'libdemmery': Britain's Progressive Cult

For three decades ‘libdemmery’ has set the political and policy agenda in the UK, moderating the worst excesses of socialists and greens while indulging all the worst of California’s cults

“...support for Reform averaged 43% in wards where more than half of adults have few, if any, educational qualifications. In contrast, it polled just 19% where more than two in five have a degree.”

One of the most striking developments in recent politics, not just in the UK but across The West, has been the abandoning of ‘the left’ by working class voters. What is described in that comment from pollster and political scientist, John Curtice, is that educated, urban graduates now make up the base of support for left wing parties while the old working class base has migrated to supporting conservative and populist parties. This process didn’t start recently but can be traced back to the success of Reagan and Thatcher in attracting the working class, especially skilled workers, to their aspirational conservatism. It is fair to say that this legacy has been rather squandered by subsequent leaders of conservative parties and that a new sort of right wing has emerged. We can call this ‘populist’ but at its heart is an agenda - MAGA Maoism as some have dubbed it - far more about a state directed economy and the elevation of traditional workers to a special status, all washed down with an echoing nostalgia for the mass employment of 1950s manufacturing.

The parallels between Reform in the UK and Trump’s MAGA movement is less about policy than about creating a vibe around, respectively, ‘Ordinary Americans’ and ‘British culture, values and identity’. And the main ideological enemy of these parties (the same is true of Marine Le Pen's National Rally) isn’t the traditional socialist left but progressive liberalism, the strange combination of an international rules-based order, ‘globalism’ to Reform and MAGA, with self-flagellating ideas around race, gender and British or American history, what the populists call ‘woke’. And while there are many places that might be suggested as the source of this progressivism, it is hard not to point to California both as its originator and propagandist. An idea born among radicals in West Coast universities spread across the world because it infected firstly Hollywood and then the exploding world of social media.

It is common for the media to hint that the problem with social media is that lots of thick and stupid people are influenced by what they read in that media. The delicious irony is that the very people talking darkly of misinformation and radicalisation are, very often, both misinformed and radicalised by the Californication of their worldview. Such people embrace, without criticism, progressive liberalism’s cults - ‘transwomen are women’, ‘climate emergency’, ‘slavery reparations’, ‘Trump is a fascist’, ‘immigration grows the economy’, ‘Gaza genocide’, ‘affordable rents’, ‘cars are bad’, ‘plant-based diets’, ‘all cultures are equal’, ‘decolonialisation’, ‘suburbs are sprawl’. What’s important here is that all of these cultish ideas are, for all that progressivism is now associated with ‘the left’, entirely compatible with the managerialist, technocratic centre and centre-right. There’s no seizing the means of production or destroying capitalism in these cults and that means wealthy, entitled and educated people can adopt them as political totems.

There’s no convenient term for this ideology as it plays out in the UK, but there is one political party that socially, culturally and emotionally embraces this worldview: unhesitatingly woke, pro-EU, keen on having immigrants serving coffee or delivering takeaways, totally NIMBY, and instinctively cool with veganism, bicycles, multiculturalism and hating Trump. So I shall, henceforth, call the ideology, ‘libdemmery’. Far more than their close friends in the Greens, Labour and wetter parts of the Tory Party, the Liberal Democrats represent the distillation of comfortable, smug, home-owning, Sauvignon Blanc drinking, shire county disdain for balding, working class men who drink lager and go to football matches unironically. ‘Libdemmery’ is the defining culture and politics of market towns in Somerset, Hampshire or Gloucestershire. The sort of places with a high street of expensive craft and food shops capped off with a Waitrose. Few people in these places ever worry much about whether they can afford the prices in these shops and are quite happy to pay eleven quid for a glass of predictable New Zealand white wine.

In the world of ‘libdemmery’ the notice boards tell us about Amnesty International vigils, bus trips to gentle marches supporting rejoining the EU, or a vigil at the parish church (with the pews replaced by plastic chairs and a big space for ‘messy church’) for victims of Zionism in Gaza. Plus, of course, calls to oppose Costa Coffee opening on the High Street and the building of a few new homes on a scrappy piece of land they’ve decided to call Peter’s Meadow to make it sound ancient and important. We will be told that Libdemby is a fair trade town or village, there’ll be discussions about zero waste and the circular economy. Everybody will rally behind Petunia Catesby-Clark and her mum, Veronica, Lady Catesby, when the young lady is arrested for throwing paint on rare vases in the V&A. The local MP (Tory, Labour or Lib Dem, it doesn’t matter, she’ll support all the ‘libdemmery’) will speak at the little garden party fundraiser for Petunia although it is never clear where the money is actually going to go.

The world of ‘libdemmery’ doesn’t have much crime, it is tidy, filled with active and well-heeled people living comfortably. Theirs is a very different world from that of the thick, uncouth, lager-swilling Reform voters in the tatty seaside town twenty miles from Libdemby. And the residents believe that the reason for their place being so much nicer is entirely related to them being progressive and liberal not because they are so much richer.

In Britain, ‘libdemmery’ is the default ideology of all the people who run and manage institutions in the public and voluntary sector. It is the worldview of nearly everyone sitting on the boards of national charities, grant-making bodies and assorted NHS functions. The ideas are firmly, almost immovably, embedded in the media, TV and arts, occasionally leavened by the once youthful socialism indulged by ‘libdemmery’s’ grandees. Plus Petunia’s greenery obviously.

What Reform voters hate, a mix of justified rage and envy, is the manner in which the inhabitants of Libdemby sneer at, exclude and dismiss their concerns about immigration, crime and culture. This isn’t helped by the seeming preference in ‘libdemmery’ for talking about America, Palestine, Ukraine or, indeed, anywhere except the place where the Reform voters live. At heart the Reform voter wants their town or suburb to be more like the heartlands of ‘libdemmery’ but without all that progressive nonsense. Of course the residents of Libdenby absolutely believe that their town’s relative success has nothing to do with it having only unaffordable housing and wealthy 50+ residents but is, in some way, because of their ‘libdemmery’. And that the racist gammons down at the seaside are entirely to blame for their town being such a dump.

For three decades ‘libdemmery’ has set the political and policy agenda in the UK, moderating the worst excesses of socialists and greens while indulging all the worst of California’s cults as if they were unalloyed truth not nonsense founded almost entirely on people’s faith in California’s progressive wonderland. What’s happened, of course, is that California’s cultural domination of the USA is falling apart, the dark world of social media presents a different America, and ‘libdemmery’ starts to look like it lacks clothes. But because everywhere, every institution, every university, is filled to the brim with ‘libdemmery’, every attempt to breach the edifice of progressivism is met with all out resistance from media, civil service, academia and much of politics.

Outside Wells Cathedral, deep in the heart of ‘libdemmery’, the other day there was a little gathering of climate cultists. We wandered over and stood in front of the display. For maybe two minutes we watched as half a dozen middle-aged women talked to each other. They weren’t remotely interested in making their argument to us, not because they didn’t have an argument but because them being there wasn’t about making an argument, it was simply making a statement of faith. The women could no more countenance someone passing by wanting to challenge their belief in a ‘climate emergency’, than 14th century priests would have expected anyone not to believe in God.