Much has been
written about how the dividing lines of UK politics have changed from
being class
based to age based. As John
Curtice put it just before the General Election in
2019: “The kind of job that someone does is expected to make very
little difference to how they will vote at this election. On the
other hand, whether they are young or old may matter a great deal.”
[1]
This in turn partly reflects a gradual shift in the subject matter of political debate
over the last few decades. The big divisions are no longer over
economic policy, but instead are about social issues like immigration
and nationalism. Economic issues still matter a great deal to the
electorate, of course, but on paper at least the two main parties
since Thatcher offered broadly the same policies with relatively
small, if important, differences. (The Corbyn years were an exception
which did not end well for Labour, although not primarily because of
their economic policies.)
I would suggest
there are two main reasons for this shift. The first, elaborated
in the latest British Social Attitudes survey, is that
voters have become much more socially liberal over the last several
decades. This includes all groups in society, but not surprisingly
the views of the young have moved faster than the old (helped,
perhaps, by the expansion of numbers going to universities). This
rapid social change is bound to make those left behind by its speed
(if not direction) feel uncomfortable.
Differential change
creates the potential for political division, but only if political
parties wish to exploit it. The second reason for
the shift in the nature of the political divide is a
deliberate change in emphasis by the Conservative party. Of course the Conservative party has always tended to be socially conservative, although this has reflected their party membership more than the attitudes of most Conservative MPs. What changed in the 1980s was the party and the press making immigration [2] their main line of attack.
To be fair,
with Labour adopting large parts of Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda
under Blair/Brown, it was to some extent a forced change.
In particular, Labour’s shift to the right may have put them to the
right of voters on some issues (like public ownership), meaning that
the Conservative’s more right wing position became even less
attractive. When it came to the main division between the parties, on
public service provision versus tax cuts, voters tended to side with
Labour.
Nevertheless, it
would be going too far to say that the Conservative party and the
party in the media were reluctant to shift into promoting a social
conservative agenda before the Global Financial Crisis. What really
convinced the Conservative party to focus on immigration in the 80s
was the electoral maths.
-
As I have
noted many times, the socially liberal young are mainly where the
jobs are, in the large cities. The socially conservative old are
more spread out among MPs constituencies, which is an advantage
under a FPTP system.
-
The socially
liberal vote in England was split among at least two, and increasingly three,
parties, whereas (until UKIP at least, and to some extent after) the
socially conservative vote was united under the Conservative banner.
[3] -
Older voters
are more likely to turn up to vote
So if the
Conservatives could shift the issues on which general elections were
won or lost to the socially liberal/conservative
divide, they would stand a much better chance of winning those
elections. Yet despite their domination of the media agenda through
the efforts of the right wing press, the electorate didn’t play ball sufficiently until a major recession was added to the mix.
The problem the
Conservatives faced, and continue to face today, is that issues like
immigration and crime tend to take second place in most voter’s
minds to economic issues. The exception
was Brexit, where the Leave side managed (with the
help of mainstream broadcasters) to sideline the economics and win a
victory based on reducing immigration and a nationalistic desire to take back control. But
this apart, the party faces the problem of how to convince enough
social conservatives that issues like immigration are more important
than issues like the economy, their standard of living or health? That will be particularly so after large commodity price increases, over a decade of almost zero real wage growth and an NHS in crisis.
One way to raise the importance of issues like immigration is to link it to economics using plausible lies. By making claims, for example, that
public services are more difficult to access because of immigration,
with no mention of how immigrants make a vital contribution to
staffing some of those services. Or claims that immigrants steal jobs or
keep wages low, with no mention of how new workers contribute to
demand as well as production. Claims that it costs a fortune to put
up asylum seekers in hotels, with no mention of how this is because
the government has allowed huge delays in processing claims.
Another, perhaps
unintended, means of minimising the importance of economic issues was
to insulate their target voters from the consequences of economic
decisions, which I think is the strongest argument against the state
pension triple lock. House price inflation, helped by a period of
austerity that kept interest rates low, also helped.
But a large part of the
answer is also by using fear.
It is easy to see
the language used by Suella Braverman as just a play for the
leadership after the next election, but there is more to it than
that. The same language, involving dehumanisation, wild exaggeration
and lies over issues like immigration and asylum, can be found
regularly
in the right wing press and on GB news. Labelling any
asylum seekers who don’t get to the UK via the occasional official route as ‘illegal’ may seem like just another bit of spin, but it opens
up a Pandora’s Box where those seeking refuge from persecution can
be equated to the worst kind of criminals.
If you think this
kind of rhetoric will only impact a small minority, I suggest you
read this
article by Aditya Chakrabortty about what happened
when the Home Office took over a hotel in a Welsh town.
As Tim
Bale writes, the Conservative party is now the party
of Enoch Powell. A lot of this
happened first in the United States, of course, where the term
culture war signifies the same idea. Here
is Brad DeLong reviewing this
book:
“I date the start
of this democratic decline to 1993, by which point the neoliberal
(market-fundamentalist) Reagan Revolution had already failed in
policy terms. In the 1994 midterm election, Newt Gingrich, then the
House Minority Whip, concluded that since the Republicans could not
campaign on policy successes, they would instead run on scorn and
fear – of black people, “feminazis,” gays, Mexicans, professors
and other clever types, and anyone who had gotten rich the wrong way
or would never come to Jesus.”
The problem with a
strategy based on fear and outrage is that it invites continual
escalation, all the time distancing those who promulgate this
rhetoric and those who absorb it from the rest of society, from facts
and from science. [4] It becomes a petri dish for both populists
and conspiracy theories. It may start with calling asylum seekers
illegal, and being against 15 minute cities, but you just need to
look at the Republican party today to see where it ends up. It not
only changes some on the receiving end of this propaganda but also
those pushing it, such that their respect for democracy gradually
ebbs away.
Hopefully this
descent into ever more extreme social conservatism will do little but
please the existing base of right wing parties, and may
alienate everyone else. But it would be a mistake, as
I
argued recently, to think that it will disappear
quickly after one or two election defeats. In particular, shifting
from social to economic issues would require right wing parties to
move to the left, and that is something the money that backs them is
not going to allow for some time. Meanwhile there is always the
chance that something may turn up which gives the party of Enoch
Powell (or Donald Trump) the chance to gain or retain power.
[1] This remains
true even if we look at current polling. In this
recent YouGov poll, the support for Labour was higher
among ABC1 than C2DE.
[2] Some argue that
immigration became a major issue because Labour allowed numbers to
increase, but in
my view this suggests that facts have rather more
importance to both the right wing press and public opinion on this
issue than they do in reality.
[3] I’m tempted to
add, but don’t really have the evidence to do so, that as the left
wing political parties became more middle rather than working class
(Piketty calls it the rise of the Brahmin Left), their interest moved
from redistribution to more social issues.
[4] In part this is
because Labour, seeing the electoral advantages in winning the
socially conservative vote, triangulate towards the Conservative
position on these issues.
