Inside Politics

Good morning. In recent years we have seen an asymmetric unravelling of traditional patterns that is changing the base of political support across much of the English-speaking world. This is one reason why, as it stands, the Conservative party is in a lot of trouble.

In 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Tory party’s coalition had become more “Trumpy” for lack of a better word: the party is doing less and less well among affluent, economically rightwing voters with college degrees and better and better among skilled manual workers and voters without college degrees.

Thanks to first past the post, this is a great trade, because the voters the Tory party shed were poorly distributed across the country and the voters they gained can be found essentially everywhere. There is a reason why Labour refers to these people as “hero voters”: they’re just really great votes to have in the UK electoral system.

What we’re now seeing in the polls and elections is, essentially, a Conservative party that is still getting battered in upstate New York but is no longer doing better in Pennsylvania to make up for it.

Some thoughts on what that means not only for the next election but for British politics more broadly.

When the pollster James Kanagasooriam coined the term “Red Wall” he had put a name to a long-discussed phenomenon: that of the Conservative party’s continuing underperformance since 1997 in parts of the country. One of these seats, for example, might have identical demographics to a Conservative-held marginal in the south of England. But because the seat was outside of that area, the constituency was instead still represented by a Labour MP.

The definition has been somewhat blurred in recent years by people just using Red Wall to refer, rather unhelpfully, to either “any seat Labour has lost since 1997” or just to mean “safe Labour seats”. The best illustration of this comes in one of the few bits of what you might reasonably call the Red Wall that didn’t fall in 2019: Sefton Central. This is the only seat in the country with a Labour MP in which more than 80 per cent of households are owner-occupiers, and, surprise surprise, it’s on Merseyside, which is also one of the places where a seat that Kanagasooriam defined as Red Wall (Wirral South) stayed Labour in 2019, too.

Jim Pickard went to Great Grimsby, another Red Wall seat, and found a constituency that was highly unimpressed by both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, but one that looks likely to swing back to Labour anyway:

What we don’t know is whether what we’re seeing at the moment is a permanent reversion to type in these constituencies — that these seats, which would have been marginal in the south, will continue to be more difficult territory for the Tories — or if what we’re observing is just a collapse for the Conservatives across every type of marginal seat, and that these seats will now swing with every election, just like a perennial marginal such as Crawley does.

If it’s the latter — and I’m inclined to think it is the latter, based on what I hear when I travel the country — then the UK is going to become a much more volatile democracy, one in which even very bad defeats like Labour’s 2019 rout can be recovered from in a single term as a matter of course, and one in which the current large poll leads for Labour can still be overcome this side of an election.

It’s my birthday today, which means, among other things, that I have just one year left in which I can use Wigmore Hall’s £5 tickets for the under-35s. (I have a special affection for Wigmore Hall, the only London cultural institution that still considers me to be young: however, because the auditorium is so warm I have occasionally nodded off during very beautiful passages of string music, a habit that marks me out as very old indeed.)

In a poor start to my last year of £5 tickets, my regular D&D group conflicts with this very good-looking concert by the Nash Ensemble next week. Tonight I’m off to the South Bank to see Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony, which I’m very much looking forward to.

• Toll of Tory planning reforms | Changes to UK planning rules introduced by the Conservative party last December are already causing local councils to cancel housing developments.

• Another blow | Britain’s House of Lords inflicted a string of fresh defeats on Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda asylum bill, raising the prospect of further delays to his plans to send asylum seekers to Kigali.

• Aus together now | Australia and the UK have signed a defence and security agreement, further deepening their ties in the face of rising Chinese power in the region.

• Hold the phones | Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has ordered the UK tax authority to immediately reverse plans to drastically scale back its public helplines, a day after HM Revenue & Customs announced the changes.

• Lawrence appears to lose faith in Labour | Keir Starmer’s adviser on race relations has accused the Labour leader of failing to listen to her in a speech that highlights rising frustration over the party’s relationship with black voters, The Times’s Patrick Maguire reports.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.