Nice piece from Mary Harrington which definitely hits a few salient points particularly the clash between the proletariat left and the precariat left. But I can’t help but feel that the woke are so profoundly self-absorbed and cult like that I struggle to feel any sympathy for them. Struggling to buy a house? Then stop clamouring for open borders and mass immigration. Complaining about the gig economy? Stop supporting virtue signalling corporations and stop celebrating the multicultural mush that ensures competition for the lowest paid most insecure work. Hate your own country for its ‘colonial past’ but worship the EU which not only is stuffed full of countries with colonial pasts but busy expanding a new Empire sucking in every country around it. It appears to me that being Woke has a strong correlation with being dumb. Should have saved their money and swapped a useless uni education for a house deposit frankly.
‘Woke’ = ‘identity politics’ totalitarian, which has its roots a century ago in blaming the ordinary workers for the failure in Europe of the predicted Marxist revolution. It was idiotically supposed that ‘capitalism’ ‘repressed’ the workers and they in turn their families. This is the origin of the core of ‘identity politics’ in contemporary extreme feminism. When this baloney crossed the pond, the new Left co-opted the civil rights and Stonewall movements, thereby (after unjustifiable extension from the specific to the generic) expanding the ‘victim’ class from one domain to three. So by inversion ‘the workers’ — the masses — were in effect retro-stereotyped as male + ‘white’ + hetero. It’s all sophistry as a cover for hating the masses because we wouldn’t play ball. So it’s not immaturity: it’s virulent hatred; though yes, you have to be an adult child to be dumb enough to buy and spout the bull.
Its not even grounded in Marxism
Its just grounded in anti white racial resentment from black people.
Like from Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,Afua hirsh, who are all well off.
Think about one of the most anti white woke south asian American commentator saira roa,she’s a wall st millionaire who just spends all day being viciously rude about white people.
“Its not even grounded in Marxism” 100% grounded in Marxism, and Freudian Existentialism, founded in the Wiemar Republic in the Goethe Institute by academic intellectuals and called ‘The Frankfurt School’. Google it, and especially the 11 Points:
“The 11 Point Plan of the Frankfurt School
1. The creation of racism offenses.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
This whole piece is wrong.
Grace blakey isn’t woke.
The woke are typically BAME super successful young professionals who own property portfolios love finance capitalism but love attacking white people an Britain i know these people personally. The are unreasonable vicous and nasty.
Think more afua hirsh and Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and kehinde Andrews than
Grace blakely
Climate change is not testable. IE the stats show no overall change since the mini ice age, and before that last change was the medievil warming. Yet warmists are convinced its true. So it is technically a religion like Marxism or Christianity. It cannot be falisfied or verified so must appeal to some imagined “authority” to obtain its credibility. Notice that wokists, marxists, national socialists and freaks of all hues follow warmism, it gives them a chance to vent their hate, damage property and send global power consumption/emissions sky high with their smart phones and crypto currencies etc etc.
“So it is technically a religion like Marxism or Christianity.” Nice bit of gratuitous hate thrown in there Mike. But how is Marxism like Christianity? Do you believe Carl is a secular god you worship? That his words are divine and his morality and rules are from ultimate truth?
One definition of a religion is ‘a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion’.
I would say you are spot on with your assessment, and I have long said this to anyone who would listen, in fact I would say it is a cult.
That is no definition of religion, it is mere stupidity sounding clever.
Religion is best defined simply as: ‘That which is of Ultimate Importance’. (beyond the mundane. Death in its self is mundane, it is just what is. What is ultimate is greater than that, than everything)
You are quite right sir! I shall write straight away to Oxford Languages and let them know at once how stupid and clever sounding they are trying to be, and ask, nay, demand they alter their dictionaries – immeadiately!
Yes its is; So An odd Coalition of Marxist Greens &Capitalist multinnationals Can have Ever rising Energy prices with stupid Windfarms & Solar Panels (made from oil ,hydrocarbons &imossible to recycle) Climate We have had Coldest April &possibly May in over 100 years (See Met office archives, Climate4u.com)..Forest fires have been made worse,but No natural ‘Firebreaks’ in Forests,woodlands…Arsonists arrested in Caifornia,and New South wales have not been covered by BBC…Sky news etc..
Meaningless. Climate change is climate change. The RESPONSES being pushed for are mostly Woke, as the way they are being pushed will lead to the West being vastly harmed by self inflicted damage for very minimal returns. Much saner responses would be even more effective, but warming is a tool being used to wreck the Western economy more than to fix warming.
Do you not think the Western economy is already wrecked? There are plenty of countries proving they can do well in the global economy with a version of capitalism unencumbered by pesky concepts like democracy or freedom. If you believe in freedom and democracy maybe it’s time to reconsider the capitalism (in the West) because freedom democracy and capitalism are clearly not joined at the hip.
I can’t see how abandoning the prejudices and delusions of the Left and replacing them with the prejudices and delusions of the Right are going to solve the problems of the ‘precariat’. They’re still going to have the same problems. It’s not a matter of the woke hating the masses. The masses hate themselves, because they’re losers, because in liberal capitalism 90% of the adult population are losers (i.e. working class). At some point some of them should start rethinking things.
