With voting by the party members fully underway, Operation Meat Raffle has gone into its vinegar strokes. Ever juicier bigger bones / bribes / tax-cut porn are being dangled before the faithful. After this campaign is over, it will have done for Gammon and Karen’s relationship what Fifty Shades of Grey had only tentatively begun: the level of degradation imaginable on a floral sofa with Rishi and Liz urging them on in widescreen will take them to a whole new level. I call it Fifty Shades of Beige, though it perhaps says more about my own feverish imagination than theirs.
At this late stage it is eager-to-please-plucky-underdog Rishi who’s spaffed first, spouting nonsense about 20% tax cuts groaning out some vague anti-woke sentiment as Gammon’s tumescence subsides. Poor Rishi’s getting desperate because he’s going to lose; hot Liz is hot favourite in the Home Counties.
Prime
Minister
Liz
Truss.
In all honesty, I’ve not managed to keep up much of a commentary on the leadership election, yet it already seems to have taken up too much of my time. I mean, so much else to do! So I’ll try and put all this to bed (as it were) with a couple of reflections, so I can get on with more creative things.
What is it about the Tories and Woke?
On reflection, perhaps I’ve been uncharitable in my writing and there are less antagonistic ways of looking at the meat raffle. Apologies: ‘election for the leadership of the Conservative Party’. In any election, candidates must differentiate themselves from each other; otherwise, how else will the electorate choose between them? So, let’s set aside the inevitable spats, and posturing and plays to the gallery, and acknowledge that, pretty well from day one, all candidates have all more or less been saying the same thing about the same things and that, from a membership point of view, isn’t that a good thing? Does it not affirm a certain unity? That the chocolate box of MPs and members alike is reassuringly more Milk Tray Selection than Liquorice Allsorts. I mean, it’s not like they’ve got a Jeremy Corbyn on their hands.
Party-political affiliations tend to be based on two vectors: where you stand on the economy (big state vs little state); and where you stand on social matters (very roughly, liberal/progressive vs conservative/traditional). At the beginning of the Great British Meat Raffle, all candidates launched with bids for the low-hanging fruit of low-taxation (albeit with some caveats from Rishi). With the economy taken care of (what could be simpler?), that left social issues as the remaining area in which candidates might hope to differentiate themselves on policy grounds.
But which social issues? Again, all candidates spotted the low-hanging fruit: all candidates (I think) overtly supported the deal to ‘process’ migrants in Rwanda. Hard stance on immigration box ticked, so what’s left? Luckily there are a number of set-piece issues on which to establish one’s credentials, including:
Crime
Usually a sure-fire winner but candidates were curiously muted on this despite a series of unspeakably sad murders (of women) and a Met not fit for purpose. My guess is that overall crime levels are not a concern for MPs and party-members and that no candidate was stupid enough to talk about further outsourcing. It goes without saying that a properly funded prison system that addresses the cycle of re-offending, the cycle of violence, high incidence of serious mental health problems, learning disability, substance misuse, etc. etc. etc. is entirely out of the question.
The NHS & Social Care
A favourite whipping boy and target for ‘efficiency savings’, but essentially this was left alone as, again, no candidate was quite stupid enough to suggest structural levels of outsourcing to Capita or Virgin or Rwanda, or whatever else suggests itself as a the market solution to all problems. All candidates (I’m pretty sure) were clear they would cut or defer the 1p rise in National Insurance because, obviously as we’ve seen, Social Care can do quite well without that and making a statement about being a low-tax contender trumps all. It especially trumps long-term solutions to long-term problems, like the ticking bombs of dementia and obesity and an older population. Obviously.
Benefits
Another favourite whipping boy, but again, no candidate was stupid enough to say they’d cut them in the current climate. I’m bored now.
Defence
Bored. Good to be bombastic, good to talk up external threat and claim the oral high ground, but as it costs money, let’s just leave it at making positive noises.
