Lee Anderson thinks we should bring back the death penalty. Because say what you like about hanging, but dead people don’t commit crimes.
Sometimes, admittedly, it turns out they didn’t even commit the crimes they were actually executed for, but Anderson seems to think there are ways around that. He also believes too many food bank users are wasting money on fags, booze and Sky TV, and that the real problem is people not knowing how to cook. He once suggested nuisance tenants should be made to live in tents and pick potatoes all day and … well, you get the gist.
Only in the House of Commons would trotting all this out make people call you an original or a breath of fresh air, given there’s a Lee Anderson propping up the bar in most pubs. Why you’d want to make one of them deputy chairman of the Conservative party, however, seems less obvious.
The question isn’t whether some voters share Anderson’s views – of course they do – or even whether it’s incredibly useful for a government overseeing so many people plunging into poverty to have as its human smokescreen a man who was once hard up himself, but still seems to think poor people have it too easy. The real question is whether he’s the right person to help the Conservatives avoid a thundering electoral defeat, which is his actual job description.
The official Tory line on Anderson is that if what he says upsets you, then you’re a snob or out of touch. That’s an interesting way to describe a significant number of Conservative voters, plus a prime minister immediately forced to clarify that actually he doesn’t agree with Lee about the death penalty. Voters who do agree with him can now presumably look forward to the government repeatedly disowning his views, in a way they’d never have needed to do had he still been just a backbencher, while the hard-right Reform party carries on wooing them by saying what mainstream parties can’t say.
Ah, we’re told, but this is a cunning double act! Greg Hands, the new party chairman, will reassure all the soft, remain-voting southern Tories currently fleeing to the Liberal Democrats, while Anderson talks to northern leavers. But that works only if Anderson intends to operate on some weird bat frequency that potential Tories in Winchester or Guildford are somehow too posh to hear, and vice versa for Hands. Like a warring couple who only stayed together for the sake of their now grownup children, the two halves of the Conservative electoral coalition, brought together by Brexit, increasingly have little else in common. Giving each their own party spokesman seems more likely to highlight the differences than solve them.
And while Hands is a canny electoral survivor, holding on to his Chelsea and Fulham seat even amid a Tory wipeout in London, Anderson’s reputation as a “red wall” whisperer is less assured. A former Labour councillor, he ran the office of the outgoing Ashfield MP Gloria de Piero, before defecting to the Tories and standing for the same seat in 2019. It was a bitter campaign – the day I went to Ashfield, someone had just smashed the window of Labour’s campaign office – and while the new Labour candidate seemed impressive, I came away privately thinking she was doomed. After all, De Piero had only just held on at the previous election, and the tide was flowing strongly against Jeremy Corbyn’s party in towns such as this. But interestingly, even in the year of what turned out to be the great Tory landslide, the Conservative vote actually fell slightly in Ashfield compared with 2017 – although fortunately for Anderson, Labour’s vote collapsed even further.
What’s baffling about this appointment is that there are red wall Tory MPs out there who also understand and reflect the communities they serve, but have more thoughtful ideas for pulling their towns out of the doldrums than bringing back hanging. Crime is a huge and underrated issue in many of their seats, as recent reports from the centre-right levelling-up thinktank Onward and the more centrist More In Common network make clear.
But short of bringing back the death penalty for smashing up bus shelters, it’s unclear that Anderson’s brand of Conservatism has the answers. Both reports were picking up on frustration with the kind of petty violence, vandalism and antisocial behaviour that makes older people scared to leave the house, and makes town centres or parks look depressingly rundown. The focus groups that Onward ran in Oldham, Greater Manchester, or Clacton, in Essex, wanted more police around, but they also wanted more youth clubs and things for teenagers to do; tough on crime, you might say, but also tough on the causes of crime.
Similarly, while some Tory voters do share Anderson’s views on supposed welfare “scroungers”, soaring energy and food bills seem to be shifting the needle. Six in 10 Britons now want targeted support for people struggling with these basics. In other words, most people still want practical solutions to practical problems, from making ends meet to feeling safe going to the shops; it’s a narrow and in some ways equally out-of-touch view of working-class voters that assumes otherwise.
Mirror people’s gut feelings back at them, and it’s true you’ll always have a hearing in the pub. But unless you can also offer a decent job and home and a better future for their kids, what’s the point of them putting you in government?
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
