Securing The Wall

The redoubtable Professor Matthew Goodwin and Professor Oliver Heath have found that the Conservatives were now more popular than Labour among low-income voters.

To hold onto these electorally decisive votes, then the Conservatives really do need to get Brexit done properly, and they are going to have to spend a lot of money along the old Red Wall.

Or else these electors might just stop voting at all while the local public sector middle class, which is a major bloc up here, carried on voting Labour.

These seats elected Labour MPs in 2017, when that party was both pro-Brexit and anti-austerity. That was also under Jeremy Corbyn, about whom nothing was known in 2019 that had not been known two and a half years earlier.

To keep these seats, then the Conservatives need to banish any notion that the key swing voters in them had become Thatcherities. Nothing could be further from the case.

Accordingly, the Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.