Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics

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Matthew Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, is out on March 30. Worth, Owen (2023). "A traditional intellectual for the populist right?". Capital & Class. doi: 10.1177/03098168231187251. S2CID 260179653. As is often the case when you regret not speaking your mind in the heat of the moment, I started thinking of how I should have responded to Steel. Why indeed had the people of Kent voted Leave? And why had so many people also in forgotten or forlorn towns done likewise? Cutts, David; Goodwin, Matthew; Heath, Oliver; Surridge, Paula (2020). "Brexit, the 2019 General Election and the Realignment of British Politics". The Political Quarterly. Wiley. 91 (1): 7–23. doi: 10.1111/1467-923x.12815. ISSN 0032-3179. S2CID 214063692.

Goodwin was the director of the Centre for UK Prosperity, itself an offshoot of the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit, libertarian think-tank funded by a New Zealand-born billionaire. He has had support for his thesis from fellow anti-elitists Lord Frost, the former diplomat and civil servant who was Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator; Melanie Phillips, a newspaper columnist since 1987; and Piers Morgan, a television presenter. The book fails to demonstrate that the people occupying the most influential positions in British economic and political spheres share a “radically progressive” outlook

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Labour has staged one of the most impressive recoveries in history. After finding itself outflanked by Nigel Farage’s national populism, then Brexit, and then Boris Johnson, the party now commands a 17-point lead in the polls over the Conservatives, more than enough to win a majority next year. Hassan, Gerry (14 May 2023). "It's time for a long and hard look at the state of the UK's democracy". The National . Retrieved 21 August 2023.

Lewis, Helen (18 May 2023). "Why So Many Conservatives Feel Like Losers". The Atlantic . Retrieved 18 August 2023. Book Review: National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin Things are beginning to change, with Keir Starmer’s acceptance of Brexit and focus on crime a sign that he grasps the need to reach out beyond London and the liberal enclaves. But unlike during the era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the gulf over values is now being exacerbated by other, more recent developments. Liu’s portrait of the PMC is far more astringent and over-the-top than anything Goodwin has produced. Yet, it is also more realistic. Liu does not pretend that the virtue hoarders constitute a new ruling class. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders, what provokes her ire is that they stand in the way of real social change, having abandoned class politics for what she calls “performative transgression”. And where Goodwin argues that the “radical woke” capture of society lies at “the roots of today’s more turbulent politics”, Liu understands that the new elite is the product, not the cause, of political turbulence, the consequence of the evisceration of mass movements for social change.A really key driver of populist politics is how you construct this notion of a cultural elite,” said Savage. “You say: they’re out of touch, but they’re very influential, and they’re working to thwart the will of the people. To be sure, there are people in universities, and journalism, and other places who have a degree of power – but they are not as cohesive or as dominant as that view suggests.” Rather than reflect on why so many of our institutions do not adequately reflect the full range of values and voices in British society, or attempt to grasp why so many voters are still so utterly disillusioned with political parties of the mainstream left and right, many in the New Elite prefer to put their fingers in their ears instead, or to silence and stigmatise anyone who disagrees with them. They want to pretend that the last decade in politics did not happen. Bland, Archie (14 April 2023). "Friday briefing: Has a 'woke aristocracy' really taken control of British society?". the Guardian . Retrieved 22 August 2023. Martin Shaw compared the book unfavourably with Goodwin's work a decade earlier, arguing that whereas he was previously working with "serious scholars, helping to produce some real research", in Values, Voice and Virtue "he’s finally gone solo and it shows." Shaw called the book "a debasement of social-scientific elite theory." [19]

Goodwin is a former senior fellow for the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, and was the founding director of the Centre for UK Prosperity within the Legatum Institute. [9] [10] It is a facet of globalisation that not only are there huge flows of people across national boundaries, there are concomitant huge flows of ideas too. And the facilitator of this flow is technology – because it is heedless of human scale notions, not just human superpositions, constructs if you like, such as nation states and national boundaries, but also the ‘constructs’ of nature like physical geography. But there’s something more – technology is shining searchlights on aspects our nature which we never knew existed and would have remained hidden otherwise.Luntz finds the greates thingh dividing people in UK is rich v. poor. Cultural issues don’t really have the salience that Mathew’s piece would suggest except for the tradiotnal Tory dislike of immigrants. By contrast, the “traditional values” displayed by conservatives are presented as almost natural, despite the vast literature showing how notions such as “national identity” or “whiteness” may be constructed in a top-down way that benefits the elite. Goodwin’s argumentation bears another contradiction: if the new elite imposes its progressive values on the rest of society, was that not the case also with the old elite and its traditionalist values? Indeed, Goodwin fails to explain what exactly is wrong with questioning received knowledge about the past, the Empire, British identity etc. Shouldn’t social scientists welcome this kind of critical interrogation and debate? Isn’t history a science to be rewritten in the light of new evidence and arguments? Each of these revolts won considerable support from ex-Labour voters who wanted less immigration, slower social change and more political influence, while no longer believing Labour represented “people like them”. Yet, too often, they were labelled racists, “ gammons” and “ Karens” for thinking this way. Zoe Williams writes about the iconic, 83-year-old plastic storage container brand Tupperware as it teeters to the brink of insolvency. Nimo UK politics | More senior Conservatives have hit out at Suella Braverman’s “racist rhetoric”, accusing her of undermining the party for the sake of her own leadership ambitions. A former senior minister from Boris Johnson’s government told the Guardian they believed Braverman was a “real racist bigot”.