No, they don’t. They probably live better than a majority of people in the world, though even there you have to take into account such things as price levels and degrees of job security. But nowhere near 99%, not by my reckoning anyway.
Actually WOKE is not a cult as a cult requires a messianic leader who’s word is law. Woke is a back behind the curtain led conspiracy where Global Elites AND China trolls are trying to destroy the west by getting us to destroy ourselves from inside. Woke is a Conspiracy.
Agree. It’s been mentioned on our side of the pond as well. The younger wokesters have problems equating their naïve political choices with the issues they rant on about. Their social conscience demands they support green vanity projects and mass immigration but fail to appreciate the direct damage those inflict on their other personal wants of good jobs and housing.
‘Affordable housing’ is a popular sore point and in reality a load of nonsense. House prices are a supply and demand deal. If houses are selling quite well at $1M then they are obviously affordable but young progressives, when they’re not complaining that they can’t afford such prices, will happily don a “Save the Squirrels” t-shirt and support anti-development ‘a blight upon the land’ activism or vote for political red-tape that can delay development for years. If you refuse to increase supply then you have to reduce demand.
It is also diametrically opposed to current green thinking. Expanding the population perforce increases the demand to expand infrastructure. The UK is a densely populated country, particularly the south east where the most opportunity exists.
If there was a triangle (like the cost/quality/time one used in manufacturing) for a nation, it may look like like population, quality of life and environment. It’s necessary to pick one or a lesser combination of the three.
I have read a Leftist claiming that house prices are not affected by supply and demand. Presumably that is why they feel comfortable simultaneously suppressing supply by arguing against the building of new homes and increasing demand by suggesting that all borders should be open to the world, his wife, their children, and maybe their dog as well.
What they say isn’t entirely wrong though. Take NZ for example, since 1990 the number of average people per dwelling has remained steady at 2.7 despite a large population growth. However the average house price has risen from $100k (about $170k in today’s money when taking into account inflation) which was around 4x the average salary, to $900k today, which is around 17x the average salary. I can’t find the figures for the UK, and whilst they won’t be as extreme I’d imagine they’ll paint a similar picture.
Have enough homes been built to satisfy the demand of the new population growth, regardless of how many are per unit? If not, you’ve made his point. And if not, why not?
No, there are not enough houses to go around, largely because of a punitive Resource Management Act that is expensive to navigate, and so skews new building to large, expensive houses. (The Resource Management Act is going to be replaced by – wait for it- 3 Acts which will make new house building easier -not)
There is a hidden population of poor people living in government supplied motel units, or in cars and campsites, because there is not enough public housing, and private rental accommodation suppliers are being demonised as “greedy landlords” and have increasing levels of cost loaded on them, which in turn raises rent and excludes those without jobs and with bad rental histories. These are the people that would normally be housed in council houses, that have been sold off and not replaced.
There is much tinkering around the edges, but house prices in NZ won’t come down until supply starts to catch up with demand.
Greedy landlords are a major cause of NZs problems. They’ve been allowed to leverage themselves massively, pushing prices out of reach of first time buyers, knowing full well they won’t have to pay any Capital Gains on their investment. The properties they rented out were also of a shocking standard, closing to a Brazilian favela than what you’d expect from a first world country
Housing doesn’t have to be something bought and sold on the free market. There are any number of things which aren’t, and historically it often hasn’t been. Many other things are sold on the market but not necessarily on a pure supply and demand basis.
Good points. Turkeys voting for Christmas, which incidentally is one of their go-to insults whenver the working class votes the “wrong way.”
But then again, their other favourite pass-time is hypocrisy .
Don’t accept the implication that the Woke have some kind of monopoly on self righteousness, especially when your account of antiWoke positions is suffused with the same. Wake up enough to see that.
And why are the antiWoke so self righteous? Any clues? To those of us not buying into this type of skirmish, it’s a tell ( and comical unknowing self mockery.)
You covered every point I was going to make Cheryl, well done. I do however feel some pity for those caught up in the ridiculous race that is London and other expensive locations. That said, I left school in Manchester in the summer prior ‘the winter of discontent’. Jobs were scarce, and those available were crap and poorly paid. I was 28 before I could afford a deposit for an ex-council house costing £29,000. I lay awake at night wondering how I’d afford it. My diet was beans on toast, I drove a 25 year old car, and never went abroad.
Now I realise this is getting a bit like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and my name isn’t Obidiah, but it was worth it in the long term. I still have never had a new car, and I still have some of the old furniture I bought from 2nd hand shops and refurbished. I’ve been debt free for a decade and paid off my mortgage recently so I wasn’t indebted to anyone. I see people of my acquaintance and at work who are supposedly struggling. Yet they go out all the time, have phones worth £500, drive new cars etc. They never bring sandwiches to work but buy them at a stupid cost. As for their coffee bills!
Now I don’t expect younger people to live like paupers, but at work they are tech savvy but can’t string together a coherent written sentence, and then spend every other working minute grousing about how crap their lives are. There seems to be a generation who can’t seem to accept that ‘stuff’ only comes for ordinary people if you’re prepared to avoid debt and easy credit, and wait a while.
