Vote Leave‘s successor was Change Britain – a name that says much about the country’s decision to leave the European Union five years ago.
Brexit was a vote for economic as well as constitutional change: to shift from a model based on financial services, high immigration and London’s hinterland to one more favourable to manufacturing, lower migration and the provinces. You might call it “levelling up”
If you doubt it, look at this constituency-based map of the results. West and South of London, you will find a kind of Remain Square. Its eastern boundary is Hertford and Stortford, more or less. Its western one is Stroud.
Its northern frontier ends at Milton Keynes and its southern one at Lewes. Admittedly, this square has a mass of holes punched into it: much of Hampshire, for example, voted Leave. And some of the Remain majorities within it, like some Leave ones, were narrow.
Levelling up is a term of art. It can mean enterprise zones, freeports, better schools, improving skills, devolving power – none of which necessarily imply rises in or transfers of public spending.
But to some in that Remain Square, and elsewhere, it is coming to mean taking money in higher taxes from people who live in the south and transferring it to people who live in the north.
This truth would hold had the Chesham and Amersham contest never taken place. Obviously, it was a lousy result for the Conservatives – for the Party to lose a by-election without seeing it coming, let alone by some eight thousand votes.
There should be a searching post-mortem. But why would any canny voter back the establishment in a by-election? Isn’t it best to send it a message – namely: “don’t take our votes for granted”?
In the north, that establishment is still Labour. Hence Hartlepool. In the south, it’s the pro-levelling up, Red Wall-preoccupied Conservatives. Hence Chesham and Amersham. Now on to Batley and Spen.
Come the next general election, the Liberal Democrats won’t be able to concentrate their resources in a single seat, as they did last week. Nor will they necessarily be the opposition front-runner in the Remain Square, or elsewhere.
Which suggests that last month’s local elections are a better guide to the future than last week’s by-election. Crudely speaking, they found the right-of-centre vote uniting behind the Tories, and the left-of-centre equivalent divided between Labour, the LibDems and the Greens.
ConservativeHome will take no lectures from anyone about the potential threat to the so-called “Blue Wall” – to the seats within the Remain Square that we identify. Henry Hill published an analysis of it on this site on May 11, which we re-ran last Friday in the by-election’s wake.
But the good news for Boris Johnson is that the Blue Wall is crumbling more slowly than the red one. So time is on his side rather than Keir Starmer’s, which is why we still believe that the Prime Minister will be pondering a dash to the polls in 2023.
The bad news for him is that no party can hold a monopoly on much of the country forever. Tony Blair had one even more extensive than Johnson. He got three terms out of it (which will encourage the Prime Minister), but Labour eventually ran out of time and votes.
Its backing melted away at both ends. In the blue corner, their new-won support from 1997 eventually returned to the Tories or went LibDem. In the red one, their base was eaten away not so much by economics as by immigration and culture.
The medium-term danger to Johnson should start kicking in – unless inflation speeds the process up – in two to three years, when the vultures from post-Brexit and post-Covid spending really start coming home to roost. He may well be on a second term by then.
But at that point the Prime Minister could find himself trapped in what William Hague, referring to potential British membership of the euro, described as “a burning building with no exits”.
The cornerstone of Government economic policy to date is “no return to austerity” – which we crudely interpret to mean questionable control of the country’s public finances.
This being so, the only weapon left for Ministers to deploy is tax rises: and the tax burden is already forecast to hit the highest level since the late 1960s – 35 per cent of GDP by 2025/26.
We all have a way of reading into by-election results whatever we want to read into them. Undoubtedly, HS2 was a factor in Chesham and Amersham. So was planning. Above all, Blue Wall voters were asking for what Red Wall ones are getting: a little bit of love and attention.
Beyond that, anti-lockdown campaigners claim that the result was powered by opposition to shutdowns. Pro-aid ones assert that Buckinghamshire’s voters stand behind the 0.7 per cent.
Those suffering from Johnson Derangement Syndrome, such as Dominic Grieve, claim that Buckinghamshire’s “sophisticated” voters see through the Prime Minister. But if so, why did they chuck Grieve out of Beaconsfield less than two years ago?
So we make no special claim about what happened in Chesham & Amersham last week, other than to take some of the more exotic claims with a lorryload of salt.
But we do make a forecast about what will happen there and elsewhere within the Remain Square in future – regardless of whether or not the seat, like Newbury and Christchurch and Eastbourne and other Liberal by-election gains of the past, duly returns to the Tory column.
Namely, that the good voters of Chesham and Amersham won’t tolerate more tax rises for long. Not that voters in Red Wall or provincial English seats would do so either.
But the private sector in the Remain Square is relatively big; employment in public services relatively smaller; exposure to property and pensions taxes relatively bigger.
Sooner or later, Johnson and Rishi Sunak will have to revisit the other side of the financial sustainability ledger: spending control. With over a third of it going on pensions and healthcare, that will mean tough choices, in Chesham, Amersham – and everywhere else.
As for the Prime Minister’s prospects, we are where we were before. He can have all the Turkmenbashi statues he wants, and more, for getting Brexit done – and for saving the country from metaphorical if not literal Dreyfus affair-style strife.
ConHome believes that he should have his chance to “Change Britain” (with a majority of 80, he has earned it; anxious backbenchers please take note) while having little confidence that he actually will.
What’s left of this term risks being frittered away in bread, summits, and circuses, Roman-style. The possibility is frighteningly plausible. We devoutly hope that we’re proved wrong, as we sometimes are.