The Ballad of the Sub-Prime Voter and the Failing State

Voter suppression wasn’t, until last year, much of a problem in the U.K. The electoral system itself distorts the outcome of elections, and mostly benefits one party. The drawing of electoral boundaries can skew likely outcomes, though in nowhere near as egregious a manner as we see in the US. But the operation of the voting system itself, and the experience of voters at the polls, was well-run, trusted, and honest.

Then came this.

The Elections Act has introduced compulsory ID for voters. Unlike Brexit, which was accompanied by blather about “the rights of the free born Englishman”, the Elections Act might be considered a step on the way to European-style ID cards. But it’s actually much more sinister than that.

This is intended as voter suppression. The list of acceptable photo ID is skewed to favour older voters, the sort who are most likely to vote for the party that put the measure on the statute books. But it’s also about voter humiliation. It intends to label some voters as ‘sub-prime’. And then, publicly, to humiliate them.

I know this, because I am a sub-prime voter. There are estimated to be at least two million of us, but I am one of the mere 10,000 who have, as yet, applied for what I thought might be a sub-prime voter card, a small, durable card of the type you might get when you join a gym, or pick up a pass for Conservative Party Conference, say. But it isn’t one of those. It’s a bit of paper, A4 (you’d have thought that a Brexit benefit might have at least brought back foolscap). A flimsy bit of paper that’s supposed to last 10 years.

I don’t drive. I haven’t renewed my useless Brexit passport, as I have a parent who was born in an EU country and remained a citizen there. I’m not yet old enough for a bus pass, I’m not in the armed forces. If I want to vote in the local elections in May, I need this leaf of glorified bog roll.

It won’t embarrass me to present this when I go to vote. My only sadness is that it’s illegal to video me as, ostentatiously, I wave the piteous page at the person behind the trestle table in the church hall. Perhaps, after marking my cross in the box, I will ask as to which bin they would like me to deposit my sub-prime ballot paper?

But how might someone else feel, perhaps seeing sturdy little cards and robust passports presented ahead of her, and then having to show this cheap, crumpled token of how the government sees people like her? And if it looks this tatty now, what will it look like in ten years time?

What’s worse, is that although we know that this is a government whose only competence is performative cruelty, I’m not even sure if this vote-shaming stunt was deliberate? Penny pinching, maybe? Or simply not thought through, like nearly everything they do.

When it comes down to it, this sad little tale of a failed party, a failed government, one that’s spent nearly thirteen years stripping back the capacity of the state to deliver even its basic functions, is made stark by the Voter Authority Certificate. This flimsy piece of paper, if it is to be used by actual citizens, will be folded and shoved into pockets or bags. If someone wants to vote before or after work, they’ll presumably have to carry it around all day, or else lose their rights. How long before it’s creased, greased, torn, a metaphor for failure clasped in ten thousand, or two million hands?

When I opened the envelope this morning to see my VAC, I thought all the things I’ve expressed above. Plus one other emotion. Anger.

I want my rights back!

The Coalition For Chaos

Labour’s poll lead started rising as the always inevitable chaos of Johnson’s last months ground on, soared under the Tufton St Gang’s doomed libertarian experiment, and has become seemingly locked in to a large and steady lead under Sunak.

Already there’s a tangible sense among the commentariat that the Tories are heading for defeat at the next election. The flattering profiles of Rachel Reeves, serious attention to the Labour leader in The Times and The Telegraph, these things add to the sense in the London media that change is on the way, and might even be quite interesting.

But it’s not surprising that Starmer is apparently warning his Shadow Cabinet about the dangers of complacency. It’s not so much the folk memory of 1992 that’s seared on Labour’s collective psyche, as a hard headed analysis of polling data.

Labour’s headline numbers look good, but dig about in the weeds and they also look soft. Labour was ahead in the polls leading up to 2015, too. The new wisdom is that party poll ratings are a less reliable guide to how an election campaign will go than the ratings of the respective leaders. And Sunak and Starmer are neck and neck in the numbers for who would make the best Prime Minister, with Sunak often ahead of his Labour rival.

Add to this the “shy Tories”, those nervous little creatures who scuttle for cover behind the ‘Don’t Know’ label whenever a pollster asks the question about voting intention. Different pollsters use different methods to finesse these ostensibly undecided voters, but there’s plausible evidence that if and when they vote, they split about two to one in favour of the Conservatives.

It is upon these hypotheses – about the relative strength of the party leaders, and the reserve army of mobilisable Tory voters – that some Tory strategists are marking out a route through which they can minimise their losses, and perhaps even retain power in a 5th successive general election victory.

In other words, the Tories, factious, ungovernable as they are, are still true to their primary motivation – the gaining, retention, and exercise of power. They will fight, hard and as dirty as is necessary (and then some), to serve the interests they love.

And it might even be relatively simple for the Tories and their allies in the media to smash Starmer and smear Labour, if it wasn’t for a bloody great rancid flea in the ointment. Movement on their right flank.

Reform U.K., heirs to UKIP and the Brexit Party, are stirring. And this time they’re promising to stand against the Tories in all seats, unlike 2019 where they stood down for hard-line Brexiters. Some polls put their ratings as high as 9%, equalling Lib Dem poll numbers. Breathless right wing newspapers speculate about the return of Nigel Farage, and there’s sometimes talk of defections of Tory MPs to the Reform banner.

I sometimes spend too long peering at poll data, but I do think it to be true that the Labour lead is soft, susceptible either to hardening, or to melting away, in the perma-campaign from now until the general election. Whether the Tories are right to fear an insurgency to their right, I can’t tell. There are new, right wing rolling opinion channels which might be cheerleading Reform, but their audience figures are tiny. How much reach their social media clips get is no doubt being researched by someone, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet to suggest that they’ll be anything more than bit players in the election.

But there’s one more factor that is not getting the attention it deserves in the Westminster focussed media. That’s the role of the SNP.

The Tory Party regards the SNP as the gift that keeps on giving. The party smashed Labour in Scotland, eliminating a swathe of parliamentary seats that Labour could once regard as their bedrock, further handicapping the party under the First Past the Post voting system. And David Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 arguably owed as much to a latent English nationalism that was mobilised in ‘fears’ that the SNP would the tail that wagged the dog in any minority Labour administration.

So far, so predictable. In 2022 many who were not on the Tory side enjoyed ironically resurrecting the Tories’ “Coalition of Chaos with Ed Miliband” slogan as the Tory clown show ploughed on before our incredulous eyes. But less considered has been where the SNP stands in all this. With 48 seats in the Commons, the third party in terms of size, despite Scotland having a population a good deal smaller than that of Greater London, the party is a major player in Westminster. What the SNP chooses to do under new Westminster leader Stephen Flynn really matters for what happens in the next U.K. general election, and whether Labour wins, or the Tories hang on to power.

So what interest does the SNP have in U.K. politics, and in which party is able to form the next government? How does the new SNP leadership plan to play the next 18 months, or two years?

We know that the founding purpose of the SNP is to secure the secession of Scotland from the U.K. Like all nationalist projects, the goal is sovereignty, taking back control of resources, laws and borders. The party leadership under Nicola Sturgeon has sought to do this by constitutional means.

