter what profound changes come about in England, one thing always seems to remain the same: the unshakable belief that it is simply a conservative country. This is an influential article of faith: the only way Labour can win power, it follows, is to treat voters as so naturally hostile to leftwing politics that they must be appealed to on Tory ground. Keir Starmer’s Labour is lauded as wise and sensible for accepting these terms – wooing big business, being averse to borrowing and spending, adopting a hard line on immigration and ruling out a wealth tax on the richest. In a “conservative country that occasionally votes Labour”, these are the rules.
But are they really? Is England essentially a conservative country, or has it been made conservative? “Politics does not reflect majorities,” Stuart Hall wrote in 1987, reflecting on the success of Thatcherism, “it constructs them.” The only perennial truth about England is that it is an unequal country, and the Conservative party has leveraged that inequality to its benefit: the English ruling class it represents has constructed its own majority. This process starts before its leaders are out of school uniform, building networks that are then deployed to their benefit in adult life. Out of the 12 Conservative prime ministers since 1945, seven were privately educated, with five of them at Eton. Rishi Sunak’s cabinet is 61% privately educated.
The result is a class well trained in the art and technique of influence. Its dominance is not the expression of the country’s essential conservatism, but the outcome of its disproportionate ability, through certain groups and institutions, to stamp conservatism on the national character. To that end, cross-pollination between networks bound together by common interest draws in money for campaigning, electioneering and swinging public opinion. A 2017 study showed that the Brexit campaign was mostly funded by five of the country’s wealthiest men. Even as the Tory party’s prospects waned, in the last quarter of 2023, it raised three times as much as Labour. In 2019, it was revealed that the Leader’s Group, an elite dining club, had given more than £130m to the Conservatives since 2010.
What do wealthy donors get in return for their patronage, beyond influence over government policy? Entry into the ruling class in the form of honours and peerages – another means by which the Tories keep their thumb on the scales. The House of Lords, ostensibly a healthy break on the partisan impulses of an elected parliament, increasingly looks like, in the words of a former Tory cabinet minister, a “scandal in plain sight”, where former party treasurers are all but guaranteed an entry once their donations exceed £3m.
These networks extend into the media, where money and ideological sympathies intersect with party interests. The Tory party and media organisations friendly to its politics project a vision of a sacred Anglo-British nationalism constantly assailed by leftwing threats. From GB News, which is funded by a Tory donor and whose shareholders include two Conservative peers, to the national press, whose revolving door with No 10 is well known, Britain’s media does so much work securing consent for Tory interests. Is it any wonder that five of the eight national newspapers are seen by the British public as predominantly rightwing, and that 45% of the public, as shown in a poll last week, believe that more migrants to the UK arrive illegally than legally? (In 2023, irregular arrivals made up something like 4.3% of all immigration to the UK.)
You could take a look at these systemic strengths and conclude that it doesn’t matter if England is naturally conservative or not, because the right clearly has a deep war chest that Labour does not. But Labour does have one of its own. It resides in a public that is increasingly divergent from rightwing values, and a new millennial generation that is breaking a supposed iron law of politics by not becoming more conservative as it ages. These are trends the right recognises, and knows it is threatened by, no matter how much power it holds – so it frenetically and assiduously brands them as expressions of a woke, “new elite” capturing our institutions.
Samuel Earle, author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Party, identifies this missed opportunity. “The hope for Labour,” he told me, “lies in the fact that the Conservative party is scared of the British public in many ways. They are scared of something within Britain that refutes them.” Labour, he says, is “not scared of the British public. They’re scared of the Conservative party.”
It is easy to conflate Labour’s lead, and the predicted wipeout of the Tories, with the notion that the party is on to something. But this assumes that Labour is winning over voters rather than picking up support by default as a result of the Conservative party’s colossal collapse – years of economic and political mismanagement, hastened by Brexit-related party breakdown, became unspinnable failings.
Labour is in a precarious position in the longer term unless it mounts its own majority-creation exercise by taking on fiscal and cultural orthodoxies on austerity, the welfare state, immigration and what constitutes our modern national identity. A recent study of European electoral data found that adopting rightwing policies on immigration and the economy “does not help the centre-left win votes”, and in fact may alienate progressive voters. “Voters,” an analyst on the project told the Guardian, “tend to prefer the original to the copy.”
The next election may be settled in Labour’s favour, but that’s all that will be settled, unless the party offers an original agenda and fights to build a nation in its image. If that doesn’t happen, Starmer risks serving merely as a housesitter for the Conservatives, who can take the time to get their affairs in order, and return to find a country and political culture still tilted in their favour.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
