This an early and doubtless from a sociological perspective seriously premature attempt to respond to the Conservative victory in the General Election of 12 December 2019. We have some basic data but as yet little by way of analysis. I am siting with my laptop so promptly precisely because I too held the common view that it was a momentous vote, likely to decisively shape an era. It was not just about Brexit of course, though much of the mainstream media, in seriously in hoc to the Conservatives, presented it as such (witness Sky TV’s daily slogan ‘The Brexit Election’). But as Hitler and Goebbels were only too adeptly aware, slogans repeated often enough – ‘let’s get Brexit done’ – are likely to insinuate themselves into the common psyche. Recognition of this core principle of modern state propaganda machines does not rob people of their agency: agency is always structured but never structurally determined. I return to this and other insights from (classical) sociology later.
I heard the results of the Exit Poll on the radio at 10pm on 12 December. They are rarely much out, and I was reconciled at that point to the quashing of any optimism. I had haboured to that point a lingering hope that Corbyn might just nick a small overall majority, second prize being another hung parliament. So a comfortable Johnson majority was well outside my comfort zone. Pollsters and commentators have hurtled down the runway and jumped on the results, sometimes without first marking their run-up. A few markers seem unambiguous. In our strangely anachronistic ‘first-past-the-post system, turnout was 67.3%; the Conservatives got 43.6% of the votes cast; but, for perspective, a mere 29.4% of the total of registered voters voted for Johnson. This has been portrayed as an overwhelming endorsement. Portrayed by whom? Well, it is an evidence-based truth that the mainstream media – extending to the ‘international broadcaster’, ‘Auntie BBC’ – have not only supported Johnson, by no stretch of the lurid imagination a human role model, but subjected his principal rival, Corbyn, to a stream-of-consciousness of virulent abuse without historical precedent.
A few more data. Causal mechanisms beneath-the-surface cannot simply be read off from statistical associations on-the-surface (as I’ve laboriously maintained over the years). With that proviso, we can note that the Conservatives were fuelled by older voters: 62% of those aged 65+ voted Conservative, compared to 18% who voted Labour; 49% of those aged 55-64, compared to 27%; 43% of those aged 45-53, compared to 35%; 30% of those aged 35-44, compared to 45%; 23% of those aged 25-34, compared to 55%; and 19% of those aged 18-24 compared to 57%. Education too was negatively associated with Conservative support, though older people tend to have lower levels of qualifications, in part of course a function of socio-educational change.
Notions of class are at this early stage compromised by bounded proxies. But the deployment of market researchers’ categories is suggestive: AB = 44% Conservatives, 31% Labour; C1 = 45% Conservatives, 33% Labour; C2 = 50% Conservatives, 30% Labour; and DE = 43% Conservative, 37% Labour. Broadly speaking, A = upper middle class, B = middle class, C1 = lower middle class, C2 = skilled working class, D = working class, and E = non-working.
I am inclined to the view, merely consonant with the data as yet available, that Labour failed to recapture former strongholds – extending to Scottish constituencies – featuring ageing (via ‘forced’ youth flight), working-class communities, and that these communities were ‘lost’ well before Corbyn assumed the Labour leadership, and were only too often poorly served by New Labour and/or, to be generous, defunct/sedimented/tired Labour local authorities.
A few have pitched in early to frame their analyses of ‘what went wrong’ and I’m reluctant to join them. So just a few observations, followed by a handful of sociological points that I think salient (typically neglected by journalists/columnists). First the observations:
- A characteristically ruthless and unprincipled Tory opportunism will typically give them an electoral edge over considered and principled rivals, and Johnson epitomised just this Tory mindset, in fact taking it to a new level, while Corbyn, in contrast, took humility, honesty and straightforwardness to a new level.
- The mainstream media were consistently biased in favour of the Tories, ranging in virulence from the blatant lies of the tabloids to the more subtle propaganda (yes, that’s what it was) of the BBC.
- A pre-Brexit election allowed the Tories, conveniently purified after their purge of anti-Brexit MPs, to cohere around a clear and simple Brexit policy, while Labour’s pro-Remain MPs pressured Corbyn to sign up to a policy promising a ‘People’s Vote’ (and the possibility of Remaining within the EU) that was (mis)cast by the mainstream media as a ‘sitting-on-the-fence’ cop out selling Brexit voters in 2016 down the river.
- Labour’s failure to tackle early and head-on the cool, calculated weaponising of antisemitism by a potent pro-Israeli segment of the Jewish community desperate to prevent the election of a pro-Palestinian PM cost them electorally, perhaps mostly by diverting attention from Labour’s manifesto. I’m totally with Chris Williamson here. (My fear, and I’m confident Corbyn’s, is that this whole ‘fabrication of racism’ will actually function to increase the rate of antisemitism.)
