The left needs to campaign for social liberalism

The continuing expulsion of the Windrush generation from their home country to a country they hardly know, splitting up families in the process, is just a deliberate act of state cruelty. Why did the government go ahead with these deportations despite sitting on a report suggesting they should stop? Their pretext was that these individuals had at some stage in their lives committed a ‘serious’ crime, yet all had served their time for these offences. This act of cruelty is part of the Conservatives attempt to appeal to socially conservative voters, both traditional Tories and one time Labour voters. What do we call splitting up families just to make a political point? 

As Paula Surridge shows here, voters who were thinking of leaving Labour for the Conservatives in June 2019 were both more right wing and more socially conservative than loyal Labour voters. Those 2017 Labour voters thinking of voting Brexit were not more right wing, but were much more socially conservative. We have to wait for the BES survey before we can tell whether these were also the voters who finally broke Labour’s ‘red wall’ of northern constituencies, but it seems likely they were.

Brexit was an issue that split voters along the social conservative/liberal axis rather than the left/right axis (apart perhaps from Lexiters). Like immigration, these issues that sort liberals from conservatives are very useful to right wing parties on one condition: that right wing liberals vote on economic grounds but left wing conservatives vote on social grounds. That condition has so far seemed to hold. Furthermore in the UK’s FPTP system, the concentration of liberals in cities will favour social conservatives. So while Labour and Democrat party members obsess about internal disputes over economic policy, to win elections the left needs to focus on winning over social conservatives. [1]

It is tempting to relate the social conservative/liberal divide to basic psychological traits. Liberals tend to value individual rights and embrace change, while conservatives value community cohesion and order. Liberals look to a better future and conservatives look to the past, and so on. However it is a mistake to think individual views on particular social issues are things they are born with. Liberal attitudes often spring from an environment of security while conservative attitudes come from insecurity.

Social attitudes may also reflect experience. It is often noted that attitudes to immigration tend to be hostile in areas of almost no or recent immigration and tolerant in areas where immigrants have lived for some time. A similar effect may come from a university education. The two main predictors of attitudes to Brexit were age and education. This chart, also from Surridge, suggests having a degree is the more important factor.

Here Silent = 75+, Boomer = 54-74, Gen X = 40-53, Gen Y 25-39. There is some age effect among those without a degree, but the defining factor in generating liberal attitudes is having a degree. Surridge argues here that a lot of this effect simply comes from the socialisation that a degree brings.

All this raises an obvious question. Why have we seen a national divide over ‘culture’ emerge as the dominant political divide recently, while in the past the right/left divide seemed to be what mattered? One answer goes back to Windrush. I’m (just) old enough to remember Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968. Powell advocated a policy of voluntary repatriation for immigrants and their descendants. Today we have selective but involuntary repatriation.

The key point her was that Powell was sacked as a minister of a Conservative government for that speech, and repatriation remained something that only a few on the right and extreme right groups advocated. The Times (not yet owned by Murdoch) condemned the speech and subsequently recorded incidents of hate crimes against immigrants immediately after the speech. This was despite the popularity of the speech among many groups: famously a thousand London dockers went on strike in protest of Powell's sacking and marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster.

Ted Heath sacked Powell because he feared the damage the speech might do to race relations, and he was absolutely right to do so. Today’s Conservative party is a very different animal, but so is our press. Racism, xenophobia and social conservatism more generally are seen by today’s Conservative party as constituencies to cultivate, in part because on many issues the country is more left wing than the government (e.g. size of the state, nationalisation). The right wing press helps them do this. 

However I think this is not everything. When I used to describe Cameron’s government as very right wing, I got quite a few responses saying nonsense and using gay marriage as proof that Cameron had moved left. I thought it was nonsense at the time, but on reflection it made me think about the extent to which social liberalism has both triumphed and moved forward over the last 60 odd years. At the beginning of the 1960s we still had the death penalty, while homosexuality, abortion and blasphemy were all crimes.

The 1960s Labour government saw a whole raft of liberalising legislation passed, but it is probably fair to say that was mostly not driven by popular opinion. The data we have from the British Social Attitudes survey shows public opinion moving in a more liberal direction from the start of their data period. Here are just two examples.

One interesting feature here is the liberalisation surge that began around 2010. Paula Surridge has aggregated a number of questions from the survey, distinguishing between respondant’s levels of education

The gap between attitudes by education is clear, and there is a suggestion of a widening gap from 2011. (The education gap on left/right questions is much smaller.)

One reason for the overall trend in liberalisation, and perhaps some of the reaction against it, is that the broadcast media is largely populated by those who have a degree. This allows certain right wing newspapers to talk about a ‘liberal elite’ which ignores those with a less liberal attitude, and on this they are largely correct. More recently the broadcast media has attempted to counter its own biases by endless VoxPops and other devices. 

Immigration is part of this liberal/conservative divide. One incredible (for a liberal like me) recent YouGov poll throws a strong light on where this divide comes from.

