At some point, the “woke” worldview which has come to the fore in the United States since 2013, will start to spread enough to become electorally significant in Britain, and there will be a tipping point where liberals and progressives together will win. This will happen not long into the future: just as the Tories won an overwhelming majority in the Tees Valley last week, and even made gains in Durham, so they lost Tunbridge Wells and Cambridgeshire, a sign of things to come as the disappearance of younger Conservative voters in the professions begins to turn south-east England red.
Yet while much of this is to do with values and identity, there are also more banal material explanations. Recounting the awful conditions facing Russia’s urban underclass before the revolution, Orlando Figes described in A People’s Tragedy how Moscow landlords were able to prevent the authorities from building more homes for the desperate workers: “Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent.” Only half their income, a twenty-something Londoner would complain, like the proverbial Monty Python Yorkshireman: When I was growing up, we paid 60%!
There is a noticeable link between high housing costs and voting for Left-wing parties, partly because affordable housing encourages people to start families, which makes them more conservative for a whole array of reasons: everything from a declining belief in the blank slate — a cornerstone of progressive thinking — to support for more traditional gender roles to economic conservatism.
Voting also maps on to population density; the more people per square mile, the more Left-wing people become on average. Meanwhile, urban people adopt more of the character traits associated with being progressive; they’re more likely to be mentally ill, for example, which correlates with liberalism, more likely to be sexually progressive, innovative and open to new experiences, and trusting of a wider circle of people.
There is also the effect of people’s social milieus; if everyone around you believes something, most people come to adopt those beliefs. Anti-Toryism is almost a social norm for young people — something accelerated by housing costs — but at some point the social network becomes so anti-Tory that even home-owning does not flip a person’s politics.
The trend I’ve outlined is, of course, Londoncentric — for now — but then things are different outside the capital; for all the chatter about the North being deprived, the sort of people who vote Tory in the Red Wall (and even more so in the Midlands) are doing okay. They can afford their own home and car, with enough income to afford a decent holiday and gym membership, while their university-educated contemporaries in London are living in squalid flat shares in their 30s, without any prospect of affording a family, their politics getting redder and their hair bluer.
Both these cultural and economic trends are going against the Conservatives; house inflation continues to rise and fertility continues to fall — yet despite this Britain’s population is growing and therefore becoming more urban.
And here is another long-term advantage for the Left: immigration and its longer-term effects. While modern progressivism is increasingly repulsive to a lot of minority voters, in every western democracy the Left have a plurality or majority among non-white populations (although this varies from Canada at one end, where it has been very narrow, to France, where the gap is huge). This is because the Left-Right divide is essentially about the conflict between national and global identities, and there is little that conservatives can do to overturn that advantage (although they can, and should, reduce it by being moderate).
To put it simply, demographically Britain under 30 is very different to Britain over 50. It’s going to be more diverse, more urban, more single, more university-educated and more impoverished by rental prices. Its values are completely different.
So, unless something is done about housing costs, this wave of disappointment will wash away today’s Tory advantage. So far, the best proposal has been Policy Exchange’s Street Votes, which would potentially create millions of new homes without touching the Green Belt, while also making lots of suburban homeowners immensely rich. That one idea, more than any other, might lay the ground for a future Tory home-owning majority.
In the meantime, as housing inflation sadly denies more people the chance of a decent life, we will see the Tory desert in overpriced London constituencies start to spread outwards. And when the time comes, Labour will almost certainly capture once-unimaginable areas of the Home Counties and Thames Valley, just as the Democrats win almost all the most expensive ZIP codes in the US.
But for now Boris can kick around and enjoy his great advantage, with an enfeebled opposition whose values repulse much of the country, knowing that he truly has the luck of the devil. But Mephistopheles, and demography, will come for him and his party eventually.
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