Apologies for another long post but here is an an excerpt an article in The Times by Natascha Engel, former Labour MP whose Derbyshire East constituency turned blue. It was headed "The working classes are tired of being told what to think".
In the old pit villages, they used to weigh the Labour vote. Recently there weren’t so many votes to weigh for any political party. They certainly didn’t vote for Blair, but in those days the Labour Party didn’t mind. They knew that the working-class vote had nowhere else to go. And they were right. Politically homeless, they stayed at home.
The days of the working classes making a difference in elections were long gone, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century that the middle-class progressive elite really grabbed hold of all the remaining power and discourse.
And the working class might have remained passive and disengaged if it hadn’t been for the constant finger-wagging, being told to be more aspirational, to stop smoking/vaping/drinking and, more recently, to stop flying and eating red meat. Progressives telling them they knew what was best for them was getting really annoying.
The EU and our membership of it became an expression of this of being told what was best. It came up on the doorsteps a lot, even in 2001. Immigration not so much, but the fact that people never got a say about the EU, that it was never in any of the manifestos of any of the mainstream political parties, was something that started angering more and more people. It was a matter of sovereignty and democracy for them.--
So when the EU referendum finally came, there was a political reawakening in these communities. Most people couldn’t believe it was actually happening but when it did, and the country voted for Leave, everything changed. There was again a feeling that the working class was a much bigger thing large enough to influence the outcome of elections.
After the referendum, the Brexit-voting working classes heard how Remain liberals and many in the Labour Party talked about them: as racists who were too stupid to understand what they were voting for, how there were some things that were too important to be decided by the electorate, and how this was a backlash against having been left behind by globalisation.
Left behind? They just wanted to be left alone! They looked at their own values, their own sense of right and wrong, and they preferred it to the confusion and chaos of what the political elites in London seemed to be obsessed with: antisemitism, transgenderism and net-zero carbon emissions. It’s not that they disagreed with the parties’ positions on them, it’s that they have absolutely no bearing on their daily lives.
And this was the genius of the Tory manifesto. It spoke to those fundamental values without ideology. It didn’t ask working-class voters to change allegiances. It said that the Conservative Party had come to them, that their values were the same as those of the Tories.
Ms Engel says a great deal more of course but the subtext is "if you want your voters to come back, talk to them, don't talk down to them".
I'll see you much later. Things to do in RL, one of which is devising a treasure hunt for my little niece. The clues have to be really cryptic or they don't meet the required standard. She keeps my brain active. 