In lieu of my regular Brexit Impact Tracker, below (with permission) is a version of an article that was recently published in the Byline Times Supplement under the title “The Conservative Party's Patronising Play for the Votes of 'Real' Working Class People.”
This is a rather personal post, which seems fitting given that my dear mother passed away this week. Here is to her and all other working-class people who are full of love, decency, and respect for other human beings - wherever they are from - however hard and unfair their own life is!
I’m not entirely sure at this stage when I will post my next regular blog. Just in case though: thanks to all my readers for following this blog over the past year!
Who’s out of touch? The real ‘real people’ and working-class plurality
Being ‘out of touch’ has become a universal insult in British politics in recent years. Out of touch, that is, with the ‘real people’ in our country, which apparently would mean working class people from outside the large urban centres and university towns and active in manual, blue-collar rather than white-collar jobs. The latest public spat about being ‘out of touch’ was sparked off by Prime Minister Sunak being filmed using a hammer sideways. This prompted the Labour Party to post a video excerpt with the caption ‘not the son of a toolmaker’ in reference to Keir Starmer – omitting, however, that the clip also made it clear that the PM had been instructed to use the hammer that way.
The episode reminds one of Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch where four evidently wealthy men are outdoing one another telling stories of just how deprived their origins were. It would seem that in British politics, only those who had to drink a cup of ‘sulphuric acid’ – instead of tea – for breakfast and ‘work twenty-nine hours a day’ (Eric Idle’s words) can truly claim to speak for the ‘real people.’ Everyone else is ‘out of touch.’
That is where Lee Anderson comes in for the Conservative Party. Its Deputy Chairman lays claim to be true salt of the earth working class; having a coal miner as a dad and having worked in a coal mine for ten years himself. That background seemingly confers upon him a ‘connectedness’ with the spirit of British people that almost magically transforms his every opinion into what the ‘real people’ in this country actually think and want – most recently that the British government should break the law to deport people to Rwanda despite a Supreme Court judgement ruling that plan unlawful.
The paradox with Anderson being portrayed as the unchallengeable spokesperson of the working class is that his views say a lot more about what politicians who ‘are out of touch’ think working-class people are like, rather than what they really are like. As such, using Lee Anderson as the representative of the ‘real Britain’ and spokesperson of the working class is the ultimate Tory insult of working-class people.
Having grown up in a working-class family – my father a factory worker, my mother a housewife – most of my relatives, our family friends, and acquaintances are working-class people. Some of these people are like Anderson. But most are not. Amongst our factory worker friends were people who spend their valuable spare time caring for refugee families, for people with addictions, or launching environmental associations. Most of them care deeply about social issues and hold very humane and tolerant opinions. Not radical but rather conservative ones – especially by 21st century standards –, but humane and tolerant, nevertheless.
To be sure, sometimes – during a family gathering or a meet up of our local brass band – you would hear someone make crass comments that could be shocking. But again, while these were usually the loudest, they were certainly not the most representative voices. Indeed, far from being the opinions of a ‘silent majority’ that dares not speak its mind, the crass reactionary opinions were those of a small, but very vocal minority.
Catering towards this angry, shouting minority – from all parts of society – has led to what I have called elsewhere a strange inversion of ‘virtue’ and ‘sin.’ What used to be considered democratic virtues and the basis of our liberal democracy are now becoming ‘luxury beliefs’ that only privileged people in good jobs and living in metropolitan areas can afford to hold. Conversely, disregard for any rules of morality, self-restraint, and human decency – that are so crucial to peaceful societies – has come to be seen as an expression of freedom; freedom defined as a ‘right to transgression’ of social norms and values – however harmful that transgression is to others.
This inversion of values goes together with an anti-intellectual, obscurantist ideology that attributes the ‘real people’ an alleged preference for ‘common sense’ over expertise; gut feeling over reason; and personal opinion over society’s norms.
