The Social Distance Between Us

The Welfare State no longer exists to protect working people from the pitfalls of the free market – it has become infected by a toxic corporatist ideology that is behind its worst excesses. An ideology where citizens become assets and liabilities in public services which are run like cash-and-carries – except, where the poor are concerned, the customer is never right.

Austerity was a sham. The financial crisis that preceded it was created by the same political class and private enterprises which then oversaw the savage cuts to public services that have, according to a report by the IPPR [Institute for Public Policy Research] think-tank, been linked to more than 130,000 preventable deaths since 2010. The explanation that this occurred because politicians are evil does not satisfy me – that would imply competence. The rather banal truth is this: the social distance between those in government and those on the sharp end of inequality cannot be bridged by a few photocalls in poorer communities. It has become so vast that even when some politicians have acted with the intention to improve people’s lives, they have instead immiserated them – or pushed them over the cliff’s edge.

But it’s the hypocrisy of it all that should really anger us. The blatant double standards of a political class, which has for the longest time enjoyed a parallel benefits system which not only distributes public money to them far more generously, in the form of subsidies, expenses and other entitlements, but also one where the rules in place around it are nowhere near as punitive.

Meritocracy cuts to the heart of the political crisis in the UK. The ravine that separates the winners and losers. The more privileged your point of origin, the more remote from the reality everyone else experiences you may become. With increasing degrees of affluence, you may lose touch with the truth of your success, because as well as enjoying the great many perks which exist in a society tipped in your favour across health, housing, criminal justice, education and the labour market, you are also furnished with a narrative which conveniently accounts for them. This lack of proximity increases by orders of magnitude the wealthier you happen to be, as does the hubris and the divergence from social reality as it is experienced by those who enjoy no such perks.

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The myth of meritocracy persists because we all like to feel like we have a degree of autonomy over our circumstances. That we are the authors of our own stories. And like those who rise to positions of great consequence, we are all guilty of embellishing our experiences to some degree, revising the narrative and failing to understand the social forces which determine our trajectories in life. We are all capable of self-delusion. But some delusions are more consequential than others. When meritocracy’s most zealous advocates have no frame of reference for genuine struggle and are rarely forced to compete with those outside their own social class, who are they to define what is meritorious? Who are they to dispense advice about matters of personal responsibility? Surely you should have had to overcome great odds yourself before you get to define what or who is and isn’t ‘worthy’? Indeed, it is the endless falling upward of profoundly unserious and mediocre people in British public life in recent years which exposes meritocracy as [a] bare-faced lie.

Much like a drug addict reaches out for an illicit substance to quiet feelings of discomfort, thus turning down the unbearable volume of reality, popular notions of meritocracy act as an ideological sedative, stilling that nagging sense of imposter syndrome many rightly feel. A quick fix that numbs the user from the fleeting but horrifying thought that their success, prosperity and sense of security may hinge in some way on the struggle of people further down the food chain, and that were the system truly meritorious, they might not find themselves in such favourable circumstances. When your kid’s university place is guaranteed because working-class kids’ grades are suppressed, your home is worth more because so many people can’t own one, and your company can only turn a profit by paying poverty wages, perhaps you should, occasionally, feel like a bit of a chancer. What if imposter syndrome is not always the unfounded suspicion one is undeserving of their success, but sometimes, just their conscience gently reminding them that they really aren’t worthy?

If it were only elites suffering from this cultural delusion, perhaps the situation in Britain would not be so grave. Put simply, if all the best people are in all the top jobs, why is Britain such a fucking bin fire?

First-past-the-post produces duopolies which by their very nature cannot be truly representative. As Britain grows more divided, the two main parties must pitch themselves broadly in ways which create problems for them later on. As they contort themselves to triangulate lucrative new demographics while attempting to simultaneously retain what they regard as their traditional bases, they become politically overstretched and ideologically redundant. Meanwhile, we have a House of Lords still rooted in the ridiculous principle of hereditary privilege, and those who find themselves there not as a result of birthright are often placed there for political expediency rather than because of any inherent ability they may possess. In essence, Britain’s main democratic institutions are misaligned with swathes of the population; people want their lives to improve but parties who desire the power to do that become constrained by the winner-takes-all imperative of Britain’s electoral system.

Rather than setting forth a clear, honest prospectus, outlining a vision of Britain which is attractive to voters, parties are forced to build unsustainable electoral coalitions by underselling the longer- term implications of their proposals until after they get elected. Once in power, the expectation management begins as the reality of governing sets in and the seeds of their political demise are sown. While populism is often defined as an attempt to gain popularity by providing easy answers to complex problems, the electoral orthodoxy which arises from Britain’s first-past-the-post system necessarily demands that even mainstream parties must innovate ever more perverse strategies which themselves hinge on half-truths and falsehoods – presenting the UK’s problems as simpler to solve than they are – while promising solutions which in the long run cannot be delivered in the manner specified or, as has often been the case, simply won’t cut it.