Bored
Really bored. Housing and planning – while the head loves a market free-for-all on housing and planning, you’re a nimby at heart, so don’t go there either….. Europe: done that. Don’t mention the ‘B’ word to the party faithful lest that stinking corpse rise again and divide the party (again). Transport: it’s all gone to pot but spending money on rail is not a vote winner in this election. I’m kind of surprised that no-one came up with a national pot-hole filling pledge, but the play to the motoring lobby was via reducing tax on fuel, and spending money on public infrastructure is a no-no. Do you think we’re made of money? There was, of course, a radical proposal to improve mobility, improve long-term health, boost productivity, reduce pollution and put a dent in carbon emissions via a national policy promoting active travel. Just joking. Do NOT mention bike lanes or LTNs. Climate crisis? what crisis? the correct line is to acknowledge the science but in a sort of abstract way, like acknowledging the existence of quarks or black holes. Not really to do with us, so kick the can down the lane. Protect the economy!
From a party-political perspective, how nice it is that the boldest and brightest among us have all come to essentially the same conclusions on all the same things? In fact, as the campaign has gone on, candidates’ pledges have converged even as they tried to differentiate themselves by becoming ever more strident. In the end, the contest will come down to one of personality: despite Sunak’s caution / Truss’ recklessness they are essentially singing from the same sheet because they have been advised by the same people that this is the tune the audience of MPs and party members want to hear. Sunak will therefore lose (too slick) and Truss will win (her supposed channeling of Thatcher shows she’s ‘one of us’). Speculatively, I actually wonder if Truss’ foibles – her small human failings – actually endear her to the electorate, as did Johnson’s. Perhaps because it suggests she can be controlled? Whereas Sunak is more Machiavellian?
Anyway, the upshot is that all are agreed that a low-tax economy will be a growth economy and that the electorate will want a low-tax-high-growth economy because the pie will be bigger everybody likes a big pie, especially if it’s a meat pie and doesn’t it make you proud to be be British? AND, isn’t it great that all candidates agree on this despite – or even because– of their different backgrounds.
So, what remains?
Woke
Kemi Badenoch set this one rolling by overtly pitching herself as ‘anti-woke’. Once she had done that, others, whom I suspect would rather have avoided its many potential pitfalls, felt obliged to align themselves with anti-woke sentiment. At the risk of understatement, let’s say that no-one was anxious to position themselves as pro-woke. So what’s going on?
As a relative outsider, Badenoch could go bold and actually risk setting out a vision rather than trying only to second-guess what others wanted to hear. My guess is that her invocation of anti-wokery was more about a bid to re-align UK politics along US lines, importing a dog-whistle US socio-political fracture-line as a basis on which to establish greater party unity. And, who knows? Maybe to set out a future for the party as both economically and socially conservative along Republican lines. After all, now we’re no longer European, what’s to stop us adopting the strident, partisan, divisive politics of the ‘States?
The woke / anti-woke divide makes a certain sense in the ‘States. Having its origins in African American political consciousness, the woke position of collective circumspection adopted by the dispossessed towards power structures maps tolerably onto other divisions in the US: race, poverty, law enforcement, church. To set out your position on one, is to set out your position on all. However, that sense of woke in the US doesn’t travel well and, in any case, has moved on both in the ‘States and here.
Woke was re-found in the US in 2014 as a social-media affirmation of consciousness around Black Lives Matter. As BLM became international, woke came to the UK still bound to the politics of race. However, widespread use on social media, including its uptake by white folk had the effect that social media has on most things it touches: ‘woke’ was prised from its specifically African American context and watered-down to become an unthinkingly shared affirmation of only the vaguest political awareness or sentiment of solidarity. Eventually, it was all but deprived of that too. Now circulating as a more-or-less empty meme, ‘woke’ became available for vacuous virtue signaling, and thus available to be used disparagingly to deride that.
So, here’s a puzzle: having been more-or-less de-politicised by social media, why is ‘woke’ even an issue for any political party? What is there to get het up about, particularly for a Tory party keen on free speech? Are people not fee to think what they want and to say what they want, particularly in the irrelevant echo-chambers of social media? For Woke to be an issue, it presumably has to be seen as a threat in some way.
To be clear, I’d be mildly surprised if woke were an issue that any of the candidates had particularly strong views about. I’d be very surprised if any of them could articulate a clear stance on woke, but that’s not the point: the point is that woke has become, or is thought to have become, another dog-whistle, populist gesture that unites a group against an (essentially imaginary) foe. Seen like that, anti-wokery says more about Tory pre-occupations than anything interesting about woke.
