When I think about the state of British politics, I keep returning to a man named Tom Skinner. He is not a politician, but a jocular Essex businessman and media personality who found fame through an appearance on The Apprentice. Not only do I admire his positivity and social media updates about seemingly eating a fry-up every day, he also usefully personifies some of the complexity of where we find ourselves today.
After a Just Stop Oil protest in 2022, Skinner went on GB News, where he accused the group of ruining people’s lives. Following this foray into political debate, a lot of people on social media leapt to the conclusion that Skinner was rightwing and/or ignorant – the embodiment of the “I’m alright, Jack” working-class Tories who delivered Thatcher to power and who don’t care about anyone else, let alone victims of the climate crisis.
A short time later, however, Skinner was interviewed by Joe, a left-leaning outlet. Although he wasn’t sure about describing himself as a socialist, he delivered a masterclass in left-populist rhetoric, laying into the government and big business, and championing the working class, small businesses and the NHS.
These two political pronouncements – seemingly at odds with each other – capture what so much of Britain’s mainstream political thinking fails to recognise: that people in this country, particularly now, cannot be easily pigeonholed. To put it another way, Britain has entered an age of chaotic, unpredictable politics.
There are many Tom Skinners out there. When I worked with homeless people, I spoke to rough sleepers who loved Boris Johnson. I know policemen and ex-squaddies who liked Jeremy Corbyn, and have met nurses who love the NHS yet vote Tory. Anyone who has ever knocked on doors for a political party or canvassed the public for work will have similar stories of values and views that seem eclectic, to put it mildly.
But despite this complexity, there is a strong tendency in our political culture to divide the public into neat, clean-cut political boxes or schisms. “Essex man”, “Stevenage woman”, the “red wall”; “boomers” v “millennials”, “ethnic minorities” v “the white working class” – and, of course, leave v remain. These shorthands are then taken as reliable proxies for a coherent set of values and interests that all members of the group hold.
As a sociologist, I know that categories such as this can be useful. But they can also blind us. Politics and the media rely on particular forms of research about society, chiefly polling and focus groups. Just this week, the Tory party has been tearing itself apart over a poll suggesting that a 1997-style wipeout lies ahead, reviving talk of where “blue wall” and “red wall” voters might go. Yet polls are snapshots that tell us very little about people’s underlying values, how they have arrived at their opinions, or how their opinions change over time or in different contexts.
One of the reasons we cling so faithfully to such simplistic categories is to do with the fact that social mixing across class lines has become increasingly rare in Britain. We live in bubbles separated by class and geography, and seldom have meaningful encounters or relationships with people outside our own social class. In this environment, other people’s views become hard to comprehend. We see phenomena such as the Brexit vote, support for politicians such as Johnson and the rise of conspiracy theories as being simply irrational; or we assume that everyone who likes or votes for these things must also be in full agreement with all aspects of them.
The rise of “chaotic” worldviews relates to concrete changes in British society over the years. Far from the old heavy industries and communities in which people worked and lived collectively – conditions that produced a more coherent class consciousness – today we live atomised, individualised lives. Workers often have jobs in which they are forced into competition with one another or are given supervisory, “team leader” duties over others. Class boundaries are less stable than they used to be, as people cycle through low-paid employment, unemployment and (bogus) forms of self-employment in the gig economy. The rise of mass working-class home ownership and self-employment mean that many people occupy what sociologist Erik Olin Wright called “contradictory class locations”: they have interests that align with labour and capital, and therefore simultaneously believe in change and the status quo.
This is not wholly new, nor is it wholly British (look to the farmers’ protests across Europe for more contradictory politics that can’t be easily pigeonholed as left or right). Observing the chaotic politics he witnessed among Italian peasants and workers in the early 20th century, the influential political theorist Antonio Gramsci concluded that “personality is strangely composite”. The Uses of Literacy, the sociologist Richard Hoggart’s portrait of working-class life, similarly showed how new forms of popular culture and news media collided with older values and belief systems to produce ostensibly contradictory viewpoints. Our beliefs are the result of accumulated life experiences: family history and intergenerational narratives and values, education, the areas in which we live, experiences at work, the institutions we inhabit and so on. These experiences and feelings form a lens through which we each view society, but this is often more like a kaleidoscope than a magnifying glass.
So what should the left do about this? Too often, the contemporary left seems to expect people to emerge fully formed with perfect politics. But as the late thinker Mike Davis pointed out, class consciousness – coherent politics – never magically emerged out of the ether, but was always the result of arduous, unglamorous political education work by union reps, political parties, and through people’s immersion in working-class associational life such as libraries and clubs. The decline of the union movement and the disappearance of these community institutions has led to incoherence and contradiction.
Labels and categories such as “Brexiter” are seductive. They entrench our own preconceptions about types of people and places we don’t know and don’t want to know. But not only is it corrosive to democracy and people’s wellbeing to believe that large swathes of the country are irrational reactionaries, it is also incorrect.
For all the talk on social media of Britain being a “rainy fascist island”, most people in the UK generally have progressive values. Broadly speaking, they are tolerant and open-minded when it comes to race, gender and sexuality. They also support redistributive economic policies such as public ownership and higher taxes on the rich. The fact these progressive instincts have not, historically, been harnessed by the Labour party says more about the Labour party than the electorate.
Gramsci despaired of progressives who were convinced of their own rationality but who were unable to understand other feelings or life experiences. If there is to be progressive change in this country, we need to appreciate people’s chaotic complexity, stop assuming views are fixed and can’t be changed – and rediscover the value of empathy.
Dan Evans’ book A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie is out in paperback