But ‘constitutional means‘ doesn’t just mean negotiations between the U.K. government and the Scottish administration, the use of referendums, legal challenges through the courts. It also means raw politics in the pursuit of power, as is the case for any legitimate party in a democracy.

Sturgeon has said that she will treat the next U.K. general election as, in Scotland, a vote on independence. (As an aside, it wasn’t entirely clear that even the 2014 referendum was regarded by people as a a vote on independence. Like the 2016 Brexit referendum, the NHS and the state of public services cropped up a lot.) It’s a big ask, seeking over 50% of the vote under FPTP, but it’s a bold and striking strategy that has some political logic to it.

So how important are the SNP MPs in Westminster to all this? In the battle for Scottish votes, what happens in Edinburgh, and in the Scottish media is surely much more pertinent than what is, or is not said in the House of Commons? But equally SNP MPs, and the strategy and tactics adopted by their leadership on the ground are very important in the battle to set the political weather. Bluntly, SNP MPs are in a battle to game U.K. politics for maximum SNP advantage in the goal of securing majority consent for independence. The mood music of Westminster is a key part of the mix.

The new Westminster leader, Flynn, sees this with clarity. Taking back control of resources, laws and borders requires the winning of hearts far more than the winning of minds. In Holyrood for 15 years, but especially in the last eight under Sturgeon, the Holyrood election winning formula has been to present the SNP as a steady, competent, ‘social democratic’ party in tune with a steady, competent Scotland, in stark contrast to a mean, nasty, public services slashing, and latterly entirely chaotic Tory U.K. dominated by emotionally incontinent English nationalists.

In other words, failing Tory government is the optimum U.K. political backdrop for the achievement of Scottish secession. It follows from this that the maintenance and perpetuation of Westminster chaos must be the primary duty of the SNP in Westminster.

The Labour recovery threatens that happy chaos. Whilst in Scotland the framing of political choice entirely in terms of secession, with a number of inventive epithets lumping together what are called “pro-Union” parties has had more than a decade to bed in and become a normal part of political discourse, this only works whilst the “Union HQ” looks like a disease, not a cure. The long general election campaign now beginning will be seen, through however artfully skewed a lens, in terms of which party is likely to win the battle for Westminster. And if that party, Labour, seems to promise a change of direction, a renewal of public services, a restoration of a competent government and a state with the capacity to deliver change, only with far greater access to the levers of power, that could be a problem for the SNP.

We saw at Flynn’s first PMQs in December last year a more urgent sense of the SNP wanting to do in Westminster what it has done in Scotland – explicitly tying Labour to the Tories as essentially the ‘lite’ version of full-fat Tory unionism. In this, conveniently, they have allies in the form of some supporters of the former leader of the Labour Party, who are equally clear that they prefer ideological warfare and the consequent perpetuation of Tory rule, to the election of a disappointingly unradical Labour government.

The ‘thinking aloud’ I’m doing in this blog post isn’t intended to critique Starmer, or Labour’s political strategy, or likely programme for government. I’ll do that elsewhere. I’m simply trying to look at the year or so ahead from the perspective of what could keep the Tories in power, despite everything they have done, from the dismantling of a functioning state, to the international humiliation that is Brexit. And I think the conclusion is inescapable.

The fate of next U.K. government is likely to owe something – and possibly a great deal – to what the SNP does in Westminster.

Cold political logic demands that the SNP uses all its formidable skills to undermine, to ridicule, to trash Labour to prevent it gaining a big parliamentary majority. If that keeps the Tories in power, and 67 million U.K. citizens in misery, so what? It’s a price worth playing to take back sovereignty.

Labour better be prepared.

Take Back Control

Last night I went to bed exhausted. Exhausted by the zombie Tory Party and its infinite capacity for slapstick. A party that turned a Commons lobby into a fight night, with the Deputy Prime Minister allegedly threatening to rip one reluctant MP “a new arsehole”. A PM sprinting through the corridors after the Chief Whip so fast that she lost her security detail. It’s too much for poor, punch drunk voters like me.

So today it started all over again. The celebrity lettuce on the front of The Daily Star, the traditional daily visit to the Prime Minister by the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the ritual humiliation of the head of the executive by a sacking in the rain outside No 10. No wonder Larry legged it for the day.

The country can’t keep going through this endless torture by Tories, and their boundless capacity for ever more bizarre outrages. From Chillaxed Dave’s careless calling of a referendum for which no plans were made in advance, through Theresa May’s desperate, doomed bid to save the party she loved even at the expense of the country, to Johnson’s manic clown with a chainsaw act, to Truss, the charmless, clueless ideologue who laughed as she sacked people, this party must now be over. No more.

Yet as I write these thoughts another ‘election’ is being planned, the details made up on the hoof (that always goes well), and in a week we’ll have a new PM chosen by the same people who chose Truss a few weeks ago, only this time via a eminently hackable online vote. And who will stand? One of the failures, the disgraced Johnson, the only PM to be fined for breaking a law he had made whilst in office, thinks he’s the front-runner. It’s a joke.

An international joke. The markets aren’t laughing, but the media is. German TV News has been enjoying the fruity language of the Mother of Parliaments, while the New York Times has followed with interest the fate of The Star’s salad. Even the blameless bean curd has been in the spotlight thanks to yesterday’s Home Secretary who dreams of putting tofu on a flight to Rwanda. She’s standing for PM, by the way. Again.

It’s about 100 years since the Liberal Party ceased to be a party of government in a U.K. in which a distorting electoral system makes the Conservative Party the almost inevitable governing party. Whatever decline, perceived or real, that Britain has suffered in that time is down to the party that nearly always occupies No 10.

The things that used to make the party, to coin a phrase, ‘strong and stable’ have long gone. From party of business to party of ‘fuck business’ (Boris Johnson’s words), from the party of the aspirant, to party of the old and the resentful. Only the press, itself no longer the power it was, can be relied on to bang the drum for this party.

It’s not even a real political party in any meaningful sense. Riven by factions that span the gamut of the right from near anarchist libertarianism to nativist authoritarianism, it’s hard to discern any coherence of thought or belief in the modern party.

But the greatest recent damage it has done is to Britain as a democracy. Far from ‘conserving’ our democratic institutions, it’s taken an axe to them. The Brexit referendum, technically ‘advisory’, was turned by sleight of hand into the ultimate democratic mandate, higher than parliamentary, or representative democracy. The plebiscite is binary, with a winning and a losing side, and that’s it, game over. Whilst representative democracy has checks and balances, government and opposition, both legitimate. Mandates are finite and have to be renewed. Majority choices are balanced by minority rights. The Tories have nudged our political culture towards a plebiscitary model, which is how the party has ended up way to the right on the international political spectrum of democratic parties.

Above all, contemporary Toryism is chaotic, incapable of coherent government. Power is its drug, a near corrupt craving for trappings, baubles, and, yes, riches. There’s little sense that many of them have any innate instinct for true public service. Those that do were mostly expelled by Johnson.

And so we cannot, surely, go through another Tory leadership lottery without a general election? it would be outrageous. A further degradation of our political system. We must demand that they bend to the legitimate public desire for a meaningful say over who governs us, and how.

We’re all exhausted. But sorry, Brenda from Bristol, we need “another one”. A General Election. Before Christmas.

