C&A/DC
A by-election is fertile ground for takes. From the subtle to the ludicrous, we are blessed the morning after a by-election with a range of views expressed with a range of confidence normally closely related to the lunacy of that view. Chesham & Amersham was no different — but unlike Hartlepool, those takes appear to have faded far faster.
This is understandable. The Blue Wall is a thing that only dimly exists in the mind of British commentators as a general class — I’ve written before about how I think most of them are barely cognisant that Remain voters exist outside of Zones 1/2 in London. But the threat to the Conservative party in the South and East of England (for this is where it is most concentrated, but there are seats elsewhere like Cheadle, or Harrogate, that fall into this camp as well in my view) is no less real because we are blessed with a commentariat with a fetish for flat caps, derelict mills, and pensioners who own homes but speak with a ‘Northern’ accent and therefore must be the true sages and guardians of political, cultural, and moral truth.
But this is a complex story. It is a sensible view to remember that the simplest explanation is often the best; but the best explanation is rarely the sum total of the causes. To understand a full story, rather than just treating events as moments to be recycled or forgotten to harvest the attention of those who deem us crowned head of the Harlequins, we need to break it into its many causes, identify the simplest but also the others. For it is very rare in politics that anything is caused entirely by one other thing.
It is tempting to look at Chesham & Amersham and imagine the entire result (and, it must be said, this is a barnstorming result for the Liberal Democrats, that cannot be gotten away from) is due to either HS2 or opposition to the governments’ planning reforms. And yes, the Lib Dems did shamefully campaign against both building green infrastructure and making it easier to address the grotesque housing crisis in this country in that seat. They are shielded from consequence on this by virtue of being a minor party, and there being no upcoming vote on HS2 this Parliament, which is a shame, because consequences are an essential part of politics. But, perhaps another time.
The central point I am reaching towards is that HS2 and planning were merely the immediate causes that gave voters already on their way out of the Conservative voter coalition an excuse to join voters who were never particularly in that coalition in the first place, and reject the Conservative party in a fairly loud fashion. Voters often harbour suspicions, prejudices, views that make them uneasy with the party they support, but these things go unfulfilled because stronger bonds — often historic — keep their behaviour the same. But, if you can find a way to connect those suspicions to immediate threats to the way they believe the good life should be lived — that is, their own little good life — then you can convert those views into political action and cause them to drop out of their existing behaviour. Thus Brexit did so to the Labour Party — but is is now also doing so to the Conservative party as well.
The voters I am here thinking of are not younger graduates. They have ample reason to be suspicious of the Conservative party, indeed resentful of it, under Johnson. Its entire message is 180 degrees from their moral and cultural world view, its politics seem designed to do them and their values down, its whole political project is poking them in the eye for the fun of people they really think have been too dominant in British politics of late, of the places they all really wanted to escape from and finally did, of the values that they view as backwards and corrosive to their places and people. These voters are getting a sliver of attention, with is less than they need but more than the other camp of voters that I think should be included in this analysis.
These voters are older graduates, and they have a special place in recent Conservative Party history. They were the key focus of the Cameron-era party, and the people amongst whom he reaped the best electoral rewards. They are socially liberal, but vote Tory because they’re well-to-do. They own their own home, or pay a mortgage. They think of themselves as being quite accepting, even if that doesn’t always run deep, and they quite liked that nice David Cameron, thank you very much. Because they’re slightly green, think of themselves as more accepting, worry about terrible things in poor countries, and have a lovely pair of friends — Arthur and David, do you know them, a couple you see — who were able to get married because David Cameron, being a good sort of egg, legalised that; because of all that, they were happy to vote for his party in 2010/15. Their most representative seat is Richmond Park, and it is there that the greatest symbol of the Cameron project to attract these voters — former editor of an environmentalist magazine Zac Goldsmith, was deployed to great effect against the Lib Dems.
And in 2016, when the referendum rolled around, they voted Remain because David Cameron was campaigning for it, and he’s a decent chap, and anyway we work in the City — can you imagine the trouble? No thank you to that sort of bother, shouldn’t we be focusing on conservation? Of course, they lost that vote, and since then have experienced a rather unusual — for them — phenomenon in recent times of not being the drivers of political change. They have become increasingly unwilling passengers in a Conservative party heading in the opposite direction to that. Gradually, the Cameron things they liked have been eaten away at — not just Remain, but also things like overseas aid, a clear commitment to LGBT rights, the Big Society, and so on. This started as a drift and has now turned into loud and sustained attacks on what they like and value.
So these voters have suspicions. They accepted the referendum result but have been increasingly alienated by the behaviour of the winning side since then. They didn’t particularly get excited for Theresa May but she was a Remainer, like them, at least? Now they are confronted with Boris Johnson. He is not only the Leaver of Leavers, he is also dedicated to broadcasting his contempt for people like them, with their values. He seems unsuited for the job he is in to them — corrupt, dodgy, sleazy. But none of these things were enough to move them on from voting Conservative in large numbers; they were enough, however, to start a drift in 2016, in the Witney by-election, a process that’s been accelerating gradually across places like that ever since.
The role that HS2 and planning played in C&A is therefore a complex one, more than just a case of NIMBYs gonna NIMBY. They are, of course — housing in places like C&A and its sister seats across Oxfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent and Essex is grotesquely unaffordable because the planning system is the simplest and most important factor in restraining the necessary explosion of house building the country needs to unfuck this vital yet entirely broken market. The system allows NIMBYs to jam it up time and again with lazy excuses about views and schools and bats and roads and house prices. But this simple explanation — it is just resistance to house building — misses a key thing.
These planning reforms are final proof to these voters that this is not their Conservative party any more. It is the thing that translates those suspicions and prejudices into political action — either remaining at home, or switching to a challenger party. These voters view the changes as being imposed by a government that doesn’t understand them, or really care what they do. Setting up Civil Service campuses in Darlington holds nothing for them, and so talk of Levelling Up to them sounds like shipping their jobs off to places they don’t want to live, for reasons that don’t benefit them. They know the Conservatives have been in power for over a decade because they helped put them there in the first place — telling them this government represents change invokes mockery in reply. They are peeling away from the voter coalition of the Conservative Party, accelerated by short-term factors, but the detachment was always going to come — it was just a question of what the issue would be that crystallised their views into action.
On their own, of course, these voters are just one brick in the Blue Wall. They can influence the political landscape, but they are not a sufficient condition to break the Conservative voter coalition. But what they are is an essential ingredient, with younger graduates, to flip the political map on its head. Because these voters already existed in these seats, there are existing Tory votes to be peeled away by challengers, to add onto those of newly arrived graduate voters who already know the Conservative party holds them in contempt, and little will shake that in the medium-term.
This, to me, is the interesting story of C&A. This long-term shift of more established Conservative voters out of the party, coupled with its persistent weaknesses amongst the still growing share of voters who are graduates (a share larger than school leavers with no qualifications since, incidentally, about the first time David Cameron won a general election) is together a real source of pain for the Conservative Party. What compounds it is that, at present, they seem to have no message for these voters, and no interest in getting one either. Many prominent Conservatives — including the Prime Minister — hold seats on this electoral journey away from them. Much as losing the Red Wall was deeply emotionally painful for Labour, losing the Blue Wall should be the same for the Conservative Party.
Chesham & Amersham then, is that special thing — David Cameron’s final gift to the Conservative Party. The possibilities of the electoral realignment he started in 2016 are yet to fully come to fruition. In this one corner of Buckinghamshire, we may well have just witnessed the first scene of this second act of his legacy.