So, what is it such that the anti-woke box needs to be ticked? What is the anxiety such that targeting woke – whether real or imagined – is the answer? I want to suggest that woke is perceived as a threat, but that the nature of the threat – or threats – are contradictory, and say more about Tory pre-occupations and the currents circulating within the Tory party, than anything particularly interesting about Woke.
Woke is weak
The first threat lies in the perception that to be Woke is to be too ready to take offence. This is the Snowflake side of Woke, whereby a generation of the relatively young, living life through social media, lack the necessary resilience to make it in the real world. Or at least the real world imagined as the tough competitive marketplace / Oxbridge debating chamber of Tory fantasy. Snowflakes melt. There is an epidemic of anxiety. And, for the Woke, it always somebody else’s fault: to be Woke is to be part of a community of shared victimhood.
Partly for the Torys, and in a throwback to Victorian and Edwardian notions of degeneration, what this represents is a crisis of culture: how will this generation make it in the tough world of banking and finance if they are forever falling over at the slightest provocation?
A more fundamental concern about the woke’s belief that the world is stacked against them is that it amounts to a challenge to the Tory pretence of a meritocracy and belief in the power of the individual to define their own future by dint of hard work. Underlying Woke-ism is a perception of society beset by structural inequalities. In this is an echo of woke’s original African American consciousness of race as the site of embedded, institutionalised, structured inequalities of power and opportunity: to be woke is to be awake to white privilege. In its more recent, and perhaps more paranoid incarnation, woke is alert to other privileges too: of gender and wealth, and other sites of institutionalised power imbalance, particularly corporate power and particularly where this is disguised through companies own disingenuous virtue signaling, green washing and pretences to inclusivity.
All of these are Tory sensitivities but not so much because the Tories stand opposed to such flies in the ointment of perfect market conditions, but because the party itself embodies all these vested interests itself: need one look any further than the Tory Party itself for an example of an institution plainly working for the interests of the corporate and financial world, the already-wealthy, the entitled, and themselves, while burbling platitudes to the contrary. And, as the party of Gammons, they are, of course, the party of embedded while male privilege.
Or at least they were. Today, of course, we have the splendid spectacle of a mixed gender and ethnically diverse leadership election: living proof, if any were needed, that the Tory Party is a party welcoming of all and that anyone, no matter what their background, can aspire to leadership of our great democracy. Or is it?
To be fair, there is a strand of Conservatism that more or less holds to that meritocratic view of things whereby any class, race, gender or other structural barriers to that meritocracy are things to be overcome. This is the strand that is LGBY etc.-welcoming because no-one cares what you do or who you are so long as you treat all others on the same basis. Perhaps David Cameron was one of those Tories? Why David Cameron? Because in 2006 it was David Cameron who, recognising the overwhelming white-ness and male-ness of the parliamentary Party, introduced priority-lists of female and minority-ethnic candidates for Tory seats, many of them safe ones. Essentially, this worked – the number of Tory MPs from minority ethnic backgrounds has increased from 2 then, to 22 now; and the number of female MPs has increased from 17 then, to 87 now (of a current 360 Conservative seats, though compare this to Labour’s figures of 41 ethnic minority and 104 female, out of just 202 seats).
It’s interesting why Cameron might have done this. He may have been then, and certainly is now, all sorts of odious things, but there’s no reason to think that racist is one of them and so it might be churlish to suggest that he acted out of anything but the most progressive intentions. However… a more cynical person than myself might suggest that he simply took a long, much more self-interested, look at the Party’s parliamentary composition and said ‘you know what, unless we start looking a little more like the people we supposedly represent, then the more we will look like the dinosaurs we are.’ Why might he do that? Well, the Conservatives, then and now, face some interesting demographic challenges over the longer term.
Demographics
In the UK, the number of older people, both in absolute and percentage terms, is increasing. It is likely to keep doing so for some time, mainly because of people living longer. At first sight, this might sound like good news for the Tories since there has traditionally been a link between being older and voting Conservative, however, there are some concerning nuances in there. One is that, as a demographic, the boomer generation – those who have done so well out of property ownership, economic growth, free education, secure pensions and all the other things that the young resent them for – always represented a bulge of core Tory votes moving along a timeline. That bulge was always going to be temporary and boomers are now getting long in the tooth. And the voting behaviour of the non-boomer older people following behind looks less secure.
