A selective picture but still worthwhile

Payne has a tendency to choose the narratives he prefers but some illuminating contributions nonetheless

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The most important political book of the decade

A charming travelogue, wittily told with a lovely lightness of touch, conceals a razor-sharp political lesson. Everyone should read this.

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incomplete

its a shame stoke on trent was completely ignored. History of mining steel pottery industry all gone i would say it fits the profile the author was discussing. It's three labour seats all weighted towards brexit all voted conservative... an entire city forgotten about, maybe i missed something in the selection criteria. perhaps im just oversensitive because SOT is always shoved to the back of the queue or even out of the queue entirely. I would have liked to hear what the people of my grandparents' city had to say.

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Excellent read it your are interested in politics.

Great incite into the collapse of the Labour vote in the north of England, well written and informative.

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Sebastians fantastic interviews, speak volumes !!

A must read for any political leader who thinks they can judge or take the historic working class vote for granted.

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Interesting listen

Really interesting insight for anyone interested in this topic. I wasn't keen on the author's narration, but recommend otherwise!

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Excellent

Grew in interest as it went along. Fair minded. Good to hear from people outside the London bubble.

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Too focused on ex Labour Voters who voted Leave

This book analyses why Labour lost the 2019 General Election. But Payne goes further and assumes that Boris Johnson's delivery will match his rhetoric and that Brexit won't cause substantial damage in red wall constituencies. From the perspective of late December 2021 things already look very different. The Conservative's new electoral Coalition is far more flimsy than Payne suggests in this book. Despite all this I still found it an interesting anecdotal listen of many places in England that I have never visited.

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This didn’t age well did it!

Blindingly obvious how the authors own political beliefs shine through.
Some of the interviews with red wall voters…. It’s no wonder we are in the mess we are in if this is representative of how the British vote. Vote for a clown and you will get a circus.

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Unbearable

I bought this in full awareness that it would be chock full of concentrated liberal (small-L) prejudice. It therefore did not disappoint, because I was ready for the lazy tropes. The decline of the aristocracy is cited, one assumes, because we don’t have inbred muppets in coronets bombing about in carriages. It ignores the many ways in which aristocracy has largely preserved its wealth and power, to the point where figures like George Osborne, former Chancellor, is the heir to a baronetcy. David Cameron is equally the scion of a number of Viscounts, Dukes and Earls. This gets even worse when one considers the prejudices about what “working class” means to the author, outwith the post-Thatcher generations. It’s flat caps, working men’s clubs and repression of individualism. Never mind that the labour movement was a core component of the battle for racial equality, women’s rights, gay rights and for the end of the class system that allotted people roles from birth, instituting comprehensive education and huge expansions to university education. The author’s prejudices are so commonplace amongst the lower middle class as to be genuinely boring. As I say, however, I was ready for all this and decided to buy the book anyway so I wouldn’t slate it just for this.

I was interested in the whistle stop tour the book promised of English areas where Labour have recently lost bastions of a century to a Tory Party led by another Blair type (with more free market fundamentalism in his vocabulary and less of Blair’s characteristic aura of a middle management advertising executive). For anyone interested in politics, that’s worth a look. You won’t find the answers here though. The basic idea is the author travels parts of northern England and interviews people. Fine. This goes off the rails really, really early on.

The failures come in three varieties.

One, the grossly distorted selection of people interviewed. I’d be fascinated to get a breakdown of the average income of those interviewed. An “NHS executive” interviewed neatly demonstrates this. Average income in the UK is about £26,000 per year, give or take. “Executives” in the NHS earn pretty much double this. This is repeated throughout. There are a few genuinely working class voices - but these are badly outnumbered. Now, there’d be room here to explain how elections depend not just on those who show up but also on those who don’t - and vast chunks of the working class didn’t show up. There are nods in this direction but they are superficial and any analysis attached is often hobbled by a knee-jerk hostility to Jeremy Corbyn. This is common currency in the press and I have criticisms but in this book they are unexamined and get in the way.

Two, the political prejudices and spin that are allowed into the book are just too much to stomach. Figures like Heseltine and Tebbit are allowed to vomit up any history re-writing they like without any kind of scrutiny. This happens with others, ex-Labour MPs and whatnot, but it’s just lazy. I don’t mind getting the views of key political figures, old or new, but you’d need a shovel to dig through the self-serving drivel to get to any nuggets of insight from many of the household names interviewed for the book. It’s hard to escape the impression that this is because the author doesn’t really have any ideas and is reduced to the role of stenographer for the political figures he interviews.

Three, and this one is the biggie. The sheer number of facile morons interviewed at times in this book is overwhelming. The low point from me was definitely the section treating seriously the political views of someone who described their reasons for voting for Thatcher as being because she’s a woman and women have better judgment than men. Unless the author really believes most voters to be idiots, this is not going to be representative of the shift away from Labour. Utterly facile, stupid comments litter the book to the point where it invalidates the idea that the author is giving an unvarnished look at this part of England and you can draw your own conclusions.

Compare this to the masterfully insightful essays of a journalist like Patrick Cockburn on his home turf of Kent - which went from red to blue long ago and no one seems to have noticed much - and to even call the author of this book a journalist seems a stretch. Don’t buy this book.

As a final note, the standard of narration is dreadful. After the first few chapters the slurring of words every so often began to grate on my nerves.

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20 people found this helpful