Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout election ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 4-percentage-point margin. It was an unexpected result and a harbinger of Donald Trump’s even more unexpected election as president five months later.
In both countries, key votes were cast by white non-college graduates. Blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania and the Midwest switched to Trump. Working-class voters long loyal to Labour joined leading Conservatives in supporting Brexit.
Supposedly ascendant coalitions of metropolitan professionals and racial and ethnic minorities were, to their self-righteous rage, defeated. Metropolitan London, comprising 20% of the nation’s vote, was 60%-40% to remain in the European Union. But the rest of England, 70% of the United Kingdom, voted 57-43 for Brexit.
Five years on, the realignments that produced 2016’s surprise have continued, with seemingly different results in the two countries. Here, Democrats regained the White House in 2020 and won majorities in both houses of Congress.
In Britain, the Labour Party, split between metropolitan leaders and working-class Brexit voters, suffered its worst defeat in decades in 2019 and did even worse in local elections last week. It looks to be in danger joining the old socialist parties of France and Germany in facing extinction as a major party.
But the differences can be overstated. Joe Biden’s Democrats have only tenuous majorities and on important issues (crime, immigration) face increasing tensions between woke leadership and historic constituencies.
In Britain, such tension resulted in Labour losing dozens of House of Commons seats in its “Red Wall” — the traditional textile, steel, and coal mining communities in the Midlands and Northern England. Conservatives won more than 40 Red Wall seats as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won 365 seats to Labour’s 202 in December 2019.
After that, Labour ditched its London-based leftist party leader Jeremy Corbyn for London-based barrister Keir Starmer. Like long-serving (1997-2007) Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, Starmer is a centrist on economics. He joined Blair in trying to overturn the Brexit referendum; he also proudly took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter.
Starmer’s stances won him record support, 65% and 70%, in his home constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras (you’ve been there if you’ve ever been a tourist in London). But he foolishly chose an anti-Brexit candidate in last week’s special election in the Red Wall seat of Hartlepool, a 70% pro-Brexit port on the North Sea (a place few American tourists have ever seen).
Hartlepool had been a Labour seat since its creation, won with 61% and 59% by Blair consigliere Peter Mandelson in 1997 and 2001, before he became a European Union commissioner in 2004-2008. But last week, it voted for a Conservative over Labour, 52% to 29%.
“Labour,” writes Telegraph columnist Janet Daley, “has not just, as everybody keeps saying, ‘lost touch’ with its traditional supporters: it now holds them in open and quite febrile contempt.” And she adds some historical perspective: “What is the point of a political party that began as the voice of the industrial proletariat when there is no more industrial proletariat?”
The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as the political arm of labor unions at a time when the working class was the majority of the electorate. Continental parties with similar heritage are in even more trouble. France’s Socialist Party, which won the presidency in 2012, got 6% of the vote in 2017. Germany’s Social Democrats, founded in 1863, have now fallen to a distant third place in polling for next September’s election, with the Greens emerging as the chief competitor of the governing center-right CDU/CSU.
It may be natural that, as the working class grows smaller and high-education cultural leftists more numerous, an environmental and anti-nationalist Left will replace socialists as major parties in parliamentary systems or, in a two-party system such as ours, as dominant forces in the left-wing party.
One lingering problem: Working-class-dominated parties have concrete goals relevant to large constituencies. But high-education-class-dominated parties tend to fixate on abstractions aimed at increasingly microscopic groups (transgender rights) or to virtue-signal their own superiority over the benighted masses (as with claims of “systemic racism”).
This may not be a winning tactic in a Britain that “has fundamentally shifted” and “become a more open society,” as its multiracial Sewell Commission recently concluded, or in an America that elected a black congressman from a white-majority district in 1972, a black governor of Virginia in 1989, and a black president in 2008 and 2012.
