1/ YouGov poll- Working Class Voters
- Conservatives 48%
- Labour 29

A short thread discussing reasons for this.

1) Deindustrialisation has disrupted working class communities far more than it has impacted the middle class. Image
2/ Deindustrialisation has largely destroyed the economic structures that underpinned working class communities and their social and political organisations. The sense of being part of a powerful social, trade union and Labour movement has largely gone.
3/ In quite a few working class areas a large influx of migrants has transformed areas already afflicted by deindustrialisation. Communities where people grew up have vanished. The familiar has become unfamiliar and strange.
4/ When people feel threatened by social and or economic change they often seek security in the tribe. During the industrial epoch that tribe was generally the union and Labour movement which was both powerful and deeply embedded in workplaces and communities.
5/ Deindustrialisation has hugely weakened the unions and Labour movement. So now when disorientated people in a fragmented post-industrial society seek safety in a tribe, the only available tribe is the nation-tribe. Hence the appeal of nationalism.
6/ Like all basic human social affiliations tribalism is highly emotive. It is little swayed by facts and reasons. The core language of tribalism is the emotive sloganising of the fascists and the current Tory right, not the careful fact-based reasoning of our current opposition.
7/ A defensive tribal mentality resolves the problem of unity being disrupted by disagreement, through unquestioning loyalty to the leader. Thinking and reasoning is for the leader and their advisers. The rest must uncritically obey. Again the Tories play that game very well.
8/ There's another strand to working class Tory support and that's working class individualism. Whereas in the early 1970s working class folk would believe their lives had been improved by being part of the union, now many are proud to believe its through their own efforts.
9/ Working class individualists, rather than seeing the rich as class enemies, may see many rich people as more successful versions of themselves. They don't aspire to overthrow the rich, they aspire to or dream of being rich. Once again a win for the Tories.

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More from @nickreeves9876

Sep 23, 2023
1/ 🧵 Sunak is likely to leave us with HS2 as a stump linking Birmingham to Acton. The Old Oak Common station will be incapable of handling more than a handful of trains an hour. So this massively costly stump of a railway will be grotesquely underutilised, and many trains from the North will have to be routed down the existing lines, eliminating most of HS2's benefits in terms of speed and capacity. If you are going to build an immensely expensive railway, then one thing you must do is ensure it is used to close to full capacity, and for HS2, that means building the Euston terminus.
2/ HS2 has been poorly conceived from the beginning. As planned, the northern arms of the Y were always going to be underutilised. There's a solution, but that would have required joined-up thinking, which is alien to most British governments. HS2 should be more closely integrated with cross-country rail services, particularly the main route from the SW and South Wales to the North.
3/ Just north of Birmingham HS2 runs alongside the main line from the SW and South Wales to the NE. The lines should be linked, so trains from the SW leaving Birmingham can switch onto the HS2 line (or lines) going north. If the NW arm of HS2 was completed, this would cut around 30-40 minutes from the journey times to Manchester and other destinations in the NW.

Of course, this would mean completing electrification of the lines from Birmingham to Bristol at the least, and preferably further into the SW.

If the Eastern fork of the Y was completed, then there would be even greater time savings from the SW and South Wales to Yorkshire and the NE, and HS2 would be turned from a London-centric Y, to a genuinely national X centred on Birmingham.

Unfortunately, this kind of joined-up thinking is utterly alien to almost any kind of UK government.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 12, 2023
1/ Brexit was won through the worst abuses of democracy in modern British history. Here's one of them - Had it been mandatory the referendum would have been annulled because of Vote Leave's electoral law-breaking. But the government then lied that the result was an instruction ImageImage
2/ By lying that the vote of 37% of the electorate in an advisory referendum was an instruction, the government unleashed a tide of anti-democratic hate against Remainers in the name of the "Will of the People", a tactic Goebbels had used after a Nazi referendum victory. ImageImageImageImage
3/ This torrent of hate directed against the core democratic right to oppose very predictably incited death threats. They were so threatening that they caused some MPs to change their votes. Threats of violence for political ends are legally counted as terrorism. ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
May 18, 2023
1/ Please retweet if you want our Freedom of Movement restored.

We were robbed of our right to live, work, study and love in 30 countries by the worst abuses of democracy in modern British history. Image
2/ Throughout the entire Brexit debate Remain politicians dared not talk about Freedom of Movement, and so left the debate to be framed in terms of immigration hysteria. There was no debate about the loss of our Freedom of Movement. It was an appalling failure of democracy.
3/ We must now make the case for Freedom of Movement, which was a birthright for millions of British people. We must let people know that we now have to satisfy bureaucratic tests to stay in any one EU country, and that we have gone from being citizens, to being immigrants.
Read 6 tweets
Apr 1, 2023
1/ Brexit was designed by the economic libertarian right to drive the UK towards ever more libertarian economic, trade and regulatory arrangements to compensate for the loss of EU trade. Any devation from that path will be labelled as sabotaging Brexit.
#RejoinEU
2/ The EU does not allow cherry-picking so any attempt to improve our trade with the EU, particularly in the vital service sector will require rejoining the Single Market. A Labour government wedded to Brexit won't be able to do that.
3/ So unable to bring the UK back into the Single Market a Labour government would be under immense pressure to boost the economy by implementing the kind of deregulation and tax cuts for businesses and global investors demanded by the market fundamentalists.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29, 2023
Rejoiners - if you want Labour to listen to us, then you have to threaten to deny it your votes. That is the only way to ever get a chance of rejoining the EU or Single Market.

The local elections are a good chance to show rejoiners are an electoral force. Vote pro-EU
#RejoinEU
The same goes for supporters of PR. Labour will only listen to you if you threaten to deny it your votes. Facts, reasons and Conference votes will have no effect. Only the threat of electoral defeat will force the Labour leadership to support PR.
Leavers bullied Cameron into a referendum and May into Brexit extremism by making a very clear threat to vote for UKIP. Rejoiners and PR supporters must learn from that and apply a similar form of pressure on the Labour leadership.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 27, 2023
1/ If you want us to rejoin the EU or Single Market, if you want Freedom of Movement restored, then you should seriously consider voting for pro-EU parties in the local elections. Only when politicians see that Rejoiners are an electoral force will they listen to us.
#RejoinEU
2/ While the Labour leadership knows it can take Rejoiner votes for granted it will ignore us and will continue to pander to the dwindling minority of hard core Leavers. If it fears the loss of Rejoiner votes it will act to keep us on board.
3/ Does Labour need to go full blast for rejoining? Of course not. It could just say that if there was a strong majority for rejoining the SM or EU, then as a democratic party it would have to listen to that majority.
Read 5 tweets

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