Tagged with Class

Immigration and benefits: the political economy of scapegoating

scapegoatImmigration and benefits. Immigration and benefits. Immigration and benefits. I can barely remember a time when these weren’t commanding headlines or the imaginations of politicians. One might say that this is no surprise, seeing as they are both hot button issues for the public – though it might be said these issues are fabricated and amplified by those with vested interests to do so.

Left critics of this kind of pernicious scaremongering rightly call it out for what it is: the politics of divide and rule. I’ve done it myself. That, however, is as far as it goes. Too often the deeper political economy, the economic pressures of which politics is but a concentrated impulse, either remain unexplored with regard to these matters or, when they are analysed, they tend toward crude conclusions and deeply problematic politics. Continue reading →

Aspiration for all would be fine, but neither the Tories nor the Blairites will deliver it

aspiration escape from crisis and destruction - credit lightwise http://www.123rf.com/photo_34979261_open-door-light-and-the-resilient-power-of-hope-as-a-symbol-of-shinning-rays-of-human-aspiration-con.html?term=aspirationThe Tory manifesto was artfully targeted at making everyone a weeny bit richer, and some a lot richer. It offered to raise the income tax threshold to £12,500 (though the rich get more from that than the poor), to lower tax on those on the minimum wage, to raise the higher rate income tax threshold to nearly £50,000 (benefiting largely the top 10%), and raising the threshold for the inheritance tax from £650,000 to £1 million (benefiting only the richest 6% of families).

The Tories showered these goodies around like confetti, freely admitting that these handouts plus the £8bn for the NHS and £6bn for housing association right-to-buy discounts amounted to over £20bn, wholly unfunded, but Labour kept doggedly to austerity and no unfunded handouts in order to prove its fiscal reliability. So who won? It’s a no-brainer. Continue reading →

Why any Labour leader who can’t reach working class voters will lose again

working classThis is a defining moment for the future, and arguably the survival, of the Labour Party. In the coming months there will be much debate about what went wrong and where next.

In 2005, I produced evidence that Labour had lost 4 million voters since the election in 1997. A substantial part of these missing millions were traditional working class voters. This pattern has continued over the last 10 years.

In a minor tidal wave of what looks like pre planned statements, a group of commentators have argued that what lost the election was a failure to tap into the hopes of “aspirational” voters. Continue reading →

The big downside of this election

ballot boxApart from the narrowness in the polling between the two main parties, the other dramatic characteristic of this election is the number of people who are profoundly disgruntled and deep-down angry at the Establishment, in which they include Labour as well as the Tories, and are likely either not to vote at all or to vote UKIP.

The reasons variously tossed around are that “they’re all the same/nothing ever gets done/there’s no point because nothing changes/I’m not voting because politics doesn’t interest me”, etc., etc. UKIP will pick up quite a number of these turned-off disenchanted – may even come second in a large number of constituencies – even though it’s led by a phoney imposter who was an investment banker and preens himself as a working class lad in a pub with a pint of beer in his hand. But despite Farage’s obvious pretentiousness and the fact that UKIP will probably end up with only a handful of seats, what that tells you is that the big parties have massively failed in the eyes of a significant and growing section of the population. So what should be our response? Continue reading →

Re-engaging with the alienated “untouchables”

proud to be working classThe Labour campaign continues to make good progress whilst the Tories lurch from one failed artifice after another, and Ed Miliband is increasingly taking command with growing confidence. The election has nevertheless drawn attention to a disturbing penumbra of alienation from the whole process.

In poor white working class areas the number of households who say they never vote/haven’t made up their minds/believe there’s no point in voting because nothing changes or they’re all the same anyway, is alarmingly high. Of course there has always been a substratum of the population who felt and talked like that, but it has grown uncomfortably over the last 5 years. In a sense these patches of territory in England begin to resemble what has happened on a broader scale in Scotland. They feel they have regularly voted for Labour in the past, but it seems to make no difference because nothing changes (however unfair this judgement might be). This is not something that Labour can or should neglect: why has this happened and what needs to be done to regain these voters from their sense of abandonment? Continue reading →