Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics

Product Information

A major theme of Goodwin's work has been to explain what he calls "the realignment" of British politics, which has seen the Labour Party becoming more dependent on the liberal,

Eatwell, Roger; Goodwin, Matthew (2018). National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Pelican Books. ISBN 9780241312001. UK politics | More senior Conservatives have hit out at Suella Braverman’s “racist rhetoric”, accusing her of undermining the party for the sake of her own leadership ambitions. A former senior minister from Boris Johnson’s government told the Guardian they believed Braverman was a “real racist bigot”.A key area in which the British public feel unheard is on immigration, the main driver of UK population growth. Against the wishes of voters the UK population is predicted to hit 72 million if immigration continues as predicted, equivalent to adding five new cities of Birmingham. The ramifications on culture, green spaces, housing, the NHS, traffic, agricultural capacity, water resources etc are obviously huge. These ‘hyper-globalists’ have lost touch with the electorate they purport to represent and cater to. The values from unfashionable non-urban regions are undesirable and excluded in the voice of institutions such as academia, media, creative cultural institutions. Virtues of certain groups are upheld as desirable, honourable and rewarded with high status while others are slammed as ignorant ‘Karens and Gammons.’

Ford, Robert; Goodwin, Matthew (2014). Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain. Routledge. ISBN 9780415661508. a b c d C. Davies, Huw; MacRae, Sheena E. (15 May 2023). "An anatomy of the British war on woke". Race & Class. SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/03063968231164905. ISSN 0306-3968. S2CID 258736793. Rice, Gavin (31 July 2022). "The daring buds of May". The Critic Magazine . Retrieved 21 August 2023. Freedland, Jonathan (26 October 2018). "Don't normalise the far right. But sometimes we must take it on". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 12 July 2023. This group “creates, filters and determines what is or what is not acceptable or desirable within the national conversation”, Goodwin writes. “The new elite watched the prevailing culture be completely reshaped around their far more socially liberal values, tastes, political priorities, and interests.”As an exercise, I followed up a random citation. On p101 of the Kindle edition, he says: 'These changes played a direct role in Labour's electoral collapse[...] Political appeals to the working class', conclude professors Geoff Evans and James Tilley, in their insightful study of how Labour's electorate unravelled over the last ten years, 'have now effectively disappeared from the lexicon of party politics.' The meaning of what he's saying is clear: that Labour, primarily under Miliband and Corbyn, have lost sight of the working class, with catastrophic consequences (ie the 2019 election). These tensions have been reinforced by the way the elite see some groups as less morally worthy or virtuous. Instead of bringing people together around unifying narratives the new elite are increasingly adopting a world-view that is hard-wired to push different groups apart. They are reshaping institutions around a divisive new ideology of radical woke progressivism that awards highly-educated liberals and racial, sexual and gender minorities a much greater sense of social status, honour and respect than other groups. This leaves many voters feeling that not only have their values been cast aside but that they and their wider group are now being shamed and stigmatised as a morally inferior under-class. Martin Shaw compared the book unfavourably with Goodwin's work a decade earlier, arguing that whereas he was previously working with "serious scholars, helping to produce some real research", in Values, Voice and Virtue "he’s finally gone solo and it shows." Shaw called the book "a debasement of social-scientific elite theory." [19] Aaronovitch, David. "Flag, faith and failure: three days with the National Conservatives". Prospect . Retrieved 18 August 2023.

Match of the Day host and supposed ‘new elite’ enforcer Gary Lineker. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters Either Goodwin doesn't understand that the groups he talks about overlap, or he doesn't want to dig into the nuance. He talks about the working class as if it is only made up of white and straight people. There's no recognition that many people of colour/LGBT+ people are also working class.Many would also agree with his view that this group was blind to the evidence that a majority would vote for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, arguably Britain’s defining anti-elitist event of the 21st century. That isn't an issue in itself, obviously. My own politics are pretty similar to his in many respects. But he lets them into his work, making the book less effective as an argument. Funnily enough, he mentions 'confirmation bias' in his introduction and this is exactly what happens in this book. It has been 26 years since the British children’s television show Teletubbies aired on TV for the first time, with its infamous grassy hill, Sun Baby and 10ft tall aliens capturing the hearts of children all over. Like with so much TV aimed at infants, Teletubbies made no sense, but its saturated colours and catchy songs made it a mainstay in children’s entertainment.