It is too easy, and I think a mistake, to describe this as reflecting xenophobia, as if you are describing some immutable characteristic. Better to note that it would be very hard to be bothered by foreign languages if you heard them all the time, as many city dweller would.

This evidence suggests two important but provocative conclusions, which for me represent tentative hypotheses rather than anything firm. First, the key division in UK society today as far as elections are concerned is the social liberal/conservative divide, rather than ABCD class divisions or how left wing economic policy is.[2] Brexit was not an aberration but part of a trend. The big divide in the UK is partly age but mainly education. [3] The political right understands this, which is why elections will be fought on proxies for this divide. It is a divide they can exploit because social conservatives feel they are not in control, in part because the tide has been towards liberalisation. An interesting question is what the proxy for this divide will be in 2025 after 15 years of Tory rule.

Second, social conservatism is not immutable. Leavers are becoming more liberal than they used to be just as Remainers have, even if the pace may be slightly different. One clear example is immigration, where attitudes are becoming more positive regardless of Brexit. This means that the left can and must argue the case for more liberal attitudes, rather than regarding social conservatism as a problem to appease while dealing with economic issues, or worse still romanticising older class divisions.

Both the Blair/Miliband left (the control immigration mugs) and the Corbyn left are equally at fault here. The idea that Brexit represented protests from the economically ‘left behind’ has dominated thinking on Brexit, moving the debate on to a more comfortable economic frame. It is far from clear that improving incomes will change people’s socially conservative attitudes, as the large Brexit vote outside 'left behind' areas shows. Left parties must fight for social liberalism, rather than vacating that ground to the right.

[1] Just to be clear, winning them over does not mean adopting socially conservative policies. This does not work for various reasons that I have mentioned in earlier posts. Labour voters are socially liberal, and they have alternatives in the Liberal Democrat and Green parties as 2019 showed. The left needs to challenge socially conservative myths, not validate them.

[2] This is not to say that economic divisions are unimportant - far from it. My point is about where the key divisions are as far as elections are concerned.

[3] Part of the age division may also represent economic rather than social divisions, as Rachel Shabi discusses here.

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Why Theresa May should not get anyone’s sympathy vote

She may have fortitude in the face of misfortune, and it is easy to feel sympathy for her in comparison to the Brexiters in the Conservative party. But to a large extent she has brought that all upon herself, from the moment she became Prime Minister. Here are some of her bigger mistakes.

1. Appointing Brexiters to key posts in cabinet, including the minister who would be in day to day charge of the negotiations, and Boris Johnson. A clever wheeze, some political commentators opined, to make the Brexiters own the result. In reality not so clever when the aim of the Brexiters is not to get a deal. In the end she had to take over negotiations herself to get anywhere at all, and of course she owned the result.
   
   
2. Rather than listening to experts on the EU, law and economics when formulating her plan, she listened to her political advisors whose only interests were in keeping the party together. As a result she wrote red lines that she has had to cross over to get a deal, and wasted a lot of time in between.
   
   
3. If she had listened to anyone with even the slightest knowledge she would not have rushed to start the Article 50 process.
   
   
4. Holding a General Election in 2017, in the middle of the negotiation process, and then holding on to power when that gambit failed by bribing the DUP with, as the Tories like saying, taxpayers money.
   
   
5. Ignoring the Irish border for over a year. Then agreeing a deal on the Irish border in December 2017. Then declaring in the House of Commons that no Prime Minister could ever approve such a deal when the EU put that agreement in legal form.

Two things seem to have motivated her throughout this process: to appease the Brexiters, and to end Freedom of Movement. Both have influenced the Withdrawal Agreement, although not in ways she suggests. In the two years she could have been outlining a deal that brings the UK much closer to the EU, but she has quite deliberately done the opposite.

There is a story going round that she had no choice in all this. She had to appease the Brexiters at every turn because her survival depended on it. This is simply not the case. She has brought her present position on herself through her constant appeasement of the Brexiters. She could and should have marginalised the Brexiters at the very start of her premiership, when she was at her most powerful, and been honest with people about what the trade-offs were. The Brexiters would have huffed and puffed, but they never had enough support to bring her down, particular in the early months of her premiership. If she had done that, and listened to sound advice, the last two or more years would have been a much calmer and more rational period.

But she was not going to do that because of her obsession with ending freedom of movement and reducing immigration. May is the author of the hostile environment, that has inflicted suffering on so many people, just so she can try and meet some arbitrary target. Yet when Amber Rudd, her replacement as Home Secretary, had to deal with the flack that the hostile environment caused when the media discovered it was being applied to the Windrush generation and their descendants, May allowed Rudd to resign without a hint of apology from herself as author of the policy. Her recent description of migrants who came to the UK when we were in the EU as 'queue jumpers' is unfortunately all to typical of this Prime Minister. 