We Are Where We Are

We are in the dying days of a Prime Minister, the third in six years, all destroyed by the flagship policy of their party. When are they going to realise that Brexit isn’t the Philosopher’s Stone? Just say it, all of you, from nice Rishi, Nigel Lawson without the sneer, to ‘Suella’, born at the height of ‘Who Shot JR’ mania to wacky parents who named her Sue Ellen. Say it, Unmagnificent Eleven – Brexit’s a crock of shit, and you’re all fighting for possession of the commode.

But it isn’t about Brexit any more. The bridges have been burned, the tunnels sealed up. We’re barely even Airstrip One these days. Haven’t got the staff.

This is about this sad little island set in a silver sea full of ferries staffed by temporary agency workers, and desperate people in inflatables. The only plot, blessed or otherwise, is the ongoing Tory plot against themselves. We are hostages, and sleepwalkers, onlookers, and junkies. We rap out morse code on the radiators to which we are chained, or film the whole car crash and upload it to Tik Tok, or shoot up until that drowsy numbness hits.

I could witter on about the ‘runners and riders’ as if it mattered. Or give vent to justified outrage at what Kim Johnson and his whole Kardashian family, and their assorted hangers-on, have done to us in the tawdry pursuit of Kremlin gold wallpaper, but what’s the point?

Why aren’t we angry? On television I see Sri Lankans lolling on their PM’s bed, or frolicking in his brother’s Presidential pool. Perhaps it’s easier when the Rajapaksas have looted the country and there’s literally no money left. The Tories have only looted our reputation as a country that used to respect international law. Trashed the constitution. And it’s not as if we’re all hungry. Only 27% of children live in poverty. The same figure as the number of hours someone spent waiting in an ambulance outside an A&E department yesterday.

It feels as though the next sentence should be, ‘We can’t go on like this’. But we do go on like this. On, and on, and bloody on. Blown around on a tempest powered by money and malice, much of it off-shore, or never on shore. And the longer it goes on (which is already way too long) the more perilous it will get.

It’ll get dangerous, because people aren’t wholly passive, or just hopelessly cynical, when it comes to what’s wrong. People do feel in their bones a queasy sense that things ought not to be like this. Every pack of pasta dropped in the supermarket food bank box is a token of conscience, of moral unease, shared by shoppers from Aldi to Waitrose. There’s something lurking in the fear that we feel as we look at this month’s Direct Debit from the energy supplier, and know it’s nearly twice last year’s figure, and set to double again later in the year when there is no heatwave, only lengthening nights and frost on the window ledge. There’s lots of latent discontent that for now is unsaid, or expressed in gestures.

It’s not as if we aren’t aware of precisely what the problem is. Plenty of people – politicians, academics, commentators – are doing the hard work of analysing what’s wrong. There are reports, and conferences, the odd people’s jury, to suggest what might be done, and how, and by whom. But who knows about these things, unless they’re directly involved, except sad people like me who read the reports, and go to the meetings. So the many collective and individual grievances, except in the rare event that they have a union to organise them, remain in isolation from the ideas that might be, if not their resolution, at least might offer practical relief, or improvement.

Because what is needed to link these disparate things – the inchoate unease, real material need, alienation, cynicism – with the prescriptions from which we might choose something else, something better, is the very thing that is currently most despised. Politics, and politicians.

But power is so highly centralised on this island that even devolved governments have little real ability to make real change, except at the margins. We are in desperate need of leadership that can take the fight to the centre, as the first necessary, but insufficient, stage of change. The centre needs to irrigate the country, but right now, it drains it. And will continue to do so until it’s under new management.

The Tories aren’t capable of doing this. They might have been, once, when they shared certain basic convictions, and observed the rules about what constituted good governance. Those far off days when ‘law ‘n order’ wasn’t an empty three word slogan. But now solutions cannot come from the party responsible for turning a drama into a crisis into a bloody apocalypse (dump “green crap” even as the planet burns?) The sooner the whole Tory Party is told firmly, in the words of their esteemed and gallant former Chief Whip, to “go away and shut up”, the better.

The trouble is, who else is going to do it? Where’s the leadership to come from now?

There are plenty of opportunists and loudmouths, political entrepreneurs, who fancy a bit of the Tufton Street action, some Heritage Foundation gelt, a regular seat on the talk shows and Question Time, and approval in the Mail and the Telegraph. We could easily continue on this road for some time to come, if we allow that to happen.

The Opposition needs to stop cringing. It’s time for a bit of courage, a bit less cap doffing to the ‘wisdom’ of focus groups (which only repeat the lines they’ve heard from louder voices). Of course it’s not easy. Too much of the press is a plaything of some rich and malevolent men. The BBC is cowed. Getting heard isn’t straightforward. But playing by the rules that the others break is getting us nowhere. A ‘reasonable’ sounding Blair talking conversationally on a daytime TV sofa won’t cut it in these times. A good PMQs is nice, but it’s nothing more than a sound bite, not a megaphone. In a shock jock age it’s necessary to turn up the volume to be heard. And once leaders command attention, the proper arguments can begin, the vision can be sketched out, and the people who don’t feel heard right now will, perhaps reluctantly at first, feel the first stirring of hope.

Otherwise we are stuck, trudging morosely along on the treadmill to nowhere. And I’m not sure I can take much more.

Why Vote?

Glancing at my phone this morning I was reminded by Facebook of my entry on this day in 2017. Theresa May had just called a general election, and was riding high in the polls, all of which gave her a lead of over 20 points. The local elections hadn’t yet happened, though when they did, they were dreadful for the Opposition. And I wrote, from a feeling in my gut, but no empirical evidence whatsoever, that I was an “optimist”.

My optimism in 2017 was that despite Corbyn, who hadn’t done a thing in the 2016 referendum campaign, despite the Tory poll lead, the galvanising effect of Brexit had given a unity of purpose to the Remain camp which could yet weaponise tactical voting, stop May’s presumed landslide, and perhaps, lead to a People’s Vote.

And arguably that’s almost what happened. No landslide, hung Parliament, tactical voting everywhere. Even in an electoral system as skewed as ours, given common purpose, we can be effective.

Today, with local elections looming, a ‘difficult’ by-election ahead in Wakefield, polls tanking for the Tories, and voter opinion word clouds centring upon words like ‘liar’, you might think that my inner optimist might be clamouring to get out. But it’s not.

Of course, there isn’t a general election looming. It’s hard to get motivated by local elections, especially when few councils will change hands when only a third of wards are being contested. Turnout will be low, 30%, perhaps a lot worse in some areas. There’s no sense of jeopardy, at least not for opposition parties.

The Tories are worried, of course. I saw an election poster locally which made me do a double take. It obeyed the visual grammar of an election flyer, with two smiling young men, and a background of a billowing Union Flag, upon which was printed the candidates’ names, and the date of the election. But of party affiliation, there was no sign. No party name, no logo. A search of the local press showed that the Conservative policy was explicitly to detach the local party from any association with the Tories nationally. One of the candidates said to the media, and this became the headline, “I’m nothing to do with the national side of the party”.

In other words, Conservatives contesting this election are worried. They are resorting to highly unusual tactics to shore up their vote.

You’d think that the other parties, and especially Labour, would be brimming with confidence at this scent of blood.

It doesn’t feel like that. Far from it.

