Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)The good people of Westminster have taken their revenge on the Conservative party. After five years and more in which the Conservative party has used “Westminster” as a shorthand to describe the metropolitan elite which is, apparently, rigging the system in its own favour against the neglected provinces, Westminster took the opportunity to make its point at the polls. It is no surprise at all that the Tories were kicked out and Labour took control of Westminster council.
It is hard to credit that, six years to the day, Boris Johnson was stepping down from his second consecutive term as Mayor of London. The Conservative party was competitive and interested in power in the capital. Now, it has all but given up. In the local elections on May 5, Labour won 21 councils to the five held by the Tories. With the exception of Kensington and Chelsea, the Conservatives have been thrown out of inner London. Harrow and Hillingdon to the north-west and Bromley and Bexley to the south-east are the first time a traveller through the capital would encounter Tory territory.
The most startling borough was Barnet, where Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader and Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor, had chosen to open the party’s London campaign on April 8. Barnet had never been a Labour borough in all its history. It is now and no wonder.
Barnet is exactly the sort of place — on a national scale relatively wealthy, relatively well-educated and relatively diverse — that the Tories are essentially leaving alone. This is a place in which Mr Johnson’s electoral calling card of Brexit really does not work. The same is true in Wandsworth, once the flagship of low-tax fiscal conservatism and now a Labour borough.
In the most recent opinion polls, Labour is consistently scoring on or about 50 per cent, often twice as much as the Conservatives. This is the direct result of an electoral strategy in which Tory populists have cast the capital as the villain in a process in which the forgotten towns of England decline, leaving their people to their fate. The strategic stupidity of this strategy lies not just in the fact that London and the South-East is the one region of the country that generates a fiscal surplus and therefore transfers resources out to the rest of the country.
More important even than that is the fact that as the rest of Britain gets wealthier it will become more like London, rather than less like London. The components of success in a modern economy are high levels of education, which brings with it greater social liberalism and greater diversity. As Manchester has grown from a provincial city that was struggling to a regional capital that is flourishing, it has been more diverse and more liberal. It is still definitely Manchester but its social profile is becoming more like that of London. This is exactly what would happen if the Government ever succeeded in levelling up the rest of the country. The process of spreading wealth around the nation would create the social conditions in which the Tory party in its present state would be unable to thrive.
Johnson’s plan of getting Brexit done and pretending that London was a conspiracy against the rest of the nation was a plan for a single election only. The people of Westminster have just shown him that. If the Conservative party is to have any chance at all of salvaging the next general election it is going to have to change course because an appeal to a dwindling section of the electorate simply cannot work.
There are two significant problems. The first is the immediate set of circumstances, which are very inhospitable to the Government. Inflation is already running into double digits and the cost of living is going to be very tough for lots of people. It is almost inconceivable that the discontent caused by falling living standards will come with a political penalty to the Conservative government.
The second problem is that the Tories don’t know how to respond. The Prime Minister has a vaguely defined desire to spend money and make things better, somehow. The Chancellor, who has most of the Tory backbenches on his side, would rather save the money for tax cuts. The two of them seem to be talking to different groups of people and that’s because they are. The Chancellor wants to win back the lost people of Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet. Meanwhile, the former Mayor of London, who moved across the river to Downing Street, still thinks he can win without them. He can’t and the only question is whether he realises in time.
