By most parameters, be it education, healthcare and democratic participation, Britain lags behind most other ‘industrialised’ nations. Granted, nations should not be judged on GDP or per capita income alone, both of which are in decline in the UK. Yet they give some indication into trends. Britain has a ‘three tier’ society: firstly, the public sector which eats up a huge slice of national income. Secondly a civil society of private business working in a bureaucratic, anti-profit environment. The third constituency is the disenfranchised working class. Losers in the glorious era of ‘globalisation’, peripheral to the main political parties and living in the unfettered gig economy of Britain. Three tier Britain has created a divisive society where large parts of the population feel disenfranchised. The divisions are indicative on two levels: the economic and the cultural. In the economic sphere there is the supply side issue of social mobility. On the cultural side there is also the knotty problem of free trade/protectionism. This, although appearing to be an economic choice, is predominantly a cultural one. Governments look after their constituencies and the constituency of the working class has shifted. It has been replaced by a managerial and bureaucratic class which appeals to the Brahmin like Labour Party. Trump has recognised this conundrum and sees that to ignore your traditional base is historical suicide. Therefore protectionism, perceived by the disenfranchised as in their interests, goes against the idea of the ‘rational’ voter.
Stuck in the middle of the malaise is the lack of social mobility in the UK. A Goldman Sachs study shows how poorly the UK performs with social mobility. Sharon Bell of Goldman Sachs maintains that:
‘The primary thing is that the U.K., relative to the rest of Europe, looks pretty poor on most metrics on social mobility and things have actually deteriorated further in the last few years..’
The Sutton Trust, an organisation which studies social mobility, concluded that:
‘The poor academic performance of disadvantaged boys, especially those from white working-class backgrounds, is a tragic waste of talent with a significant economic cost..’
In education, according to the DOE, (Department of Education) white working-class schoolchildren are less likely to go to University than ever before. In Britain this is not merely an economic reality, but a cultural construction. It stems from the brutal fact that globalisation has been a disaster for the British working-class. However elite governance, i.e. the Labour Party, is estranged from its traditional support base. This is largely due to a conscious policy of deindustrialisation and the catastrophic effects on working-class jobs. At the same time the state sector has turned into a Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ – a ‘win-win’ since the destruction of employment means an uptick in social services employment.
In the US a ‘New Class War‘, is described by Michael Lind. The new elites are managerial and international in outlook. The post war consensus between Labour and Capital; the New Deal trade off, collapsed with deindustrialisation. The US is ahead of the curve now – with the Trump administration recognising their constituency.
The free trade arguments of Adam Smith, then Hayek etc made sense in the eras of industrial growth, when the symbiotic nature of world trade was clear. Materials were sourced abroad and manufactured at home. What China and India realised, in the era of dollar hegemony, was that they were always going to be bridesmaids at the wedding. The tsunami of globalisation of course suited the western economic brief: higher rates on the return on profit and lower social incomes (i.e., the economist Piketty’s r>d). This, despite the usual free trade narrative. It meant cheaper consumer goods. But globalisation has led to the concentration of wealth and an acceleration of inherited wealth (Piketty). The globalist narrative is lost in the new rust belts, both in the US and Britain. It echoes, for example, Richard Reeves ‘Of Boys and Men’ which paints a dysfunctional picture of rootless, lost youth, having foregone the cultural ties of work and culture which had defined the working class. Globalisation, by contrast, is a rootless, mercantile conduit which reflects the cosmopolitan world view of the bureaucratic class. The industrial waste lands replaced by the society of the spectacle. The ‘use value’ of labour replaced by ‘sign value’; the working class as merely a consumer of signs, the mobile phone etc, which symbolise a kind of bastard participation.
Metropolitan cities, in the US and Europe, are alight with resplendent museums and cultural artifices which seduce the observer into a miasma of deceit. The cities attract government funding, and the boundless pockets of tax payers will pay. The metropolis lives in the post-industrial illusion of well-being. It is a privileged cacophony of civil servants, NGOs recycling the same policies in different coloured garments. This is a ‘win-win’ for the new class. The common arguments for free trade do not register with the working class. Walk outside of Chicago and one can see dereliction. Northern British cities have lost their ‘telos’- there is no meaning besides a broken consumerist fetish. Free trade does facilitate the division of labour and cheaper manufacturing inputs. The argument goes that free trade leads to higher skilled jobs domestically. That’s the theory and perhaps it works in the long run – but as Keynes said – we are all dead in the long run. These new high tech jobs haven’t materialised in Chicago, Michigan, Newcastle or Manchester. But robots will do the work in the future it is claimed. But who will do the consuming? Capitalism needs an endless circle of consumers; hence new invented needs. The crux of the dilemma is to open up economies and invest in real growth through social mobility rather than investing dead money into bureaucracy. This will strengthen both the working class and also strategic defence and security.
Another reason for protectionist policy is overlooked by globalists. This is the Hobbesian argument for the ‘grossraum‘ or civilisational state. The ‘win -win’ mantra of free trade was challenged even back in 1945 when the American economist Albert Hirschmann published ‘National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade‘. It was the first time that economic power was defined in relation to geopolitical power. Hirschmann noted the corollary between the two, in the wake of Goering’s infamous quote about the choice between producing guns or butter. Therefore, the missed point re: Trumpian protectionism is the correlation between economic wealth and establishing military hegemony. To establish hegemony a country needs control of its resources for strategic reasons. There is no such thing as a free lunch in geopolitics. Adam Smith, the doyen of free traders admitted as much in the ‘Wealth of Nations’, arguing that “the act of navigation is not favourable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence which can arise from it.” There are ‘exceptions’ to free trade. There would also be arguments for restricting free trade to prevent child labour and exploitation i.e., in China and Myanmar for example. There is no ‘quid pro quo’; it is a sliding scale of choices. The free trade mantra and neoliberalism has been replaced by the spectre of ‘Geoeconomics’. Strong economies translate to strong geopolitics and hence hegemony. The benevolent liberal world view replaced by realpolitik. Britain remains in a state of limbo, a kind of ‘Waiting for Godot’, as in Samuel Becket’s play where the protagonists wait for the arrival of something or other, forever unrequited.
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as ‘The Spectator’ ,’’Comment Central’, Takimag’, ‘The American Spectator’, ‘Asian Affairs’, ‘Deliberatio’, ‘L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica’, ’The National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, ‘The Montreal Review’, ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review’ ,’The Salisbury Review’, ‘New English Review’, , ‘American Thinker’, ‘Indian Strategic Studies’, ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.
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Much more work needs to be done on the concept of social mobility, surely it’s somewhat of a self-defeating concept? Those who bemoan the woes of the underclass (often from the perspectives of the middle class and not from the, now largely, consumerist aspirations of the underclass) want to have it both ways – the underclass moving up to become middle class and yet the underclass preserved as a bastion of happy hard manual workers.
The middle class don’t seem to be the target of social mobility champions as they are as unlikely to make it beyond upper middle class/nouveau riche and yet no one is agonising over this when it’s far easier to affect a paternalistic concern for the bottom of the pile (often in their own eyes).
Also social mobility champions inevitably choose to see better social mobility abroad and defacto classlessness, oblivious to the fact that all societies are subtly tiered and everyone knows their and others’ status even though it may not be spoken out loud.