Labour’s leadership seems to be locked into a permanent cringe, forever in awe of the Tories. The response to the Tories’ cynical and outlandish stunt in which they claim that they will banish all male refugees, however deserving of asylum, to camps in Rwanda, exemplifies this. Where the former oil executive turned Archbishop of Canterbury, no wimp he, felt compelled to express his moral disgust from the pulpit, Labour is reduced to bloodlessly stressing the expense, and the practical difficulties of implementation of this bizarre and offensive policy.

It is easy to understand why Labour is in this pitiful position. The leadership is in thrall to focus groups. Where the former Labour leader reportedly waved away all polls, and took no interest in qualitative opinion research, the current leader is mesmerised by them. Both leaders were wrong. Polls give some indication of the direction of travel of voting intention, and that is useful. And focus groups can give a glimpse of the sort of messages, narratives, that are lodging in voters’ consciousness. But what they don’t do is reveal how people think. They don’t provide a blueprint for winning elections.

When asked about things we don’t normally spend a lot of time discussing, we tend to repeat whatever we can recall about the subject. If I was in a focus group discussing reality television, or football, I wouldn’t have any real opinions. If pushed, I could probably say something vague about Married at First Sight Australia, or Manchester City and Liverpool. If my fellow discussants then came up with an amusing anecdote about Naked Attraction, or a sad tale about Cristiano Ronaldo, I would probably smile, or nod gravely, as appropriate. It’s the focus group way. Shallow, but indicative of what’s getting through to people.

And so a careful reading of focus groups ought to be telling Labour that it is not projecting a consistent and compelling narrative. That it needs to show clearly what it stands for, and to project leadership. Sadly it is trying to follow opinion, not lead it.

Which brings me to the most personal side of these reflections. I am a voter. I want to feel that there is a party I can vote for which is broadly on my side. There are two key verbs in the last sentence – vote, and feel.

Voting is an action. It requires the voter to make a decision, and to mark a cross on a form. Feeling is what can motivate the citizen into wanting urgently to use that vote – or conversely to stay sullenly at home. I shall vote – I always do – but it will be without any enthusiasm. I am finding it difficult to motivate myself, because the party that usually gets my vote not only doesn’t inspire me, it repels me.

And it feels deliberate. Voters like me embarrass the current leadership. Urban, educated, internationalist, environmentally-conscious, socially liberal, above all, a bit Muslimy-looking, we are not valued. Even Tony Blair quite liked some of those attributes, (with one very conspicuous exception).

And I can’t help but reciprocate. Labour’s “Hero Voters”, town-dwelling, ‘plain speaking’ (euphemism for bigoted), petrol-headed, Brexity, anti-woke, are exactly the kind of people I’ve spent my life avoiding. Which hasn’t been that difficult, even when I’ve lived in ‘Red Wall’ towns. Because they don’t exist in large numbers.

There isn’t a “Red Wall”. It’s a clever marketing invention by the Right, allegedly populated by the “white working class”, who are said to have flexed their reactionary muscles to push Brexit to victory, and who are now king-makers in any electoral contest.

Labour needs to stop believing the Right’s confident, self-aggrandising mythology. It needs to decide what its principles are, what its direction of travel should be, and to show some swagger of its own.

Look closely at the Tories. They have an ethnically diverse Cabinet, and rising ministerial stars, which might be thought to be at odds with dog-whistle xenophobia. Indeed, the Tories often draw attention to that diversity. That the nastiest anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from the likes of Priti Patel, and the most noxious anti-anti-racism/sexism is fronted by Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch, is no accident. It’s a product of their confidence. It’s absolutely audacious stuff, which proves only that sass trumps substance. And Labour’s scared to display much of either.

The Tories are, in reality, running on fumes. Their vote is old, and getting older, their tame press isn’t the powerful beast it once was, and if they lose property developers’ money on top of the laundered Roubles that have been bankrolling them of late, they’ll struggle, even after gerrymandering the boundaries and stifling the Electoral Commission, to maintain their unique hold on our politics.

It’s long past time for Labour to find fire, purpose, and poise. Women, of all ages, all classes, and in all constituencies, are to the left of men, and are a force waiting to be mobilised. Minorities shouldn’t be regarded as an embarrassment. Most people know that climate change is real, and urgent, and everyone wants a decent home, secure work, high-quality healthcare, good education from nursery to tertiary, dignified old age, and a safety net in hard times. Why would that be a hard sell?

I suspect that I’m not alone in wanting a reason to vote that isn’t just the limited goal of getting rid of the Tories.

But I’m not seeing it.

What’s Up With the Tories?

They’re always up to something, those Tories. They aren’t the most successful political party in the world for no reason. Their ability to move from reactionary to reformist, from anti-democratic, to the extenders of the franchise in the 19th Century demonstrates a breathtaking ability to ride any wave. And in the 20th and the 21st Century that shapeshifting has continued, giving us the political folk wisdom that the ruthless Tories want to stay in power so much that they will ditch any leader once he or she starts to look like a liability.

But I’m not sure that the Conservative Party retains that superpower any more. When it was “men in smoke filled rooms” who appointed leaders perhaps it was easier to conclude that a change at the top was necessary, and to act decisively. Indeed, the Tories of old weren’t actually a party in any contemporary sense. The ‘party’ existed in Parliament, and comprised Peers and MPs. The ‘party in the country’ was a network of ‘Conservative Associations’, membership of which was as much social as ideological, perhaps more so. They certainly held little sway over the orientation, policies and leaders of the party in Parliament.

These days the party membership elects the leader, from a shortlist of two, decided, in rounds of voting, by the MPs. Moreover, that membership is small (how small we don’t really know, perhaps 70,000?), heavily white and male, with an average age of 72. How well, collectively, they can read and anticipate the feelings of the wider electorate is perhaps open to question.

And so to 2022, Plague Year Three, and growing signs of panic in the Tory ranks. The party is now consistently trailing in the polls. A poll of Tory members https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-conservative-members-think-rishi-sunak-would-make-better-party-leader-than-boris-johnson-poll-12512455 shows tumbling confidence in their leader. Troublesome backbench groups like the Covid Recovery Group, the Northern Research Group of Red Wall MPs, and the Net Zero group (https://www.itv.com/news/2021-07-31/tory-backbenchers-prepare-to-fight-cost-of-net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions) all suggest that a lot of unhappy rumbling is going on within the party, both in Westminster, and more broadly. There have even been fears reported in the Mail on Sunday of new MPs crossing the floor of the House (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10382665/No10-fear-Red-Wall-chicken-run-defections-Labour.html).

How has a government elected with a huge majority just two years ago ended up so fractious and jittery?

Some explanations are obvious. The party might just have won a landslide, but it’s been in power for twelve years. Brexit isn’t the cakewalk that was promised – quite the reverse – and as for the pandemic, the government has had to face tsunami, after earthquake, after storm. It’s taken a battering.

But this feels like something more than the consequences of external events, or in the case of Brexit, the unintended consequences of an adventure with no agreed purpose or outcomes. It feels like something organic, intrinsic to the contemporary Tory Party, a malignancy.

The Tory Party at its most confident and successful has been disciplined, inclined to resist change for change’s sake, traditionalist, ‘respectable‘ in middle class terms, and studiedly unideological. The system it ruled worked well for Tory interests, and they could see no reason to favour change. Strong, and stable, you might say.

