Matt Chorley is a lot closer to power than my neighbours in Yorkshire. This is what Matt Goodwin is saying...

The silly debate about who runs things is important because it involves a sort of denial from the educated elite that they are far closer to power than most ordinary people

A couple of months ago I looked at accountability and how the people running our state’s services were, to all intents and purposes, unaccountable:

“What we see here is that the public sector understands that being accountable is important but seeks to redefine the idea as a tool rather than as a condition. Moreover, as the Surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle discovered, the one thing accountability isn’t for is holding individuals to account for their mistakes - this would be to assume something about the administration we are not permitted to assume, that it makes errors.”

In examining how we might get at least believable faux-accountability into public services, I looked at the work of Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede who developed the idea of power distance:

“...the extent to which the members of a society accept that “power in institutions and organisations is distributed unequally”. The further power is from the individual consumer of a public service, the less that person feels able to influence the way in which that service is run. The distance could be physical (you have to travel to the castle to get an answer), cultural (it is in a language or style I struggle to understand, for example) or social (the service is administered by people who aren;t like me), but the bigger the distance the less the institution is accountable to those receiving its services.”

In the last few days there has been an interesting reaction to the central thesis of political scientist, Matthew Goodwin’s new book, ‘Values, Voice and Virtue’. This thesis is, as the FT review put it “...that the rise of the radical right, the Brexit referendum and Johnson's general election victory of 2019 are expressions of a deeper realignment in UK politics that pits the marginalised white working class, socially conservative older voters and the 'non-graduate majority' against a new elite of university-educated progressives.” To my way of thinking and looking from up a hill in the South Pennines, Goodwin is saying that people have become aware of how distant they are from the people who run everything and that this will get reflected in our politics.

What has happened in the more febrile responses to Goodwin’s book (or, in truth, a single extract from the book where he sets out the characteristics of the modern British elite) is that people who are, in the main, university-educated progressives splutter and moan that this can’t be true because the Tories have been in government for the last 13 years not them and their trendy mates. In large part this is a straw man since, not only are plenty of Conservative MPs university-educated progressives but as some of the less progressive Tories will point out, every institution in the land is dominated by the sort of people Goodwin describes as the elite.

Even if you don’t accept Goodwin’s analysis of the excluded parts of society, the idea that our public services and big national institutions are culturally and socially distant from many people is not misplaced. To appreciate this, you have to recognise how Hofstede framed power distance: the extent to which people feel able to affect the decisions made by organisations that impact on their lives. So a national newspaper journalist such as Matt Chorley sets about bashing Goodwin’s idea:

“I mean it’s a daft argument, but bold to make it to the sort of “liberal elite” (or just sensible, intelligent) readers who know it’s a daft argument because they can see who is actually in power rather than just on the telly”

Chorley lists a load of media personalities and celebrities who obviously aren’t in government so therefore obviously have no power. This, perhaps wilfully, misses the whole point by using a very narrow definition of ‘power’ when (to reference Hofstede again) those who have power over things that affect our lives are a much bigger group than just the members of the current cabinet. The civil service, local government, the NHS, the BBC and, of course, the media have middle and senior management dominated entirely by university-educated progressives. Indeed, such a description should not be remotely controversial.

I am less agitated by the ‘woke’ agenda than others but it remains the case that the worldview and culture of university-educated progressives has grown distant from the mass of older, poorer and provincial people who Goodwin sees as an emergent coalition. Dealings with the government and large institutions (even big private businesses such as banks) seem designed to generate frustration, upset and confusion. We are made to wait on the convenience of the service provider, lectured about the manner in which we should address those providers, and warned that breaches of this confusing etiquette will be punished with service withdrawal. At the same time we see a new police force of equalities officers, diversity and inclusion managers, and net zero directors who appear to be accountable to nobody except a slightly incoherent and confusing ideology.

As to whether this power distance will cause a complete realignment in British politics, I am sceptical. The nature of our system means that it is extremely difficult to envisage a situation where a new political party representing this supposed anti-woke majority can supplant one of the two main parties. The last political party to do this in Britain was the Labour Party and that took twenty-five years (forty-five for an overall majority), and was greatly helped by the enfranchising of millions of working class men in 1918. So any change has to happen within the two main parties and, given the centre-left pretty much everywhere is the political manifestation of the university-educated progressive, this means the Conservative Party has to become the party of Lee Anderson and Ben Bradley rather than the party of Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove. This, I suspect, is possible but unlikely.

The more likely outcome is that state services get more disconnected from who we vote for, that the progressives extend their domination of big institutions, and that people in Goodwin’s coalition get still more detached from their government and the services it provides. The national debate likewise will focus ever more directly on the concerns of those university-educated progressives while the worries of a lot of ordinary folk will get exploited as fuel for political performances rather than the creation of a policy framework addressing those worries. Meanwhile actual policy priorities will reflect what that university educated elite believe is important, chiefly things that improve their lives. So transport policy will focus on trains and active travel, social policy priorities will be about work and getting people to work, and housing policy will stress densification and urban environments. 

The silly debate about who runs things is important because it involves a sort of denial from the educated elite that they are far closer to power than the coalition Goodwin describes. I dislike the racialisation implicit in some of Goodwin’s thesis because I don’t think, for example, much of Bradford’s Pakistani community feel any more able to influence the state and big institutions than do the mostly white folk in Denholme. There are places where the interests and concerns of that Asian community overlap with elite concerns (the treatment of Islam, the agenda around race and equalities) but their other concerns about schools, road safety, crime, family and the economy do not overlap and won’t be prioritised.

There is right now a good discussion around the meaning of conservatism and what a future conservative agenda might look like. I suspect it starts with looking at the little list at the end of that last paragraph - schools and what is taught in them, crime and safety, families and children, the balance between work and community as well as a renewed commitment to that Disraeli promise of betterment to working people, do the right thing and we will make sure society rewards you. At the same time, economic policy has to follow the evidence that open trade and free enterprise represent the best way to get the betterment promised by our renewal of Disraeli’s promise.