WHAT NEXT FOR REFORM?

At last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election results, the neatly coiffed man wearing an expensive suit, large pale blue tie and air of superiority was the Reform candidate, Matthew Goodwin, not the Conservative, Charlotte Cadden. Perhaps a sartorial come hither to Tory MPs watching her lose her deposit? 

Unlike the winner, the Green candidate Hannah Spencer who took 12% more of the vote than Reform, and who entered politics to oppose greyhound racing, Goodwin’s political debut might have had  more equine undertones: Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself and falls on the other [side]”.  Ms. Spencer stood in the Manchester mayoral election, was a member of the local Council, a plumber specializing in the installation of the new heat pumps – illustrating the essential political  qualities of fortitude and managing the impossible, – and, unlike Goodwin, was genuinely working class.

But wait a moment, didn’t a Matthew Goodwin author a number of books on the “new elite” in Britain, identity politics and suchlike.  Yes, one and the same.  So why wasn’t Professor Goodwin, a recent recruit to Reform endorsement, wearing a jacket with leather patches and corduroy trousers, or arranging a little tousling of the hair?  Why the unexpected dress code?

I went away and read his Penguin 2023 book Virtues, Voice and Values and understood why.  He’d moved from explaining to joining what he called the national populist ‘counter-revolution’.  And, at a fair guess, within a year or two would be leading it.  Or what was left of it.  We TV viewers weren’t supposed to ponder his career trajectory. 

The book is not only about a clash of values in Britain, our divided society, but the assumption that voice and virtues are the prerogative of the ‘new elite’.  On the altar of the ‘new politics’  Good win describes the ‘liberal progressive’  triptych:  cultural liberalism, human rights - for black, ethnic, and sexual minorities - and ‘hyper-globalisation’.  In recent years, these have created a significant reaction, to EU membership, immigration, regional unemployment, with a perception of an insulting condescension by a new elite made up of academics,  journalists, creative artists, Oxbridge graduates, and the rich towards those without university education, particularly White blue collar workers.  Add cultural discomfort with growing numbers of women in elite positions and resultant changes in family life - allegedly for the worse.  The result, Goodwin argues,  is a nation increasingly  divided into ‘traditionalists’ and ‘radical progressives’, the new elite and the ‘left-behinds’, the ‘anywheres’ and ‘nowheres’,  cosmopolitan London plus the big cities against the rest of the country.

The book provides an historical perspective with comparative statistics on changing opinions and control of key institutions and power structures, but all shoe-horned in a variety of binary  categories, subsets of the one theme: how a dominant, arrogant new elite rejected, neglected, the country’s - 20-25% - minority whose values, voice and virtue it discounted.  Like most binary stories it sounds compelling until you step back and think about it.

The book, apparently a Sunday Times bestseller, has several flaws.  There is much emphasis on the big picture in which politics has been transformed from primarily seeking economic goals to cultural ones.  That is not an either-or though a quick reader might come away thinking it was.  Nor is there any significant elaboration of the core content of one side of the divide, the supposedly despised British, traditionalist values. 

The word ‘England’ appears only in the last chapter as if it can be used interchangeably with Britain.  So it is as if the cultures of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all the same.  No mention that the population of the UK has, of course,  been created by waves of migrants from Vikings and Normans to Huguenots and Flemish weavers, to Irish dock workers, Jewish, Polish immigrants to Commonwealth and Muslim arrivals, Vietnamese, Hong Kong, and Ukrainian refugees, each bringing something new to different parts of the country and to “British culture”.   ‘Diversity’ isn’t some new elite obsession, it’s in our genes. 

Then there is the problem of agency and the implicit causality found throughout the book. The new elite doesn’t cause the problem, the divisions, nor invent globalization, nor economic transformation from the industrial to financial services and the information economy, it has limited agency and struggles to gain some control.  It is an effect.

Employment has always relied on particular sets of skills with formal education required to perform complex tasks becoming increasingly important.  And the epochal changes from agricultural to industrial to information economies have changed society, the nature of power and how people live.  So most probably will AI. 

Goodwin makes it difficult to understand the demands made on Government by these changes.  In a number of instances, the ‘new elite’ becomes a ‘class’; he conflates them with university graduates (rising to some 50% getting a university education today from 5% in the 1960s).  This makes even less sense now that even post-doctoral qualifications do not always result in elite jobs.

The casting of - implicit - blame over the new elite in Goodwin’s book can only be justified by its failure to ‘level up’ and achieve some degree of redistribution. But the odds against this are impressive: Brexit and COVID damage to the economy, a right-wing Press, and mighty, mobile transnational companies, and investors,  more interested in profits than social stability and social justice. 

Attempts at redistribution have been made.  Tony Blair made a dent in child poverty.  Gordon Brown did his poverty reduction by stealth on the assumption that if the public noticed it, being anti-tax, they would vote Tory.  Just coping  with socio-economic change has been overwhelming.  The pace of economic transformation has been ferociously fast in the 21st. century.  No Party radical and progressive enough to bring about the necessary change gets elected or re-elected.

There is a glaring omission in the book:  Churches and secular NGOs which cut across Goodwin’s social binary divisions.  Only a fleeting mention occurs of their contribution to poverty alleviation, sustaining and promoting values, requiring  virtues of their members.    Remove the charitable work of the Anglican and Catholic Churches most notably  - but that of others too including Muslims and Jews – and the gap between the poor minority and the rest would be much greater, the voice of the poorest heard or heeded even less.  Nothing either on the impact of their faith-based global consciousness.   But are these the missing ingredients of Goodwin’s ‘British values’? 

The irony of Goodwin’s career move is how many ‘new elite’ boxes he ticks himself.  He stars in State of the Nation on GB News, was a former associate fellow of Chatham House, a former member of the Government’s anti-Muslim Hatred working group, and his Father was CEO of the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority.  He did not convince the Gorton and Denton electorate.  A populist he might be but not popular enough.

Nigel Farage, though, has some proven appeal.  He too ticks several elite boxes though he never went to university; he was Private school educated and a former city trader, and worth a few million.  He better keep waving his pint of bitter around and keep up his man-of-the-people performance.  He’s going to have competition for the Reform leadership.