Boris Johnson Cracked The Code For A Reagan Coalition In Great Britain
It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.

By Sumantra Maitra, December 13, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/13/boris-johnson-cracked-the-code-for-a-reagan-coalition-in-great-britain/

As I came back from my office at the university, the cab driver was asking me about what I teach in politics a day before the British elections. A big NewCastle guy, with an affable Northern accent, this guy voted Remain in the European Union elections and has been a lifelong voter for Labour.

For those who have no idea about the electoral map of the United Kingdom, the entire Midlands and North of England are traditional working-class Labour voters since Margaret Thatcher broke the back of trade unionism in the 1980s. These people were taught in their households, in no uncertain terms, that voting for posh urban southern Conservatives is a cardinal sin and they have more in common with the Scots north of the border than their fellow Englishmen down south.

This guy, however, said that he would vote for Conservative Boris Johnson, reluctantly: “What’s the point of a vote, if the results are not even honored? We voted for Brexit as a country, even when I voted for Remain. Chin up and move on.” It was then I knew Labour was toast. If a traditional Anglican working-class bloke from NewCastle can vote Conservative, even in anger or apathy, then we are living in a very different world.

The election results are still coming in as I write, and the Conservatives are on course to get a bigger majority than Thatcher’s. No word can adequately express the result. A rout, a massacre, a thumping—nothing explains the political earthquake that just happened.

It also highlights a few important trends that should be urgently studied and emulated by conservatives across the world. The former Eton-Oxford Classics scholar, former successful two-term mayor of liberal London, former editor of world’s oldest English magazine The Spectator, a chubby cosmopolitan blonde who can recite The Iliad in ancient Greek and lecture on the usage of ascending tricolons in the speeches of Winston Churchill, has just cracked the code of outright long-term conservative majority. This is the Reagan coalition of Britain at work.


-- excerpt, rest at link above --