The Right mustn't give up on Yellow England
Or, How Woking became Wokeing
At the 2024 General Election, the Liberal Democrats gained a notional 64 seats — in non-notional terms, up to 72 seats from just 11 in 2019 (reaching 15 just prior to the election, after a number of by-election victories) — thus achieving the best result for a British liberal party since 1923. 60 of these 64 seats were gained from the Conservative Party. 8 of those 60 seats begin with the letter ‘W’, and 5 of these 8 are located within fifty miles of the M25. In alphabetical order, the kind of place which I want you now to imagine looks like an amalgam of Wimbledon, Winchester, Witney, Woking, and Wokingham. Close your eyes, and take yourself to their pleasant, tree-lined avenues. See the three-bed, two-bath semis, and the Volvo S60s on the driveway.
If I had asked you on the election morning of 2015 which party won these seats, you would have no hesitation in correctly guessing ‘the Conservatives’. Even in 1997, the last time the electorate got bored of the Tories, three of these five seats continued to play for the blue team: Witney was the seat of David Cameron and Douglas Hurd; Wokingham, of John Redwood; Wimbledon, of Cyril Black. Now, ancestrally Blue England has substantially gone Yellow, and is represented, in large part, by legions of bannermen of the blob brigade. Woking has become Wokeing.
Of course, the 2024 General Election was the Conservative Party’s worst ever defeat: at least some beacons of blue were bound to be toppled by the national swing alone. But what sets this type of constituency apart from the rest is that it was going to defect even in a good year for the Conservatives. This was a development that was more than a decade in the making. At every General Election from 2001 to 2019, the Conservative Party increased its national vote share. However, even as support swelled across Britain as a whole, it was stagnating from as early as 2010 in ‘W’ England: most of these seats saw smaller proportionate swings to the Tories than nationally that year, and once again in 2017 and 2019. In the Heathrow-Gatwick arc especially, which contains a number of our ‘W’ seats (and many others similar to them), a combination of the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn and improving national performance had kept Tory MPs just above water, papering over the crack that would finally rupture the Tory hull in 2024; for instance, amid a Tory landslide in 2019, de facto Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab nearly lost his leafy Esher and Walton seat, suffering a colossal adverse 19-point swing, which cut his majority to less than 3,000 (the Liberal Democrats now hold this seat with a solid majority of 12,000; by contrast, Raab’s majority in 2015 was a massive 29,000).
What also differentiates these seats is the relative lack of support for Reform UK. A great deal of the seats that the Conservatives lost across the country saw hefty vote hauls for Reform candidates, signalling a predictable flow of voters away from the Tories due to the Conservative Party’s vulnerability on its Right flank. By contrast, across these five seats, Reform UK won an average of just 9.3% of the vote, far lower than the 14.7% they took nationally. Yet the Tory vote fell by an average of 20.7%. From this, we can infer that many, if not most, of the 2019 Tories who actually bothered to turn up (many stayed at home) to vote for someone else voted Liberal Democrat, joining the many 2010, 2015, and 2017 Tory voters who were already doing so. The share of the vote given over to notionally right-of-centre parties is at a historic nadir in these constituencies.
It would be tempting, in the face of such dynamics, to believe that the future of the British Right (and I will use the term ‘Right’ as a catch-all, because I do not pretend to know what the party landscape will look like by 2029) lies in the areas which showed more immediate promise at the last two elections. This course seems especially appealing for those who do not want the Conservative Party to return to the supposed ‘centre ground’, as most of those interested in winning back Yellow England insist is necessary (often disingenuously, because they want to do this anyway for ideological reasons). Many on the Right would argue that, instead of expending energy on the fallen South, it may be more useful to focus on the Northern and Midlands seats which saw Reform take as many votes from Labour as they did from the Conservatives, and which have been trending rightwards over the same time period. But while it is indeed fruitful for the Right to target the Left Behind, it would be a serious mistake to do so by entirely forgoing the Striding Forward.
