levelling up
The Road to Batley and Spen, (part one).
And thence to the wilderness?
Wigan pier before levelling up
Observations of the political scene in two parts, part one.
George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ came out in 1937. The publisher thought highly of the first part where Orwell had travelled North to observe what life was like whereas the latter part was all about himself and his publisher had reservations. For this post our observations are not related to a conventional journey, we are looking at a fault line in the Tory party. We are always told how popular the Government is and of its large majority. On the other hand the forces at work here might be not so much about the popularity of one side of a political divide at the last General Election but the unpopularity of the whole of the other side. Also our road to Batley and Spen goes via Chesham and Amersham. Both these recent by-elections represented not so much a win for an opposition party but a loss for the Government. We have written before two articles about the state of the Tories, here and here . In those articles we noted there is a huge difference between the politics of things and the politics of ideas.
In both by- elections it really does look like too much of one and not enough of the other damaged the Government's chances.
