Canada's New Progressive Right

With this announcement it is clear that Liberals have taken Gerry Nicoll's advise and moved to the progressive right. May and Dion the new Red Green Tories. A match made in Antigonish.


Globe and MailGreen leader to get free ride from Liberals
Globe and Mail, Canada - 2 hours ago
At the time of Ms. May's announcement it was rumoured that she already had a deal with the Liberals -- the party wouldn't run a candidate against her and ...
Liberals staying out of May vs. MacKay ChronicleHerald.ca
Liberals agree not to run candidate against Green leader CBC Nova Scotia
Green leader gets helping hand from the LiberalsThe Daily News


See:

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

May Day For MacKay

Shameless

Corporatism

Elizabeth May Catholic Grrl

PC=Liberals

No Room for Red Tories

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay

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Red Tories Are Progressives

Should Progressives embrace Red Tories, I would say yes and this is why;

The party adopted the "Progressive Conservative" party name in 1942 when Manitoba Premier John Bracken, a long-time leader of that province's Progressive Party, agreed to become leader of the Conservatives on condition that the party add Progressive to its name. Despite the name change, most former Progressive supporters continued to support the Liberal Party or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and Bracken's leadership of the Conservative Party came to an end in 1948.

And because of this,

Joe Clark going log fishing in Ghana lake

VANCOUVER - Former prime minister Joe Clark is leading a company that has secured the rights to log vast quantities of lucrative African hardwoods from beneath the world's largest manmade lake. In a project that could save lives and inject some cash into an impoverished region, Clark and several partners have leveraged high-level political connections to open Ghana's waters to a project they see as an exemplar of socially responsible development.

Through Clark Sustainable Resource Developments Ltd., he and B.C. businessman Wayne Dunn are hoping to harvest thousands of hectares of tropical lumber submerged by the Lake Volta hydro reservoir.

Moreover, the trees, some of which form part of anold-growth tropical forest, were valuable. The wood could be worth from $400million to $2-billion, depending on the value and quantity of lumber CSRD is able to harvest.

But rather than rushing to develop the technology to raise the timber, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Clark set out to gain the rights to log the reservoir, which, as the world’s biggest, stood to attract the interest of other companies.

Mr. Dunn’s wife, Gifty SerbehDunn, comes from a well-known Ghanaian business family, while Mr. Clark has attained a significant profile in Africa thanks to his work monitoring and establishing elections in countries like Cameroonan d the Democratic Republic of Congo.

They met several times with Ghanaian President John Kufuor and soon obtained exclusive access to the entire lake beginning this September. They also negotiated exclusive access to 350,000 hectares — or 40% of the lake — for the next 15 years, with a 10year renewal option.

A Hidden Harvest

A few years ago, Wayne Dunn approached Joe Clark about buried treasure in Ghana: hardwood trees, worth millions, submerged in Lake Volta. "I promised Joe my plan wouldn't involve he and I in snorkels and flippers, carrying chainsaws into the water," laughs Dunn, a B.C.-based businessman.

At the time, the former prime minister was still in the House of Commons. But after trying in vain to resuscitate the Progressive Conservative party and watching it merge with the Canadian Alliance over his objections, he was ready to leave politics for good in 2004. After stepping down, he became heavily involved in election observation work in Africa and then, in October 2005, at age 66, he founded Clark Sustainable Resource Developments, with Dunn as president and CEO.

By last spring, after five visits with local officials, Clark had hammered out a deal with Ghana's government and the Volta River Authority, which controls the man-made lake that spans 8,515 sq. km. And now, having secured some start-up cash from Goldman Sachs and several other large investors last week, Clark and Co. plan to start cutting and dragging trees to shore later this year. The Mill Bay, B.C.-based company is having equipment from the oil and gas industry adapted to harvest the 80 tree species in Lake Volta's underwater forest -- including mahogany, odum and ebony -- some as tall as 100 feet and 10 feet in circumference, rooted 170 feet below the surface. After 40 years underwater, all that hardwood has been preserved from the deteriorating effects of air and insects.

Aside from the potentially massive cash windfall, the African government also wants the trees removed for safety since Lake Volta is a high-traffic transport route and dozens die every year when their boats hit trees just below the surface. (If CSRD is successful in Ghana, similar opportunities await in South America, Asia and other parts of Africa.)

And because of this; which some Progressive Bloggers agree with:

Harper government comes under fire from former PM Joe Clark

“The Harper government has embraced a pre-Nixonian policy towards China, deliberately distancing Canada from the emerging mega-power, thereby limiting our ability to affect China’s performance on human rights or on other issues,” Clark said.

“With the Harper government, there is a new, more deliberate insularity [in foreign policy] with the singular exception of our military engagement in Afghanistan,” Clark said. “I believe that Mr Harper and his colleagues are moving deliberately away from central elements of the foreign policy that has been a key strength for Canada under both Progressive Conservative and Liberal administrations.

“Mr Harper’s party, [formerly] known as the Reform Party, began self-consciously as a protest movement and it has no inherited tradition in international affairs … moreover, their method is wedge politics, so there is scant domestic experience with brokering and embracing contesting points of view,” Clark added. “These significant departures from Canada’s traditional foreign policy should not be considered as rookie mistakes, but as deliberate policy.”