It is a mistake to see stubbornness as fortitude, particularly when the person’s misfortunes are entirely self-inflicted. It would be a serious mistake to be sympathetic when she is finally standing up to the mad Brexiters when she should have done this 2 years ago. Her failure has given us a deal which makes voters worse off and gives them less sovereignty. She has put this country in a position that we have only months before we leave with no deal, saying you take my deal or you have chaos. She has done all this with only one thing in her mind: it is a strategy that maximises her chances of staying leader for longer (see this post on perpetual Brexit). When you keep making serious mistakes, having someone who is stubborn and self-centred as Prime Minister is extremely dangerous.

A hostile environment

The received wisdom on immigration goes as follows. Growing public concern about increased immigration to the UK led the Coalition government to put in place a target for net migration, and then enact measures to achieve that target. Creating a ‘hostile environment’ to discourage immigration was part of that effort. The Windrush generation and descendants are unfortunate victims of overzealous or box ticking officials.

Almost everything in this received wisdom is wrong. Although immigration has never been popular, active concern as reflected in opinion polls increased followed the Conservative party highlighting the issue as a way to attack the then Labour government (Hague: foreign land, Howard: are you thinking what we are thinking), and more importantly an increasing number of articles in the right wing press portraying immigrants or asylum seekers in a negative light. Most people didn't think immigration was a problem locally, but they perceived it was a problem for the country as a whole. The best predictors of immigration concern was readership of the Mail, Express and Sun. 

In my post about neoliberal overreach, I listed austerity and immigration as the two ways in which the 2010 Coalition government went too far in an effort to achieve neoliberal goals. Austerity was what I call deficit deceit: using scare stories about the deficit to shrink the state. The focus on immigration with the tens of thousands target was also deceit because most of the government had no intention of achieving that target. The hostile environment policy was there for show, as part of the deceit. The 'go home' vans were meant to be seen by the public, not illegal immigrants. Most of the government knew that seriously trying to achieve their immigration target would damage the economy, but rather than tell the public this they continued the facade to take votes off Labour and UKIP. 

The facade came back to bite the Conservative government during the Brexit referendum. Cameron could not credibly start talking up the benefits of EU freedom of movement while at the same time putting policies in place that made it appear as if he was trying to hit his own immigration target, and then failing to do so. In that sense the Conservative's immigration policy created the Brexit disaster. 

Part of the facade of trying to hit that target was the hostile environment policy. Some ministers were right to suggest that the policy was “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”. To say that the policy only applied to illegal immigrants misses the key point: people were assumed guilty of being illegal until they could prove, and pay to prove, that they had a legitimate right to be here. Being assumed guilty could mean losing your job or your home. If the Home Office made a mistake, the applicant had to pay to try to put it right. If the mistake was large enough, they could be detained without trial.

What is worse, the policy entrapped landlords, employers and nurses into acting as extensions of this Home Office regime. Some, fearing the consequences of getting things wrong, were bound to be tempted to discriminate against anyone who was not white and did not have a British accent. In that sense the policy actively encouraged discrimination. But the Conservative party didn't mind, just as it didn't see any problem in conducting an Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Kahn 

The hostile environment policy, like austerity, has ruined people’s lives. Some are Windrush, some are not. The Home Office were warned about how the policy was entrapping innocent people in 2014, but did nothing. Rudd and May could see what the policy was doing to innocent people caught in their net, and they made no attempt to change anything. They only acknowledged problems when they were forced to by public opinion. [1]

Like austerity, the Conservative party’s focus on immigration seemed like a useful political tactic at the time, as well as playing to the xenophobic elements in the party’s base. Like austerity, the policy started to do real harm to innocent people, yet the leadership showed no inclination to dilute or abandon their policy. While Cameron and Osborne could see that the immigration target was only there for show, they had given the responsibility of achieving it to someone who didn’t get the deceit. Worse still, Theresa May seemed quite happy with any collateral damage as she stubbornly pursued the impossible.

So austerity and the hostile environment continue, because the Chancellor and Prime Minister respectively are committed to these policies, and seem indifferent to the consequences until forced to undertake partial palliatives. This is why I called both policies neoliberal overreach. Past Labour leaderships have unfortunately felt they had to tag along with both or suffer electoral costs. Liberal Democrats were part of the government that enacted both. The media helped construct or went along with narratives that made both policies seem essential. But there was a small group of Labour MPs who opposed both policies on principle, and continue to do so. Is it any wonder that it is they who now lead the opposition party? Is it any wonder that the political and media consensus that enacted neoliberal overreach will do anything they can to prevent that group gaining power?

[1] The same public opinion that supposedly was clamouring for policies to control immigration. It is sometimes said that most people dislike immigration not immigrants. When confronted (thanks to persistent strong journalism) with the human consequences of anti-immigration policy on actual immigrants, the public pull back. Most of the public lack the ideological zeal and indifference to its human consequences of many of their political leaders.