Culture wars -- in Surrey

J Harris speaks even more feelingly for the petite bourgeoisie in todays Graun:

In the face of all the noise about “Workington Man” and the purported significance of leave-voting seats in the north of England, this particular subplot has been overlooked. It is about the extinguishing of David Cameron’s Tory “modernisation” project – and the growing disconnect between voters in affluent Conservative heartlands and the ludicrous ideology of Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group....While the Tories have been transforming themselves into the nationalist, Pooterish party of hard Brexit, essentially cosmopolitan attitudes – open, internationalist – have been seeping into the formerly Conservative areas of our cities, and the suburbs and towns around them.

There is also 'a blunt economic question: if your livelihood is dependent on the capital’s booming economy, why would you vote to leave the EU?'

By way of background, and this might surprise you:

in the borough of Guildford, remain got 56.2% in the 2016 referendum; in Woking, 56.2%; in Elmbridge, which includes Raab’s seat of Esher and Walton, nearly 60%.

So any intrepid reporter would visit the natives:

When I talked to people in the centre of [Guildford]  and observed [!] some Lib Dem canvassing in the upscale neighbourhood of Onslow, one thing was striking: as well as a smattering of staunch and sometimes angry Brexit supporters, there were many people who said that post-2016 Conservatism had left them feeling abandoned. “Labour and the Tories are too extreme,” said one man, 

It is easy to still think of the home counties in terms of a quintessentially suburban mindset – prim, reactionary, moralistic and deeply Conservative, with both small and large Cs.[i.e traditional bourgeois, but]...The population of Surrey is becoming more ethnically diverse, and as people are priced out of London, they are bringing a more cosmopolitan culture with them. On Guildford’s north side, the University of Surrey draws in a multitude of people from overseas

Harris reads the runes. He talks to people in Guildford (3 or 4 of them are quoted including the marvellous 'churchgoing couple in their 60s – he a geologist, she a self-described housewife'). He SEES...

Parts of England are drifting away from a political tradition that once represented them as a matter of instinct, but that now seems to be lost in a murk of nostalgia and Brexit dogma.

Elsewhere, the lovable side of Graun reading moderates is revealed by this:

I have a property which I bought with an equity loan under the help-to-buy scheme. This means that if I sell my property I will pay back a proportion of the significant value growth to the help-to-buy agency. Can my father’s property company purchase my property at lower than market value – thus reducing the proportion of profit transferred to the help-to-buy agency – and then my parents give me the balance between sale price and market value to assist in purchasing a new home?