See

PC=Liberals

No Room for Red Tories

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

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Harper, Canada, Progressive Conservatives, Joe Clark, Red Tories, PM, politics

Danny Williams A B C's

Ouch this is gonna hurt.

" Progressive " Conservative Danny Williams unveils a new alphabet in the battle against political illiteracy...

Premier Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador is now actively campaigning against his federal party brethren, urging people not only in his home province but in the rest of Canada to “vote ABC” — anybody but Conservative.

Williams, himself a Tory, upped the ante Thursday in his ongoing verbal skirmish with Prime Minister Stephen Harper over equalization payments. In recent weeks he has hoped aloud for the defeat of the Conservative minority government in Ottawa and taken to calling Harper “Steve” as a sign of his disdain.

On Thursday, he took his message to the Economic Club of Toronto where he refrained from the name-calling but didn’t hesitate to describe the prime minister as “untrustworthy” and “stubborn.”

“I’m telling voters in Newfoundland and Labrador and in Canada to vote ABC — anybody but Conservative. I’m hoping for just that,” Williams said. “My hope though is that the ABC campaign will basically stop them from forming a government.”

See:

Tory Cuts For All

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Red Tories Are Progressives

Conservatives New Nanny State

No Room for Red Tories

Canada's New Progressive Right

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

Liberals The New PC's

PC=Liberals

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Elizabeth May and Red Tories

Nice to see confirmation of my post about Elizabeth May choosing to run against MacKay.

“As a former Progressive Conservative, I am delighted that Elizabeth will be running in Central Nova, against the person who destroyed the party of Confederation.”

And as I said; Red Tories can be progressives too.


See:

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay


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Not Before Alberta Votes

Hey, hold off those plans to bring down the Harpocrites.

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe vowed Thursday — in the wake of the deaths of three Quebec-based soldiers this week — to bring down the Conservative government if it does not commit to a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2009.

He said if Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not soon notify NATO and participating countries of Canada's withdrawal plans, the Bloc will vote against the expected autumn throne speech with the hopes of bringing the government down.

Ignoring Kyoto law could bring down Conservatives, opposition warns

Federal opposition parties say a Conservative decision to ignore a law requiring them to find ways to meet Kyoto targets is a provocation that could spell the end of the minority government.

"It is an explicit and important example of how the government is not respecting the wishes of the majority of elected parliamentarians," NDP Leader Jack Layton said. "They can't expect our party to take that kind of disrespect lying down."

Not until we have a provincial election in Alberta, folks.

Why? Because with our unelected Premier and his gang of Tired Old Tories messing things up, business as usual in the One Party State, the PC's are in for a trouncing at the polls when an election is finally called.

A loss of seats and popular support in Alberta for Stelmach and the PC's will mean the conservative voting base will also be weakened. It is this same voting base that the Harpocrites take for granted in all Blue Federal Alberta. With a seismic voting shift provincially there will be a resulting Tsunami away from the Harpocrites.

With the influx of 'Eastern bums and creeps' from the ROC, the political landscape in Alberta has changed. And not in the Tories favour. Instead the mass of these are like other Albertans, middle of the road Red Tories, Lougheed liberals by any other name, wondering where to go.

Across the province, the percentage of undecided voters doubled, from 18% in January to 36% in August.

Dem's da folks dat don't know much about the opposition parties, dey just know dey don't like da folks in power.

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UK

The Tories Are on a Mission to Destroy Black Lives Matter

They're going all out.

by Kimi Chaddah
26 July 2021

https://novaramedia.com/

THIS APPLIES TO ALL TORIES/CONSERVATIVES EVERYWHERE, LIKE IN CANADA & USA

Henry Nicholls/Reuters



In the current culture wars, the Tories have made delegitimising the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement one of their top priorities.

The movement gained traction in the UK back in 2016, when protesters blocked the motorway leading to Heathrow the day after the anniversary of Mark Duggan’s murder by police. Its presence grew as it began exposing the endemic nature of institutional racism within the UK. This culminated in the explosion of protests last summer in response to George Floyd’s murder, with protesters not only condemning America’s racism but their own country’s too, exemplified in the rallying cry “the UK is not innocent”.

This antiracist spirit was revived once again this summer, when the England men’s football took the knee during the Euros. With the decision receiving widespread support – even from rightwingers like Piers Morgan – it’s clear the Tories understand the power the movement holds and its potential to upend their agenda.

As a result, the Conservatives have launched an attack on the movement. From health secretary Sajid Javid claiming it is “not a force for good”, to home secretary Priti Patel describing BLM protests as “dreadful“ and full of “hooliganism“, government ministers have made every effort to further the impression of a subversive, divisive and dangerous organisation.

With a global aim of “eradicat[ing] white supremacy and build[ing] local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes”, there is no mention of Marxism in Black Lives Matter’s mission statement. This, however, hasn’t stopped the Tories from deliberately conflating the movement with Marxism, and other ‘extreme’ leftwing ideologies.

This came to a head last year during the George Floyd protests. Once again, Javid was on the attack, describing the rallies’ organisers as “neo-Marxist”. Meanwhile, foreign secretary Dominic Raab claimed that the widely used action of ‘taking the knee’ was a “symbol of subjugation”.

