Rejected by the working-class North & Midlands: Can other political / campaigning organisations avoid Labour’s fate?
Every month I allocate myself a book-buying budget. Every month it gets overspent.
This month, those to blame for inconsiderately releasing interesting reading include David Goodhart, Michael Sandel and Peter Mandler, who together authored THREE books about “why meritocracy isn’t working” (reviewed here by Rana Foroohar). As anyone who has read my book (The End of Aspiration? - Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects) could tell you, this subject is very much ‘up my street’. To make matters worse, Deborah Mattinson’s Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? is published on the 15th and — given that I come from one of the former-coalfield areas of the ‘red wall’ and my job involves helping organisations to reach & involve people from beyond the metropolitan middle-class bubble — means there is currently so much going ‘up my street’ as to be causing serious traffic problems.
Interviewing Mattinson about her book on The Week in Westminster, Paul Waugh identified the main themes as a “strong sense of pride” coupled with “a sense of despair at the decline some places have suffered”.
The importance of pride can be hard to grasp for politicians and for individuals involved in campaigning organisations and think tanks, who typically don’t lack for things to feel proud about: Involvement in political or campaigning organisations itself allows us to feel good about ‘making a difference’ or ‘fighting the good fight’. But there are numerous other sources of self-esteem available to the staff and activists of campaigning and political organisations, associated with the fact of their being overwhelmingly middle-class (For example, even in 2017, before the voters of the Red Wall turned blue, more than three-quarters of Labour members were ‘ABC1’) and middle-class people are routinely treated with a level of respect from employers, educators, state, media and their fellow-citizens that is denied to others.
The sense of ‘despair at the decline’ in the availability of self-esteem is illustrated in James Bloodworth’s Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain (which I blame for helping blow last February’s book-buying budget) in which he notes that former coal-miners he met in Rugeley would say “I only work at Amazon” (i.e. in a warehouse where they were treated with little short of contempt by their employer) but would never have said, of their former job, that they were “only a miner”. The situation Bloodworth describes can also be seen in my home town which, since the ‘pit closures’ has acquired a growing number of warehouses reliant on cheap labour, a proliferation of pound shops, an increase in antisocial behaviour and a drug problem.
But political and campaigning organisations often inadvertently ram salt into these wounds, and consequently alienate the working-class communities to whom they are attempting to reach out. Interviewed alongside Deborah Mattinson on The Week in Westminster, Peter Gibson MP — who in the last General Election won the once dark-red seat of Darlington for the Conservatives — said much of his success was down to his willingness to offer positivity, in contrast to Labour, who “go on about how bad somewhere is and how poor somewhere is”. Proud people don’t take kindly to being called ‘poor’ (see here).
To make matters worse, interactions between political/campaigning organisations and working-class people often injure the latter’s pride even further. One of the problems with environmental organisations being what Craig Bennett (the former Friends of the Earth CEO) called a ‘white middle-class ghetto’ is that they underestimate the value of cars as source of self-esteem to people afforded few others and consequently, by being perceived to regard car-users as antisocial, present many people with a choice between two sorts of shame. Similarly, political activists who attempt to court working-class people with plans to increase social security payments can find themselves baffled to be given short shrift by people who suspect an implication that they are ‘the sort of person that claims benefits’: a label the vast majority of working-class people are very keen to avoid. Another key source of conflict is concerned with values. One of Deborah Mattinson’s findings was a strong sense of patriotism (again, concomitant with people who value sources of pride) which is often disdained by the sorts of people who fail to see that their own tribal flag-waving just takes different forms, such as, say, the prominent shouldering of a tote bag from Daunt Books.
In the unlikely event that people from outside the university-educated metropolitan middle-class bubble overcome all of this to become actively involved with political/campaigning organisations, they are (to quote one of my previous articles) likely to “see speaking up as presenting a big risk of being humiliated, especially in the presence of people with posh accents and posh educations who do the sorts of jobs you were previously unaware even existed and therefore presumably know better than you. This is exacerbated if you or your family have typically been in jobs that provide a harsh training in not speaking up, by making it clear that your role is to answer questions and fulfil requests, not ask questions and make requests, and certainly not to suggest that a posh person might be asking the wrong question or misinterpreting your answer”.
As Deborah Mattinson (and others) have pointed out, being able to engage with people from outside the university-educated metropolitan middle-class bubble is important (and — PLUG ALERT — it’s what I can be commissioned to help your organisation to do: see ‘About’ here). The people outside of the middle-class comfort zone were pivotal in both the Brexit vote and the 2019 election, and politicians know it, which means that outside of the university-educated metropolitan middle-class comfort zone is where the future will happen.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Photo By Manchesterphotos — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14652055
