Values, Voice and Virtue: the New British Politics. By Matthew Goodwin. Penguin £10.99.
Goodwin was co-author of National Populism, reviewed in the March 2019 Socialist Standard, which was largely an unconvincing and unpleasant defence of a xenophobic form of nationalism. His latest book is no better.
The basic argument is that, since the 1970s, there has been a revolution or re-alignment in British society and politics. Thatcher supposedly emphasised family values and individual responsibility, but also ‘ushered in the new era of hyper-globalization’, as if this was government policy rather than part of the way that capitalism works; this involved, for instance, selling off ‘many of Britain’s assets’. The former ruling class of industrialists and landowners was replaced by ‘a new middle-class graduate elite’. The latter attended top universities, and were not just journalists, politicians and broadcasters, but also academics, doctors and architects. They have allegedly made it much harder for white boys from a manual working-class background to get into university. They control Britain’s main institutions, and a third of MPs have postgraduate degrees. Many of the elite are radical ‘woke’ progressives, a group that apparently constitutes about one in six of the population.
It is noted that Britain has become more unequal, and there are some passing references to very wealthy people, such as the ‘international jet-setting elites’ who have homes in London but also in New York and so on. Yet overall the author has not the slightest idea of how capitalism operates, of the division between a tiny minority who own and control the planet’s resources, and the rest, who have to work for them. The decline in manual jobs is noted, and much is made of the geographical divide between London and the rest of the country. But in London a quarter of the population live in poverty and one in fifty are homeless, though the reader would not gather this from Goodwin’s treatment.
It is correct to say that choice was reduced in politics as Tories and Labour grew closer together. However, the book’s focus is very much on England, with no discussion of parties such as Plaid Cymru or the SNP. The claimed counter-revolution against the new rulers involved three revolts: populism, Brexit and Boris Johnson. Brexit, we are told, was intended to reduce immigration and ‘restore Britain’s national sovereignty’ (whatever that is). Despite his privileged background, Johnson was ‘a renegade member of the elite’ and became leader of the non-graduate majority who supported the counter-revolution. But Partygate derailed this, and Truss’s ‘small-state, low-tax’ vision of Brexit failed as it had little popular support (nothing to do with market reactions, then).
The whole book is a fantasy, with no arguments to show how the supposed former ruling class have been replaced by the graduate elite, and no understanding of how politics under capitalism is driven by economic interests and the need for profit.
Paul Bennett
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