And the rightwing press is in on it too, with newspapers like the Telegraph frequently describing BLM as a “radical neo-Marxist organisation“.

Another red scare.

Of course, this isn’t anything new. Historically, such redbaiting tactics are frequently deployed to discredit antiracist movements. Most notably, the US government aggressively targeted the civil rights movement during the 1950s-70s in an attempt to root out those with Communist leanings. This onslaught led Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the FBI’s prime – and totally unsubstantiated – suspects, to declare, “There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.

“The government is in the midst of a sustained ideological attack on the anti-racist movement,” says a spokesperson for BLM UK. “The pejorative use of ‘Marxist’ [acts] as a red scare-style tactic intended to whip up a moral panic around the anti-racist movement.” However, they are also quick to stress that “BLM is not a ‘Marxist organisation”, explaining that “while some of the members of BLM UK are Marxists, not all members are. We are, however, anti-capitalists, and are committed to dismantling class as well as gender and racial domination”.

Beyond verbal attacks on the movement and its organisers, the Tories are also indirectly waging a war on BLM through their policies – particularly in terms of their attempt to pass the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will effectively criminalise protest. The bill itself appears in part to be a response to the BLM and Extinction Rebellion protests of last year with Patel describing them as acts of “thuggery“.

It’s no secret that the bill will disproportionately target people of colour. With excessive use of force, racial discrimination and failures in duty of care already all prevalent at last year’s BLM protests, the stifling of dissent will enable – and legitimise – even more discriminatory policing. 55% of people in the UK already claim that last summer’s protests increased racial tensions – likely due to the unfavourable way in which demonstrators were portrayed by factions of the mainstream press. If protesting is criminalised, it is extremely likely that this figure will only go up.

Indeed, the Tories have consistently relied on this lack of education around antiracist politics and movements to stoke up fears and anxieties in the British public. In schools, the government has gone as far as to actively suppress knowledge dissemination on the subject for that very reason.

We saw this most clearly in October, when equalities minister Kemi Badenoch declared that any school teaching elements of critical race theory would be breaking the law, arguing that supporters of critical race theory wish to create a “segregated society“. Meanwhile, the Department for Education told schools in England that they were prohibited from using materials produced by anti-capitalist groups, or to teach “victim narratives that are harmful to British society” – the implication being that critical race theory implies whiteness is oppression and Blackness is victimhood.

“Political education has historically served as a tool for liberation, and the right knows this just as well as we do,” says a spokesperson for BLM UK. “Guidelines that restrict the teaching of Black Lives Matter materials, of critical race theory, and of so-called victim narratives are a direct response to the dissent we saw last summer. In an attempt to quash future resistance, the government is depriving young people of the tools to understand and dismantle structural racism”.
Resisting racism.

But where there is repression there is also resistance. In response to the Tories’ attempts to silence antiracist political thought, there has been a welcome and noticeable growth in small-scale activism. All Black Lives UK, Tribe named Athari and United For Black Lives all emerged out of the 2020 protests and are working to resist the government’s racist rhetoric and policies.

And outside of England, resistance is happening at an establishment level too, with the Welsh government working with charities like Show Racism the Red Card in order to dismantle racism in the education system and create a more racially and culturally representative curriculum. Consequently, the Welsh government recently announced that colonialism and Black history will be mandatory parts of the new school curriculum, set to be introduced in 2022.

“It’s important we develop a generation of anti-racist ambassadors that will go on to challenge the historic injustice of racism throughout society wherever they might find themselves as they grow; in their future workplaces, universities, communities and institutions,” explains a spokesperson for Show Racism the Red Card. “Racism is largely perpetuated through ignorance. Education is our greatest weapon to break down that [ignorance]”.

The government is working hard to create an atmosphere of denial around racism’s existence. This is seen perhaps most clearly in its recent report, which found racism in the UK to no longer be an issue.

On the surface, the country might look like it’s making progress. Sure, we have the most racially diverse government cabinet in history, but that doesn’t matter when the people of colour in positions of power – people like Patel and Javid – wield it to promote racist agendas.

BLM is a vital organisation and movement. The Tories’ campaign to destroy it only confirms why it must exist. It is absolutely vital that we challenge damaging racist discourses and the politicians that uphold them. Black lives matter. We must not allow the Tories to get away with pretending they don’t.

Kimi Chaddah is a freelance journalist whose work covers government policy, education and inequality.

UK

RED TORIES

Why Labour’s ‘law and order’ tribute act feels hollow and overblown


Nesrine Malik
Sudanese-born journalist and author
THE GUARDIAN

Sun, 9 April 2023 

We are squarely into the campaigning for May’s local elections across England, and the dominant feeling is of being part of a bizarre exercise in which you are constantly offered things you have not asked for. The disconnect between what Labour and the Conservatives are campaigning on and people’s real lives and needs – following an extended season of strikes and painful inflation – feels more pronounced than ever.

The Tories continue to bang on about small boats and transgender issues. It’s dispiriting, but expected. But what about Labour? If you are sick with anxiety about the rising cost of your essentials, your ability to pay bills at the end of the month, or a host of local concerns such as the closing of leisure facilities, declining town centres and public service infrastructure, most of what you have got so far from the official opposition is a blitz on restoring “law and order”.

