Flat Wrong

Mary Riddell was on the Today programme, blathering on about how you could once tell Labour voters by their "flat caps and pigeons".

In fact, never less than around forty-five per cent of men like that, and if anything an even higher proportion of their wives, always voted Tory. How do you think that the Tories won General Elections in the Twenties, Thirties, Fifties, Seventies and even Eighties, indeed really even all the way up to 1992?

In that case, how did Labour win any? Simply because, just as a flat cap of a pigeon was no sure sign of a Labour vote, so the absence of such was no sure sign of a Tory voter. Ever. British politics, like Britain, simply isn't like that, and simply never has been.