The Battersea Problem
The Tories and 'successful Britain'
This post was first published in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s excellent Substack Comment is Freed in July 2024. It is available free of charge here for the first time.
It was not until I heard a Conservative strategist write off Battersea – not just in the difficult context of the 2024 election campaign but forever – that I realised quite how bad the situation had become for conservatism in Britain. James Johnson, the pollster who runs JL Partners, wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 19 June that ‘The least understood thing in British politics is that the seats won through Cameroon triangulation, like Battersea and Brighton Kemptown, were lost to Labour seven years ago and are not coming back.’
Johnson is no fool and his words should be taken more seriously than those of some ranting columnist. But if he is correct, the Conservative Party has ceased to be a party of the centre-right and has been transformed, in a historical blink of an eye, into something entirely different. Few have grasped the scale of the change, although one anonymous Conservative candidate interviewed for the Financial Times got to the root of the problem: ‘How did we stop being the party of successful Britain?’1
Introducing Battersea
Let us look first at Battersea, this spurned constituency that symbolises a Tory past, before broadening to conclusions about where the Conservatives, and politics in general, are headed.
It is in the inner London borough of Wandsworth, south of the Thames opposite Chelsea; the seat stretches down to the maze of railways around Clapham Junction and onwards to Wandsworth Common and Balham. This patch of London has a complex political history. It elected trade union leader John Burns in 1892 as a Liberal candidate with Labour support (a ‘Lib-Lab’) and in the 1920s Battersea North elected the radical Shapurji Saklatvala, first as a Labour candidate and then as a Communist. The early adoption of left-wing politics owed much to the strength of the railwaymen’s union in the yards and workshops around Clapham Junction.
One cannot understand Battersea, and what it represents and portends, without realising that it did not come to the Conservatives through ‘Cameroon triangulation’. It was Ground Zero of Thatcherism as policy and as electoral strategy. The early adoption of Thatcherism can be traced to 1970s gentrification ‘Between the Commons’, as middle-class families discovered large houses and pleasant surroundings.
Young people in their early professional careers moved in from the already-conquered areas of Fulham and Putney in the 1980s; the boom in London financial services meant there was a plentiful supply of affluent ‘yuppies’ looking for places to live. Back in 1978 the Conservatives won Wandsworth Borough Council with a clear set of policies – contracting-out of services, low local taxes and an ambitious programme of council house right to buy sales – that anticipated national developments. After a few years in power the Conservative administration in Wandsworth was popular; they made sure the bins were emptied and the streets were cleaned and charged a low tax for doing so.
Battersea’s moment of electoral fame in 1987 came early on election night – Wandsworth counts its votes briskly - when the Conservative John Bowis unseated Labour’s Alf Dubs. Many of the cheering party workers outside Conservative Central Office that night waved Bowis posters in triumph. He increased his majority in 1992, following on from a Conservative landslide in the 1990 local elections. Previously loyal Labour wards like St Mary’s Park fell, through a combination of right to buy, gentrification and a successful local and national political formula.
In 1998 Labour activist John O’Farrell wrote a book, Things Can Only Get Better, about quite how miserable it had been to be in Battersea Labour Party for most of the previous two decades. The Tories were not entirely beaten even after Martin Linton gained Battersea for Labour in the 1997 landslide; they still controlled the council (only losing it in 2022) and only missed taking the seat back by 163 votes in 2005, even though Michael Howard’s campaign was unafraid of striking socially conservative notes (‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’). Labour’s narrow win was dependent on the bits of Battersea that social change had not reached yet, such as the system-built estates of Latchmere ward; the future was with the Tories.
The Conservative gain in Battersea in 2010 came because it was a marginal seat that would form part of any election-winning Conservative showing. Triangulation, Blair-style, meant distancing the leader from the party’s traditional ideas and supporters; this was not the case in Battersea which was perfectly happy to identify itself with the Tory tradition. While Battersea was brought to the Conservatives by Thatcherism, the project was one that united the party. The Tory left shared in and celebrated the Wandsworth approach.
The council was radical in its approach to industrial relations, service provision and taxation, but on cultural issues it was mild, particularly towards the end of its long 1978-2022 reign. Battersea’s Tory MPs John Bowis (1987-97) and Jane Ellison (2010-17) were both from the One Nation tradition and liberal on gay rights. Under Thatcher, Major and Cameron a pluralistic party had a good relationship with Battersea’s voters. Battersea’s professionals are centre-right economically but socially ‘progressive’ according to surveys of attitudes like those of the National Centre for Social Research . But this is by recent definitions only and a mild variety of progressivism, in contrast to the radical form one finds in Hackney or Islington. For years it could be accommodated within the Tory Party.
Battersea has evolved into a distinctive constituency – it has the highest proportion of the electorate with a degree (66 per cent) and with professional and managerial employment status (56 per cent) anywhere in the UK. Until the mid-2010s the Conservatives here were climbing an up escalator – they got an assist every election from demographic change. It seemed on a trajectory towards safety; Jane Ellison’s majority in 2015 was (then) the largest in Battersea’s post-1983 history as a single seat.