The pledge to make “Britain’s streets safe”, one of the party’s five missions, has been amplified, but its details somehow remain both vague and oddly specific. Last month, it was laughing gas. The recreational use of nitrous oxide, the shadow culture secretary said, was a “blight on our communities”, causing “littering”, “disruption” and unspecified “antisocial behaviour challenges”. In this, the party was following the government’s lead in supporting a ban, posturing on a minor matter despite what the experts – who caution against a ban – say. Cannabis also featured in a recent Keir Starmer speech, in which he spoke of it ruining lives in his constituency.

The tone of this “tough on crime” messaging is off – hyperbolic, disciplinarian, and as of last week, it stinks. On Friday, the Labour party ran an ad on social media accusing Rishi Sunak, personally, of not thinking that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison. It managed to draw condemnation from both the Tories and several Labour figures, for being tone deaf at best, or dog-whistling at worst, at a time when south Asians are accused of being culturally prone to grooming and child abuse.

Reports over the weekend suggest that members of the shadow cabinet, including the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, were not consulted about the ad. It’s all symptomatic of a Labour leadership that in its stated intention to appear muscular is hitting all the wrong notes.

There are real problems, real concerns about violent crime in Britain, but Labour’s approach to them is often divorced from talking about the funding crisis that has engulfed our policing, legal systems and support services – in favour of rhetorical shows of force. Spending on youth services in England and Wales was cut by 70% in less than a decade, while after only three years of austerity, 28% of organisations dealing with sexual and domestic abuse had had essential services cut. These cuts are sometimes name-checked by Labour as reasons things are in chaos, but instead of pledging to plug the holes the Tories have punched, the party offers vague soundbites about “modernisation”, “raising standards” or proposing laws “with teeth”.

The better-defined pledges are to expand the police force and give it bigger mandates to deal with sexual assault. Considering how fresh the Casey review’s findings are – which spoke of institutional bigotry in the Metropolitan police – this is not only not reading the room, but shouting over it.

The justice system in England and Wales is so underfunded, and therefore understaffed, that there are not enough judges, defence lawyers and prosecutors to process a huge backlog of cases. In some instances, cases are not being seen through because the physical state of courts is so poor, with mould, overflowing sewage and leaking roofs. Labour says Sunak doesn’t believe in locking up child abusers because “under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time”. Let’s leave to one side blaming someone who’s been prime minister for half a year for figures that date from 2010, and ask: what has actually happened to prosecutions?

For child sexual abuse, they fell by 45% in the second half of the last decade. Between 2010 and 2020, there was a 25% reduction in the Ministry of Justice’s budget and cuts to victim support services. The result is an overburdened system where justice feels like a distant prospect. The same goes for adult sexual assault, where delays prompt distressed victims to drop cases altogether.

This is supposed to be easy territory for Starmer. He is, after all, a creature of the law, who says he was profoundly shaped by his tenure as director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. Law and order is both his comfort zone and his chance to give some clear outlines to a blurry self-image. “This is personal,” Starmer has said.

That’s nice for him, but is it wise? When it comes to talking tough on law and order, as with immigration, the Tories have no reservations about promising the most draconian measures, curbing the right to protest or strike, and regularly dangling red meat in front of voters. Chasing their lead only results in the sort of abject loss of principle that brings us tawdry attack ads, and in voters’ minds may only reinforce the rightwing worldview on justice and crime that the Tories excel in exploiting.

Related: Yvette Cooper was ‘not told’ about Labour’s Sunak attack ad in advance

The second issue here is Labour’s allergy to politics that in any way violates two sacred principles: that government must be frugal, and that wrong ’uns have no one to blame but themselves. Since it has stopped presenting itself as an anti-austerity party, Labour can only really focus on crime as an issue of goodies and baddies, rather than a complex social problem that has been worsened by underinvestment in deprived communities. At the heart of going along with the “lock ’em up” mentality – egged on by the rightwing press – is the fear of being depicted as a party whose natural tendencies are to spend public money and coddle criminals.

And so, again, we skirt around the real solutions to this country’s problems. The overall effect is to create in people’s minds the image of Britain as a criminal dystopia, where people are unable to go out at night and youths huddle ominously in parks and public areas getting high and menacing the public. That is a caricature. In the real world, people want to be safe but more urgently need job security, to earn enough money to eat and keep warm, and have places to gather and find some joy, relief and support in communion with others. Instead, they are offered more cops and crackdown. Because dignity is expensive, and fear is cheap.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

UK

'The bile-soaked Tory conference has gifted Keir Starmer an open goal ahead of election'

Keir Mudie says we learnt nothing from Tory Conference apart from they are unravelling, out of ideas and some of them stand on dogs - and now it's time for Labour to act

This is peak time for Labour, says Keir Mudie

OPINION By Keir Mudie

7 Oct 2023

Let’s get Tory conference out of the way first. Not one to dwell on, that one. I was getting hourly updates from Manchester that were becoming increasingly desperate.

“I just want to go home, it’s too weird,” that kind of thing. And it was. Utterly bizarre from beginning to end. From Penny Mordaunt’s bizarre fist-pumping, finger pointing rallying cry to a roomful of bewildered – slightly frightened – octogenarians to Rishi Sunak’s equally bizarre giveaway of things he’s already given away.