At the same time, another demographic trend has long been apparent: that the proportion of the electorate identifying as non-white (and therefore much more likely to vote Labour), has been increasing, and looks likely to continue doing so. In that light, Cameron’s move looks to have been a prudent bit of future proofing.
So what?
What’s kind of interesting though, is to folow the effects of this through to the current crop of leadership contenders. The messages that we are expected to infer from the (welcome) diversity of this group are that 1. The conservative party itself is neither gendered nor racially biased: it rewards ambition and ability irrespective of these and has become a party much more representative of, and therefore appealing to, a true cross-section of the electorate. 2. The diversity of the modern, meritocratic Conservative Party is a microcosm of a diverse, meritocratic United Kingdom where background is no obstacle to success. This is the glass-half-full view of the nation that welcomed the report from the that Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that, while recognising that racism did exist in some areas concluded:
“Put simply, we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism.”
In her ministerial forward to the government’s own response to the report, entitled ‘Inclusive Britain’, none other than Kemi Badendoch, wrote:
If there is one thing at the heart of this government’s agenda, it’s that anyone in this country should be able to achieve anything, no matter where they live or come from. As a black woman, a first-generation immigrant and the Minister for Equalities, I passionately believe in this idea too. It is my lived experience.
But is it though? Or at least, is there not an unacknowledged debt here to David Cameron? Personally, I think that Cameron’s introduction of priority lists was commendable, pretty well irrespective of motive, but the point is that he saw that the gender and racial bias of Conservative MPs at that time was unlikely to change without intervention. What he perceived was an organisation that consistently chose MPs from a pool of white male candidates and would continue to do so in perpetuity: what better definition of institutional sexism and racism cold there be? Only by forcibly overcoming its resistance, could he bring about the cultural change he saw as necessary. But wasn’t his alertness to discrimination just a little… you know… Woke?
Though Kemi Badendoch, in common with her peers, would love to say she made it on her own, because being a victim just holds you back, without Dave’s woke intervention, would she really be in the running, or even in politics at all? That being so, you’d think that she’d be a bit more supportive of the woke of the world, after all, what’s unreasonable about saying ‘I’m here because someone a few years ago had the courage to make a progressive intervention and now we a have a vibrant, able and diverse composition? What’s wrong is that it undermines all those core Tory messages about the primacy of the individual over the social, and the primacy of the free-for-all over any sort of state intervention, and the belief that success and failure are matters primarily of individual responsibility and choices.
The problem with Tory leadership is that MPs and leadership hopefuls alike, have always been, and very much still are, ‘successful’ people having had prominent careers in business, the ‘metropolitan professions’ (law, finance), perhaps the military but most likely politics as a profession in its own right. Well, what’s wrong with that? I’m surely not suggesting I’d like to be governed by a cabinet of dullards am I? Or without real-world experience? Well, no, but I want to suggest that there is an inherent tension between your representational responsibilities and your success if you are Tory.
Without wishing to open up a huge can of worms, but without wishing to leave it unsaid: class is an issue in British society and its party politics. Traditionally (whatever that is) taken from the (white male) upper middle classes, it was an easy criticism to claim that the demographics of Tory MPs put them out of touch with the people they supposedly represented. This could be said of Cameron and Johnson, but also might be levelled at Jeremy Hunt (son of an Admiral), Tom Tugendhat (son of a High Court Judge) and, in a more complicated way, to Nadhim Zahawi (son of Kurdish-Iraqi migrants, yes, but ones who sent him to Winchester College). The success (or deceit – take your pick), of Thatcherism was to deny the privilege of what we would now call inherited social capital, and to present upper middle class-dom (in the sense of access to private schooling, business success, professional standing, wealth accumulation) as something to aspire to, and potentially accessible to, everyone via the medium of hard work, self-reliance and determination, in the same way as it was, of course, to Thatcher herself.
And is not the diversity of the current leadership candidates the fruit of that Thatcherism? Proof that the perceived barriers of class, ethnicity, gender need not hold anyone back? Evidence of the empowerment that comes from refusing to take on the victim role demanded by the ignorant, whether they be old-school Tory gammons or pernicious academics determined to rake up the past with their post-colonial studies or challenge the present via critical race theory – the latter being a particular bugbear of Kemi Badenoch.
