Will Tanner, a former deputy head of policy for Theresa May, told a gathering of policy wonks in London on Tuesday night that Jeremy Corbyn was able to turn the election by becoming the \u2018candidate who represented change.\u2019<\/p>\n

The director of Onward, a new Tory think tank<\/a>, said that early on he believed May was seen as a change candidate, but this flipped during the campaign. \u2018Clearly we made mistakes in that campaign which means we ended it in that position [of having to form a minority government],\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

Tanner was speaking at the launch of The New Working Class<\/em><\/a>, a book aimed at getting politicians to recognise that the traditional working class of miners and dockers has shrunk, to be replaced by a more diverse group.<\/p>\n

The author Claire Ainsley, executive director of the anti-poverty Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: \u2018Any political party who wants to win a majority needs to understand the new working class.\u2019 She estimates it at half the UK’s population.<\/p>\n

\u2018I don’t think mainstream politics has listened well enough to the concerns of low to middle income voters for a very long time,\u2019 she said. Arguing that politicians should better stand for what the public want, rather than imposing elite views, she added: \u2018It’s clearly not the case that just because you come up with a bunch of policies the votes flow.\u2019<\/p>\n

Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent, said that both Labour and the Tories’ respective members had been polarised by recent political events, and their attitudes did not align with those of the wider public.<\/p>\n

‘That’s going to make it much harder for those parties to get back to the centre ground,’ he said. The New Working Class <\/em>also cites research suggesting that richer people are more likely to join political parties than the poor.<\/p>\n

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Will Tanner, a former deputy head of policy for Theresa May, told a gathering of policy wonks in London on Tuesday night that Jeremy Corbyn was able to turn the election by becoming the \u2018candidate who represented change.\u2019 The director of Onward, a new Tory think tank, said that early on he believed May was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[826,784,874],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3823"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}