It was probably the best speech of his to date. It just, you know, didn’t make any sense. None of it did. Who comes to Manchester to deliver the news they’re going to scrap the rail link to, well, Manchester? Bizarre.

This column, which prides itself on not making any predictions, last week predicted Suella Braverman would continue her unhinged of appearances – and she delivered. Nothing but bile. A “hurricane” of immigration on the way. Clearly positioning herself as the right-wing option next time the Tories have a leadership contest. Horrible speech, dripping in poisonous nonsense.




Angela Rayner promises to prioritise affordable housing if Labour win election

Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt delivers a speech during the Conservative Party annual conference (Image: PA)

Went down a stom, of course. Immediately after – as if to demonstrate her credentials as pure evil – she went outside and, I kid you not, stood on a guide dog. Anyways. Too much time wasted on that debacle. Labour MP Chris Elmore summed it up perfectly, saying: “Chaos. The End.” Right on both counts.

Now on to Liverpool. Mr Starmer and co roll into town – on low-speed rail – with it all to play for. There is an open goal here. More than open, come to think of it. The openest of goals. We learnt nothing from Tory Conference apart from they are unravelling, out of ideas and some of them stand on dogs. And we knew the first two of those anyway.

This is peak time for Labour and surely they can’t mess it up. Although, having said that, Thursday’s policy drop was terrifying. Assisted toothbrushing. It did not bode well.

Poll predicts landslide Labour election victory with 12 cabinet ministers losing their seats


Michael Savage Policy Editor
Sat, 7 October 2023 at 5:04 am GMT-6·5-min read


Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Labour is currently on course to win a landslide victory on the scale of 1997, according to dramatic new modelling that points to the Conservatives losing every red wall seat secured at the last election.

The Tories could also lose more than 20 constituencies in its southern blue wall strongholds and achieve a record-low number of seats, according to a constituency-by-constituency model seen by the Observer. Deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, defence secretary Grant Shapps and leadership contender Penny Mordaunt are among those facing defeat. Some 12 cabinet ministers face being unseated unless Rishi Sunak can close Labour’s poll lead.

According to the model’s central projection, which takes into account the new boundaries that the next election will be fought on, Labour would win 420 seats – equating to a landslide 190-seat majority. The Tories would take just 149 seats and the Lib Dems 23. The results mirror the 1997 landslide, when Tony Blair’s party secured a majority of 179 with 418 seats. The new analysis also suggests that the cost of living and the state of the NHS continue to be the clear priorities for voters.

The huge study, commissioned by the 38 Degrees campaign group, has been carried out by the Survation polling company using a mega poll made up of more than 11,000 voters. A modelling technique called multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) has then been applied to reach constituency-level findings. Pollsters using the method successfully detected the swings ahead of the 2017 election.

While a 190-seat Labour majority is its average estimate, the modelling – based on polling carried out shortly before the Tory conference last week – suggests Labour could have between 402 and 437 seats. The Tories could have between 132 and 169 seats. The results suggest a Labour majority between 154 and 224 seats.

Every one of the 44 red wall seats that the Tories won at the last election would return to the Labour party, the analysis found. A further 22 so-called blue wall seats – defined as those held by the Tories in 2019, have a majority of Remain voters and a higher than average number of graduates – are also lost by the Conservatives.

Voters will want real guarantees of action to bring the dual cost of living and NHS crises under control for all of us

Matthew McGregor, 38 Degrees

The findings will be controversial among both parties’ members. Many Labour insiders are expecting the polls to close over the coming months as the election approaches. Senior figures in Sunak’s team also believe they can target Labour leader Keir Starmer, whom they don’t believe has been embraced by the public.

Despite Sunak’s attempts to switch focus to his plans to ban smoking, overhaul A-levels and ditch the northern leg of HS2, the analysis suggests that voters remain overwhelmingly focused on the cost of living and the state of the NHS.

In every single constituency, these two issues were most important to voters. Across the country, a third said they are “getting by, but making cutbacks” and 8% described themselves as “financially desperate”. More than two fifths (42%) said they had struggled to get a GP appointment in the past six months.

In a major blow for Sunak, Labour has some significant leads in red wall seats. In Blyth Valley, the first red wall seat to be declared for the Tories in 2019, large Labour majorities are predicted. In Blyth and Ashington, Labour are ahead 49% to 22%. In Hartlepool, whose predecessor seat was won by the Conservatives for the first time in a 2021 byelection, Labour have a 38-point lead. In both constituencies, a quarter of voters said they were “worried about their financial future”.

Bassetlaw, whose predecessor seat saw the country’s largest swing from Labour to the Tories in 2019, is predicted to return to Labour. The model suggests a 23-point lead with 12% of residents reporting they are “financially desperate”. Meanwhile, North Dorset – whose predecessor seat last elected a non-Conservative MP in 1945 – is predicted to fall to the Liberal Democrats. At 64% the NHS was a top issue for the highest proportion of this constituency.