The dissatisfaction has been fermenting for decades. There is little public trust left in social media so Russian bots aren’t to blame either. Rather there is a distinct period (begun under Margaret Thatcher|) that has culminated in a paper thin difference between the two political parties and leaves little in the way of traditional left/right democratic alternative. That there are such echoes across the decades should not surprise us. The image of a distinct, new elite, defined by its education and values, and standing over the common people, has a long history, popping up throughout the 20th century. The roots of the contemporary debate about the new elite lie in the 1970s. The late Barbara Ehrenreich published with her husband, John, an essay in 1977 in which they coined the term “ professional-managerial class” (PMC). There had developed, they argued, a new class of college-educated professionals, from engineers and middle managers to social workers and culture producers, that was distinct from the middle class of old but essential to the functioning of capitalism. The Ehrenreichs were hopeful that this class could be mobilised for progressive causes. They warned, however, that it could also give rise to “what may at first sight seem to be a contradiction in terms: anti-working class radicalism”. Only in America was inequality higher than under Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. London was made an open hub for business, tax havens, gangsters oligarchs and kleptocrats. A stateless elite seized power accordingly and the rest were left to rot. The British working class is exemplified by statistics on poor health, low life expectancy and East European level living conditions. Goodwin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics and contemporary history from the University of Salford in 2003 and obtained a Master of Arts degree in political science from the University of Western Ontario in 2004. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree under the supervision of Roger Eatwell at the University of Bath in 2007. [3] Career [ edit ] Academic [ edit ]

Daniel Lavelle spoke to people who have decided, or been forced, to live in caravans as rising rents and section 21 evictions make housing increasingly precarious for many. Nimo Members of the old elite derive their social status from wealth, income, holidays and leisure time. Members of the New Elite increasingly derive their status from their luxury beliefs and their allegiance to radical ‘woke’ progressivism (a worldview that some of them try to claim does not even exist). They rally behind the leading advocates of this new religion and deride those who are critical of it. They claim to be committed to liberalism and pluralism, while simultaneously avoiding or shutting down debate with anybody who might hold different beliefs to their own. metropolitan middle-class for its votes while the Conservative Party appeals increasingly to working-class, non-university educated voters in former Labour heartlands (the " red wall"). [20] Goodwin recommends that political parties "lean into" this realignment, by moving "left on economics and right on culture". [21] [22] [23] The morning after the Conservatives under Boris Johnson won the 2019 general election Goodwin tweeted "it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity & culture." [24] Kenan Malik wrote that this view was based on an assumption the working class are socially conservative, and "the trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation", citing examples such as attitudes to sexuality, premarital sex and interracial relationships. [24] Many still believe that the vote and will of the majority should count and that the emphasis on differences isn’t culturally cohesive. This often shows itself as a divide in pride over being British, a censoring of alternative views and the idea that the floundering British working class have somehow squandered their “white privilege.” There are several premises in Goodwin’s argumentation that, albeit not original, one would struggle to disagree with. For one, he is right to point out the erosion of significant differences between the two main political parties, Conservative and Labour, which have coalesced around the liberal consensus set up by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. He is also correct in linking that to the relative reduction in social mobility (from accountancy to architecture to acting), coupled with the rise of a new middle class that has benefitted from that liberal consensus and that has been increasingly detached from other social groups. Indeed, a significant part of this social group displays a broad liberal orientation on both economic and cultural matters. However, Goodwin uses these widely accepted observations to perform a series of logical and empirical leaps in the attempt to push a very transparent political agenda.