You are probably aware that there is a large number of people in the UK who are socially conservative but economically left-wing and who find themselves politically homeless (in the B&B sense, if not quite sleeping rough), unwelcome to both the woke-brigades of the metropolitan left and the low-tax, pro-austerity leaders of the right.
What is stopping political parties from picking up their votes?
Part of the answer is that UKIP did pick up their votes (and the Brexit Party will do so too): UKIP always had a much stronger cultural brand than an economic one.
Another part of the answer is that many of these people are Muslims: "a quarter of Brummies, including a plurality of the city’s children" are Muslims, the Economist tells us, and "they are equally clear that others must accept them for who they are: products of a conservative Muslim culture."
Muslim people have proved a reliable voting bloc for Labour, in part, at least, because the Conservative Party has not been as welcoming to them as it should have been. Even in its heyday as a decent party, UKIP made little effort to attract to Muslims (and has no hope now), but the Conservative Party, at least, can change.
Birmingham is where we might see this change happen. You have probably heard about the protests against the 'No Outsiders' LGBT teaching programme. (I have tried - not terribly hard, I admit - to find out what is in the programme, but with no success.) The Economist (same link as above - read it) reports that "The city’s Labour councillors, who dominate local politics, range from Muslims with sympathy for the parents protesting against the gay-friendly classes, to secular left-wingers who strongly support the school."
So the local Labour Party is split on a cultural issue. Which side does the Conservatives take? "The Conservative opposition tends to be on the progressive side; one worry among local Tories is that a new commercial development may destroy a “gay village” near the city centre." Hmm. Let's run the numbers on that one: where are the votes going to be in the long run? Have a look again at that fact about the children of Birmingham I quoted above.
Ok, so there are votes to be had in cultural conservatism. But isn't this all just grubby vote-counting, not based on any principle?
I don't think so. Read this piece, by someone called Jacob Williams, about why he became a Muslim. He was at Oxford, it seems, where "My utopian peers found their purpose in crusades against racism and homophobia, but their contempt for England revolted me. I chose a different course and embarked on a search for God. // Where could a lost soul go? Nowhere in college or country offered an answer. What the campus Conservative Party outlined was absurd: We can pick up the fragments of our culture by putting on three-piece suits, getting riotously drunk, and reviving the divine right of kings."
A serious person, a lover of England, looked for meaning in life and found it in Islam. Expect more stories like this.
Williams is a small-c conservative; he may well be a big-C conservative too. And why not? (He missed out at university, of course: you haven't had fun until you've spent an evening in a port-fuelled rampage aimed at reversing Cromwellism! And Henry VIII! And the Rescript of Honorius too! But I digress.)
Again, try this, by Ed Husain about Roger Scruton: conservative non-Muslim thinkers find plenty to like in Islam.
I would suggest, therefore, that there is a viable future for the Conservative Party as a party for conservatives, patriots and believers. Of course, that development would be helped if the party came to be led by, say, the Rochdale-born son of a Pakistani-born bus driver. Quite soon, we will get to see if the Conservative Party is still entitled to its old reputation as a party that can survive any change in British society.
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