Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics

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It is true that a new generation of thinkers and activists has helped consolidate a culture more given to identitarian thinking and more censorious in its outlook (though also one that is less racist, more accepting of women’s equality and more welcoming of gay people). To confuse that, however, with the claim that it constitutes the new ruling class is to have a weak understanding of how power works and where it lies. Lewis, Helen (18 May 2023). "Why So Many Conservatives Feel Like Losers". The Atlantic . Retrieved 18 August 2023. 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 Goodwin was an associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham from 2010 to 2015, a research fellow at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester from 2008 to 2010, and, between 2010 and 2020, associate fellow at Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) where he authored research reports on the rise of populism, [4] Euroscepticism ahead of the Brexit vote, [5] the different political tribes of Europe, [6] and the future of Europe. [7]

Matthew Goodwin is going native - New Statesman Matthew Goodwin is going native - New Statesman

a b Malik, Kenan (22 December 2019). "The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense". the Guardian . Retrieved 21 August 2023. Lee Anderson, recently interviewed on ConHome, is a Tory Democrat, never happier than when teasing the New Elite. Goodwin’s dichotomy seems to stand empirical scrutiny, but in the reverse: a conservative ruling elite governing an increasingly progressive country.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.

Matthew Goodwin

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. One of the other features of this definition of a new elite is how easily it can flex to accommodate the politics of those it needs to include: so Jeremy Corbyn is a member, and Boris Johnson is not. To explain this, Goodwin says that “most of all, they are defined by their very liberal if not radical ‘woke’ values”. So if you’re a rich, prestigiously educated Londoner but you don’t like footballers taking the knee, you’re probably not part of this “new governing class”.

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The irony is that by adopting this view of the British public as inherently hostile to other nationalities, Goodwin reproduces the discourse of the moralising Remainers whom he claims to loathe. For both these strands of opinion, material grievances – falling wages, gutted public services, decimated trade unions – have little to do with the ascent of Farage and Johnson. Rather, prejudice is thought to be embedded deep in the psyches of ordinary voters outside major cities. The chauvinist impulses of this proletarian layer are incurable. The only difference is that Goodwin defends them while liberal cosmopolitans condemn them. Although one cannot know what disasters are about to occur, the hysteria provoked by Boris Johnson does not seem any greater than the hysteria provoked, in their different ways, by Enoch Powell, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson or Margaret Thatcher. This is a canny and deceptive intellectual move. It would be strange to define socialism in terms of the hopes and fears of trade unionists, or liberalism in terms of the worldview of a free rights-holding individual. And yet national populism is only really distinguished from nationalism and racism by the fact that its supporters do not see themselves in these terms. Inversely, Eatwell and Goodwin’s insistence that Le Pen or Wilders are not racist politicians rests on the PR efforts these figures have made to detoxify their images as racists in the eyes of the public and media. But just as new scrutiny has been applied to that rarified economic class, others have argued that other kinds of elite wield power of their own. One influential broad definition, from the American sociologist Shamus Khan: elites are anyone who has “vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource”. 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.