The inflection point, as with so much, seems to go back to Thatcher. She was, or was persuaded to become, ideologically committed. Sir Keith Joseph, a Leeds MP and with something of a reputation as an intellectual in the party, was a key influence. They repudiated what was called ‘the post-war settlement’ of a ‘mixed economy and a welfare state’, and marched the party towards neo-liberalism, what was then often called the New Right. I remember seeing Thatcher era minister, Peter Lilley, now a Brexiter Peer, addressing a packed Tory Party Conference fringe meeting about ten years ago, pumping his fist whilst declaring to the adoring audience, “we were the Leninists of the New Right!”

But Thatcher’s success was less to do with her ideological clarity of purpose, than with her deft melding of neo-liberal novelty with very traditional social conservatism. Ideology only went so far (to the evident frustration at the time of younger Thatcherites, like Lilley, Redwood, and Portillo.

Once Thatcher had been deposed, for the overreach that was the poll tax, the ability to hold together the Conservative Party, a party having become a hotbed of ideologues, was beyond any new leader. Major did his best, beset by ‘bastards’. William Hague, unsuited to the leadership, and facing a confident Labour government, struggled. Iain Duncan Smith was in some ways the best ideological fit for an increasingly Eurosceptic party, but lacked any discernible leadership skills. Michael Howard was hapless, undermined by his own MPs (who can forget Anne Widdecombe’s insidious “something of the night about him” comment?), and in any case ran an election campaign with a negative tone wholly at odds with a Labour government which still looked shiny and optimistic.

Then came David Cameron. In today’s faction-ridden Tory Party, some see Cameron, with George Osborne, as their Blair and Brown, the charismatic and clear sighted reformers who remade their party as a credible electoral force. But the PR gloss of social liberalism might have given the Tories a bit of a makeover in 2010 and 2015, but it was barely skin deep. The hugging of huskies and hoodies soon gave way to muttering about “Green Crap”. The march of the libertarians accelerated under Cameron. ‘Austerity’ went where Margaret Thatcher never dared. Centralisation gathered pace, local government lost up to 50% of its income, the NHS was ‘reformed’ to make it easier to privatise by stealth, and the state itself was hollowed out, stripped of capacity, institutional memory, skills and independence; something made starkly obvious by the pandemic.

But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough for the party the Conservatives have become, an unserious party of ‘fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists’ as David Cameron once called UKIP. After Cameron’s ill-advised referendum in 2016, the UKIP membership has almost entirely decamped to the Tories.

The Brexit referendum threw an unforgiving spotlight on the Conservative Party, though one which too few have commented upon. It is the left that is more often prey to the sin of political vanity which makes them think that capturing the levers of power in a party enables them to steer it like a vehicle in any direction they choose, but Cameron, a PR man in his only real job, also believed that he could steer a referendum using the same tactics that had made him PM, and then won the Tories their first general election in eighteen years. In other words, he really didn’t understand his party, nor the wider political culture that sustains it. As someone in his camp said during the campaign, “Now we know what it’s like to be Ed Miliband”.

From 1832 to the mid-1970s, the Tory Party was an intelligent and flexible force, marshalling their formidable resources, both financial and cultural, to become an almost unstoppable election winning machine. It was genuinely representative of key interests in the country – business, finance, the leadership of the great institutions, like the military, the Church, the judiciary, the universities. It had an authentic appeal to the middle class, who joined the party in their hundreds of thousands. The press was mostly on its side.

But since the 1970s, despite the party’s continued political dominance (with a 13 year interregnum), the ecosystem that supported the Tories has changed radically, and in ways not yet widely understood. (The same is true for Labour, though the effects there are more obvious.) Globalisation, the replacement of industry by finance capital and services, the growing inequality of regions as a consequence, the rise in the numbers of people attending university, migration, rapid technological change, and much else, has altered the landscape. The idea that the Tory world view might by synonymous with that of the Church, the law, leaders of higher education and the great cultural institutions is now palpably absurd. Far from sitting atop a stable pyramid of power, the party surfs the waves of fickle opinion, bankrolled by a footloose selection of assorted chancers, oligarchs, kleptocrats.

And the party’s shrunken membership, with its very own Militant Tendency of former Faragistes, is not the potent force on the ground it once was. Camera phone footage of a raucous looking party meeting in 2019 in former Attorney General Dominic Grieve’s then constituency of Beaconsfield at the height of Brexit faction fights looked far from the 1950s vision of the Tories as a place where your daughter or son might find a respectable marriage partner https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-grieve-traitor-liar-local-conservatives-constituents-no-confidence-a8847266.html.

Brexit was no aberration, no spasm, no moment of madness. Because it is a symptom, not a cause, a malignancy that needed, and continues to need an outlet. The pandemic, or rather it’s handling, has been a temporary vehicle for the rebels in search of a cause. But that will fade. ‘Net Zero’ is shaping up as this century’s Europhobia; not climate change denial, which has never flown in this country, despite the best efforts of ‘think tanks’ and paid advocates. Rather, they will tout a combination of ‘head in the sand’, and a mock regretfulness that ‘nothing we do matters’ in the face of giants like the US, China and Russia.

And so here we are in 2022. Whether Johnson remains leader of the Tory Party is being discussed openly by party members, but the sullen and sometimes volatile electorate in the short term might deliver any outcome this year, from a pasting in the local elections, to a stunning victory for a Teflon PM, or for his successor. The immediate fate of this government, however, isn’t the question.

The real question is what is the Tory Party for, and who, or what, does it represent. Is it a coherent and sustainable force, long term?

Because from here it looks very much like a powerful, malevolent, but terminally ill beast kept on life support by the distortions of the First Past the Post voting system.

The Myth of the 2017 General Election

From the moment the exit poll dropped on election night in 2017, indicating a shock result in which Theresa May went from a 20 point lead at the start of the campaign, to a lost majority and a hung Parliament, a myth has grown, at least among sections of the left, that Corbyn ‘won’ a moral victory, if not an actual one that year. But it’s likely that the real story of the ‘righteous losers’ lies elsewhere.

Let’s start with the facts. Theresa May’s humiliating ‘defeat’ saw her winning 42.4% of the vote, which is 5.5% more than David Cameron got two years earlier, and only 1.2% down on Boris Johnson two years later. That’s 13,636,684 actual votes compared to 13,966,454 votes in the 2019 landslide.

But the myth is about Labour under Corbyn. So how did Labour do? They got 40% of the vote, which was 10 points up on the previous election. That’s 12,878,460 voters backing the party in an election with a relatively high turnout at 68.8%. A stunning result, given Miliband’s 30.4% in 2015. So how and why did that change so rapidly to become, on a similar turnout, 32.1% – 10,269,051 votes – in 2019?

The Corbyn myth, or the myth of the magic manifesto, is seductive. There was a disastrous Tory campaign which showed that three word slogans aren’t always winners (Strong and Stable?). A wooden PM appearing in carefully stage managed venues before hand picked audiences of party supporters was plainly a contrast with the celebrity status that seemed to surround Corbyn, especially his enthusiastic rallies. And polls did show many Labour policies, some of which have subsequently been adopted by the Tories, whether by design (energy price cap, more police) or accident (rail renationalisation), to be popular. How can anyone suggest that there wasn’t some magic to Labour’s 2017 campaign?

