 but because he was, quite correctly, seen as part of the Islington coup: he was the voice of decadent, self-regarding London left-wingers, not of the desperate communities of post-industrial Britain. This leader who was supposed to be an antidote to Blair, was really the logical conclusion of the New Labour wave. Except that Tony Blair himself had a message that resonated more with the new post-working class people which his party had to recapture from Thatcherism than anything said by Corbyn's playground Bolsheviks. Sir Keir Starmer himself){kind=link}
Their core electorates are defined by clashing worldviews and competing sets of interests
What with all the excitement of another new prime minister, you may not have noticed one of the most dramatic developments in modern British politics. By a quite astonishing historical coincidence, both main parties have been reconstituted in ways that would make them unrecognisable to earlier generations.
Of course this did not happen as suddenly as it might now appear. Such transformations are always gradual: it is only when their metamorphoses reach the final full-blown stage that we appreciate what has happened.
That point was reached with the result of the last general election when it became clear that the Conservatives were attracting support in regions, and among sections of the population, which would once have been inconceivable.
That was not a freak incident to do with Brexit or the personality of Boris Johnson as many now think. It was, in fact, near-inevitable after a very long process of realignment which turned Labour into a bourgeois metropolitan conclave which had lost touch almost completely with its class roots: a process which was speeded up paradoxically, by the leadership of that supposed champion of the proletariat, Jeremy Corbyn.