Britain’s new divide is not about a rejection of liberalism, writes Allen Simpson
In the dying days of the Gordon Brown government, Douglas Carswell made an impish appearance at a Fabian conference to tell the left that it had a structural problem.
He said our purpose was to oppose the powerful, but we have been so successful at reshaping the public space that we have ourselves become the elite. The left is embarrassed by this new power, and has abandoned our working-class interests in favour of an identity politics which allowed – and I quote – ‘readers of the Guardian to play at disadvantage’. His prediction was that we would be wiped out across our heartlands by any party which understood the worries of the modern working class.
David Goodhart’s new book on the gulf between a metropolitan, graduate tribe he calls ‘Anywheres’ and the ‘Brexitland’ tribe he calls ‘Somewheres’ brought that Carswell prediction to mind. Early press comment has been largely dedicated to the chapters on why so many people appear to object to immigration, even if their own areas have been unaffected. But the book also has something to say about a parallel and equally important problem – a quieter dispute about who in society has opportunity and who does not.
Goodhart’s thesis has been misrepresented (at times even by himself) as being a rejection of liberal values. In fact, something subtler is happening within the data he has collected for his book. Polling shows no dispute across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide about cornerstone liberal issues like gay and minority rights or women’s equality. As he notes, Somewheres are ‘in the main, modern people for whom women’s equality and minority rights … are part of the air they breathe’.
Certainly they are mildly more nationalistic, and rather more nervous of immigration. But as Goodhart argues, that is more a result of the greater emotional significance that communities have for these groups than of any dislike for the incoming people themselves. We should not be naive about the small proportion of the population which is directly racist, but it is not representative of the large part of society which experiences changed communities as a loss.
So if we are not seeing a rejection of liberalism, why does it so often seem that the opposite is the case?
It may be that the protections offered by the Anywhere form of liberalism – the ideals brought into law by acts of parliament, culminating in an Equalities Act which stands as the last great achievement of the Labour government – are simply less relevant to many in the country.
Life chances today are defined above all else by geography and access to education. There is legitimate disagreement about whether these problems are getting better or worse, but if they are loosening they are doing so far more slowly than the constraints of gender, sexuality or ethnicity.
It can never be said enough that the most disadvantaged person in the United Kingdom today is a young white working-class boy outside of the major cities.
While a middle-class woman may still expect – nearly 50 years after the Equal Pay Act – to earn 10 per cent less than a middle-class man, a working-class man or woman will earn around half that.
London and the south-east account for nearly 70 per cent of the UK’s top 20 per cent of socially mobile areas. Yorkshire and the Humber, the north-east and the west Midlands between them count for none.
A single mum in Warrington who works shifts at the local supermarket may be marginally less likely than their male colleague to be promoted to team leader, with the extra 70p an hour it brings. But she knows that gender is not the reason for the gap between her and the supermarket manager’s far larger graduate salary. She is poor before she is a woman.
Employment seen as ‘women’s work’ within these Somewhere groups will often pay less than an equivalently skilled ‘male’ job, but both are paid far less than low-skilled middle class jobs. It would be difficult to argue that the skills and talents required to work in third sector public relations – a predominantly middle‑class female job – are higher than those required to be a nurse, which remains a predominantly female job with a working‑class, technical skills tinge. Yet the average nursing salary is lower.
In that context it is perhaps unrealistic to expect the Somewheres to engage with the evident inequalities of race or gender. Remember the polling – they absolutely believe in the principle of equality, but they know it is an abstract concern to them; a glass ceiling they will probably never reach.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a useful metaphor. When your most immediate concerns are to do with physiological needs, safety and belonging – the very areas where Somewheres feel threatened – the limits on self-actualisation implied by identity discrimination must feel very far away.
The paragraphs above are likely to be more contentious than they should be, and it is fascinating how firmly the Anywhere tribe polices the borders of its narratives of disadvantage.
For many of us within the Anywhere liberal left, our concern for equality and the care of others defines our sense of ourselves as good people. The cognitive dissonance in seeing yourself as fighting inequality while in practical terms being the beneficiary of it is not an easy thing.
Speaking in the House of Commons, rising star Jess Phillips gave a densely packed example of this problem. It is worth quoting at length: ‘For the first seven years of my career, I earned less than my husband. I am sure he will not mind my saying that I am not sure that he even has a GCSE. The work he did was what is considered to be man’s work – he is a lift engineer – and, after all, I was working only in a charity, helping victims of domestic and sexual violence.’
There is more than one sense in which Phillips is exceptional. Her work with victims of domestic violence before and within parliament guarantee her a place in heaven. She is also without question a representative of the new elite. The child of a very senior public official and a company director, she has degrees in social policy and public sector management. Her advance to the House of Commons and her performance within it seem in that context almost inevitable – as indeed does her attitude towards her husband’s Somewhere technical skills in the face of her own Anywhere humanities degrees.
A similar story appears to hold across the all-women shortlists which have done so much to improve the gender equality of the parliamentary Labour party. On most measures AWS members of parliament are higher quality than the wider House. They ask more questions, and speak more in debates. They are also more likely to be from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. But they are – marginally – more rather than less likely than other Labour MPs to come from the small part of the population with an elite education both at school and university level. The policy does nothing to address the deeper inequalities experienced by the greater number of people, and indeed explicitly excludes many people whose social capital is lower than those it includes.
Many of us in the Labour party have expressed exasperation at polling which shows that both men and women of every social class disapprove of AWS. Perhaps for some people it is not disapproval of positive discrimination, but confusion as to why you would be content with a policy which intervenes so far from the point of greatest need.
All of this places the Anywheres in unnecessary opposition to voters who share many of their liberal views, but know they will never have need of them. We do not need to make the case for equality. But we do need to make good on the promise for everyone, not just ourselves.
––––––––––––––––
Allen Simpson is a member of the Progress strategy board. He tweets at @allen_m_simpson
––––––––––––––––