This study-in-miniature is not of the ‘Blue Wall’ in broad terms, because that amorphous grouping is as heterogenous as its poorer carmine counterpart. Nor am I talking about the middle classes at large, for the same reason. I am choosing to focus on our five ‘W’ seats because these ‘Yellow England’ seats all have many similar characteristics (though Wimbledon is a bit more unique). Most of their population live in a medium-sized town or city, with rural elements at the fringes; there is a big contingent of commuters to larger nearby settlements; the average salary is high by national standards, and so are house prices; local schools are among the best in the country; and crime is very, very low. These are the ideal locations for 30-something professionals and successful executives and businessmen to raise children, and as such should be a model for an ambitious and aspirational Right. It’s what all of the South and East of England quite easily can — and should — look like, which is why it is intolerable for the Liberal Democrats to have a stranglehold over them. People should once again associate the nicest bits of Britain with right-wing politics, because the kind of places where people hold certain beliefs can be one of the clearest illustrations of what those beliefs actually represent.
Just as this is not a profile of everyone in the South earning between £40k and £100k per annum, neither is it a profile of the loyal Liberal Democrat voter in these seats. Even in 2015, when the Liberal Democrats were cut to just 8 seats, ruthlessly squeezed where it mattered by their erstwhile Conservative coalition partners, they still won 7.9% of the vote. Given how disastrous the previous five years were for the Liberal Democrats, their 2015 performance can be considered something of a floor for them. In 2024, when they won nearly ten times as many seats as in 2015, they increased their vote share to only 12.2% — identical to their vote share in 2019, when they won just 11 seats. Many Liberal Democrat MPs have small majorities; others are larger, but given recent history, could easily prove illusory. On the whole, these are slim margins we are dealing with here, especially given the amount of seats that are at stake.
In much of the Home Counties, we can basically consider this floor of support, represented by a ≈8% national vote share, to be little more than the local variant of the Left. For although there are some genuine distinctions between the two parties (especially in terms of internal party culture), if they lived elsewhere, the great majority of these voters would simply transfer their vote to Labour. This is because, in practical terms, their political views are just not that different. Needless to say, these people cannot seriously be won over by the Tories without completely compromising on all matters of principle. The kind of voter who has been vandalising their ballot with a cross in the bird box at every election they’ve been able to vote in is not someone worth chasing, or even really discussing. Many readers will already know that type all too well. A voter who has seen the Liberal Democrats up close and personal, and has decided to give them their support regardless, requires scientific — rather than journalistic — study. It is far more fruitful to point the magnifying glass at the margins; the yellow brick road which the Right must cross to return to power will be demolished by starting with the loosest slabs.
I will not attempt to lay out any detailed plan for my proposed Home Counties Reconquista because I do not possess sufficient strategic foresight (just ask anyone who has ever played, and thus beaten, me at chess). There are many others — including, I hope, readers of this article — who could draw up far more coherent plans. What I can instead do is attempt to explain how Wokingites and Wintonians think, and why they remain both important and winnable for right-wing parties. I can do this because it is a world into which I have socially mobilised myself. The following is all based on my Lived Experience. I am not the typical caricature of a right-winger: degree-educated, public-sector-employed, young, renting, and urban. Sometimes, I even read The Guardian and, occasionally, I order the vegetarian menu option. Inadvertently, I have become a mole in the Tory-to-Liberal-Democrat class.
Before I embark on the anthropology of Liberalis Democrati, it is necessary to impress upon readers why we shouldn’t leave Witney to the birds. The Right should remember that if, like me, you want to succeed in modern Britain, there is a good chance you will find yourself among the class of people under discussion. In a sentence: we cannot just abandon Yellow England, because it has abundant human capital which a successful Right should want to be able to effectively exploit.
Almost all successful and long-term political movements are built upwards, and therefore it matters where the foundations are laid. These areas are some of the most educated in Britain outside of London, with the relevant local authority districts all registering 44-47% of residents as holding at least an undergraduate degree, compared to 34% across England and Wales (yes, of course a degree doesn’t in itself signify intelligence, but these figures aren’t entirely meaningless just yet). They are well-off by national standards, too: residents of Woking, Wokingham, and Wimbledon command mean salaries of £43-£48k. They are also filled with high-calibre retirees, who make up the bulk of local councillors. I know firsthand from my home district that the quality of local representatives makes an enormous difference to the local perception of the national party, and to the effectiveness of canvassing. Councils are frequently where future MPs are trained — especially the foot-soldiers, and even some of the officers. The Right cannot recruit the best and brightest if it solely focuses its efforts on the places where the best and brightest tend to leave as soon as they have the chance. This is not to say that high-quality candidates cannot be found in Whitehaven — merely that there presently exists a larger untapped supply in Wokingham.
