Despised

Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class

Paul Embery

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509540006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Europäische Politik

The typical contemporary Labour MP is almost certain to be a university-educated Europhile who is more comfortable in the leafy enclaves of north London than the party's historic heartlands. As a result, Labour has become radically out of step with the culture and values of working-class Britain.

Drawing on his background as a firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham, Paul Embery argues that this disconnect has been inevitable since the Left political establishment swallowed a poisonous brew of economic and social liberalism. They have come to despise traditional working-class values of patriotism, family and faith and instead embraced globalisation, rapid demographic change and a toxic, divisive brand of identity politics. Embery contends that the Left can only revive if it speaks once again to the priorities of working-class people by combining socialist economics with the cultural politics of belonging, place and community.

No one who wants to really understand why our politics has become so dysfunctional and what the Left can do to fix it can afford to miss this authentic, insightful and passionate book.

1
The Gathering Storm

‘Treat people like cattle, and you’ll get kicked’, as the man said. The people of Barking and Dagenham had been treated like cattle for years. Patronised, neglected, dismissed. Many had disengaged from the political process entirely. The political establishment was tin-eared. It didn’t want to hear from people like them. It thought they were a bit, well, uncultured. All it wanted was their votes at election time.

Among locals, the feelings of abandonment, of marginalisation, of being ignored, were profound; the sense that their views and concerns would never be taken seriously by a political class that saw no legitimacy in them was palpable.

I was a fourth-generation resident of the place. It was home for thirty-five years. Those of us who had lived and grown up in communities like this, and knew them and their inhabitants intimately, saw the revolt coming a mile off. We had warned time and again that the anger and bitterness were building. That the writing was on the wall.

And then 23 June 2016 happened.

The establishment and its outriders were shaken to their core. To some of us, though, the vote to secede from the European Union came as no great surprise. In Barking and Dagenham, 62 per cent voted Leave. The cattle had kicked. It was their response to a ruling class that had long regarded them with contempt. Their way of getting their own back.

For Barking and Dagenham, read hundreds of similar working-class communities across post-industrial, small-town and coastal Britain. These places had had enough. For years, they had been treated as social and moral outcasts by the political and cultural elites. The sneering derision of these elites was summed-up in the words of Times columnist Matthew Parris after he paid a visit to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex in 2014: ‘Clacton is going nowhere’, Parris opined. ‘Its voters are going nowhere … This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.’ As if maligning them mercilessly were not enough, he went on: ‘I am not arguing we should be careless of the needs of struggling people and places such as Clacton. But I am arguing – if I am honest – we should be careless of their opinions.’¹

Parris expressed openly what many of his chattering-class political and media chums believed privately: the people of Clacton and communities like it were trash and not worth listening to.

Some political and media commentators would have us believe that the divisions and strife that have plagued our country in recent years began on referendum day. On the contrary, they had been brewing for years. The EU referendum was merely the mechanism which enabled the populace to give full vent to their festering anger. They had waited a long time. Like magma rising quietly and unobserved inside a volcano, the pressure was building. Yet the political establishment was blind to it. Until the day the eruption occurred.

How, then, did we get here? What were the origins of our current tribulations? Why did a nation that to outsiders may have appeared harmonious and at ease with itself begin to experience such convulsions?

The rise of the cultural revolutionaries

It may seem something of a stretch to some, but many of the seeds of Brexit and the wider polarisation of our nation were sown back in the 1960s. That pivotal decade saw a seismic shift – a revolution – in political, social and cultural attitudes across the Western world. The origins of the rebellion lay in the universities, where thousands of students – the bulk of whom hailed from various sections of the middle class – rose up against the old order. Their protests culminated in a sustained period of revolt throughout 1968, with Vietnam of course a great galvaniser for the dissenters. But they had much more than US imperialism in their crosshairs.

Old-fashioned concepts such as patriotism, self-discipline, conscience, religious belief, marriage and the centrality of family, manners, respect for tradition, personal morality, and a belief in free will – all of which had, over many generations, become so firmly embedded in British society, not least as a consequence of the country’s deep roots in Christianity – were being rejected wholesale. And in their place came the beginnings of a new age of free love, drugs, self-gratification, individualism, divorce, contempt for tradition, and disdain for the concept of personal responsibility for one’s own actions.

The old universal moral code, which broadly united people irrespective of their class or political beliefs, and the breaching of which was certain to induce shame, was slowly breaking apart. The cultural revolutionaries were on the march.

