Political Realignment Panel | Dr Steve Davies | THINK2021

I'm scunthorpe born and bred and though I'm also an ex uni student I can say that everything said is true.

Labour have lied to us locally for years and we've been left way behind through lack of investment. Labour thought they could get away with doing nothing because we would not vote for anyone other than them no matter how badly they treated us.

I saw this realignment coming years ago as ukip gained more votes locally and then people started to slowly gravitate towards Conservatives.

It's a pity labour never addressed our local issues going right back to the Blair era and beyond. Things like a lack of investment into building more houses, creating more jobs etc.

Paul Embrey has is exactly right with his book despised.

I honestly can't see a way back fof labour here. The anger towards labour who took our vote for granted for years and then ditched us for their new kind of voter is massive. Many people I know have vowed never to vote Labour ever again.

Corbyn was a disaster.

The labour manifesto was totally unbelievable even besides the issue of costing of policies. An example of this was the free fibre broadband for all. How does that work when in many places around here you often can't even get a signal? The cost of connecting remoter houses just outside of town (some that don't even have mains gas), would have been crazy. It was an electioneering policy that would have turned out to be hollow afterward if a corbyn government had got in number 10. We aren't so daft to believe anyone is going to connect homes at £1000s per home because tons of infrastructure has to be built first over possibly years of construction. How would all those millions of investment costs be provided?

Then people locally just didn't like him and the direction he was taking the party in and the open contempt and snearing that the wider Labour Party was directing towards towns like ours. It was just clear they were tarring us all with the same brush without taking the time to look at why the town voted so much in favour for brexit.

It had become plain to locals with labour's attempts to overturn brexit something I had known was happening for years. That Labour was becoming more detached from people from my town. As they've become more city centric, middle class, uni student focused, a massive gulf has appeared. Labour doesn't understand our lives, how we live them and how this affects our priorities and how they're different priorities to their own.

Now there is a no toleration of diversity of opinion within labour on a given subject so there can be no coalition of voters across the spectrum of the electorate that will return a labour government. As Paul Embrey puts it 'labour use to be a coalition of hartlepool with a dash of hampstead, but now the hartlepools have more or less been eliminated from the labour party'. In that scenario, labour can't be surprised that towns in the red wall have now decided, by the thousands of votes, to no longer vote Labour. It's a disaster totally of labour's own making.

In recent years, the centre left experienced a triple whammy of, for them, pretty disastrous defeats & not only did they occur in quick succession but also the fact that almost literally none of them saw these three horrific defeats coming, with the 2015 General Election victory of Cameron & this time his having no need for Clegg, the 2016 EU Referendum result & the victory of Leave & then only a few months later, the election of Trump in the USA. All of these decisions by the electorate/voters in the UK & the US were & still are a perfectly legitimate democratic decision & completely non extremist in any way or shape or form but that's not how the centre left viewed any of these defeats individually & certainly not collectively.

And if all of that wasn't bad enough, along comes the 2019 Brexit General Election & Boris securing that huge big whopping 80 seat overall parliamentary majority that Thatcher & Blair took almost for granted in their respective triple General Election victories & once again, literally nobody saw that one coming.

All of the above has only meant that the Labour Party has now become completely London centric with their manic obsession with identity politics in every shape or form that has seen them out of power for the last 11 years & only ensures that they are out of power for at least the next decade too & that is not to say they will never be a force again, the same thing was said about Hague & the Tories after their 2001 General Election defeat & the country was in the vice like grip of all things Blair & New Labour, but as Tony Blair himself has already recently said, the Labour Party in the here & now is in the gravely perilous state of being too big to ever completely disappear but too weak to ever govern again.

To the best of my knowledge vox are pro- markets

Another issue with Corbyn, and not mentioned in the opening comments by Lisi, was that he held terrible views (the allegations, never properly handled, over anti-semitism, his past support for Sinn Fein/IRA, various Islamist groups, his batty foreign policy views, etc). Even fairly left-wing Labour voters were appalled.