The Tories will never be the party of the working class

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised a ‘levelling up’ agenda in the North of England (PA)

John Rentoul’s interesting article, How did Boris Johnson become the defender of working-class culture? (19 June), might have provoked a greater response. In reality, I don’t see the Conservative Party being any more sympathetic to “working class people” than the Labour Party.

The former is a party that, according to John Bercow, is “reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic”. Its main aim is to do anything to gain and retain power. I think he is correct in suggesting that “levelling up” is another “empty slogan”. It plays well in the “red wall”, but whether it will survive the twin assaults of pressure from the treasury to reduce the Covid-inflated deficit and serious discontent from the “blue wall” seats, so as to have any meaningful and long-lasting impact, remains to be seen.

As for many Labour Party supporters, I don’t think they consider themselves better than anyone else or elitist. What I suspect many of them do feel, however, is a deep sense of frustration and bewilderment. Frustrated because a large proportion of the population has allowed itself to be persuaded that most of its quite legitimate grievances were the fault first of the EU and latterly the Labour Party. Yet it seems totally absolve from blame a Conservative government that has been in power for the last 11 years and which for the first 10 followed a policy of deep cuts and rigid austerity. Bewildered because it beggars belief that any sane individual could possibly conceive that Boris Johnson is the answer to anyone’s cry for help.