To nobody’s surprise, Labour has lost the Hartlepool by election to the Tories. I see plenty of recriminations between the Corbynite and the Starmer wings of the party, and the usual recriminations and disbelief that working class voters vote against their interests, but it feels like fighting the wrong war. It seems to me that the UK is very firmly, and agonisingly (as class affiliation is more a matter of identity here) going through the realignment that the US did a decade or two ago, and here, again, it’s not bread and butter economic issues that are the immediate concerns – though they are underlying concerns. I suppose in America abortion and guns were two big non-economic issues that mattered to voters; in the UK, something that Brexit represents but which is harder to put a finger on. Maybe it is something to do with class identity – New Labour took the old white working class party to the metropole and the process of shedding the constituencies continued inexorably long after Blair was gone.
It is still astonishing though, that this government is still in power and actually flourishing despite the last decade plus. Britain really is a small, conservative country, and growing smaller and more conservative by the day.