The spirit of the age came to be summed up in the lyrics of the song ‘Imagine’, penned by 1960s icon John Lennon. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven … no countries … no religion too … Imagine all the people living for today.’

All of this was done in the name of ‘liberation’, of course. It always is. The revolutionaries considered their causes entirely worthy and themselves inherently better people than those against whom they waged a culture war. And in some respects they were right. But, like many battles for liberation, the invoice didn’t arrive until many years after the event, and only then did people see the price to be paid. What was presented as ‘peace, love and harmony’, turned out in so many ways to be the opposite.

It is important to say that one does not have to be a social reactionary, nor hark back to some mythical ‘golden age’, nor believe that we are living today through some dystopian nightmare, to believe that the new morality hasn’t proved in every respect to have been for the better. And, of course, not all modern-day social problems can be attributed to the legacy of the 1960s. Indeed, it would be absurd to postulate such a thing. An ever more predatory free-market capitalism, with its culture of long hours, low wages, overwork and stress – and the impact of these things on family life – has unquestionably taken its toll on society and contributed in no small part to our ills.

Neither is it credible to deny that sections of the working class have themselves embraced some of the more tawdry aspects of cultural liberalism and a shallow consumerism which have undermined social bonds and deepened the moral decline. We should be honest about the vices as well as the virtues of the working classes, and there is no room for romanticism in any candid examination of their plight. But, though the ’60s were plainly not all bad, it is hard to imagine that we would have experienced to the same degree such problems as family breakdown and fatherlessness, atomisation and loneliness, teenage pregnancy, widespread drug abuse, social exclusion, an abject lack of discipline in the education system, and the steady drip of lawlessness and disorder on our streets, if we had not chosen quite the path we did back then. Can anyone sincerely deny that we have reaped over the past half century what we sowed?

It was a couple of decades after the 1960s student protests that their protagonists – the soixante-huitards, as they came to be known – came of age and really started to put their stamp on politics and wider society. In particular, they established the beginnings of a cultural hegemony across the public sphere, particularly in the fields of education and law, and throughout our public services. They also began to wield greater clout in the national media.

Their influence was felt keenly across the mainstream British Left. Thus it was no coincidence that the ethos of the Labour Party and wider labour movement began to change around that time. Until then, Labour had remained anchored as a working-class party. There had long been middle-class liberals in it, of course – particularly among its higher echelons and leading thinkers – and it was always the better for that. It had also traditionally enjoyed the support of a layer of educated, professional and liberal middle-class voters. This was a necessary and finely balanced electoral compromise, and one which had broadly served the party well. The working class was generally willing to accept a modicum of social liberalism if it was introduced gradually, and provided the party continued to champion its economic interests. (So, for example, Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were able to introduce various liberal reforms, such as the abolition of the death penalty, without too much of a backlash from its core vote.)

But the greater part of that historical alliance had always been the working-class element – those who toiled for a living, the men and women of Britain’s industrial heartlands, the workers and trade unionists employed in the shipyards, mines, steelworks, factories and offices of the nation, the families of moderate means living in council properties or, occasionally, fortunate enough to own their own modest homes. These millions, proud of their working-class heritage and imbued with a deep affinity for place and tradition, were the party’s core vote, its base, its raison d’être.

During the 1980s, a new, emergent liberal class – personified by the likes of Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt – began to secure key positions in the Labour Party as behind-the-scenes apparatchiks. As they did so, the bonds with the working class that had sustained the party for generations slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, started to weaken. A concerted effort to transform the image of Labour from an avowedly working-class ‘cloth cap’ party to one which embraced the new cosmopolitan liberalism was under way. The party was becoming centred around a new urban, modern, middle-class, internationalist and progressive style of politics. By the mid 1990s, Tony Blair, though he occasionally exhibited traces of a communitarian and Christian socialist style of politics, had become the ideal front man for the project. Needless to say, the BBC and liberal commentariat lapped it up.

These social and cultural revolutionaries who had taken control of the levers of power inside the party were disdainful of the early Labour tradition and the party’s roots in Christian socialism and the trade union and co-operative movements. They frowned upon the quietly patriotic and socially conservative values to which so many in the party – from its working-class supporters to past leaders and statesmen – had held true. They saw no space for this ‘faith, family and flag’ nonsense in their shiny, new, socially liberal party. They elevated the cosmopolitan over the communitarian, the global over the local, the progressive over the conservative, modernity over tradition.

Their social and cultural radicalism was not matched, however, by any sort of economic radicalism. On the contrary, the Labour Party – or ‘New Labour’ as it became known during the Blair years – made its peace not only with the market itself but with th...