This is an extract from an article originally published by Unherd in December 2019. Read the full article here.
With one throw of the dice, Boris Johnson broke the Brexit interregnum. After three years of frantic inertia, he resolved the impasse through transforming the class basis of the Conservative Party. In doing so, he has renewed his party for a generation and ripped into the Labour heartlands by aligning Brexit with national renewal and exposing the class divisions within Labour by siding with the poor.
Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.
His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.
Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.
The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.
To read the piece in full, please visit this link.