PopCon's Head of Communications, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, highlights the reasons why Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election and the lessons the Conservative Party here in the UK can learn from his campaign. 

History, at least that of countries such as the United Kingdom, appears to be more popular with those who would self-identify as right of centre. The old “right” and “left” name tags may no longer apply (just ask JK Rowling), but the woke left tell us our history is one we should be ashamed of, to make reparations for and therefore, by implication, forget.

However, learning from history is invaluable. And a lesson Donald Trump knows well. There have been a thousand articles, blogs, vlogs and memes since his landslide victory last week. Some have especially caught our attention at PopCon and we have shared a selection on our website. One I found most interesting was sent to me by a UK labour friend and it was not from the last ten days. It was from eight years ago. If anything, it is more relevant today than even in 2016. Especially if you are a UK Conservative. The Democrats ignored its message on American voters, contributing no doubt to their historic loss of the presidency and the House of Representatives.

In his 2016 article, Jason Pargin attempts to explain Trump’s election win. He admits he is a Democrat voter but that he grew up in a Republican stronghold. And he explains why his home town voted red.

These themes will be all too familiar to us in the UK. The details are different because America is different. But in response to the elite urban left painting traditional voters as “simple”, “racist”, “Nazis” and “homophobes”. Pargin says urban lefties ask “who cares about those people, right?”

But he points out that all of the tropes about rural dwellers, small town hillbillies in US terms, are wrong. Yes, they are more likely to have traditional values, but they are not racists, Nazis or homophobes. They are more likely to want to be self reliant, have less interference by the state, be more likely to drink too much but be less likely to be drug addicts. The divide is a gulf, with those in the countryside often feeling alienated by our big cities, with their crime, drugs, traffic and fast walking-talking, culturally superior folk.

But that does not make those who live outside densely populated metropolises bad people. It makes them the ignored, the unheard, the undervalued and overburdened backbone of our country. In UK terms this was highlighted by Brexit, but the bien pensant folk in London, from Theresa May and Keir Starmer to Carole Cadwalladr and Gary Lineker, like the Democrats in the US, didn’t listen to the quiet voters’ demands for change: our demands to be heard.

Keir Starmer’s two-tier policing, Rachel Reeves war on farmers, net zero and the war on motorists, and the feeling that all of us – urban or rural – who do not ascribe to woke values are being peered at condescendingly over Lord Alli-funded spectacles is making this divide ever wider.

And just like in America, a country that historically, both economically and politically, we have mirrored far more closely than our nearer neighbours, our politicians need to wake up, not woke up. The Tories lost because they ignored what most small “c” conservatives wanted. A smaller, more efficient state with lower taxes, personal responsibility with the freedom to succeed, a nation with safe borders and armed forces able to defend it, equality before the law with laws that are seen as fair, a democracy that represents the best interests of the voters, not the civil servants.