Let’s be uncomplicatedly generous to this crop of leadership candidates: they are all, in different ways, very successful people. Rishi Sunak is enormously wealthy, but there’s no doubt he’s bright guy; Penny Mordaunt seems to have had a genuinely humble-enough upbringing that has not held back her political career; Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman might genuinely be said to be self-made. I’ll complicate this slightly by suggesting that those candidates who went to Oxbridge (half of them – Truss, Sunak, Braverman, Hunt) may have picked up some social capital via that route, but my essential point is this: they are all successful, bright people, but, by dint of being successful, bright Tories, they attribute their success to their own hard work.
Being successful and bright and a Labour MP, does not prevent you from realising that, though you may have worked very hard to get where you are, plenty of other people work hard and get nowhere because of the structured social inequalities of opportunity in Britain that stack life chances in favour of some people and against many others. For a Labour MP, recognising that your success, your education, may owe as much to luck as to ability, to having been born to the right people, or to having been noticed at school, or to have just been blessed with a really quick mind, does not stop you from recognising that it is no moral failure on the part of others to have run aground on any of these. In fact, recognising this makes it incumbent on yourself, as their representative, to put in place policies to address these inequalities, because that is what government is for because it in the interests of the people that you do so. Government is about recognising the needs of people not like yourself insofar as they didn’t have the advantages of birth, or upbringing, or intellect, or plain old good fortune that has brought you to your own position of power as an MP. As for the fortunate, the successful, the well off outside of politics, well, they can look after themselves.
Being a successful, bright Tory MP though, means that you understand inequalities to arise from material, rather than social, impediments to people realising their potential. As a Tory MP, the impediments to social mobility are of the nature that distort the labour market; such things as benefits that disincentivise individuals from seeking work, collective bargaining that distorts the value of labour, or education not geared to the needs of the workplace and, of course, taxation that deters entrepreneurship and penalises success. Once those impediments to achievement based on merit are removed, what remains is the question of how much people want success; the matter of character and determination. It’s all a bit Darwinian but misses the Darwinian insight that chance is a key factor in determining success or failure. The resulting glue that binds those of wildly disparate backgrounds together as Tories, is the self-belief that they made it themselves, and that others can too.
Leadership vs Representational politics
Really, this works much better as a model of leadership than it does of representational democratic government. In this respect, Tory MPs, and particularly those without a privileged upbringing, or who otherwise draw upon their ‘backstory’ are presenting themselves as exemplars of what can be achieved in a meritocratic society and a meritocratic party, with a little drive and hard work. Being a Labour politician is (or should be) about identifying with the needs and aspirations of constituents, and particularly the most needy and vulnerable. In important respects, it is about understanding and being like the people you speak for. Being a Tory MP (particularly in the progressive, Thatcherite, ethnic-minority sense) is about getting the electorate to identify with you: it is about saying ‘I made it in business and politics, and you could strive for, and achieve, better things too’. It’s less about ‘I share the same humble / immigrant / dislocated background as you’ than it is ‘you share the same humble / immigrant / dislocated background as me, and look at me, I’ve made it big.’
Thinking about it, perhaps this belief in leadership, rather than ‘public servant’ representational politics is the thread that holds the slightly Frankenstein-esque spectre that is the Conservative Party together. Oxbridge PPE appears to be a finishing school for those convinced their destiny is to lead rather than serve, where leadership consists of a great deal of talking but no listening and an unthinking certainty that one is correct in all matters. Those with military backgrounds unsurprisingly also have an ingrained faith in the value of leadership and their own leadership qualities, though this time mercifully tempered by a greater willingness to accommodate reality and with a greater emphasis on the importance of personal integrity than their PPE chums. One would assume those with a business background – where ‘business’ convers a multitude of sins, under which I’m also including working for ‘big business’ like banking (Badenoch, Sunak) as well more entrepreneurial ventures (surprisingly, Jeremy Hunt) – would also have a faith in leadership as the magnet around which success accumulates.
Do you know? I’m all talked out. I’m going to publish this now lest I go on forever. Though I seem to have gone off topic, this has been about one way in which woke represents a challenge to Tory-ism. there remains two further aspects to expolore that I may or may not get round to. The first is the linking of woke to identity politics beyond race: to gender and sexuality. The second is the perception of woke, not as too weak, but as too threatening. This is the perceived threat of ‘cancel culture’ whereby self-identified victims turn on their persecutors. I’ll do it if I get round to it.
