(Top photo: Chris Radburn/PA Wire/PA Images)
If Mayism has an intellectual case to make for itself, then it hinges on the following narrative: for too long, liberal metropolitan elitists have dominated political life in the UK. Their rule has brought with it rising economic inequality, rapid cultural change and – most crucially – mass immigration. The Brexit vote represented the point at which the provincial white working classes – ignored by the liberal order – ceased to tolerate all this. To make a country that “works for everyone”, politicians need to instigate a policy platform that will limit immigration, restore traditional social roles and provide a stronger safety net against the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. This is why, I suppose, a lot of Theresa May’s rhetoric has proved appealing to commentators previously associated with the Labour right.
Videos by VICE
One of these commentators is David Goodhart, a “mainly inactive” Labour member whose book, The Road to Somewhere, has caused a bit of a stir in the broadsheet press in recent weeks. The interest in Goodhart’s book, I think, stems from the fact that it manages to state the intellectual case for Mayism in a very concise way. The book’s central distinction – repeated ad nauseam throughout – is cleaved through the middle of the UK population. It is between “Anywheres”, who make up roughly 25 percent of the population, and “Somewheres”, who make up about 50 percent (the rest are “Inbetweeners”, although we’re never told very much about them).
The Anywheres are the hated metropolitan elitists of the Mayist narrative: high-achievers whose worldview values “autonomy, mobility and novelty”, placing a much lower value on “group identity, tradition and national social contracts”. They are comfortable with immigration, pro-international development and have progressive views about minority rights. Typically, they have what Goodhart calls “portable, achieved” identities – which means they’ve left the area they grew up in to attend a residential university and now live in London, or “even abroad”. The Anywhere worldview encompasses a broad swathe of educated society from “polished business executives to radical academics”.
Somewheres, by contrast, are the real bloody people of the UK. “Socially conservative and communitarian by instinct,” they have “rooted, ascribed” identities based on “group belonging and particular places”. They feel “uncomfortable about many aspects of cultural and economic change – such as mass immigration… the reduced status of non-graduate employment and more fluid gender roles”. Although particularly suspicious of immigrants from places that are “culturally distant”, Somewheres are, according to Goodhart, definitely not-racist: their nationalism has apparently shed the “historical trappings” of jingoism and white supremacy.
According to Goodhart, then, Anywheres have dominated policy-making and political discourse in this country for too long: this is something that we see manifested not only in immigration policy, but also things like gay marriage and the post-1992 expansion of universities. To remedy this, we need a more “rooted, emotionally intelligent liberalism” that will – for instance – use ID cards to maintain a “population register”, and limit public sector employment to UK citizens.
“London is hardly any guarantee of great wealth, as I’m sure basically everyone reading this article knows…”
Goodhart’s central distinction is bogus. Somewheres are supposed to be authentic, rooted in space and place; Anywheres, meanwhile, are inauthentic elites who have abandoned their roots to pursue personal success.
This doesn’t work for at least two reasons. On the one hand, Goodhart struggles throughout with the fact that – far from being placeless – Anywhere identity is in fact associated with one very specific place: London, which has a distinct culture of its own. On the other, it is conveniently forgetful of the very real financial struggles that young Anywheres in particular often face: leaving your hometown and moving to London is hardly any guarantee of great wealth, as I’m sure basically everyone reading this article knows (as presumably does that couple on Facebook you knew from school, who never left Drudgery-on-Moor and have just celebrated putting down the deposit on a house up the road from your mum?).
Goodhart is generally quite disparaging of the determination of Anywheres to abandon their roots, which, he thinks, means they cannot possibly understand the people who choose to remain living in or around their hometowns. But I wonder if the problem isn’t rather that these apostate provincials understand all too well how awful their hometowns are: after all, they’ve often taken a significant financial hit just to be able to escape them. David Goodhart, by the way, is a professional journalist who went to Eton. Perhaps he is in a position to lionise Somewheres precisely because he knows nothing about them?
Moreover, Goodhart’s distinction conflates social and economic liberalism. For Goodhart, identity politicking academics and globalising business elites are just two halves of the same snake. But this is of course nonsense. Social liberalism is driven by a conviction that everyone deserves the liberty of a chance at forming a life that is meaningful to them. Economic liberalism, by contrast, uses the freedom of the market as a disciplinary tool. Both might involve the word “liberalism”, but in practice the two are starkly at odds.
This leads us to what I think is the real problem with Goodhart’s book. Throughout, there is a huge stamping, bellowing elephant in the room: capitalism. For Goodhart, capitalism is not something that can change: it is rather a law like gravity, basic to any possible interaction with the world. And yet, whenever Goodhart talks about, say, the inability of poorer white people to see immigrants as anything but competitors for scarce jobs, it is clear that there is one big powerful force causing all of this.
That something is an economic system which treats every human body as a commodity and obliges human beings to see themselves – either along individual or group lines – as in competition with one another; that empties the provinces of any beauty or meaning and turns the cities into giant machines for the production of debt.
Goodhart’s proposals for a new rooted liberalism only make any sort of sense if we assume that nothing fundamental about capitalism can change. And this, I think, reveals the truth about the post-Brexit consensus May is trying to establish. The Brexit vote may well have been a “protest” against unfairnesses associated with shadowy liberal elites. But in practice Brexit will not result in these elites losing power. May’s government is in fact using cultural conservatism’s emotional energy to prop neoliberalism up. If you really want to eliminate the unfairnesses associated with capitalism, it’s not social liberalism that must go: it’s capitalism itself.