This right-wing trope is the most insulting caricature of the working classes who have fought for centuries to have access to education and send their children to school and university for them to have a decent future. Many working-class people have struggled hard in their lives to get a decent education despite the cards being heavily stacked against them. Many working-class people highly value education, reason, and science. Associating working class values with obscurantism and anti-intellectualism betrays how little the voices of purportedly ‘real people’ like Anderson, or academic and columnist Professor Matt Goodwin, or so many others, really know and care about them. They do not represent and speak for the ‘real people,’ they create the myth of a working class supposedly holding a cohesive set of reactionary values; to fit those of the Eton- and Oxford-educated right-wing elite and billionaire party donors and media owners.
It may seem paradoxical that some of the most privileged people in the country are the ones pretending to speak in the name of working-class people, given their otherwise patent contempt for those very same people. Besides being a tool for individual career advancement, a key reason for this is that after the financial crisis of 2008 and a decade of austerity, their hateful populist rhetoric is crucial to encourage people – who have seen their living standards and prospects decline – to punch down rather than getting any ideas about punching up. In other words, make people hate Islington, so that they do not start hating Mayfair.
This also explains why right-wing ‘thinkers’ like Matt Goodwin have developed a (very incoherent) ‘New Elite Theory’ that does all it can to eliminate socio-economic differences from the equation and instead define class based on reactionary right-wing beliefs rather than profession or socio-economic status. We are told that the real people are revolting against highly educated, wealthy, urban elites because of their liberal ‘luxury’ values, while they were quite happy to be dominated by an equally highly educated, even wealthier, not less urban, ‘old elite,’ with whom they allegedly shared conservative values. In Goodwin’s New Elite Theory, anyone who is opposed to immigration, who proclaims to be ‘patriotic’ and ‘nationalistic’ is part of the real people, while anyone who disagrees with such views is ‘out of touch.’
Despite the obvious discrepancy between what ‘real people’ think and what far-right politicians want us to believe they think, there is a real danger in this political strategy. The danger with Anderson as the Tories’ working-class poster-boy is that he may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Reinforcing, enabling, and encouraging the nasty far-right fringe of the working (and other) classes. Indeed, it does seem to me that amongst my working-class acquaintances extreme voices have become louder – sometimes drowning out those who do not share their views. That is the result not so much of populist parties having given real people a voice – as the far-right GB News channel claims to do in the UK – and them finally dare saying things they have been thinking all along. Rather, it is because members of the elite, like Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Richard Tice, Suella Braverman, Boris Johnson, who have made a career based on a divisive rhetoric, enable the most extreme voices from every social class – including the working-class – to become more confident.
Ultimately, ‘real people’ may start believing reactionary arguments given their omnipresence in the media and public discourse. Thus, a lot of people tend to perceive immigration as a problem for their country, but not in their everyday life. This suggests that rather than actually experiencing any issues with immigration or immigrants, people simply start believing that immigration is a problem because they are told so. People may become convinced that immigrants are the ones putting strain on public services – not fiscal austerity and underfunding by our very own UK governments – so that the elite-generated discourse becomes a wide-spread belief.
What will it take to get politicians out of the pernicious belief that what will get working-class people to vote for them is hatred and resentment? First and foremost, it would need more working-class people standing up and challenging the idea that they are like Lee Anderson: crude, cruel, and contrarian. Rather than accepting that stigma, working-class people in all their plurality, with all their variety of ideas, values, and convictions would need to participate more in the political debate rather than being represented by political entrepreneurs who are given a platform by far-right billionaires.
What stands in the way of that is often the stigma that comes with being a member of that class. As one study of ‘class in the 21st Century’ found, working-class people themselves often distance themselves from that term, associating it with people who are not in work. Working-class people need to fight against that stigma, the weight of which can be felt even among those who have experienced ‘upward’ social mobility.
Real working-class people reclaiming their identity would force more honesty onto the political elite and would open spaces for electoral strategies that do not rely on mobilising extreme fringes of the political spectrum, but on actually representing the plurality of views that exist in modern British society. The ‘First-Past-the-Post’ voting system constitutes a major obstacle to this outcome, as does a media system dominated by billionaire-sponsored newspapers and outlets. Neither of these factors are likely to radically change anytime soon. Until that change happens and allows a larger plurality of voices to be heard inside Westminster and outside, we are all at least in part out of touch with what ‘the real people’ in this country really think and want.