A group of under-30s has just launched Undivided, a campaign “set up for young people, by young people, to get the best possible deal for young people out of Brexit negotiations.” They aim to gather 1m suggestions from across the political spectrum, to be boiled down to a coherent set of demands for the government.
This is a much-needed initiative for a generation the Tories seem to have decided doesn’t exist, and the fact that they have branded themselves as “undivided” is very welcome. The fact that they felt they needed to, however, is not.
Since the Brexit vote, the one thing that’s clear about Britain is that it’s deeply divided. If the press is to be believed, people who voted remain think leavers are a bunch of uneducated bigots, happy to cut off their nose to spite their face, while remainers are seen as a clique of self-obsessed urbanites, unable to imagine a world in which they’re not right about everything, all the time.
Sympathy for the views of others is in short supply; the only thing we can seem to agree on is that we don’t agree. In this febrile environment, pundits and politicians have been desperately trying to work out how to carve up British society, but no one can seem to agree.
Since the decline of British industry, traditional class identity has become too complex to be practical. It is no longer possible to guess who someone will vote for based on what they, or their parents, do for a living. From the “precariat” to the emerging service workers, changes in the way we exploit employees have led to a whole collection of new economic identities, and a collection of new dividing lines to go along with them. We’ve been watching this happen for a long time, but needed something like Brexit to shock us into working out where the divides really lie today – as well as providing a massive new data set with which to do it.
Political scientist David Runciman thinks it’s education that sets people apart, writer John Harris thinks the dividing line is wealth and access to the fruits of globalisation, Dr D’maris Coffman thinks it’s whether you define yourself as British or English, and Theresa May thinks it’s the metropolitan elite versus the rest.
Who’s right? And why is it so important to carve up British society anyway? Who gains from it?
Well, Ukip and the Brexiteers gained from it in the referendum. They cast the establishment as a careless, self-interested elite, bent on protecting its own prosperity in the face of massive inequality, and we all know where that got them. The Tories obviously think they’ll gain from it now, and they’re probably right. Whether it’s telling bankers they’re right, and nothing will change, or telling the public they’re right, and a revolution is at hand, the party is not just picking sides, but creating them. The Liberal Democrats also seem to think they’ll benefit, branding themselves as the party of the 48%, while walking blithely into the prime minister’s liberal elite trap.
Who loses? At the moment, the Labour party. Unless it can take control of the narrative, it risks looking like a confused version of Tim Farron’s “educated remainers”, run by a trio of MPs representing three of north London’s most bourgeois constituencies. The fact that the party is shot through with its own destructive ideological divisions only makes matters worse.
The real risk is that Labour is seen as a party of middle-class messiahs, who see the country as divided between their disciples and the rest. The “rest” being, by definition stupid, greedy, racist, immoral and always and for ever wrong. According to much post-Brexit analysis, many of those who don’t agree with Corbyn’s Labour chapter and verse are those living in the much-touted “heartlands”, which are currently reported to be turning hard to the right.
So things don’t look good for the left, or British society as a whole. But aside from today’s political wrangling, the real question is how far will this go. Is the Undivided campaign the start of a backlash against the self-interested division of Britain? I doubt it. There’s far too much to gain from the divide-and-conquer strategy currently in play, and far too much to lose from not getting in on it.
Politicians are not famous for long-termism, but they ignore these warnings at their peril. British society is sick; it has been for a long time. The Brexit vote and the discourse that followed have made the symptoms acute. Our leaders need to think very carefully before they play fast and loose with what holds this country together.
