By Matthew Flinders ( Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield) @ TheConversation.com, Sept. 19

[....]  England – appears defined by a new core axis that no longer revolves around class. It’s defined by place-based and educational characteristics. The traditional “left versus right” axis has been replaced by a more complex focus on “open versus closed” models of society. In making this argument I am indebted to the research of Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker and the recent writing of journalist David Goodhart and playwright David Edgar.

On one side of the divide, we find the “cosmopolitan” or “anywhere” sections of society. This group tends to be diverse, positive, educated, younger, liberal, mobile and urban based. They are the “winners” of globalisation. On the other, are the “backwater” or “somewhere” communities. They tend to be white, economically precarious, older, less educated and nostalgic. They are the losers in a hyper-fluid, globalised world.

When Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson called for the “rebooting of capitalism” in July it was to these “somewhere” communities that she sought to draw attention. Pit villages without pits, fishing ports without fish, steel cities without steel, railway towns without railways, seaside piers without tourists – to paraphrase her argument. Many within the Conservative party recoiled at the obvious sentiments of a lefty within the nest but in reality Davidson was encapsulating the manner in which representative politics seems to have turned itself inside-out and upside-down [....]