Why “Don’t Rock the Boat” rules English politics | Part II
Stable campaign, radical governance. It has been this way since the Industrial Revolution
Pundits say that the Labour Party lacks big ideas. Yet come election time, Keir Starmer is sure that Labour will win a majority. He’s right. To English shire voters, the Tories have simply caused too much instability. And recent history, from Thatcher to Blair, makes it clear that wooing Middle England with a “Don’t Rock the Boat” message leads to victory.
Why the Tories have already lost the next election | Part I
When you look at the demographics, Middle England’s outsized role in British politics makes sense. The UK is not the US — there is no electoral college weighting some votes above others. Indeed, it is just a numbers game. Of 67 million Brits, roughly two-thirds live in England outside of London, Birmingham, and Manchester. This gives Middle England more the political weight than the rest of the country, especially in referendums where the result is a pure headcount.
Politically, this part of the country thinks differently. To those in many of England’s villages, towns, and smaller cities, English life has always been uniquely pleasant. You can criticise this idea for its exceptionalism. But it’s easy to think this way, when many of the buildings and institutions around you have existed for centuries, and when other countries have overthrown governments and undergone countless wars and revolutions. For hundreds of years, good or bad, England has been stable. No wonder, then, that people think “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
But this view is concentrated especially in what Margaret Thatcher and John Major both called ‘Middle England’. Major defined this place using three characteristics: rural cricket matches, warm beer, and big, suburban gardens. It’s here where “Don’t rock the boat” is the prevailing force in political life. Indeed, it has been this way for as long as Britain has been a modern democracy. Here’s why:
In the mid-1800s, English society was extremely divided. While the empire greatly enriched parts of the country, millions of working-class people toiled in England’s polluted and cramped factories and foundries. This discontent gave birth to the Charter Movement, an ancestor of today’s Labour Party. In 1838, one year after Queen Victoria acceded to the throne, the Chartists published a call for six major reforms:
- The right to vote (for all males over 21, no women yet)
- Secret ballot voting
- Introduction of payment for MPs
- Removal of the requirement that MPs be landowners
- Equal size constituencies to ensure equal representation
- Annual parliamentary elections
These demands gathered considerable support from the working class. At their peak, the Chartists commanded the confidence of 3.5 million people, around a tenth of the population at the time. Chartist periodicals spread quickly in pubs, coffee shops, workplaces, and town squares. In them, many could for the first time read articles exposing the horrors of British imperialism abroad. For example, Chartists opposed the Opium War where Britain foisted a poisonous (but vastly profitable) drug trade upon China.
To combat their growing influence, Parliament brutally repressed the Chartists. The group’s leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and some even deported. Things changed radically in February 1848, when French unrest led to the overthrow of the monarchy. This left the British government looking on nervously from across the channel. (Plus ça change.) Inspired, the Chartists scheduled a march to Parliament on the 10th of April. In response, new sedition laws were passed just three days before the demo:
“[Seditious acts include] proposing to make war against the Queen, or seeking to intimidate or overawe both Houses of Parliament… or openly speaking or writing to that effect”. — The Decline of the Chartist Movement.
If you see parallels with the recent Public Order Act in effect outlawing forms of open protest, you’re not alone. Here though, offenders would be punished by death or deportation. More still, 100,000 constables were recruited to guard Parliament. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Chartists cancelled the march. Despite that, the event’s organiser, William Cuffay, was arrested and convicted for “preparing acts of arson, intended as a signal for the planned armed uprising”. He was deported to Australia.
All in all, these events terrified the English middle and upper classes. Chartism filled working class people in the cities with confidence and threatened the status quo. Back then, riots and rebellions in China and India could be put down without much fuss in England, if those events ever made it in a paper in the first place. But homegrown revolution was another thing entirely.
While Chartism’s power as a grassroots movement declined, those in control could not stop the spreading knowledge of what the British Empire had done abroad. Upon becoming Prime Minister in 1868, Liberal Party leader William Gladstone called Britain’s opium trade in China “infamous and atrocious”. So with malcontent in the lower classes and corruption and genocide above, the middle classes retreated to the countrysides.
There, they invented a sort of national myth that persists to this day. They are a wistful set of exceptionalist ideals that paint England as a stable, pragmatic nation, whose heart and morality lies not in the cities, but in its pastoral rolling hills and villages. You can see this in the literature of the day. From Rudyard Kipling to Rupert Brooke, poems and books were consumed by romanticism.
German nationalists, who finally united the country in 1871, freeing it of Napoleonic influence, had significant influence on this nascent movement. Deeply nationalist societies were founded, such as the English Folk Dance Society, which championed rural English life and the idea of the ‘pure’ White English countryside folk. This was a racist and anti-semitic philosophy that, in Germany, would go on to inspire the tenets of Nazism. (Chartism was also anti-semitic in nature, however.) Conversely, English nationalists used these beliefs to form an English identity that justified their ‘splendid isolation’ in the countryside.
In the mid-1800s, the Conservatives lost their power to the Liberals due to infighting and instability, both domestic and overseas. For one, Britain had no major friends or allies in Europe. Tory protectionist policies rose the price of food and exacerbated a cost of living crisis. (Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.) And news of concentration camps in South Africa appalled the populace, although Britain’s use of Chinese slaves there only angered people as it was seen to take jobs from British workers.
With this, in 1859 the Liberals achieved their first ever majority. Over the next few decades, they would finally enact many of the Chartist’s demands. They passed the secret ballot in 1872, equal constituency sizes in 1885, payment for MPs in 1911, and finally the removal of property qualifications and universal male suffrage in 1918 (women would wait another ten years). It is an understatement to say that Liberal reforms continue to shape UK politics and society to this day.
Eventually, the Conservatives retook power in 1918 at the end of WWI, and the Liberals declined in favour of the Labour Party. 105 years on, and the Tories have ruled for all but 34 of those years. Yet again, however, it looks like they are in trouble and things need fixing at home. What will happen?
What the future of English politics looks like
The sizable population of Middle England gives it political heft, even as its financial power declines. In turn, this growing regional inequality will lead to more mistrust and resentment, especially when it comes to London.
Between 2007 and 2019, London’s share of the UK’s GDP grew from 22% to 24%. This imbalance is only getting worse. In Q2 of 2022, the most recent quarter with data available, London grew by 1.2%, while England’s economy shrank by 1.6%. In fact, the capital generates more tax than the next 60 cities combined. It’s fair to say that levelling up has failed.
As political power strays further away from economic reality for England, tensions will heighten. Growing resentment in an influential electorate will result in instability; indeed it already has. An incoming Labour government would do well to make regional equality a priority to alleviate this issue. But given the parlous state of the country that the Tories are sure to hand over, it won’t be easy. With this in mind, Keir Starmer must go further than simply offering stability and competence. That message is likely to carry Labour into government, but what will they do when they get there? Sometimes, keeping the boat steady means making big changes.
