Tag Archives: British politics

The UK's working classes have lost out

Tighter money as class conflict: why the UK’s working classes lost out

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In previous posts I argued that: (1) the UK’s working classes have lost out as a result of our rulers’ responses to covid, the war in Ukraine, and inflation; and (2) this outcome wasn’t necessary.  The next step is to explain why elites responded in the way that they did, why they chose policies detrimental to the working class.  In this essay, the focus will be on the decision to tighten monetary policy in the face of rising prices.  Subsequent posts will examine the choices of proxy war with Russia and lockdowns.

Explanations of the policy response to inflation have come in three types: those emphasising a monetarist bias; those concentrating on central bank credibility; and those focusing on distributional conflict.  The first two can be readily dismissed, as we’ll see, but the third puts us on the right track: the response to inflation has been detrimental to the working class because policymakers have prioritised the interests of productive capital; this reflects not only a structural advantage enjoyed by capital but also the weakness of Britain’s labour movement.

As I’ve detailed elsewhere, current price rises have been driven primarily by supply-side shocks (lockdowns, the war in Ukraine) and secondarily by corporate profiteering.  The policy response, however, has been to hike interest rates, giving the impression that our rulers are treating inflation as a problem of excess aggregate demand.  According to this approach, tighter money should remove demand from the economy and so bring prices down.  This may well happen.  But the point here is that, from the standpoint of the working class, a better approach would be for policymakers to promote supply-enhancing measures and to rein in price gouging.  So why haven’t they done these things?

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Can the Labour Party reconnect with the working class

Can Labour reconnect with the working class?

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Labour is no longer the party of the working class.  This was confirmed by last year’s general election, which saw Labour slump to its lowest seat-share in over eighty years and lose a significant number of its ‘heartland’ constituencies to the Conservatives.  The Tories’ breach of the so-called ‘red wall’ portends a bleak future for Labour.  Without reconnecting with working class voters, the party will likely be out of power for at least another decade.  Yet there is little sign that Labour is capable of winning these voters back.  In fact, the political thought that prevails in the party works against this outcome, a point that is most clearly illustrated by the issue of culture.

Culture now sits alongside economics as a major political faultline.  In Britain, this was revealed most starkly by the EU referendum.  Though the classic left/right divide mattered to this vote, its result was primarily shaped by a value cleavage.  Broadly speaking, the culturally conservative backed leave and the culturally liberal backed remain.  Working class voters on the whole were in favour of Brexit, a position that reflected their desire for more economic and cultural security.  This demand for cultural security may be thought of as patriotism, defined by George Orwell as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life”.

Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have grasped what many blue collar Britons are after, as shown by their policy platform of moving left on economics while delivering Brexit and a tighter immigration regime.  The best that can be said about Labour is that its Corbynite policies have spoken to the working class’ economic concerns.  But that is all.

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Machiavelli, liberal decline, and Britain's selfish elite

Machiavelli, liberal decline, and Britain’s selfish elite

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Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth century Italian political theorist, saw history as a recurring pattern of decline and renewal.  This stemmed from his view of human society and human nature.  Society could never have a natural unity nor could it be based on a shared understanding of the common good.  Instead, Machiavelli believed that society is always divided by conflicting interests and all we can hope for is an artificial unity, attained by balancing competing social forces.  However, our innate tendency towards selfishness means that we are prone to pushing our own interests too far, undermining any equilibrium that may have been achieved.  At this point, decline sets in.[i]

Machiavelli’s view of history can be applied to the contemporary UK.  Britain’s political settlement of the last few decades, which can be broadly defined as a commitment to liberal globalisation, is on its way out.  Leave’s victory in the 2016 EU referendum is the biggest indicator of this, though we can point to UKIP’s triumph in the 2014 EU parliament election, to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015, and to the rise of the Brexit party as further proof.  It’s too soon to say what form a new political settlement will take, but the direction of travel seems to point towards greater cultural conservatism and economic protection.

Machiavelli may also help us understand why this decline has come about.  In this respect, it’s important to emphasise that Britain’s political commitment to liberal globalisation wasn’t inevitable.  It was neither naturally ordained nor was it the result of a societal-wide agreement.  Instead, this commitment reflected the historically constituted preferences of certain social groups.

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How culture replaced economics as the main political faultline

How culture replaced economics as the main political faultline

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Until recently, elections were widely seen as being won or lost on economic grounds.  Yet events such as the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president have challenged this conventional outlook.  These results had more to do with conservative cultural values than with material interests.  Likewise, the backlash against Brexit and Trump has been mainly focused on defending liberal cultural values, not the state of the economy.  How did culture become more politically salient than economics?

Some say elite interests have prompted this shift.  In this view, the right has politicised culture to manoeuvre poorer citizens into backing policies that favour the rich, such as tax cuts and market deregulation.  This argument has some substance.  Trump’s election and Leave’s success both depended on blue collar voters, and in each instance culture was used as a tool of mobilisation and concealment.

In the US, this sort of politicking has been going on for some time.  The Republican party started provoking the cultural sensitivities of working class Americans following its victory in the 1994 midterms.  During this period, high-profile Republicans like Patrick Buchanan began preaching about the “war for the soul of America” and the left’s threat to “the values of faith, family, and country”.  But while the party talked up the kulturkampf, its policies continued to benefit economic elites.

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Information or ideology? Why most leavers still back Brexit

Information or ideology? Why most leavers still back Brexit

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The British Labour party’s decision to back a second referendum has raised the hope of ardent remainers.  The latter claim a “people’s vote is now inevitable” and “remain can win”.

Their optimism may simply be a matter of political manoeuvring.  They may be talking up the prospect of overturning Brexit to build support for this option.  However, their view of Leave’s victory in 2016 suggests they genuinely think they will prevail.  Many of them believe this victory stemmed from information deficiencies.  They see leave voters as being misinformed, uninformed, or both, implying that had they been exposed to more accurate information, they never would have chosen to exit the EU.

Some aspects of the Leave campaign were undoubtedly misleading.  The UK doesn’t pay £350 million a week to Brussels, for instance, and Vote Leave wasn’t in a position to suggest that the money Britain saved by exiting the EU would be spent on the NHS.  To say this campaign dealt in “lies and false promises” is therefore true.

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What if Brexit doesn't happen?

What if Brexit doesn’t happen?

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What will happen to Britain if Brexit is cancelled?  According to the writer Larry Elliott, the UK will return to the status quo of the last few decades.  That is, the country will revert to a regime of liberal globalisation that has mainly benefited the metropolitan middle classes.  Elliott makes this prediction on the basis that no-Brexit will dampen popular “demand for deep and urgent reform” and so “the real grievances of those who voted for Brexit will be quietly forgotten”.

Those who want to overturn Brexit have said it is necessary to “address the grievances of those leave voters who were protesting about the state of our politics and economy”.  This suggests that, if Brexit is stopped, a reversion to the days before June 2016 isn’t necessarily on the cards. Yet there are grounds for thinking that Elliott has a point.

While ardent remainers typically cherish the economic and cultural openness of liberal globalisation, they often fail to appreciate this phenomenon’s impact on many leave voters.  Since the 1980s this form of globalisation has decimated blue collar jobs and unsettled attachments to community and place.  For working class northerners and so-called Middle Englanders in particular, these changes have to varying degrees been felt as losses of livelihood, esteem and culture.  And that’s not all.

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