{"id":2757,"date":"2021-11-18T14:02:40","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T14:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewitnessexet.wpengine.com\/?p=2757"},"modified":"2021-11-18T14:16:27","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T14:16:27","slug":"opinion-the-red-wall-the-daftest-phrase-in-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/?p=2757","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: The ‘Red Wall’ \u2014 the daftest phrase in politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Featured Image: ‘The Red Brick Wall<\/a>‘ by Jos\u00e9 Mamona<\/a> on Flickr<\/a> is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 <\/a>(link to license deed<\/a>). Link to old license<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the 2019 General Election, politicians, journalists, and political commentators have referred to a series of constituencies as the \u2018Red Wall\u2019. The term was established to describe the row of seats between Merseyside and West Yorkshire that have in past decades more or less reliably voted Labour. Over the past two years, this phrase has been misused and misconstrued more than any other piece of political jargon and is now merely an empty and meaningless sound bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The east-west dimensions of this wall could under a broad definition include North Wales in the west \u2014 reaching the Isle of Anglesey \u2014 and with a stretch Kingston-upon-Hull in the east, though the Tory safe seats along the Humber do make that a very extensive stretch. Doncaster is perhaps a better marker as the edge of the wall. The Red Wall\u2019s north-south dimensions are, however, far more contested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The top of the wall is by any sane measurement somewhere like the Preston-Burnley-Keighley latitude. Perhaps with a bit of imagination the seaside towns of Lancashire might be brought into the fold, though they have been split by the Tory-heavy Ribble Valley. Any attempt to bring the west coast Cumbria marginals into the wall would be madness. The wall image would become more \u2018Red Column on a Plinth\u2019 \u2014 which doesn\u2019t quite roll off the tongue as nicely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The southern endpoint of this wall comes back to an age-old argument about where the North ends and the Midlands begins. Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire are counties of the Midlands, yet plenty of their constituencies are marginals \u2014 especially their Northern seats; thus, parts of these areas could be included in the Red Wall. It\u2019s fair to include seats like Bassetlaw, North East Derbyshire and Mansfield, but I think as soon as one reaches Gedling or Derby North the underground root of the wall has extended a little too far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This geographical description is a broad one, and clumps together constituencies that have very little in common. The socio-economic, demographic, and electoral differences between Birkenhead and rural Yorkshire are severe, thus painting them as two identical bricks in the same wall is fundamentally daft. What\u2019s worse though are the political commentators who include constituencies in the Red Wall that could in no rational sense be classed as belonging there. A recent MRP poll<\/a> by respected pollster YouGov asked voters in Red Wall seats what their voting intentions were. They included acceptable constituencies such as Rother Valley, Bury North and Vale of Clwyd, but added areas of the country which just simply aren\u2019t red bricks \u2014 like Blyth Valley, Birmingham Northfield, and Lincoln.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if geographic conditions are set aside, these seats do have to have something in common. In many Politico\u2019s minds, Red Wall means working-class, leave-voting deindustrialised towns that have almost always voted Labour. The reasons for not doing so now are related to their ageing population, cultural disillusionment, and evaporation of unionised heavy industry. This ought to be the basis of any socio-economic analysis of these seats. Instead, politicians, journalists, and other Westminsterites are lazy. They refer to any constituency north of Watford Gap that has ever voted Labour in the past as a Red Wall seat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet there are areas within the geographically sound Red Wall that do not fit the profile at all \u2014\u00a0such as Manchester or the Wirral \u2014 as well as areas in the South that undoubtedly do fit the profile but are ignored by pollsters and vox pop producers because of their location. Here in Devon, for instance, we have the city of Plymouth. By all accounts, the Plymouth Moor View<\/a> constituency ought to be considered a typical Red Wall seat. A traditional working-class area where the maritime industry once ruled, it voted to leave the EU by more than 65%. It once voted heavily Labour, but since 2015 has chosen the Conservative Party. Nevertheless, when the BBC needs a constituency that represents the views of Red Wall voters they go to Stoke or Dudley, not because they are part of the Wall \u2014 they aren\u2019t \u2014 but because they are due North from London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is at the heart of the greatest problem with the phrase ‘Red Wall’: it is supposedly a description of the populist, anti-metropolitan working poor of Britain; those who have been described as \u2018left behind\u2019 by the rapid pace of globalisation and inhabit the \u2018forgotten towns\u2019 whose industry have packed up and moved abroad. Politicians such as Boris Johnson have used this phrase to appeal to this class of the electorate and as a way of empathising with their concerns. However, by utilising it so liberally and by pointing to any part of the North and calling it the ‘Red Wall’, these politicians have proven the constituents of every \u2018forgotten town\u2019 right. Westminster is so snobbish and detached from reality that they don\u2019t bother to distinguish who they\u2019re talking to. They simply clump millions of people into the same socio-economic stereotype and produce an utterly meaningless phrase.<\/p>\n

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Featured Image: ‘The Red Brick Wall‘ by Jos\u00e9 Mamona on Flickr is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (link to license deed). Link to <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":2762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-british","category-latest","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}