It used to be easy to work out which way a man or woman would vote in a General Election. It was closely correlated to class, education and, for the short version, which national newspaper you read. There even was an epigram for the latter (including: the FT is read by people who own the country, The Times by people who run the country, the Sun by people who don’t care who runs the country as long as she has big tits. How we laughed).
Today, that’s no longer true. We’ve become harder to sort into hard-wired political classes even though ill-informed pundits insist it is all polar opposites: remainers v leavers; boomers v millennials; red wall against blue wall. This is a long list. It reminds me of the trope concerning motorists. You know, when a politician says ‘motorists are vehemently opposed to low traffic neighbourhoods’ forgetting those same ‘motorists’ also walk, cycle, have children and older relatives, all vulnerable to SUVs barrelling their way through residential back streets from one traffic jam to the next.
The breakdown of industrial society, of the old economics of certainty (that we made things, for example, rather than serviced them), has increased the impetus toward a more fragmented politics. As has home ownership, greatly increased until recently from 50 years ago. To which we might add a global, if still nascent, economy, mass migration (both in and out), the climate emergency and, recently, gathering or actual war clouds (Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan). We are in danger of being deracinated, aliens in our own backyards.
Sociologist, Dan Evans, describes it thus: ‘The rise of “chaotic” worldviews relate to concrete changes in British society over the years. Far from the old heavy industries and communities in which people worked and lived collectively – conditions that produced a more coherent class consciousness – today we live atomised, individualised lives. Workers often have jobs in which they are forced into competition with one another or are given supervisory, “team leader” duties over others.
‘Class boundaries are less stable than they used to be, as people cycle through low-paid employment, unemployment and (bogus) forms of self-employment in the gig economy. The rise of mass working-class home ownership and self-employment mean that many people occupy what sociologist Erik Olin Wright called “contradictory class locations”: they have interests that align with labour and capital, and therefore simultaneously believe in change and the status quo.’
The politics of populism stir this mix of uncertainty into a maelstrom of hurt and anger, causing people to lash out in blind fury at the established order which is deemed by so many – with justification – to have utterly failed.
We going to have to look past that, in the next few months, to try to see a vision for the future which is not so bleak that we will grasp for the tawdry baubles offered by leaders like Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Orban or Modi. They are all straw men, their ‘solutions’ traps into which democracy itself will fall. With Orban and Modi, much of that has happened already.
Yet, as the recent election in Poland demonstrated, a pushback against authoritarian rule is possible. In the UK, we’ve been headed down this route for a while, begun by Brexit, hastened by the pandemic, now openly espoused by Sunak and, as a good example, his illegal (in both senses) immigration bill. When former judges say on the radio that this country will become an authoritarian state if this bill becomes law, giving ministers powers to overrule the courts, arbitrarily to deport individuals, do be worried, if not actively afraid.
The next General Election is going to be a turning point: should the Tories win (nothing should be ruled out: it will be a viciously dirty campaign from the start, they have nothing to lose, everything to gain) we’ll be moving in the direction of Italy or, worse, Hungary and India. It is depressing to have to write that the jury is still out on Starmer’s ‘vision’ should it even exist. But we so need one right now, not the prospect of a managerial class Labour Party trying to prop up a broken economic model, a collapsed health and social care system, a diminishing education service and the seriously rich whose failure to pay their dues has helped us into this mess.
We may still be waiting in a year from today: Sunak might just hang on until the very last minute (as Callaghan did in 1979 – then lost, of course).
Oh dear would be the mildest of responses to that depressing thought.
