I read
this a few weeks ago. I think there's something to it. Partial quote:
IF YOU bought a copy of The Times today, cut out and keep a copy of Matthew Parris’s column. In it, he describes the Clacton by-election as a battle between the Conservatives, Labour and UKIP for the dying parts of England, those end-of-the-line towns (literally, in the many seaside cases) where people go to retire, not to aspire nor to achieve. The Manichean scheme that he paints sums up the debate that will surely decide the future of England’s politics.
Mr Parris is careful not to belittle the residents of the faded Essex resort, but to describe it as he saw it: poor, nostalgic and occupied by white, working-class and mostly elderly folk. Still, he has come under attack from fellow Tories for writing what he wrote. Tim Montgomerie and Tim Stanley, to name two eloquent commentators, have rubbished the column’s argument: that the Conservatives should concentrate on the fizzing, optimistic parts of the British electorate, not the drably, barely comfortable Clactonites and their ilk. They accuse Mr Parris of snobbishness, elitism and ignorance of political realities: almost everything, in fact, but being wrong in his description of Clacton.
In your correspondent’s experience, Mr Parris is right about the town and the broader split that the by-election there will illustrate. In the past weeks I have had occasion to crisscross England from Birmingham to Southend, Hull to Berwick, Oxford to Peterborough. The single overwhelming impression of this English journey has been that the great divide is not north versus south or cities versus towns or left versus right, or even working-class versus middle-class. It is between those communities that have found a way to thrive in the economic circumstances conscribing England today—a high-wage, Anglo-Saxon service economy on the edge of Europe—and those that have not been able or (debatably) willing to do so.
On the one side are places that have some combination of transport links, housing, natural resources, skills, international connections, open-mindedness, existing industrial clusters and political can-do. Not all of these are present in all cases (most obviously, London badly lacks the second of these). But, your correspondent submits, the last of these is disproportionately present in the places that are making a good fist of whichever other factors they have at their disposal. On the other side are those that have few of any of these. They are declining, in spirit as in population.
As ever, political tectonics are following socio-economic ones. Just as England is splitting along lines perpendicular to its traditional divisions, so its two main political parties are tearing along their middles. Mr Parris’s column and the reaction to it neatly depict the debate within the Conservative Party. A very similar conflict is playing out in Labour ranks, too. In both, communitarians have come to blows with cosmopolitans.
Topic: UKIP gains first elected MP with Clacton win