The myth of the “Red Wall”?

Today’s Sunday Times has Dominic Lawson telling his faithful:

This new Tory coalition has deep foundations
Shared values mean the Conservatives won’t struggle to keep their new voters

He calls in evidence:

James Frayne, founder of the opinion research group Public First and author of Meet the People. He has conducted countless focus groups in these former Labour heartlands, so his opinions have an empirical basis. In October he wrote on the ConservativeHome website: “I ran a detailed opinion research exercise for the Taxpayers’ Alliance to probe working-class attitudes to prospective tax policies . . .

Frayne was a Times understrapper. Public First is a ‘business friendly’ PR-operation, which recruits its ‘faces’ largely from corporate types. Meet the People comes with the essential sub-title Why businesses must engage with public opinion to manage and enhance their reputations (which implies to me managing ‘public opinion’, rather than acknowledging it). ConHome is hardly an unbiased authority. The Taxpayers’ Alliance is as shady and opaque an operation as one can find.

So not a good start there, Dominic.

Lawson essential thrust is to deny:

the fashionable argument has been that it is impossible for the government to remain true to its “traditional” support in the affluent south while satisfying the demands of the former Labour voters in northern England and the Midlands who provided the electoral breakthrough.

And that is what prompted a bit of alternative thought.

Much of the froth around the December 2019 General Election was Tories taking constituencies such as Bishop Auckland and Sedgefield. Unprecedented … etc., etc.

That made me take a closer look at what actually happened in the County Durham.

There are six constituencies. Currently they break three Tory and three Labour:

Bishop Auckland Con maj 7962
City of Durham Lab maj 5025
NW Durham Con maj 1144
Sedgefield Con maj 4513
N Durham Lab maj 4742
Easington Lab maj 6581.

Across the whole County, then, there’s a Labour majority of 2729.

Add Northumberland — much more tending to the Tories — and one has the same number of constituencies as the country of Surrey. Tories hold all Surrey seats, most with shed-load majorities.

The likelihood of a Tory government favouring Northumberland and Durham over its home and prosperous turf of Surrey?

Zilch.

Nor am I greatly taken by Lawson’s other great claim:

Every general election of the 21st century — all six of them — produced an increase in the Conservatives’ share of the vote.

The precise Tory figures are:

1997: 30.7%
2001: 31.7%
2005: 32.4%
2010: 36.1%
2015: 36.9%
2017: 42.3%
2019; 43.6%

There are various interpretations of that:

• the inevitability of gradualism;
• it wasn’t that the Tories did so well, but that others (the SNP apart) did so badly;
• Theresa May shows as the most successful Tory vote-gainer of the last quarter-century.

Moreover, 2019 is no guarantee of future Tory success. And certainly not in those parts of the North-East where any further industrial job-losses, as a result of #Brexit, will be most painful. The North-East has already lost over twenty-two thousand jobs over Brexit.