Photograph (c) Yasmin Ali

Always a Corbyn sceptic, I did go to his final rally in Birmingham the day before the election. There were lots of people there, the atmosphere was excited, Clean Bandit played a great set, Steve Coogan read Shelley, and when Corbyn spoke, a rainbow appeared in the sky. A sign!

A sign not exactly foretold in the polls. One late YouGov poll, viewed as a rogue, suggested hung Parliament territory, but disastrous campaign or not, the other still pointed to a clear May victory. The only question was the likely size of her majority. But the polls were wrong.

The Corbyn myth makers put it down to the enthusiasm of young voters, the sorts of people who might spontaneously sing his name. The media got on board, writing of a ‘youthquake election’. So what’s the evidence?

There is a clear age effect when it comes to voting intention. The crossover point at which voting Labour tips to voting Tory in 2017 was 47. Below that point, Labour led. After that, the balance shifts, with the over 70s being around 80% Tory. It’s also true that Labour’s vote grew very clearly in constituencies with a lot of young people, such as university towns. But Labour polled most strongly with 30-40 year olds. Higher turnout was driven by younger and minority ethnic voters, but this doesn’t seem to have been the primary driver of the Labour surge. A British Election Study report, The Myth of the 2017 Youthquake Election thoroughly debunks the idea that ‘It Was the Young Wot Won It’.

Corbyn myth makers are less likely to seize on election data that shows the party’s share of the middle class vote soaring by 12%, while the Tories’ share of working class support showed a similar rise.

So who are these Thirtysomething middle class voters who fuelled the Labour surge, and, more to the point, why did they go missing two years later?

Again, it’s polling detail, and the British Election Study which perhaps offers the answer.

The Labour surge happened very late in the campaign. In most elections, furthermore, ‘late switchers‘, people who change their voting intention at the last minute, tend to split fairly evenly between the two big parties. Not in 2017, when 54% of late switchers went to Labour, and 19% (probably from a poorly performing UKIP) went to the Tories.

Detailed analysis by the British Election Study showed that the campaigns run by the parties were not aligned to the issues that were moving voters. Or perhaps that ought to be the ‘issue’. For it was one question, which hardly featured in campaigns by either the Tories or Labour, that was found to be the top concern of the electorate – Brexit.

When the 2016 referendum was called, I thought that Labour would use it as activists around the 2014 Scottish independence referendum used their poll, to campaign around issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with the question on the ballot, such as the NHS, or the state of public services. Instead Labour largely ignored the issue, leaving it to Alan Johnson to run an under resourced Labour Remain campaign without any buy-in or active participation from the leadership. This was a huge mistake, both on an opportunistic, and on a principled basis, but it set the stubborn mindset that was to characterise the party then, and now.

I was slightly involved in campaigns around the referendum, attending meetings on the issue. Labour was always notable by their absence, even at ‘Another Europe Is Possible’ meetings of the left (where there was a palpable sense of fear from some participants, even platform speakers, that their ‘comrades’ might disapprove of their presence at an anti-Brexit event). But as soon as the vote had happened, a strange, loose social media phenomenon began to emerge. People outraged by the result, unguided by parties, began to ‘find’ one another. There was a sharing of hashtags, a habit of following anti-Brexiters, and a practice of adding sympathetic strangers to anti-Brexit Facebook groups.

This grew into the People’s Vote Campaign. Organised at the top, at grassroots it was a loose coalition of local groups, and many, perhaps millions, of individuals. The marches were huge, the meetings often crowded. I recall seeing a slightly bewildered Michael Heseltine, dressed in a casual sweater, address a packed meeting more enthusiastic than he had even in his heyday at Tory Party conference when, with his blond locks, he wowed them as ‘Tarzan’. I recognised many of the people in the hall. Some were Labour activists, some Lib Dem, and others I knew from fields outside politics, people who ran cultural organisations, or were writers and actors.

When the 2017 election was called, this amorphous group, part organised, part autonomous, were immediately embroiled in arguments. Some people were politically naive, with no understanding of how the electoral system worked. Others found their political sectarianism reigniting. But we argued it out, often on a highly local basis, and almost entirely through social media.

It was in the last week of the campaign that I thought something was shifting. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to getting people to vote tactically for Labour candidates was Labour’s lack of enthusiasm for stopping Brexit. In some constituencies there was an additional obstacle in that the Labour candidate was an active Brexiter (my own MP at the time was Gisela Stuart, who would probably have lost the seat had she not stood down). But pragmatism, often through gritted teeth, seemed to prevail. I remember one man, half-accusingly, half-incredulously, saying to me, “You persuaded me to vote Labour!”

Certainly on election night there was elation at a result that at least opened up the possibility of another vote on leaving the EU. I spent that night on social media watching the political party that stole victory from the Tories. And it wasn’t Labour – it was the People’s Vote Party.

Photo (c) Yasmin Ali

That’s how it felt. Now we have the evidence to suggest that our perception was right.

It could have been Labour’s victory. Even after a year of having nothing to say on Brexit, Labour could have read the election result as a second chance to lead the fight, to bring party and trade union banners and numbers to the PV marches, and made unified common cause in Parliament to offer the electorate another chance to vote, and perhaps even to lead a minority government to organise that vote.

But the Labour leadership chose to believe the myth that their ‘absolute boy’ somehow ‘won’.

He didn’t. The extra million (1,120,000) voters he got in 2017 who were gone in 2019 are in number pretty close to the number of people who marched in London on the final People’s Vote March in 2019.

The Corbynite myth of the 2017 election is just that – a fairy tale. The unexplored story, and one with implications that still matter for Labour, and for other parties, too, including the Tories, is what happened to the anti-Brexit coalition, and can it rise again, in some other form, to transform the prospects of some other party?

Losing Focus

There’s a magazine called Total Politics. It’s described as a “lifestyle magazine” for those who work in British politics. I first read it when I was given a free copy at Conservative Party Conference about a decade ago. I’ve always been a political nerd, a wonk, and an ecumenical one, reading publications from across the political spectrum. Why else, indeed, was I at a Tory Conference, as an avowed social democrat?

Total Politics magazine troubled me. It was fascinating in its narrowness and banality, as I suppose fits a ‘lifestyle” rag. There was a joke in Private Eye when the short-lived SDP was born, that their slogan was “Take Politics out of Politics”. Total Politics ought to have used that as their strap line.

The view of politics enshrined in the magazine was that politics was an aspect of media, or showbiz, essentially marketing, advertising and public relations. It was not primarily about principles, philosophy, ideology, or policy development for a purpose. For there was, in its pages, only one purpose in politics – to win.

I’m no ideological purist. Principles without power are of little use in a democratic polity. But ‘win’, in this context, is perhaps a misleading word. Winning really means gaming the system.

When that first copy of Total Politics fell into my hands, I was a political naïf. I had a gut belief that the purpose of winning elections was to do good things, to change unhappy lives, to make the country a better place to live, and a better influence in the world. But this innocuous little publication suddenly made me realise that I was a dinosaur, Beatrice Webb adrift in a Love Island world. For all that I knew about Thatcher and the Saatchis, or the spinners of New Labour, I hadn’t grasped the full degradation of our politics.