Matthew McGregor, chief executive of 38 Degrees, said the findings suggested voters were “crying out for change” and warned Labour against being overly cautious. “With the spotlight this week on the Labour party’s conference pledges, it’s clear what voters will be looking for: real guarantees of action to help those most in need and bring the dual cost of living and NHS crises under control for all of us,” he said. “If they can’t deliver that, there’s no promise these polling results will hold.

“These are the issues which will dominate at the next election. Parties who are unconvincing, out of touch or distracted on these issues will rightly suffer at the polls.”

The results make it even less likely that Sunak and his team will opt for a spring election. Figures close to the PM are said to be opposed to a May vote, despite many MPs believing it may be in the party’s interests to go for an earlier vote. Meanwhile many figures in the Labour party accept that a lack of clarity over Starmer’s vision for power remains a vulnerability.

Damian Lyons Lowe, chief executive of Survation, said: “Red wall seats, which were crucial to the Conservative’s Brexit coalition, are all predicted to return to Labour. Furthermore, it is in seats with the highest proportion of Leave voters that the swing back to Labour is largest. Even traditional Conservative strongholds in the south-east and south-west are under threat from the Liberal Democrats and Labour.”

Survation polled 11,793 people between 11-25 September

Working-class ‘red wall’ voters decided the last UK election. How do they feel now?

Stefan Rousseau/PA/AP
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer arrives on board his election bus in Halesowen County of West Midlands, England, June 13, 2024, after unveiling Labour's manifesto in Manchester.

By Katie Marie Davies Contributor

June 20, 2024|TYLDESLEY, ENGLAND


When the United Kingdom heads to the polls July 4, all eyes will be on towns like Tyldesley.

With its tangle of narrow streets and red brick homes dating back to the area’s industrial heyday, Tyldesley is typical of towns across England’s northwest. Labour Party candidate Jo Platt has already spent weeks campaigning here, diligently pushing glossy leaflets into letterboxes and engaging in doorstep conversations with voters.

“We need to give a little bit of hope back to the country. I think that’s what we’ve lost,” she says earnestly, already walking to her next canvassing event. “We’ve lost pride in our towns. If we’re fortunate enough to get into government, then I hope that’s something that we can bring back.”

In 2019 elections, Britons living in “red wall” constituencies felt disrespected by the Labour Party, which helped lift the Conservatives to victory. Now, they may decide the election again – and they feel it’s the Tories who aren’t doing right by them this time.

Labour is campaigning hard here. Once it was all but given that the traditionally left-leaning party would win the votes of working-class, industrial towns like Tyldesley. Then came 2019. The area’s constituency switched allegiances to the opposing Conservatives, ending decades of Labour domination.

Tyldesley was not alone. The 2019 election saw a landslide of small towns across England’s north and Midlands as well as in Wales – an area often described as the “red wall” in honor of Labour’s traditional colors – vote in Conservative members of Parliament, many for the very first time.

The collapse of the red wall was a key factor in pushing then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to 2019 election victory with an 80-seat majority. But five years later, with Conservative approval ratings rapidly tumbling and Labour looking at overwhelming gains in Parliament, it’s these seats – and accordingly, their voters – that are likely to push Labour across the finish line.

Identity and the red wall

The legend of the red wall – and its 2019 collapse – is tightly bound to an idea of British political tribalism. Throughout the 20th century, northern, working-class voters were seen as loyal Labour devotees, while rural, more affluent areas were judged to be unquestioning Conservative heartlands.

Karen Norris/Staff

The 2019 election brought new political divisions to the fore, with old class divides overshadowed by issues such as Brexit, when the U.K. left the European Union. Many red wall areas – towns that too often felt overlooked and forgotten in a new era of globalization – had voted to leave the EU, but were concerned that Labour would not honor the referendum results. In Tyldesley, the mood soured in the run-up to the 2019 vote. Local Labour councilor Jess Eastoe, who has been handing out leaflets with Ms. Platt, describes being verbally assaulted and spat at.

“The political wrangling over Brexit forced many people to choose between their EU identity [as a ‘leaver’ or a ‘remainer’] and their party identity,” says David Jeffery, a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool. “Most studies show that, until quite recently, the EU identity was held much more strongly. Brexit really broke down this strong loyalty toward Labour.”

But that is now changing. As of June 13, just over three weeks before the election, the Conservative Party was polling at just 26% for the Leigh and Atherton constituency of which Tyldesley is part, compared with 50% for Labour. Similar figures are being seen across red wall seats, many of which are projected to fall back under Labour control.

“Of the red wall seats, I’d be surprised if more than a handful stayed with the Conservatives,” Dr. Jeffery says.

“The Conservatives have done nothing”

The Conservatives’ fall from grace across red wall towns has a regional accent. Across Wales and northern England, many voters feel cheated by shortfalls in the government’s “leveling up” plan, a targeted program supposedly designed to help balance regional inequalities between London and other U.K. regions.

Leon Neal/Reuters
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (left) walks with energy secretary Claire Coutinho (right) at the Rough 47/3B Bravo gas platform in the North Sea, June 17, 2024.

The program was a key part of the Conservatives’ promise when they won red wall seats in 2019; at that year’s party conference, then-leader Mr. Johnson vowed that “leveling up” initiatives would repay the region’s trust.

