Paul Bristow was the Conservative MP for Peterborough from 2019 to 2024.
Back in 2016 I ran a moderately successful healthcare public affairs business. Out of the dozen or so young people I employed, I was one of only two in my office that supported Brexit.
I was never shy of explaining my views, but in a professional sense there was a time and place to articulate them. The morning after Brexit was very difficult for many of the young people on my team who found the result hard to understand.
The same thing occurred a few months later when Donald Trump was elected for the first time. Coming to work the next morning, there were some very long faces.
Young, university-educated people across London, working in professional jobs, were horrified. But back in my home City of Peterborough, there was an altogether different sense of what was happening.
This political realignment looked complete in 2019 when I became the MP for Peterborough. Non-university educated people were voting Conservative and for Brexit across the country. The oldest political party had found a whole new coalition and, in Boris Johnson, a prime minister who could sustain its success for years.
Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and the catastrophic electoral performances of my Party since we got rid of Boris, lent support to the view that this realignment had failed – to use a phase I heard time and time again from MPs who savoured the change in direction – and the ‘grown ups’ were back in charge.
But I always thought that this realignment was there to stay – and the remarkable Trump victory last week demonstrates this more clearly than ever. While there are obvious differences, the realignment is as evident here in the UK as it is the USA.
A chance encounter with some young lads in the local Wetherspoons in Peterborough showed this to me more clearly than anything else. In the run up to the 2024 general election, they recognised me as their local MP. They asked me to pose for a picture and as I did, two of them turned their mobile phones round to reveal Reform UK stickers.
These young people couldn’t be more different from the young people I employed back in 2016. But they are similar to the young people who Trump has extended his voting coalition to include in this recent triumph. The key political difference is that the Republicans in the USA have leant into this realignment, whereas the Conservatives in the UK have too often ran scared of it, or even seemed ashamed of it.
Trump won because he extended his coalition from rural voters, older voters, and white working class men to Hispanic communities, young people, and a growing number of black male voters.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that black and Hispanic voters have similar concerns as their white counterparts about protecting jobs in their community. This is not some sort of unseemly form of economic nationalism, but an understanding that when there are economic shocks or decisions to be made about manufacturing jobs in one country, they want a government that will not shrug their shoulders and blame the world economic outlook.
And why wouldn’t these voters be just as concerned about gender ideology, what is being taught in public schools and uncontrolled migration as their white counterparts?
As the former MP of a multi-racial constituency like Peterborough, and losing by just 118 votes, I can assure you that the same is true in the UK. The friendly young people I met in Wetherspoons liked me. They liked the fact I clearly loved my city and talked about my social media presence.
They just thought the Conservative Government were not on their side. They were fed up of a cultural trend that told them they were ‘privileged’ as young white males; of increasingly being shut out of a job market that requires them to fill out a 32 page form and demonstrate a commitment to diversity to obtain entry level positions.
They were fed up of living at home with their parents, or sofa surfing, or knowing the only way to get a council flat was having a baby with their girlfriend. Fed up, most of all, of being told they were part of the problem.
Especially when statistics show the opposite is true. White British males who are eligible for free school meals are the least likely of the main ethnic groups in England to progress to higher education by the age of 19; suicide rates have also increased most dramatically amongst young white men aged 15 to 24.
I sincerely hope the Conservative Party studies carefully what has happened in the USA and what lessons can be learnt. Understanding and leaning into the realignment does not mean copying the rhetoric of the 47th President of the United States. The coalitions we need to build and maintain contain marked differences.
But it might mean offering hope to the young lads I met during the campaign – showing that we care and we have solutions to the hopelessness some of them felt.