There are also the obvious points to be made about money and connections. UKIP and its successors have been repeatedly held back by a lack of money. One only needs to point to Zia Yusuf’s grimy, hostile takeover of Reform UK to demonstrate where a lack of financial independence can lead a party. If the Right can repair its relationship with the affluent South, it will be able to capitalise on the inevitable flow of smaller donations which will be prompted by Labour’s continuing slide into deep unpopularity. If the Right leaves these voters to the Liberal Democrats, all that cash will be funnelled directly into the Annoying Ubiquitous Diamond Sign fund, and Ed Davey’s next trip to Paulton’s Park. And, of course, these voters are also much more likely to belong to the professional and social networks which still retain much influence in British society. Even aside from the professional associations (which are important for obvious reasons), we are talking about members of golf clubs, church committees, and charity boards; organisations which are both rightly and wrongly maligned by many younger right-wingers.
Unfortunately, being a biscuit-huffing bureaucrat myself, I can tell you that this Stakeholder ecosystem directs a lot of action on the ground, and until this state of affairs is duly dispatched with, it is enormously beneficial for the Right to have at least some sympathisers in these ranks. ‘Community’, to the extent the word still has any meaning, remains stronger here, thanks in large part to the initiative and proactivity of its residents — attributes which are obviously indispensable for any successful political movement.
What, then, goes on inside the brain of a Wimbledonian? Where do Max and Molly’s minds wander while they take the spaniels out? I can no longer ignore the gigantic elephant in the room which is raising its trunk to the sky and screeching about Brexit. Occam could indeed wield his razor at our particular problem here and slice away at everything that isn’t simply ‘these people voted Remain, and gave up on the Right because it co-opted Leave’. It’s a narrative that has support from all sorts of numbers that our friend Sunder Katwala might supply to you, but it would be one that would lead us to the wrong conclusions. For one, it may surprise you to learn that, per Ipsos, the Conservatives won a roughly equal share of Remainers in 2024 (18%) as they did in 2019 (20%) — thus, the 2024 Tory electorate was in fact marginally more Remain than it was five years earlier, despite the Liberal Democrats winning big (though we should add the caveat that we do not have any more specific statistics for the seats which the Liberal Democrats won or came close in, which may have had somewhat different electoral dynamics to the national picture).
The right-friendly Remain voter in these constituencies belongs to a specific sub-genre, distinct from the ‘FBPE’ or ‘soft left’ types that most are more familiar with. These are not avid listeners of James O’Brien’s bloviations, donors in support of Steve Bray’s ravings, or readers of Carole Cadwalladr’s conspiracy theories. For the most part, these voters have no particular attachment — emotional or ideological — to the European Union. They rejected Brexit as a political action, rather than the state of being outside the EU. It is a recurring theme that, despite — or perhaps because of — their high levels of education and income, means are often more interesting political objects than ends to these voters. This is very different to the traditional view of ‘Remain’ versus ‘Leave’, which paints precisely the opposite picture: in this view, the former is rational, orientated towards ends, while the latter is characterised primarily as looking for an outlet (i.e., the means of Brexit) for their cries of incoherent anguish, rather than by ends, i.e., concrete political goals directly achieved via Brexit.
Having carefully built successful lives in these pockets of prosperity, the disruption of Brexit was, mostly on the basis of ‘vibes’ alone, perceived as an unnecessary risk, with the downsides immediate and tangible, and the benefits long-term and immaterial. Now that the political action has mostly concluded, we can see that Britain, for all of its problems, has emerged from the Brexit chaos more stable (aside from in politics) than many of these voters would have imagined. Most of the biggest disruptions since 2019 — such as COVID, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis it caused, and even Liz Truss’ mini-budget — evidently had little or nothing to do with Brexit. It will not be much of an uphill climb now to make them fully comfortable with a Britain that is outside of the European Union. It seems reasonable to predict that the salience of Brexit for most of these voters will continue decline over the next five years, though that is not to say that we don’t need to do anything active if we want to win back their trust.
