Tory Voters, Labour's Jamie Driscoll

                                      Tory Voters

…Nearly half of Tory voters are over 65 and 83 per cent are over 45, according to a report that Onward released this week. Only one in five women aged between 18 and 24 would even consider voting Tory, and just eight per cent would do so if an election were held today. What was once One Nation is becoming One Generation.

…As the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, said this week, people used to think about voting Conservative when they got their first pay cheque – they now do so when they get their winter fuel allowance.

The reasons for the growing age gap are complex. Falling home ownership and low levels of disposable income mean younger generations are less indebted to capitalism than their elders. Millennials’ economic views have been forged by financial crisis not financial prosperity. On social issues, younger people are well to the left of any generation before them, putting them at odds with older generations’ belief in law and order and shared identity.

Fairy Tales, 

William Charles Thomas Dobson (1817-1898)

Photo Credit: Heritage Doncaster [CC BY]

…To this generation, trickle down is a fairy tale, not a valid economic theory.

(Will Tanner, The i, 2019)

       Isn’t ‘trickle down’ a fairy story not just for this generation but for most of us?

People

Whalers Entering the Tyne, 

John Winston Carmichael (1799-1868)

Photo Credit: Torre Abbey Museum [CC BY-NC-SA]

On 2 May, voters from Newcastle to Berwick can elect their first North of Tyne metro mayor; and the overwhelming favourite is…Labour’s Jamie Driscoll.

…After spending a day with Driscoll last weekend, I came away convinced that if you want to see just what the British left might do, and the length of leash it will be on, this articulate scruff is one to watch.

…He left school at 16 and worked as both a nurse and a bouncer, before going to university as a mature student. He owns precisely one suit, only bought after deciding to stand for mayor, and he spent part of our weekend together scouting for the office he’ll need for the start of May. A manicured and media-trained, dead-eyed dealer he is not.

…[Driscoll] vows to bring in the real living wage and to judge suppliers on their pay, openness to trade unions and gender wage gap…launch a co-operative people’s bank to direct regional savings to regional businesses. Then there’s building council housing…

“We’ll become a case study in rejecting the way the economy has been run for the past 40 years,” Driscoll says. “Economics is deliberately obscure and intimidating, but why can’t we have a bank? Why can’t we build council houses? We’ll start it, then they’ll do it in Norwich and Southampton and…”

…What can’t easily be fixed is the chasm between politicians, however new and imaginative, and an electorate that no longer cares. Take Driscoll’s canvassing in the Northumberland coastal town of Newbiggin. On an estate of small houses, the constant refrain is, “I don’t follow politics.” When he talks policy, the reply comes, “I’m not getting into that.”

This swathe of the electoral map runs blood-red Labour, yet as one canvasser, Jamie observes: “Policy doesn’t matter here. They’ve forgotten what government can do.”

Next door is Ashington, with its leisure centre in the shadow of the old coal mine and backing on to a giant shiny Asda. From jobs to shifts; from wages to zero-hours contracts. This was the land of the Pitmen painters; now it’s the usual landscape of deindustrialisation. Labour activists know their informed views on housing policy and planning don’t touch the economic decay and social disintegration outside this room. Ashington, one tells me, is “scary”, as he reels off recent gory crime stories.

Punished by Thatcher, patronised by New Labour, this region has not been “left behind” by economics but cut adrift by the political class. That has left a toxic legacy and in his new job, Driscoll simply won’t have enough powers to put things right. But over the longer run, bridging the divide between the representatives and the under-represented will be the big job for him and his generation of Labour politicians. The good news is: he knows it.

(Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, 2019)

A living wage, judging suppliers on their pay, openness to trade unions and gender wage gap, launching a co-operative people’s bank, building council housing – are these really considered “left wing” policies?

Driscoll won comfortably.