Lee Anderson & the nature of politics

Lee Anderson's promotion to deputy chairman of the Tory party highlights an under-rated fact about politics - one which perhaps the right understands instinctively better than the left.

Defenders of his elevation claim that Anderson represents interests and ideas that would otherwise be underweighted in Westminster politics. Matt Goodwin points out that Anderson, unlike an increasing number of Labour MPs, had a "working class" job before entering parliament. Dominic Lawson says he "speaks for millions". And Dan Hodges says:

It's important we have voices like Lee Anderson as part of the political mainstream. 52% of voters support the death penalty in certain circumstances. You can't just say to half the electorate, "sorry, we're excluding you lot".

Even if we allow for the tendency for some posh rightists to project their own reactionary attitudes onto a partially-imagined "white working class", there is a germ of truth in this.

But it inadvertently reveals a bigger truth - that politics is not a matter of rational debate about issues we agree to be important, but rather is a struggle for what gets discussed; whose ideas are represented; and whose interests are given mainstream voice.

The thing is that there are hundreds of interests, people and ideas which are underweighted in mainstream politics. I don't just mean identities: women and young people are under-represented in parliament, though less so ethnic minorities and gay people. I mean people such as the disabled, those with special educational needs or others who are dependent upon dwindling local government resources; low-wage workers; tenants facing lousy landlords and exorbitant rents; people with mental health difficulties; those who need probabation services; those dependent upon public transport; or single parents. The recent Dilnot-Blastland report (pdf) showed how the BBC's coverage of the public finances was distorted because it neglected interests such as these.

What's more, there are countless ideas which are under-weighted in Westminster in part because MPs and journalists are selected not to have them - such as the importance of emergence; the fact that work is for millions futile drudgery; the importance of bounded knowledge and rationality; the fact that capitalism constrains policy-making; or that top-down managerialism is not the only model of decision-making. Ideas as different (and I think important) as Oakeshottian conservatism, Ricardianism or free market egalitarianism don't get the attention in politics they should. Nor do many important questions such as why the UK is such a poor country, or why our politics is so anti-intellectual and philistine.

All of which poses the question. Why are Goodwin and Hodges (and Sunak and most of the Tory party) so keen that reactionary older people get a voice and yet so unconcerned that countless other voices are not being heard in Westminster? To put this another way, why is it so important to hear from ex-mining communities now when it was important not to hear from them in 1984-85?

The answer is that the right are not interested in the democratic ideal of equal representation for everyone. They want the likes of Anderson to have a voice precisely so that other voices are not heard. If we are debating the death penalty or immigration or travellers we are not debating other things such as falling real wages, stagnant productivity, the social murder that is austerity or the failure of British capitalism. And guess who that suits?

The right is engaged in a Gramscian war of position, wanting to promote reaction and silence the left, the powerless and (a more recent development) intellectuals. Of course, many on the right don't want to appear so oikish as to actually express Anderson's views themselves. For them, Anderson is a sort of ventriloquist's dummy, a comic entertainment saying what they cannot bring themselves to.

Herein lies the danger. In taking Anderson at face value the left risks being sucked onto the battlefield the right wants - that of culture rather than economics. But then, to quote Orwell out of context, "so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

Comments

[Phil]

What I don't understand is why the centre-left plays this game as well. I'm thinking of all those journalists and commentators who went out looking for former Labour voters of retirement age with small-c conservative views, and of course found them. It would have been just as easy to go out looking for people who had moved towards Labour under Corbyn (the former eco-warrior, the diehard trade unionist, the radicalised Guardian reader...), but nobody ever thought to do that. Why not, though? I blame Tony Blair, but only as a placeholder/starting guess - I genuinely don't understand it.

[ltr]

It would have been just as easy to go out looking for people who had moved towards Labour under Corbyn (the former eco-warrior, the diehard trade unionist, the radicalised Guardian reader...), but nobody ever thought to do that. Why not, though?

[ Wonderful comment. The answer is, of course, the posh savagery of Tony Blair, but also of a self-serving media-class that falsely portrayed Jeremy Corbyn first as a communist then as anti-Semitic.

Remember, the BBC began by overtly portraying Corbyn as a Russian communist. The following anti-Semitic portrayals were entirely false but frightening. ]

[ltr]

[If] we are not debating other things such as falling real wages, stagnant productivity, the social murder that is austerity or the failure of British capitalism. And guess who that suits?

[Perfect; and that surely goes for the disdain repeatedly expressed for China, when China should be the ideal economic partner for Britain.]

[Laban]

"The answer is that the right are not interested in the democratic ideal of equal representation for everyone."

I think that's called argument by assertion.

[rsm]

《the left risks being sucked onto the battlefield the right wants - that of culture rather than economics.》

Until the left embraces a strong basic income, who cares?

[ltr]

"The answer is that the right are not interested in the democratic ideal of equal representation for everyone."

I think that's called argument by assertion.

[ No, that's called an obvious truth as Tories undermine the industrial base or infrastructure base of Britain while isolating Britain from countries with which Britain should be partnered. ]

[D]

In politics and the media, the personally ambitious are massively over represented on all sides.

[ltr]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64640069

February 15, 2023

Jeremy Corbyn won’t be Labour candidate at next election, says Starmer
By Chas Geiger

[ This betrayal of the Labour tradition is unforgivable for me. I am appalled, and will never support a Party that so betrays its heritage. ]

[Blissex]

«What I don't understand is why the centre-left plays this game as well. [...] I blame Tony Blair, but only as a placeholder/starting guess - I genuinely don't understand it.»

The long term reason I guess are:

* The upper class have become fed up with sharing income and wealth with the lower classes.

* A chunk of the lower classes and much of the middle class now vote as if they were upper class people because they own property, thanks to the social-democratic policies of left-wing parties and labor unions.

* Consequently the upper classes have worked hard to compromise the leadership of the parties of the left, and many leaders of the parties of the left have thought that their base should be the new property-owning middle and and some lower classes.

As to Blair he claims he converted to "contrism" (thatcherism plus identity politics) at this telling point:

http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=202
“I can vividly recall the exact moment that I knew the last election was lost. I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra, self-employed electrician, Dad always voted Labour. He used to vote Labour, he said, but he bought his own home, he had set up his own business, he was doing quite nicely, so he said I’ve become a Tory. He was not rich but he was doing better than he did, and as far as he was concerned, being better off meant being Tory too.”

[rsm]

From the point of view of the upper class, did they create their wealth in financial markets such that the lower class never produced any of it? So why should they be taxed for being nonviolently successful?

Next question: why shouldn't the government print money (and index incomes to price rises, thus eliminating real effects of inflation) to help the lower class, thus leveraging the same technique of money creation that the upper class used to become so wealthy?