Fundamentally, that is because these voters are as ‘vibes’-led as any other in this country; in fact, maybe more so, despite what they’d like us all to think. Brexit conjured up images in their minds of storm clouds forming, of lines on graphs plummeting downwards, and of stern newsreaders announcing the latest Big Business Bankruptcies. In equal measure, for these voters, the Right now connotes a vulgar band of provocateurs and chancers, temperamentally unable to calmly steer Britain through Global Headwinds. The illusory projection of the opposite is what made Keir Starmer much less frightening to them than his predecessors, meaning they didn’t feel compelled to vote Tory just to help keep Labour out. The Right can learn much from Starmer’s success on this front.
This is all borne out in the polling, too: every survey conducted into why people left the Tories in 2024 places the general perception of incompetence and irresponsibility well above any policy matters. Rigmarole is more influential than White Papers, and it has already been observed by many in our sphere that style usually matters more than substance. Robert Jenrick’s ‘Hamas Are Terrorists’ jumper stunt comes across as crass and unserious, but if he were to express exactly the same sentiment in an interview or article, no one would even notice — though, of course, this was precisely the point (do better, Bobby!). I have little doubt that you could get most of these voters to back leaving the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act, or deportations of foreign criminals and illegal immigrants on a massive scale, so long as you just had a few interchangeable 55-year-old men in spectacles subtly championing it with Facts and Data on Question Time every week until the next General Election.
On immigration, I firmly believe that the Right has a big opportunity, even in the Liberal Democrat heartlands. To the extent that these voters actually think about it — which you will find is surprisingly rare — there is only a vague notion that for legal immigration, ‘we need it to fill vacancies’, and for illegal immigration, ‘we did go and mess up their countries, after all’. They do not actually believe these platitudes — or at the very least, these are not things they believe with any real conviction. They are merely easy and (usually) uncontroversial things to say, so that the conversation can move on to more interesting topics. Force them to spend a modicum of mental energy on the matter, and you’ll often strike oil.
Like many (if not most) British people, on immigration, they are liberal in principle, but restrictive in practice. The problem is that their remoteness from the issue means that they only think on the principles; namely that our immigration system should be ‘fair’, and that, at least in theory (with an emphasis upon ‘in theory’), it is indeed possible for someone to come to this country, contribute to it, assimilate culturally, and thus ‘become British’. There is no widespread comprehension of how these principles have become almost completely disconnected from the practical reality on the ground, or of the sheer scale of both the legal and illegal immigration crises of the last five years in particular. Even for those who do recognise a distinction in scale, it would be genuinely shocking for them to learn that net migration has been in the region of three-quarters-of-a-million for three years running, and that several thousand illegal immigrants arrive on our shores every single week. At present, however, most don’t really see what the fuss is all about. Communication of the basics, particularly the low share of visas issued explicitly for ‘work’, and the country and demographic profile of supposed ‘asylum seekers’, if disciplined and relentless, could be transformative. The tinder is already there: a majority of not just Remainers, but even Liberal Democrat voters believe immigration is too high, though without much passion; the fire just needs to be lit. ‘Fairness’ is also as powerful for this group as it is for the rest of the country, and so any story or angle which demonstrates how our system protects freeloaders will go down well: recall the war on benefits scroungers waged by the Coalition Government.
I shall take a small diversion here to discuss Islam. On this topic, the same contrast in conclusions manifests between the immediate and the more considered thought processes of the Wintonian. Their automatic, somewhat ‘vibes’-based response is to decry the ugly Islamophobia of Tommy Robinson, to assert that Not All Muslims Are Extremists, and so on. It’s very clear the last time they engaged in any reflection on the matter was after Charlie Hebdo. It’s essentially a bank of stock responses. But again, any more expansive conversation will elicit more honest views. ‘British values’, as they are understood by these voters, can be shown to be under threat, and the way they treat women (‘yeah’), is just not on. What may seem like an outdated and simplistic appeal for the defense of liberalism remains compelling for these people, and as ‘cringe’ as younger readers may find it, it works magic on those aged forty-five and over.