Politics is, at least as it is now practised by the main parties, a tawdry matter of the retail offer in a glossy package. It’s a sales job, not a manufacturing job. Find out what voters want, and flog it to them. Don’t waste time on trying the hard stuff – making something real, useful, with a purpose. The only purpose is getting into No.10.

Hence the hiring of Deborah Mattinson as Labour’s new Director of Strategy. Founder of polling firm, Britain Thinks, Mattinson is a firm believer in the use of focus groups to guide policy and strategy in politics.

Focus groups are made up of a small number of members of the public selected to be representative socially, and by political affiliation, of the wider public, either in a constituency or region. It’s quite an industry these days. There are even freelancers who do the legwork on the ground to find these Everyfolk for polling companies.

The methods of the focus group gurus draw crudely from social psychology, and the broader social sciences. There’s usually a convenor who guides the group, posing questions, but not overtly seeking to influence the direction of discussion, though keeping it within the parameters set by the company. Often there is a one way mirrored window in the room, enabling others, for instance, politicians, to witness the discussion as it happens. They ask obvious questions about parties, leaders, and policies, but also less obvious ones, like, “If Boris Johnson was a car, what sort of car would he be?” (The answer to that question, posed last year, was “an unreliable car, the sort that’s falling apart, and keeps breaking down”. Which is funny, contains some truths, but holds no clue as to why he still leads in the polls.)

Mattinson herself has gone beyond these meetings, attaching herself to individual participants after initial group discussions, joining them all day, at their homes, or as they collect their children from school, or head down the pub. Her book, Beyond The Red Wall, is based upon these encounters.

The attraction of focus groups to politicians is, on one level, understandable. Theresa May’s No.10 was apparently obsessed with the political views expressed on Gogglebox. There’s an irreverent energy, or earnest sincerity that can come across in what appear to be ‘unmediated’ public opinion. And unlike radio phone in shows, or television programmes like Question Time, they tend not to come with a high ranty factor.

But focus groups aren’t unmediated – they are ‘cast’, just as much as any QT, and they are led, too, by the questions asked, the steer of discussion, and, however skilled the leader of the group, by dominant individuals in the group, or even just the order in which people speak. There’s a tendency for a group of strangers, without a politician to shout at, to be polite, and to be reluctant to disagree with, or challenge one another. It’s a pull towards conformity with one’s peers, even if it means holding one’s tongue.

Moreover, most people aren’t political obsessives. Even if they watch the news, read a newspaper, they aren’t necessarily much engaged with, or even very informed about, what they read. What people pick up, whether from advertising or from the news, are slogans, and simple narratives.

The Conservative Party has been ruthless about refining what John McDonnell rightly called “misleading analogies”, like Labour “maxed out the credit card”, “spent all the money”, even that Labour, not the international banking system, ‘caused’ the crash of 2008.

Brexit was another successful exercise in telling compelling stories, honing memorable slogans. The Covid pandemic has been successfully sold as “no one could have seen anything like that coming”, and “Boris did his best”, and “we led the world at vaccinating people”. All these stories are demonstrably wrong, but people know them, and they haven’t heard convincing alternatives.

In other words, the Tories dominate the parameters of popular political discourse. Which has consequences for the focus group.

If I got put into a focus group discussing football, I would know nothing about football. I’m not a fan, I don’t watch it, I’d struggle to name a player who wasn’t involved in politics (fortunately quite a few are these days). If put on the spot with a question, I’d reach for whatever has permeated my skull. Manchester United, Liverpool, Spurs, Arsenal. I’d have a benign view of the England team, and I’d remember the name of the manager. Asked about Scotland or Wales, I’d be stumped.

That’s probably how most members of focus groups are. They know what’s in the ether. And what’s in the ether when it comes to politics tends to come from a Tory-supporting perspective.

Which surely must lead to the conclusion that focus groups are an expensive way of amplifying a Tory hegemony in public discourse, which offer no serious evidence of how to challenge it. Listening to their ‘wisdom’ entrenches the Conservative hold on our politics, and stops Labour, and any other party wasting their money on such ‘research’, from doing the things they can do to change the political weather.

If public opinion in the past, as measured at the time, had been ‘respected’ as it is now, we’d never have had a raised school leaving age, votes below 21, the end of the death penalty and theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, race relations legislation, equal pay, equal marriage, and much else. These things happened because enlightened politicians, who recognised the truth that democracy isn’t dictatorship of the majority (like Brexit), but a guarantor of minority rights, used political leadership and statecraft to steer the country along a better course.

Political leadership soon convinced most voters that initially controversial changes were the right thing to do. Political followership, which is what reliance on focus groups involves, is a dead end. It permits the worst, most reactionary instincts to hold a veto on change.

The Total Politics approach to gaming elections is cynical, narrow of vision, unambitious, and rigged in favour of a wholly unsatisfactory status quo. With one of its exponents leading Labour’s “strategy”, the party is paying to take an expensive ride on a road to nowhere.

Class Act

Class. Like politics and religion, it’s one of those things that is supposed to make fastidious Brits uncomfortable if the subject comes up in polite conversation. Yet everyone’s talking about it.

I used to be a very simple soul. I thought that class was, in essence, a category used in social science to describe and explain the distinctive patterns of experience and behaviour of large social groups. There are major disagreements in sociology about definitions, of course; the Marxist idea of classes that power social and economic change through a war of wills and agency (“All history is the history of class struggle”), is very different from essentially descriptive definitions, such as those bloodless categories used by psephologists – AB, C1, C2, DE. But Marx, Weber, Durkheim, poor things, are not the source of today’s arguments about class on this island.

Class is now overwhelmingly a badge of identity. A manufactured identity sometimes pinned on others, sometimes claimed for oneself, and linked materially to consumption , and emotionally to sentiment. It’s become a tabloid concept for a vapid age.

The dominant class, hailed for its ‘authenticity’, is the “white working class”. Old Etonians and academics on the make write books about these stout, commonsensical folk, mostly male, in their distinctive white vans, with their proud banner, the cross of St George. They hate immigrants, especially darker skinned ones, and that is why they commonsensically voted to leave the Pakistani-led European Union. These salt of the earth types love fish and the fishing industry, but won’t eat mackerel, preferring a good British curry. Very importantly, they must not make any effort at school. They must reject the damaging practice of reading books, although they are allowed to “do their own research”. Educational achievement confers no benefits on these people, as evidence shows that white working class men earn more than many professional workers of colour, despite their lack of qualifications. They can be found in towns, preferably those without a university. Their main social activities are watching football in pubs, and giving interviews to the BBC in Dudley market. They used to vote Labour, but now they say that their dad will be spinning in his grave, but they just had to vote for ‘Boris’.

The non-white working class does not exist. Nor can any white working class be found in cities, except, occasionally, in constituencies on the poignant peripheral areas.

When I say that the non-white working class does not exist, I am taking the theorists of the white working class at their word. But not everyone agrees with them.

For there are other definitions which include people of colour. This is where people ostensibly on the left, but eschewing Marxism in favour of identity labels, see ‘working class’ as applying to anyone with a sentimental attachment to some real or imagined aspect of their family history. Generally speaking, such working class people do not have working lives spent on the factory floor, or Amazon warehouse. They are more likely to be found in the creative industries, in education, and other professions, as a study this year from the LSE and published in the journal Sociology, reported.

