Democracy redux: the lessons of 2019

Britain’s parliamentary democracy is easily mocked: the medievalisms, the men in tights, the ayes to the right. But it has been preserved because it tends to work. It focuses minds and makes order out of chaos. Yet again we have a general election result that almost no one predicted — and one that offers plenty of lessons for those with an eye to see them.

The communities so often patronised as ‘left behind’, typically in northern and coastal towns, have now demonstrated that they are powerful enough to decide elections. During the Blair and Cameron eras they were written off as a declining demographic: older, poorer, less educated and often stuck in the past. The ‘modernising’ politicians, it was argued, needn’t worry too much about them.

Boris Johnson took a different approach, and it won him his historic majority. Voters in former Labour safe seats are now as important to the Conservatives as suburbia once was to Tony Blair. In an age supposedly dominated by television and digital debate, we have also seen that physical campaigning matters. The Prime Minister went to the places he wanted to win, sometimes several times, and — to his credit — did not stop once the election was over. The day after he won he went back to Sedgefield, Blair’s old seat. The former mayor of London will now need to be a Prime Minister who is dedicated to places far away from the capital and visits them. Donald Trump, for all of his foibles, sets an example in travelling all over America to speak to the people who lent him their support. His campaigning never stops. It’s a trick No. 10 could copy.

The biggest swings to the Tories came in areas with low-skilled workers — which is less of a surprise than it might seem when you recall that wages of the low-paid have risen faster than anyone else’s over the course of this decade.