MAY 23, 2024 4 MINS
As Westminster’s rumour mill thrummed to the possibility of a snap election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak walked into yesterday’s PMQs with a spring in his blue-suited step. High on the falling rate of inflation, it seemed the long overdue summer months may just lift the national spirits. And then it started to rain. Like the English football fans once again building up their emotional fortitude, knowing full well it’s not the disappointment but the hope that causes the greatest suffering, the dampening weather system blowing back into Downing Street suggested that, as far as the many are concerned, the future will be gloomy.
Political historians are wont to point out that there are occasions when a public becomes so dissatisfied it simply wants change. When this happens, the policies and electable candour of the opposition become less relevant. With Labour following the golden rule that it is better to let the government author its own demise than say anything meaningful, it certainly feels like we are in such a moment now. Whatever we thought of Johnson vs Corbyn, at least there was clear water between what they stood for.
Yet if we were to dig deeper into those feelings of dissatisfaction, we would see just how low the public mood is. Indeed, rather than turning a corner, as Sunak would have us believe, the nation is at a crossroads — with one path leading to continued misery and another to other abject disappointment. Who is to tell whether we have chosen well or not?
There will be a lot of bluster and promise over the next few weeks as both parties try to tap into that crucial insight first understood by Tony Blair: that elections are won just as much on feelings as they are substance. In the coming weeks, all parties will speak in the promissory rhetoric of better prospects, better policing, better regulation of borders, better health care, better education, and a better betterment. But we are a world away from the Nineties. The national mood is positively pessimistic, despite the interjection of D:Ream’s “Things can only get better” during Sunak’s big moment.
As we enter campaign season, we ought to remember another rule of British politics: that while London and privileged parts of the South may be basking in the sun, at the same time, communities in the North East of England or South Wales are being continuously rained upon.
Take the valleys of South Wales, an area I know intimately well. Whether we consider the lasting unemployment, the child malnourishment, the widespread addition, or the disturbing levels of depression, suicide and domestic abuse, these communities are a melting pot for Britain’s most pressing social concerns, which statisticians show are only getting worse. And while these “pockets of poverty” may appear more afflicted than most, the picture for much of post-industrial Britain — from Durham to Derbyshire, Kellingley to Kirkcaldy — has taken on the dejected look of a tragically updated series of Lowry paintings. Placed in sequence, they offer a damning depiction of want and destitution: nationwide, levels of poverty are around 50% higher than they were in the Seventies.
“Industrial Britain has taken on the dejected look of a tragically updated series of Lowry paintings.”
But the growing sense of despondency that follows doesn’t just affect the poorest of this nation, even if their existence is markedly bleak. Since the times of Thatcher and her social revolution, free marketeers have been fond of talking about the logic of trickle-down economics, which hold that the poor will eventually reap the rewards or the lucky few. Today, however, the sand timer in Britain has been inverted, as the fading optimism of the poor now seeps into the emotional economies of the middle classes, who are equally beset with a non-committal sense of political dejection. Turnout, one suspects, will not be high come July.
Nowhere has this been better illustrated than with the widespread embrace among the middle classes over the past decade with the doctrine of resilience. It is impossible to turn on any news item, educational or cultural programme today and not hear the term being deployed. Resilience, however, is nothing more than an acceptance that things are fundamentally insecure by design. Translated into politics, it means that we should no longer expect the state to provide any measure of security, whether it comes in the form of social security or security from existential threats.
In security’s place, what has been served up is a banal shift towards a desire to apply a therapeutic model to everything, and the necessity to learn to “bounce-back” from inevitable crises. While Chancellor Jeremy Hunt consistently speaks of the UK’s “resilient economy”, for example, the Labour Party launched into own Resilience Framework in 2022, and placed the doctrine at the heart of its policymaking. While we don’t know what that looks like, it invariably includes words such as “robust” and an acceptance of “vulnerabilities”. Yet what resilience really points to, by contrast, is the utter failure of the political imagination. Who, for instance, really found anything to be inspired by in Labour’s new pledge card?
There once was a time when politics seemed to matter; when the future direction of nations was held in the balance. Hope, back then, couldn’t be ignored, and neither could our political decisions. Looking at the lived reality of so many in our country today, it’s hard to locate anything similar. All we face is an impending choice, which, in the end, will only lead to further apathy. And as history shows, it is precisely in such wells of apathy that monstrous political ideas can start to take hold — which, maybe not this time, or the next, but sometime in the future will properly throw up a political choice that is as seductive as it is devastating.
Needless to say, the British people deserve better. They deserve a serious choice that’s not painted for the many in the light grey of insecurity — and for a growing few in a far darker and grimmer shade.
Professor Brad Evans holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath. His book, How Black Was My Valley: Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland, is out in April.
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Selections Not Elections
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