More from the front line: broken Britain personified
Casting about for which of so many tales of everyday woe and distress caused by our lives in an increasingly dysfunctional country, with so many possibilities (think Post Office scandal, still unresolved for the victims, with no prosecutions of the truly guilty in sight), I lighted upon this story from George Monbiot, climate activist and fellow scribe:
‘The weather was worse than forecast. By the time I reached Bristol, at 5pm, all trains to the south-west had been cancelled, because of rising flood waters. Hundreds of people travelling to Somerset, Devon and Cornwall were ejected from my train at Bristol Temple Meads. In the information office, we were sorted into groups of four. Each group was issued with a code written in ballpoint on a slip of paper. This, we were told, could be handed to a taxi driver outside the station, who would take us to a station near home. It seemed an extravagant way for the company, GWR, to discharge its legal duty to provide either alternative transport or accommodation.
‘Outside, my group of four joined a queue that soon swelled, I reckoned, to more than 1,000. Most of us had no shelter. We stood in the rain, waiting – and waiting. At any one time, there were about 20 taxis on the forecourt, but scarcely any picked up people in the queue. On average, one group of four was finding a ride roughly every 10 minutes. At that rate, it would take two days and two nights to clear the existing queue, let alone deal with the new trainloads arriving. I began to feel pretty rough: I must have been starting a cold.
‘None of this was the fault of the rail workers, who were trying to achieve the impossible. But anyone could see that the numbers didn’t add up. Even if every taxi arriving at the rank had been available, there wasn’t enough capacity. Surely GWR wouldn’t just leave us there? After an hour and a half, during which our group moved forward only five metres and no alternatives were offered or announcements made, I realised I was going nowhere. I phoned a friend in Bristol, who kindly agreed to put me up for the night. By the time I reached his house, soaked to the skin, my cold had developed into a rattling fever.
‘And then it struck me: by issuing those taxi chits, the train company, GWR, had discharged its duty to provide us, as the rules insist, “with alternative means of travel to your destination”. Both government regulations and GWR pledges are clear: either they must get you home or they must provide you with accommodation. The Rail Delivery Group, which represents all the train companies, promises “if the last train of the day is cancelled, we won’t leave you stranded”. Technically, GWR did not leave us stranded: it gave us a scrap of torn notepaper that would have procured a taxi, had taxis been available. What seemed like extravagance when the chits were handed out now looks to me like a highly effective means of reducing liabilities.
‘When I described my experience on social media, people replied that similar things had happened to them, at the hands of different train companies. When I asked GWR how it justified its response, it told me: “No one was left stranded at Bristol Temple Meads overnight, and we were proactive in trying to help people complete their journeys in difficult circumstances … we are not aware of anyone who required overnight accommodation, or was not able to get a taxi.”
‘Similar things happen throughout our depleted public sector, whether it’s run by private companies or the tattered remains of the state. By letting flood defences crumble, the government’s balance sheet looks better, but much greater costs are passed to households and their insurers. By triggering, through austerity, a crisis in special educational needs provision, the Tories dump untold misery on families, in some cases forcing parents to give up their jobs to care for their children. By allowing the water companies to cut corners, the government ensures that swimmers and surfers are poisoned and tourism and hospitality businesses go under.
‘There are no savings from austerity and privatisation, just a wholesale shifting of costs. The rich pay less tax and the public service companies in which they own shares make greater profits. The rest of us pick up the bill.’
A personal footnote: every time I have travelled to London recently, I have experienced serious delays on the brand-new Crossrail, designated the Elizabeth Line by over-paid PR and marketing panjandrums. I try to repeat this sorrowful journey as little as possible. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I don’t have to. Watching fellow commuters, checking the flashy electronic info boards as events change, almost invariably for the worse – by the minute, all I can do is sympathise.
This week: Tim watched The Great American Buffalo, a two-part, four-hour epic on BBC iPlayer. It’s a remarkable story, very much about the quasi-symbiotic relationship of thousands of years between native North Americans and bison. This relationship was shattered when Europeans arrived in increasingly numbers. Particularly in the 19th century, when tens of millions of bison were casually slaughtered by white men, while engaging in a slow and deadly set of violent wanton killings, along with official government policies which, together, amounted to genocide of a noble, nomadic people. The 20th century pulled this dual massacre back from its final solution but only just. Only just.