In principle it should be easy, even now, to persuade people in Battersea to vote for the centre-right. Its voters are higher-earning, they tend to work in the private sector; many of them even now are wealthy and so have the sort of stake in society that has made generations of people see the value in conserving things rather than shaking up social and economic relations. Young professionals are also among the people least dependent on public services: too young to need much of the health and education systems, too rich to have much to do with the benefits system, insulated from the creaking state of the public realm.
Labour’s failure in 2015 was analysed in the context of the Ed Miliband era party’s alleged inability to understand aspiration. Voters, it was argued, wanted to get on in material and social terms and Labour had been too distant from their concerns and too willing to intervene for ideological reasons in the market economy that created the wealth. Battersea, not implausibly, was regarded as one of the strongholds of aspiration.
But then in June 2017 the Conservatives lost their majority following a surprisingly vigorous challenge from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. One of the seats they lost – again, early on election night – was Battersea, where Marsha de Cordova swept to victory for Labour. People are still aspirational – human nature does not change overnight - but they are frustrated by the structures that exist around them and get in the way of their hopes and dreams. Brexit, and the Tory embrace of it, was seen by many voters as an additional impediment to aspiration, an abrupt curtailment of economic and personal opportunity. The obstacles to aspiration weighed particularly heavily on the young, in whom the feeling burns particularly brightly, but the middle-aged switched too. The fierceness with which many of my ex-Tory contemporaries, often Battersea types who are wealthy and significantly to the right on economic issues, grew to despise the Conservative Party is awesome to behold.
Within a short period, aspirational voters in Battersea had decided that a Labour government much to the left of Ed Miliband was less of an obstacle to a good life than the Conservatives. The party were strangely uninterested in why Battersea and other voters might have concluded this, beguiled instead by the prospect of winning over socially conservative working-class voters. They lost Battersea again, worse, in 2019 and were obliterated in 2024 when Labour probably won in every ward, from the.shiny towers of Nine Elms the elegant owner-occupied villas of Northcote.
Introducing the Problem
Let us turn from the local to the general, and use the Conservatives’ Battersea Problem as a way of understanding their wider predicament. The rupture of relations between the Tories and the sorts of people who formed the core of the Thatcherite version of the party is ultimately a question of political economy – of how the mechanics of production and distribution interact with the political system.
There were two sorts of political economy that emerged from Battersea in a ‘long 20th Century’ from 1885 to around 2008. One was the collectivist economy of big employers and strong unions – increasingly coordinated by the state and cushioned by a redistributive welfare state. The era of John Burns and Douglas Jay (Labour MP for Battersea North 1946-83). The other was the political economy of Thatcherism – private sector growth, particularly in the financial sector, inequality, individualism and the spread of ownership.
Battersea is a major cog in that machine now, not just because it is where wealth-creators live but also as one end of London’s Central Activities Zone (CAZ) which accounts for 13 per cent of UK Gross Value Added (GVA). The Conservatives won, for the first time ever, no constituencies in this nearest approximation to a real-life Singapore-on-Thames. Without this connection to the heartland of British capitalism, the Tories will struggle to evolve with structural change as well as they have in the past – even if they were interested in doing so, which seems doubtful.
Battersea and Wandsworth went Conservative for coherent reasons in the 1980s, but after over 30 years the contradictions of the Thatcherite settlement were becoming apparent. Aspiration was coming ever closer to being a polite way of describing economic insecurity, and a division had opened up between those who had been helped to get a stake in property in the 1980s and younger generations living and working in Battersea. Thatcherism could only be done once.
The fatal error the Tories made was to permanently identify their interests with the group of people whom they had enriched in the 1980s, rather than keeping up with the interests of later generations of aspirational voters. Flats sold off in the right to buy are now traded on the buy to let market, and inhabited by high-earning but asset-poor tenants who resent paying a fortune in rent to asset-rich landlords without hope of getting on the ladder locally. The unfairness continues to rankle as the tenants start families and move out to cheaper, longer commutes. A quarter of the electorate of Battersea leaves (and another quarter arrives) every year, exporting its politics across the south east. If a party is toxic in Battersea this year, it will be increasingly toxic further down the railway line in Basingstoke and Aldershot five to ten years on – as the Conservatives found in this election.
The Conservatives have struggled to come up with an account of political economy ever since they took the Brexit vote to require a rupture with reality. There might have been a way of Brexiting that did not insult the centre-right rationale with which many Remain voters cast their vote, but that was abandoned early on. Hostility to the likes of Battersea is Boris Johnson’s ‘fuck business’ writ large.
The Truss experiment of autumn 2022 did at least bring with it a theory of wealth creation. The theory was a simple-minded version of free market economics that could never have worked, but it was an attempt to produce private sector led growth and close the growing gap between the Tories and the productive economy. In the event, it compounded the Tories’ problems by bequeathing Truss’s successors with higher interest rates and the electoral pain from mortgage-holders coming off fixed-rate deals every month from then until the general election.