The main reason why the effects of immigration remain remote to most voters in these areas is simply because there aren’t yet that many immigrants there, and perhaps even more importantly, the ones that are there tend to be mostly integrated and successful. The most ‘diverse’, Woking and Wokingham LADs, are still just shy of 80% white (high for an urban area in the South of England); Winchester LAD is 93% white; and West Oxon (Witney) is over 95% white. This is not merely an artefact of immigration to these places mostly being European: only one in ten residents of the latter two are foreign-born. To understand these voters, you must first understand that they live in some of the last remaining outposts of urbanised native Britain south of the Trent and east of the Severn. As a result, their lives are serene; violent crime is something that happens on TV, or in America; and Nigel Farage appears to be simply and gratuitously xenophobic.
This may seem exaggerated, but I remind you that this is my life. I live very close to a city centre, and in eighteen months I have not seen a single crime or (for the avoidance of doubt) the aftermath of one; nor have I seen a drug addict or a schizophrenic in the street. I know about the actual prevalence of these things not from my experiences in the local area, but from the internet and going away to university. Consequently, the worldview of these areas has been shaped by a bias, albeit — and I must emphasise this — a penetrable one: namely, that everybody else is living roughly like them. Even where differences are acknowledged, such as in ‘the North’ (and other places associated with poverty), this usually takes the form of having the same things, but of lower quality. There is no conception of what it must be like to share your neighbourhood with members of grooming gangs; or of walking down the street you grew up on, and feeling that it has been completely transformed into something not only different but deeply unpleasant, if not outright dangerous, primarily due to the highly conspicuous recent arrivals; or to have ‘asylum seekers’ leering at your teenage daughter outside of her school every day.
How can we appeal to these people, then, who are getting on quite well, thank you very much, if our focus is on reversing decline? Well, you might have sensed one of the reasons the immigrant population is low in these areas is housing costs. According to Rightmove, Winchester is the fourth most expensive place to rent in Britain outside London, with an average rent in August 2024 of £2,049. The average house price across the five local authorities containing our ‘W’ seats was between £380k and £585k in July 2024, meaning that the vast majority of the younger home-owning residents will have a colossal mortgage to pay off. Young people and families feel the squeeze here almost as much as Londoners, and as yet no party has presented even a coherent explanation (simply blaming Liz Truss no longer suffices), let alone a convincing solution.
I can guarantee that mass immigration will not have entered most residents’ heads as a hypothesis for why they’re handing over 40% or more of their after-tax income to the landlord or the bank, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be receptive to it — with the caveat that explanations are presented in rational, technocratic terms (‘the numbers’). Planning reform will be a harder sell, obviously: these places are very pretty, so the NIMBY tendency is understandably strong. It will come back to the matter of awakening these areas to the existence of the rest of the country, in tandem with an essential reassurance that only the bigger cities will be thickened with concrete. Maybe I am being naïve, but I also think that a renewed ‘Scrutonian’ — please bear with me — emphasis on beauty will help. These voters will usually tell you that their main objection to a new development is its unsightliness, which I am inclined to take somewhat, if not entirely, at face value.
Material considerations are becoming more politically salient for these areas now that a malignant and resentment-fuelled Labour Government has begun to wage its war on the middle classes. I have witnessed quite bitter discontent from colleagues over the plan to apply VAT to private school fees. Hundreds of yummy mummies face uprooting their children. Although not privately-educated myself, I do sympathise: one mother I know’s child is plainly a dimwit, and needs all the help (however marginal) he can get, lest he face a life of drudgery. Others I know are worried about ISAs and pensions, rightly sensing that Reeves will shortsightedly seize upon savings as a plug for her black hole. We are politically lucky, and economically unlucky, that Labour have an incompetent and unlikable Chancellor, because fiscal responsibility is paramount to these voters. Woking’s electoral switch has been accelerated by the stunning financial recklessness of the previous Tory council, which borrowed billions to invest in risky real estate projects, hoping to fund itself with the returns. Raising taxes is especially repellent to this group of voters, who are often already paying 50%+ marginal rates, so the imminent Labour budget will be another important opportunity for the Right to play an open field.
