Generalisation The red wall metaphor has been criticised as a generalisation. In the aftermath of the 2019 general election, author and
Newcastle University lecturer
Alex Niven said that it was "a convenient term of journalese that seemed to arise in the last days of the 2019 campaign to describe a large, disparate part of the country north of
Oxford." Lewis Baston called it "a mythical wall" and "a way of making a patronising generalisation about a huge swathe of England (and a corner of Wales)". He argued that the red wall is politically diverse, and includes
bellwether seats that swung with the national trend, as well as former
mining and industrial seats that show a more unusual shift. In July 2020, Rosie Lockwood from the
Institute for Public Policy Research said: "For years the Westminster establishment has sought to define the north through soundbites. The most recent is 'the red wall'." In an article for
The Daily Telegraph that same month,
Royston Smith,
member of Parliament for
Southampton Itchen, made the case that his seat in post-industrial
Southampton was one of the first red wall seats gained from the Labour Party when he became its Conservative MP at the
2015 general election. In July 2021, following Labour's narrow victory in the
Batley and Spen by-election,
David Edgerton, professor of Modern British History at
King's College London, denounced the concept of the red wall and pointed out that "the belief that working-class people traditionally voted Labour has only been true (and barely so) for a mere 25 years of British history, and a long time ago."
Demographics In January 2022, Anthony Wells, director of Political Research at
YouGov, wrote an article titled "Stop obsessing about the Red Wall". In it, he criticised political commentators and politicians who use the term "based upon a perception of what the author's idea of a stereotypical working class Conservative voter would think, rather missing the point of James [Kanagasooriam]'s original hypothesis that voters in those areas were actually demographically
similar to more Tory areas ... [T]hese were seats that for cultural reasons were less Conservative than you would have expected given their demographics. To some degree that has unwound in some areas. There is probably not an easy way for Labour to rebuild that reluctance to consider voting Tory in places where it has collapsed. It is also worth considering whether it has even fully played out... it may be there is further realignment to go."
Class and social issues Newcastle University geography professor Danny MacKinnon said that the weakening relationship between Labour and red wall voters can be traced back to the late 1990s, when
New Labour aimed for middle-class support. He said that "Labour became more of a middle-class party. [Red wall areas] have older voters who have had lower living standards since 2010. There's the phrase 'left behind'. And there's a sense of cultural alienation from Labour and metropolitan cities." David Jeffery, a lecturer in British Politics at the
University of Liverpool, stated that "the Conservative party's new supporters aren't really that different from their old ones". Using data from the
British Election Study, he analysed the attitudes between voters within and without the red wall and found that "[t]he differences between Red Wall and non-Red Wall voters (and switchers) is marginal across all three topics, suggesting [that] 'going
woke' isn't a unique threat to the party's new electoral coalition any more than it is to their voter base in general." In May 2021, YouGov released the results of a large survey that "somewhat contradicts 'evidence' from vox-pops and commentary on the underlying reasons for voters moving away from Labour in these constituencies." Patrick English wrote: "Our survey shows that rather than being a bastion of
social conservativism within Britain, these constituencies up and down the North and Midlands contain a great diversity of opinions, and indeed widespread support for a range of what we might consider progressive policies and views. Furthermore, where Red Wall voters do exhibit socially conservative attitudes, they are not significant stronger (or no more common) than the level of social conservativism which we see among the British public in general. In other words, the Red Wall is no more socially conservative than Britain as a whole, and characterisation of voters in these areas as predominantly 'small c' conservatives concerned about social liberalisation or culture wars is not supported by polling evidence." Responding to this survey,
Jeremy Corbyn's former senior policy adviser
Andrew Fisher insisted that the concept of the "mythologised Red Wall" was "part of a decades-long agenda aimed at undermining progressive causes."
Ethnic minority voters In
Tribune,
Jason Okundaye warned Labour not to forget about its "other heartlands", namely
Black and
South Asian voters in urban areas. He said that during the New Labour years, "Labour felt it could ignore the concerns of working-class voters because they were assumed to be pious followers of the Labour religion.
Peter Mandelson's belief that they had 'nowhere else to go' became a creedal statement. What it failed to see was a class of increasing political atheists. It is not hard to imagine the same thing happening in future to ethnic minority communities." == Other similar terms ==