Do they become the party of the provincial working class and lower middle class? Or do they fight to maintain their status as the party of the affluent middle class?
“We’re badly trailing in the polls. Corbyn’s up and you’re down. You hired me to get things done and tell you how I see it. Here goes.”
There are many seats in London that are also C1/C2 heavy: it is just that they are outer London seats.
C1/C2 voters are hugely important in raw numerical terms. They make up 52 per cent of the electorate in England.
Indicating higher taxes, pledging potentially massive costs on retired people and raiding middle class welfare all played in the election result.
Party strategists should not overlook the obvious: that without locking down the provincial lower middle class it’s extremely difficult to secure a majority.
Fears that the public are shifting towards aggressive, populist cultural policies targeted at Muslims are misfounded.
Other than saying, “the state should stay out of things”, they haven’t had much to say. This must change. They need to set out how they’d do things better.
Over the last year, I’ve set out a number of policy ideas designed to appeal to lower middle class voters. Here are some of them.
Those looking to find what she really stands for may one day get an answer. But the point for the here and now is: she seeks to dominate the mainstream.
Why spend money on grammars, rather than dealing with school overcrowding? And why back Trident rather than the Navy’s conventional fleet?
Of course taxes will be lower than under Corbyn. The question is whether they’ll be higher than they are now (already high).
There is a handful of Ministers who unfortunately display two or three of these signs. They know who they are – and so does Theresa May.