While the Conservatives have shut themselves out, Labour is not entirely comfortable with the sort of society that Battersea has become. The local housing market has produced cartoonish inequality, with shimmering infinity pools in the sky a stone’s throw from urban poverty. Wandsworth’s Labour council – a broad administration combining Corbynite and non-Corbynite politicians - tries to extract more of the surplus from development in the form of social housing, but the need is too great to be met without more radical measures. 41 per cent of Battersea households are deprived – lower than the 52 per cent average for England and Wales but still not indicating uniform wealth and power.
The Conservatives’ electoral abandonment of Battersea is downstream of their abandonment of the responsibility to produce a functioning political-economic model. This constituency represents the problem in a crude form – the Tories are the rentier party, extracting resources from Battersea, rather than the party of productive capital, the professions or the entrepreneurs. It is not surprising that they have few supporters there.
The Tories are the party of people who are insulated from the market economy – paid in triple-locked state pensions and defined-benefit private pensions, owning their own houses debt free. Few other people can afford to prioritise the post-materialist politics of social conservatism over the solid matter of political economy. The working population voted to Remain in 2016. Political economy is rooted in personal experience. Insecurity, aspiration and the state of public services are directly experienced. The politics of social conservatism is usually indirectly experienced, as a response to media and political discussion of divisive issues. The usual pattern in Britain has been for gradual familiarisation with people of different ethnicities or sexual orientations to soften harder conservative attitudes over time. This history is reflected in the Conservative Party’s own gradual embrace of once-marginalised groups.
The Conservatives have been left with a smaller and less coherent electoral remnant than Labour had at its nadir in 1983. The Economist, in a paragraph which I irritatingly now cannot locate, wrote in 1983 that in order to find a Labour constituency, you had to go looking for places where there was industrial dereliction, mass unemployment or inner-city poverty. Class-conscious working-class electors tended to vote Labour. A Labour vote was an understandable cry of protest at genuine social ills; but the places where there was growth and prosperity, where Britain’s future was becoming apparent, were off-limits to the party. Some in 1980s Labour tried to create a rainbow coalition of the various groups that were losing out to change, plus social progressives, but this was a doomed strategy despite theoretically adding up to a plurality. Labour’s revival in 1997 was based on the votes of average, aspirational people who were not doing too badly.
The Conservatives seem about to try to invent an anti-rainbow coalition on cultural issues, trapping themselves into grievance-mongering and trying to bridge the gaps between social-conservative voters who disagree on a range of other subjects. Part of the formula, for (James) Johnson, is self-identified class-conscious working-class voters. However, unlike 1983, there is a poor match between self-identified working-class status and objective measurements - it may be that ‘working-class’ identity is a consequence rather than a cause of conservative social attitudes, as it was to a lesser extent for attitudes towards trade unionism and redistribution in 1983.
Conclusion
Evading economics might work indefinitely for the Conservatives with the retiree on the Lincolnshire coast, but the risk is that Reform UK will always be able to outbid the Tories on social conservatism. Either way it will not work with the self-employed plumber in Dudley who wants a mortgage and a decent school for her children; her material interests converge more with those of the liberal Battersea banker.
What economic model can both satisfy the multifaceted grievances of the voters who seem easiest for the Tories to recover while restarting the engines of growth that are needed to power any political project? Truss complained that decades of politics had been about redistribution rather than growth; if she had confined her critique to the period since 2016, or 2008, she might have had a point. To play for social conservatives alone is to perpetuate the problem. It is a populist right, postmaterialist project rather than a centre-right one. If there is a core to the centre-right, it is growth, ownership and opportunity (within a framework of traditional institutions); the current trajectory of the Tories abandons these, and concentrates on making those who have benefited from them in the past feel angry at the present.
The Conservatives’ soured relationship with Battersea is in contrast with Labour’s political and electoral strategy in old strongholds during the party’s revivals in the 1990s and in 2019-24. The New Towns were created by the Attlee government as planned socialist utopias, cross-class communities dominated by the workers living in public housing and reliant on public services. They never quite lived up to the dream, having volatile tendencies even before Thatcher targeted them with the right to buy, entrepreneurialism and privatisation and converted them into Tory seats (which Cameron won again in 2010).
But Labour never lost its respect for the New Towns’ voters, even when they had seemed to desert the party for good in 1987 and 2019, relentlessly adapting itself to keep up with the changing wishes of Stevenage and Harlow. Labour saw losing the New Towns as a failure by the party to keep in touch with swing voters and with life as it is lived by the average person. Battersea, granted, is not average – there are fewer seats like it than there are New Towns – but it plays an important part in the UK economy and in the life-cycle of voters across a lot of constituencies in London and the South East – the regions where past Tory hegemony has collapsed most abjectly in 2024. The Tories seem to be saying that Battersea voters are to blame, not them, for the rupture, and that the party doesn’t want those sorts of people anyway. It does not look like a good way to start the long road back to power.
With thanks to Sam Freedman for comments on a pre-election draft.
(24 June 2024 p21 and https://www.ft.com/content/4c7594b9-22f3-4a31-8168-4b2622e2d685 £)
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