Red Wall: The Definitive Description
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | James Kanagasooriam,Elizabeth Simon |
| DOI | 10.1177/20419058211045127 |
8 POLITICAL INSIGHT • SEPTEMBER 2021
The increasing salience of cultural
issues and Brexit, have eroded
traditional patterns of class
voting in Britain – working class
electors no longer overwhelmingly back
Labour, and segments of the middle class
have moved away from the Conservatives.
Other demographic cleavages, including
age, education and geography, have
emerged to supplant the class cleavage.
This realignment poses a challenge for the
Conservatives. Their 2010 to 2015 coalition
and 2015 majority governments were
built on winning over culturally liberal
and economically moderate to scally
conservative voters, many of whom would
go on to vote Remain, in addition to those
who had more traditional conservative
Red Wall: The
Definitive Description
The ‘Red Wall’ has become a key term in Britain’s political lexicon.
James Kanagasooriam, who coined the phras e, and Elizabeth Simon,
trace the emergence of the Red Wall as a concept, and argue that
while it has been widely misunderstood and misus ed, the Red Wall
has significant implications for predicting future elections.
views. Post-2016, there was a sense that
the Conservatives could appeal to Leave-
minded voters but would face challenges
amongst their Remain voters; with the
inverse occurring for the Labour Party.
The Conservatives’ 2017 campaign was
predicated on this ‘rotation’ strategy. They
would oset Remain losses by making
gains in Labour’s traditionally working-class
heartlands. There was inbuilt scepticism
about the logic of this strategy. Not only
had many of these seats in the North and
Midlands never voted Conservative, owing
to a long held, and deeply ingrained,
cultural image of the Tories as the party
of the rich, but Theresa May’s attempts to
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