The middle class has always been a minefield in this island. There are many gradations of class within this category, as the eminent sociologist Grayson Perry has described so well. But ‘middle class’, as James O’Brien has quite rightly suggested, is now primarily a synonym for ‘educated’. Many live in cities, which, far from being large and dynamic places, are actually voids, rendering their middle class inhabitants ‘citizens of nowhere’. They are also known as the ‘metropolitan elite’.

People who went to public schools, attended posh universities, and entertain themselves with ‘work’ in the media, in right-wing ‘think tanks’, or who take interludes doing serious work in The City or the law, before entering politics at the highest level, are not ‘middle class’ in this sense. These people are above labels. They can safely sneer at the labelled ones.

Or at least, that’s what they tell themselves. I have made a study of these people. It’s quite right not to see them as a class, or even as a sub-section of a class. They are a court.

Courts are places of hierarchy. Traditionally the top of the pyramid has been hereditary, but these days to ascend to the top of the court requires a series of markers to be passed, rather like ascent through the levels of a computer game. Prep school, public school, Oxford, the Bullingdon Club, Oxford Union presidency, The Spectator, perhaps a right-wing tabloid or a Murdoch or Barclay Brothers broadsheet, before the inevitable Tory seat, preferably in the ‘Home Counties’.

Others admitted to the court are there as supplicants. Thus they must learn to speak a code, a ‘court patois’ that amuses those who are there by divine right. Phrases like ‘cultural Marxist’ and ‘critical race theory’ are used as incantations, praise songs.

But this metropolis-dwelling, exclusive set (not a ‘metropolitan elite’, nothing so common), somehow brings to mind not the complacent upper classes of the past, but something new, something befitting ‘Global Britain’. For in this court, Johnson, Cameron, Osborne, they are men sliding down the ladder of privilege, and their hangers on, Patel, Williamson, Raab, Javid, et al, descend with them.

Rishi is the cuckoo in this nest. Johnson surely fears him not because he is more popular in polls, or with the party membership, or because his Thatcherite orthodoxy is more in tune with the party’s self-image than Borisian excess. Sunak, unlike any of the rest of them, is a real Sun King.

The angst at the top of the Tory Party, and in the ruling class of this island more generally, has been stoked by class envy. Old Toryism was built on a successful cross-class alliance between the wealthiest in society (Johnson isn’t one of those by a long chalk – the Johnson family faked it till they made it), the ‘respectable’ middle classes, the professions, and business, with a large, but minority tranche of the deferential working class to add voter ballast. But globalisation, the continuing free movement of capital, has unanchored business and most finance from a need to have deep bonds with a ruling class in one country. The expansion of education has democratised the middle class, who no longer cling to one party as a defence against a no-longer organised working class. And London has become a global city, (second) home to the international billionaire class.

The psychological stress this has caused to the old ruling class ought not be to underestimated. All accounts of Johnson, even from his friends, speak of his money worries, his status anxiety. But the chillaxed, insouciance of the likes of Cameron is an act now. His desperate pursuit of Lex Greensill, his fawning over the killers of Jamal Khashoggi, his anxiety to ingratiate himself with Rupert Murdoch, these are the signs of a decaying class desperate to retain wealth and status in the face of the stark reality of their relative fall from the summit.

But Rishi Sunak is one of the new, global citizens. His own efforts (with a leg up from wealthy parents and a public school education) made him seriously rich, and marriage into the billionaire class puts him in a different place to the plodding, dreary millionaires at the top of the Tories. He represents power in a way that they do not. And they hate it.

Class isn’t about identity, it isn’t about morality. It’s about power, who, collectively, has it, who doesn’t, and how that is contested.

The rest is a lot of mildly diverting nonsense.

Me? I’m a socially mobile peasant from the tea growing hills of Asia. A middle class pauper. An authentic white working class kid turned citizen of nowhere. The metropolitan elite. I’m quite content with that.

What Is The Point of Dominic Cummings?

Like many other people, I gave up an hour of my life to watch the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, interview celebrity SPAD Dominic Cummings about his recent time working with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And like fewer people, I then listened to the longer version of the interview available on BBC Sounds. So what did I learn?

My initial response to the TV interview was to satirise it. Cummings would be strange casting for an evil genius. He appears, with his twitching, uncomfortable body language, and slightly truculent Durham accent, like someone you’d be more likely to encounter in a police tape of an interview with a suspect in a missing persons case. That he takes himself extremely seriously only adds to his risibility. He’d have fitted into The Office very well, muttering darkly about getting shot of David Brent, whilst misfiling invoices.

But the air of bathos is misleading. The man is not destined to be at most a mere footnote in the political history of early 21st Century Britain. He has been, and plainly still sees himself as a player at the very top of high politics.

There has always been something usually unspoken lurking at the fringes of the British Establishment which surfaces briefly from time to time, usually when there’s an air of crisis. We last glimpsed it in the 1970s, when some military and intelligence figures were rumoured to be plotting coups against the Labour government. But mostly the collective might of party politics and the institutions that constitute or surround the state have rallied in stout defence of democracy.

I think that Cummings is currently the most publicly visible manifestation of that malign tendency. He is also the most indiscreet. Where the ‘think tanks’ of Tufton Street mostly operate in the shadows of party politics, or use PR gloss to second their operatives to the media to peddle their influence, Cummings eschews metropolitan smoothness for smirking aggression.

Let’s take what he actually said in the interview. He indicated that he was one of a group of “dozens” of people working together to change the nature of the British state. He said that they intend to destroy the party system, either by entryism, taking over an existing party, or by setting up a new and insurgent vehicle for their ambitions.

Cummings was imprecise about what the ultimate purpose of this would be. He spoke in vague generalisations about ‘networks’, ‘data’, and ‘science’. Prodded occasionally by Kuenssberg about what this might mean for democracy, for popular consent, Cummings sidestepped the question.

By the end of the interview I was minded to add it to the file in my mind which also contains Branson and Bezos’s recent trips into the fringe of space. It’s all an oligarchical fantasy of reshaping, or even escaping, the world as it is, and imposing an order that suits the interests of the powerful who have enough to be unanchored from the societies in which the rest of humanity lives.

The trouble is, Cummings’ dream of smashing up everything in order to put ‘brilliant’, unanswerable, unaccountable people in charge, is one he has been well placed to advance, both through the Vote Leave campaign – which he admitted might have been a bad idea – and through effectively running the government for a year. Presumably some of his “dozens of people” are still there, at the highest levels of power and influence.

Cummings, of course, is wealthy, and married to wealth and old Establishment privilege, but he’s not remotely an oligarch. He is, like Johnson himself, and those who still surround him, a courtier. They are not power, they serve power. If we have a PM who calls the Daily Telegraph “my real boss”, as Cummings plausibly asserted, we can see that concentrated media power, and the wealth that buys baubles like fancy wallpaper, is more in control than the actors who go through the motions.

It’s tempting to see Cummings as indiscreet, wounded, angry and lashing out. But that would be to mistake style for purpose.

Cummings is not the puppet master spurned by his marionettes.

He’s got strings too, and someone, something else is jerking them.