John Harris

Beyond the Red Wall by Deborah Mattinson and The Northern Question by Tom Hazeldine – review

Thursday, September 24th, 2020

Why did the Red Wall collapse? Voices from the heartlands on Labour and the north-south divide

In mid-2019, a former employee of the Conservative party called James Kanagasooriam began looking at recent electoral statistics for parts of England long associated with support for the Labour party. As a teenager, he had been fixated with a duvet cover featuring a map of the UK, and the fact that, in political terms, “the bottom half was blue while the top half was red”. Now, he realised, that was becoming much less certain.

Support for the Tories in the north of England, north Wales and the Midlands had grown by around 15% over the previous decade, and Kanagasooriam saw the possibility of a truly historic shift. Everything, he surmised, came down to the “degradation of historical memory: Mrs Thatcher, heavy industry, coal mining. The economics that had driven those places to group together was being replaced by a cultural sense of belonging that was more proximate to the Conservatives”.

According to the people Mattinson asks, Labour is a party of the south – of ’scroungers’ and ‘middle-class students’

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Under cover of coronavirus, the Tory government is bulldozing basic liberties | John Harris

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020

The Tories have been increasing police powers, bringing in laws by diktat and sowing mistrust. When will the left speak up?

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Towards the end of last week, someone I know posted a video and photograph on social media, taken one balmy afternoon on Hampstead Heath in north London. They showed a group of young people – who, by the look of them, had spent the day together at school or college. The images also featured three police officers, dispatched to disperse the gathering. In response, everyone had tried in vain to retreat into groups of six. “In the end they give up and all leave together,” ran the accompanying text. And that was that: a small, faintly absurd incident that highlighted the strange times in which we now live.

The underlying logic of England’s so-called rule of six is, I suppose, clear enough. But the sheer complexity of apparently simple regulations – not to mention the fact that they exempt grouse-shooting parties – shows something is clearly wrong. Given that schools are back, people are being encouraged to return to work and visiting restaurants and pubs is still held to be some kind of moral duty, the effectiveness of the new rule is obviously open to question.

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Disruption, destruction and chaos has become the new way of governing | John Harris

Sunday, September 13th, 2020

For the right, exploiting prejudices is all that counts. The things that used to be avoided are now being actively encouraged

At the heart of power, there used to be a distinction that allowed onlookers to make at least some sense of what was going on. For the most part, a government’s day-to-day business revolved around outwardly serious plans and policies – presented, however cynically, as being of benefit to the public – and responding to events. But, politics being politics, this solid core was inevitably accompanied by much more superficial stuff: distraction, spin, the kind of things Tony Blair once termed “eye-catching initiatives”.

Now that division seems to have crumbled. In the US, Donald Trump is standing for a second term as president without a meaningful policy platform, after a four-year riot of performance and provocation. Here in Britain, there are signs of something comparable: a new politics largely untethered by coherence and practicality, and a sense that we too have no real idea where we might be heading.

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Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn; This Land: The Story of a Movement – review

Sunday, September 13th, 2020

Two accounts of Corbynism – by journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire and the Guardian’s Owen Jones – unpick Labour’s rapid descent from the optimism of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ to landslide defeat at the polls

A week before the general election of 2019, Jeremy Corbyn’s private secretary furnished his aides and closest allies with an itinerary. Among its contents was a giddy encapsulation of what would happen to the Labour leader and his circle on 13 December: “busy day!!! Number 10”.

Instead, as the political journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire put it, “an era collapsed around them”. Not much more than two years before, Labour had achieved its biggest increase in vote share since 1945, and the summer’s great cultural moment had been the massed singing of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” at Glastonbury; now, amid the darkness and rain of winter, a great domino-chain of supposed Labour heartlands fell to the Conservatives. In the early autumn, when the Labour leader and his team had been shown polling that predicted such a disaster, the response of the then shadow minister and Corbyn supporter Ian Lavery had been disbelief: “People in the north just won’t vote Tory! It just won’t happen!” But it did.

After the Salisbury poisoning, Corbyn made the risible suggestion that the toxic substance be sent to Moscow for testing

From one of the Corbyn project’s most devout advocates, this is remarkable stuff

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The commuter is an English archetype – but for how much longer? | John Harris

Monday, September 7th, 2020

After years of grim acceptance, people have glimpsed a different way of life, and a quiet pushback may be under way

An unexpected new national stereotype has emerged with coronavirus. We are allegedly in a new era of “work-from-home buyers”: people who are determined to minimise the amount of time they spend in their workplaces, and make their recent lifestyle changes permanent.

Massed interest in what estate agents call “coastal and country” properties has apparently led to the biggest monthly increase in house prices in more than 16 years. Meanwhile, all those exhortations from politicians and rightwing newspapers intended to get people travelling back into cities – which, in most cases, means London – are evidently not working. At the centre of all this lies something fascinating: a sudden questioning of commuting and everything it entails.

Related: What’s behind the headlines demanding a return to the office? | Hettie O’Brien

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