The few ways in which the lives of these people have actually been coloured by British decline are often products of the various myopic actions of Liberal Democrats at both the local and national level. In these pretty little towns, the river sewage scandal has been a prominent factor in the increasing disillusionment with the Conservatives: Winchester is built on the Itchen, one of the finest chalk streams on the planet, and the Witney constituency contains the picturesque uplands of the Thames. The angry old dears who have emerged from their cottages to protest — I have seen it myself, it’s quite something — are probably unaware that, for all of the failures of the water companies, the crisis is still mostly the result of sewage processing infrastructure becoming woefully insufficient, in turn because the planning pipelines for the construction of treatment facilities have been blocked up and down the country by gigantic yellow fatbergs. It is thus local Liberal Democrats, as much as the water companies, who have excrement on their hands.
One can trace even more significant problems back to their small-minded meddling. The energy crisis of 2022 was an unnecessary and avoidable evil — or at the very least, it would have been less catastrophic — had we simply built enough nuclear power plants. This is what the Conservatives had hoped to do when they came to power in 2010; in reality, the petulant Coalition toddler that clung to their leg forced the government to mostly abandon this course, resulting in massively reduced investment, and ultimately the tripling of energy bills a decade later. If you want to know why you feel poor on a £60k salary, half the time the answer is ‘the Liberal Democrats’.
The Tory-to-Liberal-Democrat voter in these seats doesn’t know any of this, because they know very little about the Liberal Democrats full stop, and what they do know is often either inaccurate or out-of-date. The Liberal Democrats are well aware that their support from these voters relies upon this remaining the case — hence the deliberately stunt-heavy and policy-free campaign centred on silly, goofy Ed at the last election. If you take away anything from what I have said here, let it be this: the great majority of voters who switched from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats in 2024, and to a lesser extent in 2019 and 2017, did not do so because they are ideologically aligned to the Liberal Democrats, or at the very least the reality of the Liberal Democrats. These are not left-wing people. They voted Liberal Democrat because they did not want the ‘incompetent’ and ‘irresponsible’ 2024 Conservative Party to be in government anymore, and in their local area, the Liberal Democrat candidate was the safest and most effective choice to achieve that end.
There is a very good reason why the Liberal Democrats, not Labour, were the tactical choice in these seats: because voters in these seats don’t like the Labour Party, because Labour, unlike the Liberal Democrats, are openly left-wing! While it may be hard for political obsessives like us to believe, in many people’s minds, the Liberal Democrats are even vaguely right-wing. The mental image of the party is stuck in the mid-noughties (at best), and the Tories have as yet failed to disabuse these voters of that image. If, like me, you live a seat contested strongly by the Liberal Democrats, you will have been inundated with campaign literature this summer; there was very little indication anywhere in the myriad leaflets, letters, and flyers that the party platform was more or less as left-wing as Labour’s was — and, most damningly of all, the local Tories made no effort to expose this basic fact to the electorate.
If you are still in any doubt that these voters can be won back, polling by YouGov for Persuasion UK during the campaign asked Conservative to Liberal Democrat switchers in the ‘Blue Wall’ their reasons for leaving the Tories. Amazingly, the third most popular response was that the Tories hadn’t done enough to lower immigration (28%), well ahead of Brexit (19%). More switchers referenced a failure to stop small boats than a failure to combat climate change. All is not lost in the land of the Crew Clothing Company. If these people can vote for Thatcher, or even Hague’s Conservative Party — as many did — they can still be persuaded to vote for whatever supplants Sunak’s rump. Do not give up on the Home Counties.
Image credits: Keith Edkins, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
This article was written by an anonymous contributor, based in ‘Yellow England’. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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Very interesting, and seems compatible with Drukpa Kunley's call for "girlboss pantsuit deportations" in Europe. Policy feats are achievable provided they are done in a calm, reassuring, professional and nonthreatening manner.
Do you have an article planned about the Lib Dems' local council game?