There has been little, however, in the way of results. The government’s flagship plan for a high-speed train line between London and Manchester, HS2, for example, was canceled in October 2023. (The line will instead stop at Birmingham, 100 miles farther south.) Similar policies, such as reducing regional differences in life expectancy or building 40 new hospitals by 2030, have also fallen flat.


Discontentment in towns like Tyldesley also mirrors concerns seen across the country as a whole. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is unpopular, and after a flurry of four Conservative leaders in just over six years – including Liz Truss, who spent just 44 days in office and remains best known for being compared to a lettuce – there is a dearth of likely replacements. Meanwhile, the party’s rhetoric of fiscal austerity is wearing thin after 14 years, particularly against a background of inflation and rising prices.

“The Conservatives have done nothing,” Tyldesley resident Charlotte Steel says when asked who she’ll be voting for in the election. She’s particularly worried about a health and social care system that has been hit by repeated Conservative funding cuts, and says that she’ll be supporting Labour. “This government doesn’t care about people.”

The cost of living in particular is on everyone’s lips. Doorstep issues focus on local infrastructure: People are desperate for more housing, but the new estates being hastily erected are too expensive for locals and serve commuters from nearby Manchester instead.

PA/Reuters
HS2 workers look on as the boring machine Cecelia breaks through after finishing a 10-mile-long tunnel for the HS2 project under the Chiltern Hills, March 21, 2024.

Local schoolteacher Paul Crowther remains undecided, but is already sure that he won’t be voting Conservative either. The party’s leader, Mr. Sunak, is simply out of touch with the needs of local people, he says. “We just need more funding,” he says, “For the NHS and for education.”ing?

It’s voters like Mr. Crowther that Labour hopes to bring back into the fold. In order to do so, its manifesto has introduced new themes, such as pledges to create a “new Border Security Command” and “crack down on antisocial behavior,” as well as plans to recruit more teachers and promises of economic stability.
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Critics have accused the party and its leader, Keir Starmer, of moving away from Labour’s left-wing roots and heading for the political center. Yet the move – a deliberate break from the policies of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was seen by many small-town voters as too radical – seems to be resonating.

Mr. Starmer may not be wildly popular, but he is a safe option – and after years of political upheaval and an increasingly disliked government, that might just be a winning formula.

“People are worried about issues that affect this town, like drugs and petty crime,” says Ms. Eastoe, the Labour councilor. “We need to put the boring back in politics. We’re running a country, not a circus.”

The Return of the Red Tories?

Canada’s upcoming election could spell the renewal of a long-dormant brand of blue-collar conservatism.

WE CALL HIM LIBERAL LITE 

LIKE THE BEER

By NATE HOCHMAN
September 17, 2021 

Canada’s opposition Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole speaks during an election campaign tour in London, Ontario, Canada, September 17, 2021. (Blair Gable/Reuters)

O'TOOLE ROLLED OUT EX PM BRIAN MULRONEY HIMSELF A RED TORY OR AS THE ECONOMIST CALLED HIM; A BLEEDING HEART CONSERVATIVE FOR HIS ENDORSEMENT

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

Could this Monday be the end of the road for Justin Trudeau? While Canada’s snap federal election was originally called by the prime minister himself in a bid to regain a majority in the Canadian parliament, the incumbent’s Liberal Party has quickly found itself playing defense instead. Trudeau’s decision to call the Monday election amid a surge of coronavirus-related hospitalizations was met with widespread anger in Canada and derided as an irresponsible political stunt that put the prime minister’s “own political interests ahead of the well-being of thousands of people,” in the words of his Conservative Party challenger, Erin O’Toole. As it stands today, polls show Trudeau and O’Toole in a dead heat — and many observers say it’s still anyone’s race to win

“They’re both just hovering right around each other right now,” says Adam Harmes, a political-science professor at Western University in London, Ontario, in an interview with National Review. “We’ll have to see if there are any sort of late-breaking things that shove things one way or the other, but I wouldn’t bet a lot of money either way right now. It’s entirely possible the Liberals pull it out with another minority, but it’s equally possible O’Toole takes it.”

That toss-up is partially owing to the backlash to Trudeau’s decision to call the election in the first place, which now looks highly unlikely to produce the majority that the Liberals had hoped for. But the race’s uncertainty is also the result of an exceptionally well-run Conservative insurgency, led by what many say is the most competitive Tory candidate since the party’s last prime minister, Stephen Harper, was unseated by Trudeau in 2015.

The surprise surge of O’Toole, a 48-year-old former Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter navigator, in the early weeks of the 36-day race revealed an unexpectedly canny political shrewdness beneath the candidate’s affable, easygoing exterior. Perhaps most notably, his campaign has been one of the farthest-reaching efforts to date at formulating a coherent policy platform for the kind of populist, pro-worker “realignment” that is sweeping right-wing parties across the West. Were the Tories to triumph on Monday, that could prove to be instructive for like-minded conservatives south of the Canada–U.S. border.

On economics, O’Toole’s rhetoric is not too dissimilar from that of Donald Trump. But unlike his American counterpart, O’Toole has a meticulously written, 48-page policy agenda to match his worker-friendly rhetoric: The Conservative leader’s “Canada First economic strategy” includes mandatory worker representation on the boards of large corporations, a ban on executives’ paying themselves bonuses while managing a company going through restructuring unless company workers’ pensions are fully paid, and a skeptical, protectionist stance on international trade. He has also made explicit overtures to private-sector labor unions — and staunch critiques of big business.

