Jan from the congregation told me that over Christmas dinner she and her family had avoided talking politics but
eventually couldn’t keep entirely away from the subject of the election. Her
great-nephew’s partner, she avers, is ‘a bit slow on the uptake’ and at one
point to everyone’s confusion asked ‘So the election, who was it won in the end?’
I doubt most of us will ever attain that degree of merciful amnesia, but the feather-spitting rage some of my best
friends have expressed at the result seems to be receding a little, a couple of
weeks after the event. It was so very different from the disappointment those
of us from the progressive side of the equation find ourselves very often
feeling at the result of elections (I can’t recall ever voting for a successful
Parliamentary candidate since I first cast a ballot in 1992), and I suspect
arose from the unacknowledged realisation that this was the last possible throw
of the dice to reverse the 2016 Referendum on the part of those who couldn’t
accept that it had gone the way it did.
But there is still much
anger, and I do hope that some of the terms people have used about former
Labour voters who switched to the Conservatives are not representative of
Labour members, or much more sorrow lies ahead. This video commentary by George
Monbiot seems a little more positive:
I’m not convinced by all of the
analysis, as I would tend not to be by anything Mr Monbiot produces. The
disruptive political figures he mentions in support of his thesis are certainly
all nationalists, but not all ‘clowns’ in the Trump & Johnson mould: you
can’t say that of Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro. Nor are these
disruptive nationalists all necessarily right-wing, as the Five Star movement
in Italy, and Volodymyr Zelensky whose only qualification as President of the Ukraine was
playing one in a TV show, demonstrate. The picture of a few wealthy men
manipulating public opinion may make left-wingers feel better, but it ignores
why those manipulations resonate and succeed. Nor has Finland, despite its
campaign to educate its citizens in resisting online nonsense, avoided the
wave: it may have a 34-year-old female Social Democrat PM but she has had to
cobble together a five-party coalition to fend off the second-biggest party in
the country, a nationalist climate-change-sceptic outfit. But Mr Monbiot’s
emphasis on the development of local democracy, education and citizens’
involvement seems a plausible response to the inadequacy of national elections at
providing ways of dealing with the challenges societies face.
I think there are slight signs that
some folk on the progressive side are starting to think historically, and face
up to the slow and epochal detachment of elements of ‘the working class’ from
political parties they used to support; I’ve also just finished David Cannadine’s
sparky 1998 book Class in Britain which
examines the historical development of the term, and that has made me
contemplate the same themes. Communities in the UK where people worked with
their hands and could directly see how their labour supported the income of others,
the business owners, attached themselves to the Labour Party as a result of
that shared experience; take away the shared experience, and the sense of
belonging to groups of human beings who are subject to the same forces, pressures
and circumstances weakens, and the conservative worldview that instead stresses
independence, autonomy and the rightness of inequality becomes more plausible.
Professor Cannadine points out that in her 1989 book The Revival of Britain Mrs Thatcher claimed that she had brought
about ‘an irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their
families’ during her premiership, a phrase almost the same as one in the Labour
Party manifesto of October 1974. Of course the two texts meant something very
different by ‘working people’: they referred to sets of voters motivated by
entirely separate experiences, the one of manual labour supporting those who
did not work manually, and the other of property ownership and self-reliance.
Even Karl Marx had to admit
that there were categories of workers who didn’t comfortably fit into his class
analysis, Dr Cannadine points out, and it’s arguable that his attempt to make ‘working
class’ into a scientific description of the role of an actual group of people in
the process of production was always misjudged. It certainly is now. But if it
ever made any sense at all, as summarising an experience of manual work
supporting business owners, it now exists only as a memory of members of one’s
family having had such an experience in the past. Hardly anyone’s work is like
that now, and the processes of ownership and exploitation are far more obscure.
The English Working Class, pace EP
Thompson, has been unmade. There are poor people, but they aren’t a class any
more.
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