Belt Up

The London commuter belt, blah blah blah.

If General Elections were won and lost in the South East, then Michael Howard would have become Prime Minister with a thumping overall majority in 2005. In the days when his party used to win General Elections outright rather than having to be propped up by someone else, then it did so by winning considerable numbers of seats in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. Those are all much more conservative places than the South East.

By losing first many and then most of those seats, the Conservative Party first nearly and then actually lost power in 1992 and 1997 respectively. Furthermore, the Conservatives’ failure to regain power first at all and then on their own has consisted precisely in their failure to regain those Scottish, Welsh, Northern and Midland seats. By contrast, the Labour gains in the South East in 1997 were just a bonus, and the loss of most of them in 2005 made no real difference. However, the Conservatives, deprived of any significant parliamentary link with the areas that really matter electorally, entirely failed to register this.

The South East is in fact the least conservative part of the country, and precisely for that reason the part most supportive of the party that, as a party and regardless of who might be Leader at any given time, has come to be most committed to neoliberalism, which is the use of economics to entrench social liberalism. Having said that, not even there would there be any popular support for, say, the lunatic scheme to flog off the Health Service.

The Conservative Party, which (even if by proxy) once dominated Scotland and which did quite well both there and in the North until by no means all that long ago, has decided that the presuppositions of the Southern middle classes simply are conservatism and Toryism. Considering what those presuppositions have come to be, that decision is completely absurd. Furthermore, it serves to restrict that party’s appeal to that least conservative corner of this island.