- The election result in part reflected the deployment of massive pro-establishment resources, extending well beyond the headlines of the mainstream media to embrace donors and dark money funding non-transparent, pro-Tory think tanks (who’s personnel featured regularly on TV programmes.)
I could go on but in the interests of blog brevity will switch now to a few sociological remarks:
- It is only too easy as we make our way daily through the travails of the lifeworld to lose sight of the way systemic ‘power’ intrudes on us. My formula of choice is: capital buys power to make policy in its own interests. The Tory elite is entirely reflexive about this. Pivotally, the result of the election affirms the potency of the formula ‘when parliamentary push comes to parliamentary shove’.
- It is quite possible – and not at all unusual – for people to vote ‘against their interests’. This staple of classical sociology has gone missing from the discipline of late. Ideology was long, and appropriately in my view, contrasted with science: ideology denoted a view of the world echoing and reinforcing vested interests that it was the task of science, and I regard sociology as an essentially scientific project, to expose, counter and correct. The Marxian notion of ‘false consciousness’ retains its punch. The whole point of ideology is to hoodwink (now there’s a babyboomer word) the many into tolerating the – in fact, very– few. Who, apart from some post-classical, post-modern sociologists, can possibly doubt this?
- Brexit and its aftermath, not unlike the ascendancy and likely re-election of Trump for a second term in the USA, is a symptom of what I have called the ‘fractured society’. It is represents a howl of bitter and angry protest against a longstanding (40+ year-old) class-driven assault on that contingent of the many vulnerable to abandonment by the state. (The USA models this future for us, see Wacquant and others.)
- Financialised capitalism may be imploding (as Wallerstein, Streeck and others have argued), the victim of its ‘celebratory’ fill-your-boots self-indulgence, but the election of Johnson prefigures a short-term affirmation what Nancy Fraser calls ‘reactionary populism’ over a Corbyn-inspired hope of ‘progressive populism’.
Once again, I could risk boring people by going on here. But I want to conclude with a moment of personal reflexivity. I might go on a bit.
I am in contact on social media with a few sociologists and others who are very up-front with their working-class origins and identity and are very angry indeed. Now here’s the thing. My instinctive response is to respond by advocating less aggressive posts: we ‘middle-class’ sociologists, academics and others are not all beyond-the-pale, metropolitan-elite ‘cunts’. After all, I’m a socialist who supported Labour’s Corbyn not because I thought he would, or could, deliver a socialist transformation of society (I agree with Ralph Miliband here); but because I thought he represented a small step in the right direction (in line with my promotion of a strategy of ‘permanent reform’). Why ‘insult’ people with whom you ‘have of necessity’ to ally yourselves in the effective pursuit of change? I have always ‘got’ of course that Labour has a history of compromising when in government. I also entirely accept and demur from its ready acceptance of the displacement of working-class representatives and MPs by professional/middle-class careerists. But I have been obliged to question myself.
I still don’t thing I’m a cunt, or especially cunt-like; but I have been re-interrogating my views. Although I think I have a sense of what it is/must be to be working class – I am a sociologist after all, plus I was brought up as a postwar child in a council house on my father’s modest income and have on occasion since been stressed by red bills flopping into my postbox – I have always had hope, even expectation, on my side: there has always been light at the end of the tunnel. My primary and secondary socialisation was unequivocably middle class.
Sociology, I entirely accept, is an essentially a bourgeois science, the more so in the context of universities’ metric affiliation to the post-1970s neoliberal ideology of financialised captialism. But there is a deeper concern here, and one in which I am implicated, as it were ‘despite myself’.
I am indebted to Lisa McKenzie. The point I want to make goes beyond experiential knowledge and levels of reflexivity. Lisa forthrightly asserts that sociology is not only middle-class/bourgeois, an easy enough statement to make, but that it is anti-working class. (I am confident that she will put me right if I draw fallacious conclusions in what follows!) Drawing on Bourdieu, it might be argued that sociology is informed by a class habitus of which it is institutionally and conveniently unaware (maybe ignorant). Expressed differently, to ‘get on’, to ‘make it’, in (the profession of) sociology, especially within the elite or Russell Group of universities, it has become necessary to look the other way. Lisa has contended that ‘classism’ dominates sociology’s output in books and journals, and this makes sense to me.
While I readily admit the seductions of babyboomership, I don’t think I have looked the other way; but I do accept that it is only too easy to overlook and misinterpret the despair and anger underpinning: (a) Brexit and the Tory majority, and (b) the disaffection with politicians in general and the Labour Party in particular. It is not just that New Labour abandoned the working class. Labour only too often continues to function locally against working-class interests, most conspicuously in relation to housing. Corbyn in the brief interregnum has not been able to reverse this.
The upshot of all this is that the shift towards reactionary populism is a supremely articulate, even elegant, howl of working-class anger and anguish. ‘Sod you all!’ We are as yet struggling to grasp this, even within sociology qua science of society. We sociologists must hear working-class voices. I’m in the process of thinking my way through this imperative.