The book fails to demonstrate that the people occupying the most influential positions in British economic and political spheres share a “radically progressive” outlook One of the other features of this definition of a new elite is how easily it can flex to accommodate the politics of those it needs to include: so Jeremy Corbyn is a member, and Boris Johnson is not. To explain this, Goodwin says that “most of all, they are defined by their very liberal if not radical ‘woke’ values”. So if you’re a rich, prestigiously educated Londoner but you don’t like footballers taking the knee, you’re probably not part of this “new governing class”. As politics has become increasingly “two-dimensional”, shaped not just by debates about the economy and public services but also by new debates over culture, identity and belonging, Labour’s decision to go all in on the more liberal graduate class has left it dangerously exposed. Members of the New Elite really do hold enormous influence over the national conversation – by defining concepts, determining speech codes, shaping social norms, prioritising voices and determining which values are considered legitimate. All of which helps to explain why, even as Britain has moved rightwards economically, it has moved leftwards culturally. At the same time, members of the New Elite also continually disavow their own influence. Indeed, they are very fond of portraying themselves as oppressed underdogs who actually have no power at all.

Values, Voice and Virtue By Matthew Goodwin | Used - Wob Values, Voice and Virtue By Matthew Goodwin | Used - Wob

Daniel Lavelle spoke to people who have decided, or been forced, to live in caravans as rising rents and section 21 evictions make housing increasingly precarious for many. NimoAs an exercise, I followed up a random citation. On p101 of the Kindle edition, he says: 'These changes played a direct role in Labour's electoral collapse[...] Political appeals to the working class', conclude professors Geoff Evans and James Tilley, in their insightful study of how Labour's electorate unravelled over the last ten years, 'have now effectively disappeared from the lexicon of party politics.' The meaning of what he's saying is clear: that Labour, primarily under Miliband and Corbyn, have lost sight of the working class, with catastrophic consequences (ie the 2019 election). Goodwin’s dichotomy seems to stand empirical scrutiny, but in the reverse: a conservative ruling elite governing an increasingly progressive country. In today’s newsletter: Interrogating academic Matthew Goodwin’s description of a new left-wing elite

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That isn't an issue in itself, obviously. My own politics are pretty similar to his in many respects. But he lets them into his work, making the book less effective as an argument. Funnily enough, he mentions 'confirmation bias' in his introduction and this is exactly what happens in this book. In its details, it’s a portrait that Mills would recognise. “Their very identity as high-flying, highly accomplished graduates of elite institutions,” Goodwin observes, “gives them a profoundly important and highly collective sense of unity” and “shapes their values and collective loyalties”. This sense of collective identity is “strengthened by their social networks, which are usually filled with other elite graduates from other elite universities. More often than not, people from the new graduate elite marry other members of the graduate elite.” The image of a distinct new elite, defined by education and values, standing over the common people, has a long history An excellent book for understanding the current state of play in British politics. Matthew Goodwin argues that the economic liberalism of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government combined with the cultural liberalism of Tony Blair's New Labour regime has created a political culture in the United Kingdom that is now just as polarised as that of America or continental Europe. The divide is now mainly between the university-educated, socially liberal, and pro-mass immigration elite on the one hand and the culturally conservative national populists on the other. The latter group tend to be more right-wing on cultural issues, but more left-wing on economics. Carrying on from National Populism, Goodwin brings his argument right up to date, painting a clear picture of the “left behind” working class’s justifiable feeling of abandonment and resentment. It clearly explains the collapsing Red Wall and just as clearly explains the impending collapse of those newly-blue seats in the next election. Bland, Archie (14 April 2023). "Friday briefing: Has a 'woke aristocracy' really taken control of British society?". The Guardian . Retrieved 26 August 2023.

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You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The party’s embrace of hyper-globalisation, a hangover from Thatcherism, mass immigration and the hollowing out of national democracy as power drifted away to distant institutions has chimed with the graduate minority but alienated a larger majority of non-graduates, workers and pensioners.

Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics

I read Values, Voice and Virtue book after reading Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe, which I read a few months ago and came away from with the sense that immigration means something different in Europe than it does in the United States, and I went into the reason for that in my review of that book. Shaw, Martin (2023-04-25). "Professors, Power and Projection: the Case of Matthew Goodwin – Byline Times". Byline Times . Retrieved 2023-08-22. And at root, that's what he's driving at: the raw populism of the moment. It's the same force Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn both wanted to harness: he doesn't really want to improve how politicians engage with the wider populace - oh no, that would be too hard. Instead he wants to recycle leftover political rhetoric from the last ten years or so. The elite the cosmopolitans, the few, these people who have rigged the system, who think they're better than you. He wants to harness your resentment in the service of something that, you can be sure, will be a thousand times worse than what we have now. Worth, Owen (2023). "A traditional intellectual for the populist right?". Capital & Class. doi: 10.1177/03098168231187251. S2CID 260179653. Now, what Evans and Tilley say here is very interesting but the elisions of context made by Goodwin as well as his own contextualisation and obfuscating citation, mean a very misleading use of their work. This is just an example of the way he argues and cites. It's not academic (perhaps that's too new elite?) but it's also incompetent. It's what you'd expect from a lazy first year student at university, rushing out an essay. Not some leading academic, modern political philosopher.Other reviewers have pointed out that education has been used as a differentiator for the elite for hundreds of years yet Goodwin identifies university education as the main marker of this new elite. The old Britain used to be run by the toffs but the significance of this new elite is that they are, well, toffs. We have seen that references to the working class were particularly pronounced by Labour in the post-war era, but started to fall dramatically in both manifestos and leaders' speeches from the late 1980s onwards. Political appeals to the working class have now effectively disappeared from the lexicon of party politics. Just as discussion of class and class politics by the newspapers more or less stops by 1997, so do appeals to the working class by political parties.' a b "Gerry Hassan: Matthew Goodwin's take on the current state of Britain is flawed". The National. 2023-04-11 . Retrieved 2023-07-12. a b Payne, Sebastian. "Values, Voice and Virtue by Matthew Goodwin review — has the Tory party bungled the post-Brexit realignment?". Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a news conference after signing the ‘Stop Woke Act’. Photograph: Miami Herald/TNS