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.