“I believe that GDP alone should not be the be-all end-all of politics,” he told viewers in a Labor Day video message. “The goal of economic policy should be more than just wealth creation, it should be solidarity and the wellness of families — and includes higher wages.”

That campaign message has been widely hailed as the return of “Red Toryism,” as it is often called in Canada and the United Kingdom. While usually stopping short of the transformative central-planning schemes favored by today’s progressives, Red Tories are more skeptical of big business — and more comfortable with communitarian-oriented economic policies — than has been the norm in conservative circles for decades. At the same time, this heterodox brand of small-c conservatism — which traces its roots to Benjamin Disraeli’s “one nation” conservatism in the latter half of the 19th century — is far more traditionalist in its cultural philosophy than the modern Left, emphasizing patriotic attachments, religious traditions, and social order over radicalism and upheaval.

Those themes, which have been largely dormant in Canada and the United Kingdom since at least the 1980s, sit at the forefront of O’Toole’s candidacy. “In terms of the substance of O’Toole’s policy platform, it’s very much a blue-collar conservative vision,” as Ben Woodfinden, a Montreal-based Red Tory writer and political theorist, told NR. “There’s all sorts of stuff that kind of points to the fact that he’s trying to move the policy agenda in that direction.”

There are important differences, too. By American standards, O’Toole is no social conservative: Although he has courted pro-life voters by promising to allow free votes for members of his caucus on life issues and backing conscience rights for doctors and nurses who do not want to “refer or participate in an abortion or euthanasia,” he describes himself as “pro-choice.” And he made an explicit appeal to LGBT voters in his acceptance speech for Conservative Party leader. But he is a kind of cultural conservative, in line with the Red Tory tradition: His political rhetoric is shot through with an affirmation of Canada’s essential goodness — a more soft-edged and less assertive kind of patriotism than its Trumpian alternative, to be sure, but still a firm rejection of the unending national self-flagellation prescribed by woke progressives, in both Canada and the U.S.

There are few better foils for this brand of blue-collar conservative politics than Justin Trudeau. A child of opulent privilege, the silver-spoon-fed son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau epitomizes the hypocritical, schoolmarmish brand of elite progressivism that has come to define left-leaning parties throughout the Anglosphere. “He’s a very polarizing figure,” says Woodfinden. “A lot of people have a visceral dislike and disdain for him here.”

That visceral dislike has as much to do with the class of people that Trudeau represents as it does with the prime minister himself. The “realignment” goes both ways: Even as Canada’s Conservatives make a bid for their country’s working class, Trudeau’s Liberal Party has come to represent the worldview and interests of the highly educated, upwardly mobile urbanites that increasingly make up its voter base. This demographic is more comfortable with neoliberal market-friendly economic policy than older left-wing worker parties, but is simultaneously committed to a far more radical kind of cultural leftism, replete with all the symbols and performative pieties of campus wokeness.

To many working-class voters who feel increasingly alienated from the parties that traditionally served as their home, this brand of politics looks laughably disingenuous. In Canada, Trudeau waxes indignant about the horrors of racism and then is pictured in blackface in a 2001 yearbook; in the U.S., Democrats style themselves the defenders of the marginalized and oppressed and then make repealing the SALT-cap deduction — a state-based tax write-off that almost exclusively benefits the top quintile of earners — a top legislative priority. For all the talk of social justice — and the subsequent demands for sweeping changes to the social contract — the progressive ruling class seems unwilling to sacrifice any of its status or privilege for the common good.

This presents a significant political opportunity for conservative parties throughout the English-speaking world. To his credit, that seems to be something that O’Toole recognizes. Both his economic and cultural agenda are predicated on a recognition of the working class as the Right’s natural ally in the current political moment. A conservatism that recognizes this alliance is committed to advocating in behalf of the interests of workers, just as it defines itself in opposition to what James Burnham called the “managerial elite” — i.e., the credentialed beneficiaries of society’s bureaucratization who “exploit the rest of society as a corporate body,” both in the bureaus of big government and the boardrooms of big business. It is a distinct brand of politics that shares the Reagan-era Right’s suspicion of government bureaucracy but is far less friendly to corporate power than its older counterparts.

Whether it works, of course, remains to be seen. In spite of the polls, Monday’s election could still prove to be an uphill battle for O’Toole’s Tories. “The weird dynamic you get in Canada is that when it looks like the Conservatives are about to win, a lot of the voters for the further-left party, the NDP — kind of the equivalent of Bernie or AOC in the U.S. — start to get worried, and shift their vote to the Liberals,” Harmes tells NR. “That always happens when elections look really close. It’s a constant phenomenon.”

But regardless of whether O’Toole perseveres, his brand of conservatism will likely be a potent force — both in Canada and in the rest of the Anglosphere — for the foreseeable future. “In some ways, the Conservative Party in Canada is ahead of the curve,” says Woodfinden. “The base for the Conservatives here is very much blue-collar workers these days.”


NATE HOCHMAN is an ISI Fellow at National Review. @njhochman