The Tories' Blue Wall is turning into a Ballardian nightmare

Fred Skulthorp has visited the Blue Wall for Unherd and found it to be a land of discontent:

Travelling through Surrey, from the quiet villages nestled in the North Downs to its London border in the north, it resembles not a cliché of suburban aspiration, but a capsule of all England’s problems: the demise of its ruling party, a lost generation of millennials, polluted waterways and a cost-of-living crisis. In these leafy streets, decline and affluence have become entwined.

And Tory hegemony there is under threat from social change:

Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a "parasitical housing market" bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.

Skulthorp emphasises that this is not the traditional move to the suburbs that comes with economic maturity and that people driven out of the capital arrive in a Surrey that is very different from the stereotype of Surrey comfort.

That hegemony is also under threat from ferocious Liberal Democrats.

Take Chris Coughlan, who will fight Mole Valley at the next general election: he may be, in Skulthorp's words:

the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City.

But his verdict is clear:

"The Tory party needs to die."

Or at greater length:

Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.

Some of this new mood Skulthorp findsin the Home Counties may be an unwind from Brexit. 

The referendum wasn't won by Leave because of working-class voters in the North: it was won because great swathes of comfortable Southern England voted against their own economic interests.

Given what has hit the country since that vote, there must be many who are sick of the sight of sleek figures like Gove and Raab.