Why the Tories get London so wrong - and how that affects them negatively in the rest of the country
I think most people who pay any attention to British politics will tell you that the Conservative party is getting a lot of things wrong at the moment. Okay, most things wrong. All right, everything wrong. One thing in particular that they’ve misjudged is their approach to London and how it has not only screwed them up inside of the M25, but has weakened their image elsewhere as well.
How do the Tories talk about London? Mostly with contempt these days. Sunak calling Starmer a “lefty London lawyer”, with the “London” being used there as a pejorative term. Gullis in particular but other Tory MPs over the last five years dropping “north London” into a description of something or someone, as if it had the same connotation as “terrorist prison camp”. How do the Tories treat London? Contempt is the only applicable word here as well. Take selecting Susan Hall as their London mayoral candidate. They couldn’t have done anything that screamed “We hate London more than you could possibly ever imagine” more than that.
This behaviour has hurt them in the capital in ways that are obvious to everyone. Hall is due to get an electoral drubbing from Khan, even though the latter was totally beatable with a decent candidate. All of their Westminster seats are in serious trouble (although ones like Cities of London and Westminster could very well buck national swing). Yet this is an obvious point and not the one I’m here to make. What I want to talk about is how much I think that the Tories’ anti-London posturing hurts them in the rest of the country. I believe it does so in three ways.
One is that the Tories misunderstand the way most people outside of London think of the capital. They believe, “Everyone beyond the M25 hates London” or something akin to it. When actually, most English people’s feelings towards London are part of a very complex, English way of dealing with regional competition and difference.
A great example of this with London removed from the equation would be the rivalry between Newcastle and Sunderland. The football teams from each of those cities have a fierce rivalry. Yet if a politician from somewhere outside the northeast started talking down one of those places, I don’t think you’d get a positive response from people in the rival city. In fact, they would probably take the insults directed at Newcastle or Sunderland as an insult directed at the whole of the area and get their backs up.
I think this is the same when London is attacked in the way the Tories go after the city. Sure, lots of people outside of London have all sorts of negative opinions about the place, but when it’s attacked like that, it’s easy for it to seem like an attack on England or Britain or the UK in general. Maybe not even consciously, but it sets those feelings in motion for a lot of people. The rivalry between different parts of the UK is keenly felt but in very specific ways. Most people in Britain still love the country as a whole.
Which brings me neatly to the second way the anti-London positioning hurts the Tories nationwide: at the end of the day, London is the capital, of both England and the entire United Kingdom, and it’s pretty much impossible to talk shit about the place at length and not be doing down the country at the same time. If you want to come across as the patriotic bunch, constantly talking about what a hellscape the capital of the country is doesn’t work. Most right-wing populists around the world understand this implicitly. Orban doesn’t go on and on about how Budapest is the worst place on Earth - that’s Brussels.
The final way this is bad is that it makes the Tories look both mean-spirited and incompetent, which is a brutal combination. In other words, they seem nasty when they do it, which is bad enough, but they also give off the air that they have no idea what they are doing at the same time. As many asked during the Corbyn era, “Why should we vote for a guy and a party that seems to hate the country they seek to govern?”. This is closer to “Why should we vote for a guy and a party that seems to hate the capital of our great country so much?” than pretty much any Tory strategist has clocked onto.
In short, the Tories should stop doing down London. Just stop it now. It makes people in London hate them without helping them pick up votes elsewhere in the country. Maybe, just maybe, people would like a Conservative party that talked in positive terms about all parts of the country they wish to continue governing, instead of the London-bashing road of lunacy they’ve chosen to take over the last few years, one that has led them to the brink of political annihilation. It’s funny that one of the big results of Brexit is for the Conservative party to have turned on its own capital.
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Susan Hall is possibly the worst candidate the Tories have ever put up for a major position. With repeated ill judged comments, Hall appears to encapsulate anti environmentalism plus privilege, a cross over with 1970's National Front policies, but with a 1950's house wife, Spam fritters vibe.
The Tories get everything wrong, as will Labour, or Lib-Dem, or Reform.
What surprises me is the triviality of the post. This, in a week where FSB in Russia has evidence of direct ties between the Crocus Hall concert murderers and MI-6. The British people people are being sleep-walked into armageddon.