The notion that Britain is a meritocracy is as big a lie as any the Leave campaign peddled. The belief in trickledown economics was as groundless as the notion the flatlining wages of British workers was a result of migrant labour. And the biggest mistruth of all, that the class war was over, was as populist an assertion as Boris’s ‘oven-ready’ assurances over the Brexit negotiations. In this vapid political tussle between two hollowed-out political edifices, whose paper-thin promises to change Britain have led to more of the same for decades, even the most talentless, self-interested populists begin to look, sound and feel authentic – the final nail in the coffin of slick, ‘phony’ politicians.

Populism as it is currently defined (from the centre ground) is seen as merely a means of deliberately stoking division. While that is certainly true, it is always foreshadowed by the failure of mainstream parties to address fundamental inequities in Britain’s economic structure. In essence, while mainstream parties are not regarded as populist because, rhetorically, they emphasise themes like unity, the policies they undertake, by their nature, create division in the longer term because they inevitably widen the gulf between the winners and the losers. The label ‘populist’ in the more recent context was increasingly deployed as a pejorative, reflexively placing out of bounds any policy prospectus which might disrupt the privileges to which the middle and upper classes have become accustomed. Any disturbance to the status quo is politically intolerable to its beneficiaries – not because they do not want a fairer society, necessarily, but because they are so craven in the face of the powerful interests whose dominance hinges on structural inequality that they cannot bring themselves to even mouth the word ‘class’.

Higher taxes on billionaires – populist. Economic nationalism – populist. Rent controls – populist. Universal Basic Income – populist. Free integrated public transport – populist. Closer regulation of corporations – populist. Political realism (like merit) is thus defined according to the aspirations, values and preferences of those who have benefited from the current settlement, whose sensibilities are not offended by it and whose gains are protected by it – anything outside this is populist.

While I appreciate many of you are exhausted by the topic of Brexit, and many more have accepted it and moved on, it is clear from the aftermath that the lessons have not been learned as to how class dynamics produced this tumultuous political event. It is too great a simplification to pin Brexit on Dominic Cummings, or dark money, or Steve Bannon, or right-wing tabloids – the result was not inevitable and could have easily gone the other way. It was the failure of political figures, incentivised to shore-up the status quo, to adequately interpret the root of the grievances – class inequality – which laid the foundations for Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from the world’s largest common market.

The discourse around immigration and Brexit acted as a diversion from the fundamental issue. One which many across the political spectrum seemed happy to avoid confronting – immigration and immigration concerns, while seemingly oppositional, are driven by the same economic forces arising from a system of globalisation configured to serve the interests of the middle and upper classes.

While many of the claims made by right-wing populists and their allies in the press in the run up to Brexit were pie-in-the-sky and have since been proven as such with the passage of time, Remainers too were insulated within their own parallel fantasy. The fantasy of cosplaying as continental Europeans. The fantasy that they were somehow kinder to migrants – the EU’s response to the refugee crises at times was nothing short of brutal and many Remainers, by virtue of their social class, do not reside in communities where migration occurs on any serious level. And the fantasy that the privileges conferred to them by their class position – freedom to holiday and send their children to be educated or work abroad, and relative protection from disruption to their employment, lifestyle and cultivated identity – are not exclusive. These were delusions the most ardent Brexiteers couldn’t hold a candle to and are perhaps even more ludicrous, given how regularly we were all reminded that EU support was higher among the ‘educated’.

Perhaps the fury and subsequent wrath of Remainers – admittedly a formidable spectacle once unleashed – lay not simply in the fact of Britain leaving the EU but in the shock and indignity at having been defied – and by those who they privately regarded as lesser. Having become so accustomed to the ‘grown-up’ politics of New Labour and largely holding their noses (or turning a blind eye entirely) to the media and government obfuscation of the banking crisis, their values and interests remained paramount to successive administrations no matter the political weather. Suddenly, this previously pivotal demographic, so often central to the direction of travel in Britain, was being effectively bypassed, spoken over and even monstered. Had as many middle-class Remainers mobilised so enthusiastically against the bankers in the aftermath of the financial crisis, or against the Tories when brutal austerity was rolled out, as they did before Brexit, we may well have avoided the constitutional crisis in the first place. Remainers to this day still point to every instance of industrial decline as proof Brexit was a mistake. They implore Brexiteers to realise the error of their ways. But all this does is misread why many voted for it – their lives were already so difficult they felt they had nothing to lose.