The battle for the North will continue

After our election victory a few months ago, Boris said in his victory speech that he promised to earn the trust of Labour voters who “lent him their vote”. By the very nature of that word, I think a lot of people are expecting that this was a one off, a perfect storm which blew down the red wall, but that it would soon be rebuilt. I’m not so convinced.

It’s undeniable that it took a very specific set of factors to flip so many lifelong labour voters to vote Conservative, and to reclaim so many seats that had been lost to us for so long, perhaps even hundreds of years. But it’s my opinion that, now the seal is broken, Labour are going to have to put a lot of effort into reclaiming those seats. I’ve seen the argument a lot that, by Boris’ admission that it was a lending, that support for labour would surely resume, but the simple fact is that once you’ve done something for the first time, it’s a lot easier to do it again. So for this reason, once people have voted for the Conservative Party for the first time, it’s going to be far less of a battle to get the second vote from them five years later. What we now need to make sure of is that we really do earn the trust of these new voters. Labour hasn’t been effective in the North for years, so if we, now that we have had massive victories there, actually follow through and help instigate positive change, it’ll be a massive uphill battle for the Labour Party to prove to those people that they do actually care, as the Conservatives are in an excellent position to prove themselves now. I do have genuine faith that Boris will indeed keep by his promise to do right by the North, it terms of infrastructure projects as well as ending the cycle of just investing in the south due to the higher productivity gains. This is surely a crucial point for our new government once things are back to normal after Coronavirus comes and goes.

Brexit should be done by the next election, but those seats in the North won’t forget those years from 2016-2020 where labour didn’t represent their views, so it’s not going to gain them anything to just expect those votes back when trust has been completely lost. As far as I can tell, Labour haven’t even admitted to doing anything wrong in the election, so how can they expect to win another one when they can’t even accept blame for losing in the biggest landslide since Thatcher. The problem seems to extend beyond Corbyn as, Sir Keir Starmer will be keeping a lot of Corbyn-esque policies. Seems rather reminiscent of the Einstein quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. It’s going to take a lot more than just a new face to fix the problem of the crumbled red wall, and if we are clever, we can make sure that it is fixed up and painted blue over the next 4 years.

Tom Foster-Brown (Treasurer-Elect, Ex-Social Secretary, Ex-Committee Member) is a second year studying Engineering at Pembroke College