Ever since the seismic shock of the 2016 referendum, Westminster has been preoccupied with defending the “will of the people”—with both sides asserting a supreme interpretation of citizens’ deepest impulses. This hyper-consciousness of public opinion deepens a process that had been developing over many years. But this especially rabid modern tendency to justify or condemn political actions around the perceived expectations of the people obscures this fact: the electorate has never felt more difficult to read.
One reason for this is that many of the forces that used to unite us—whether the mass audiences of television’s heyday, or communities we once built around religion, trade unions or social clubs—have given way to fragmentation. Our culture and our technology have encouraged an unprecedented level of global connectivity. This has raised individual awareness and agency, but also concurrently unleashed tribalism, discouraging the sense of commonality of experience we once shared.
A large suite of focus groups I conducted across England in the last three months of 2017 capture the depth and complexity of this fragmentation. While I spoke to citizens from a wide range of backgrounds and locations, they were primarily White British over-50s, in areas that had undergone substantial economic upheaval over recent decades. And yet, even amongst this group, mutuality of understanding often gave way to considerable differences of opinion about many of the fundamental issues of the day.
Broadly, there were those who—however reluctantly—accepted that life in Britain had irrevocably evolved and that the younger generation would see the country through further periods of change over the coming decades. This group contrasted, and sometimes clashed, with those who fundamentally believe the country is on the wrong track, continue to see themselves as the most authentic representation of British cultural values, and are resistant to further adaptation.
It is certainly the case that those in the second group tended to express the greatest sense of personal precariousness—generally a potent combination of economic, social and cultural insecurities. It is also important to remember that much of our contemporary political and economic structures feel increasingly unknowable.
“There is a very modern kind of class divide”Globalisation, which represents the ultimate convergence of political and economic power, also marked the first time when market forces become truly opaque for many citizens, eroding their sense of a direct stake in the generation of wealth. Similarly, many of the discussions I witnessed around a perceived spike in inequality were only tangentially about material unfairness and earning parity. What is clear, is that there is now an entire section of the population—be they digital engineers or content strategists—employed in occupations which feel utterly impenetrable for many ordinary people. It is a very modern kind of class divide.
Compared to the other European countries I am studying, England appears to be considerably less explicit in its impulses towards a kind of “restorative” nostalgia—the desire to re-establish the social, economic and political structures and values of past decades. And yet, it is also clear that there was ample fertile ground in which the Brexit campaign’s remedial message of “taking back control” was able to root itself. My observation is that the idea we should forgo all the advances we have gained in lifestyle, health and equality to reimagine a kind of 1960s utopia is a relatively minority position in this country. Rather, those citizens resistive to change seem more inclined to want to arrest than reverse it; to “press the stop button” and take stock, rather than let it all unravel.
When one considers the nature of our interconnected economies and societies, and the huge waves of global change on the horizon, this presents immense challenges for political leaders. Governance, in this day and age, is so often a process of managing external forces as much as those within.
The appeal of these past decades for our focus group participants was so much related to the retrospective feeling of having everything ahead of them, all to play for, all possible. Today, these citizens look ahead to the future, with its menace of robots, economic stagnation, competing global powers and mass migration, and understandably cannot begin to visualise such dystopia, nor their place inside it. Their uncertainty stokes the fires of past memories. It appears the most pressing question of our political age is whether it is possible for leaders to bring citizens along, as we stride towards the next chapter of our national story.
