Sunday Strategy: English Votes And American Takeaways

How To Think About The English Elections

This week was polling day in Britain, with every registered voter in England voting in local elections, as well as elections to the Scottish and Welsh devolved legislatures. Also voting was the Parliamentary byelection in Hartlepool, which was gained by the Conservatives. The results in Wales and Scotland deserve separate attention, both of which this site will devote to them in the near future, but the results in England - without the complicating factor of a nationalist force - are the results that find themselves earning my attention. That said, before we get into what the results mean - and, yes, they do mean quite a lot in an American context, especially about 2022 - indulge just a sort of arrogance. After a few months of being reminded of my bad 2020 takes, two victories - the lack of SNP majority in Scotland, and the Conservative victory in Hartlepool - feel very good.

Hartlepool was the big result of Friday morning, a huge swing to the Conservatives turning this Labour seat into a seat with a majority of the vote going to the Conservatives, a Red Wall bastion where Peter Mandelson used to be the MP years ago. The seat is a classic white working class seat, 70% Leave in 2016, and only won by Labour in 2019 because of a Brexit Party candidate. That said, even then, the Labour vote collapsed further, down another 9% - making the Conservative victory a further active failure by Labour, as opposed to just a passive loss. The seat represents everything that Labour have lost in the Red Wall, both in terms of the electoral collapse - going from north of 50% of the vote 4 years ago to sub-30% now - and in terms of the symbolic nature of the seat.

Losing Hartlepool is a current electoral problem because of what it means for the Labour Party, but it is also a huge psychological issue for the party too. Hartlepool is a Crown Jewel Labour seat, a seat where Mandelson was parachuted in because of its safety. This is Democrats winning the Georgia 6th in 2018, both in terms of what it augered for the rest of the state (and country), but also because that was Newt Gingrich's seat. It was the sort of milestone victory that politics can allow for, the exclamation point on a landslide. For the Tories, their exclamation point in 2019 was Tony Blair's Sedgefield, but this is an additional one.

The problems in Hartlepool were mirrored across the North, with Tories making advances in council seats up and down the Red Wall, locking in the failures of December 2019 and confirming that that result wasn't a fluke. The Conservatives were on the march across the North, and it showed again this week. It's almost as if this is a pattern not caused by any specific campaigning decisions, but by a Global Realignment of social conservatives going right and social liberals going left.

Labour are certainly being smashed to shit by the first half of that realignment, but the evidence actually suggests things are getting better for them - slowly - in the south. In London, Sadiq Khan lost vote share between 2016 and 2021, but had a swing to him in 4 London Assembly constituencies - Barnet and Camden, Merton and Wandsworth, South West, and West Central. Those four seats - and especially the latter three - are all areas of London where I would have no trouble showing the soft affection towards a partner that I would never be willing to show in, say, Hartlepool. West Central especially - Chelsea, Fulham, Kensington - are all areas where the Tories have been slipping in recent years, where Cameron's soft touch conservatism played much better than Boris' bashful bullshit. These areas are the wealthy, socially liberal havens of the city, and there we see the Tories slipping to Labour's benefit. Is it just in London? Nope, Labour won the mayoralty of Cambridgeshire, a region where they got 19% of the vote in 2017. 

They won it after coming in third place last time, in a place full of wealthy white social liberals. Shocking how this works.

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I don't know, do these results sound like anything we've seen in the US? Whites without a degree, with socially conservative views, in places where a gay couple would not feel comfortable, racing right, and whites with a degree, with socially liberal views, in places where I would feel no trepidation or concern, racing left? Where on earth have I heard this story before?

This is a Global Realignment, and I know I make this point all the damn time, but it needs to be properly understood as a Global Realignment, because when it isn't, you get stupid shit like Owen Jones claiming that Hartlepool was Labour's to lose when the byelection was called - although, I'm aware it might have been internal posturing to try and create a tool to beat Keir Starmer with. The misunderstanding of a global realignment as about decisions made by each individual party means that parties try to restore the past, and not play into your ascending coalition.

These 2021 results do not suggest that the right is on the march forever more, but they do suggest that incumbent governments can do very well - much better than any historical prior suggests they should be able to do, given midterm blues. Gaining seats after 11 years in government is unheard of in modern British history, and yet, they did. To the extent that anyone should care, the answer to what these results mean about 2022 is that history is meaningless, not that Biden will suffer the same fate as Labour. 

What we should care a lot more about is that these results confirm everything we should have already known, which is that the 2022 elections looks poised to be a continuation of the Global Realignment that has rocked the US this decade, meaning that the GOP will need to find more and more white working class support to win, which seems unlikely, given the limits of their appeal without Trump on the ballot (as Georgia et al shows). If you're looking for a Republican midterm victory, the math says you need to find it in reversion amongst the votes of well-off white social liberals. England just took a cricket bat to the idea that GOP problems in suburbia is a Trump problem, and once again confirmed this is a Global Realignment.