Beans on toast? You were lucky! In my day, we only had beans on toast for Christmas dinner. Most days we made due with grass seedheads, served on clumps of roof moss.
Totally agree with you. Just to point out a paragraph from Mary´s comment that never fails to put a smile in my face, the one “… but my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on, only came about because I married someone who´d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a house”.
Yeah, women can always do that, fall back into the safety hands of the poor salt miner when breeding time starts to appear in the horizon. Clever move that we chaps never seem to visualize in time. Never mind, I didn´t myself whilst in the salt mines.
I’m sure it is mostly women, but not always. I’ve personally met three female doctors (two surgeons and a urologist), just in the city where I live (population less than 200,000), who have stay-at-home husbands taking care of their kids. I have no doubt all of these men are well educated and can keep up their end of the conversation at dinner, but the lifestyles they are living would be out of reach if not for the “lucky escape” of their marriages.
Self pitying whinging, that almost everyone now days is a Lazy, Entitled, Idiot is the real problem.
Like the writer claims,. I dropped out of the real world at 18 and lived totally poor and rough for 22 years, just running around the world looking at stuff and working manual work as needed. And then I hit 40, living in a camp in the Sub Arctic making a very meagre living off the Taiga, and thought how un-cool, and miserable, it would be to be a poor old person. All I owned was a dog, 25 year old truck and falling apart trailer, so I headed to a big city to get some real money. I had basic construction skills, not a skilled tradesman by far, but was iron hard physically.
So I talked my way into a piecework Industrial electrical job which worked 13 hour shifts, and then worked general construction on the days off – for myself. I then worked 12 hours a day (with setup time on top, and commute, about 14 hours a day) 7 days a week for 5 1/2 years not taking a single break – I could not take time off as if I was sitting about my mind saw the money I was losing dancing past – So I worked, slept, ate, and that was it 5 1/2 years – at HARD construction, dangerous, miserable, tedious, painful often, and slept a day away when I ‘Hit The Wall’ or was too hurt, otherwise I worked.
In those years I earned about 15 years pay as I had some really good work sometimes. I spent NOTHING but very small rent, much of my work was being put up in hotels and meals paid, I saved everything (My wife began her own business and kept the house and dog and did laundry for me so every penny I made was pure profit). (and I am now a skilled tradesman is a couple trades)
Naturally I ended up with a load of money and owned a couple houses – in all close to half a million dollars clear. Made with my own hands and back – and head as I worked smart too. I was fried at the end of it though – it is fantastically hard to do this, but I was on a mission. We dropped out then and went back to living on the road a wile, and later I began building again, but just 50 hour weeks as I hate construction, but at mid 60s still build houses myself – by hand, but part time now as I do not like building, but feel it is a waste to not build – like throwing away food – to waste my skills and not build real things, that people need – and to make the money, is why I still do it.
Anyone tough enough could do this. Work 2 full time jobs. Get a skill like helper at some trade, work 80 hour weeks till you are going nuts, then do it a couple more years, buy a nice house for cash, or two falling down ones and rebuild them (as I did later). Anyone who works 40 hours a week and does not have children, and complains about money is just a lazy wa* ke r.
PS, in today’s degenerate world some people think working two jobs is taking a job from someone else, BS! By working 2 jobs you are making growth, you are making the nation prosperous, you are creating money, jobs for others, you are REAL GDP GROWTH, because you are making more for others to consume and use, and you are making much more for you to spend, and so make others money. It means you are doubling productivity. The West is doomed because so many people will not work hard, but expect money anyway.
My Scottish Grandfather left his farm at 14, Walked 500 miles to the big cities to find opportunity (around 1900), worked 12 hour days , and later Put him self through professional school wile working, then raised 10 children, through the Great Depression, with always broke relatives staying too, took about 18 people through the depression – poor but sheltered and fed well, and worked every minute he did not sleep. He retired at 92!
The thing is, all the above is true. I could tell so many stories I have heard first hand from my long and weird life that are a lot harder than that – and again this is true, I met a guy who had worked from when he was 3 years old, supporting him self, and at 70 he had never had a holiday/vacation. people like him are gone now in the west, we are a soft and weak people.
(That guy’s story was great, during the Great Depression his parents died and he was sent to live on a big farm by the Sheriff. The Family were German Immigrants who had a children of their own and had him live in a room in the barn, his job was to feed and water the chickens from the start, He was not allowed to even eat with the family, he was from low class and they were hard times, and this was how it was. At 9 – 10 he began hanging with the Rail Road crews when they were in the area, and more and more he was working in their camps full time for tips and food, doing chores, washing, laundry and such, for traveling RR maintenance crew camps, living with them just as a sort of camp-follower. At 14 he was old enough to be hired on by the Rail Company and knew the work and they got him on, and so was hired – becoming a steam engine worker eventually – a machinist, then WWII started and….). This is 100% true, as my Grandfather set out on foot at 14 with his kit and some food and a tiny bit of cash to find a life.
I knew another guy who was sold to a remote oil rig camp by the Sherrif. Again late depression, this guy had run away from his hellish home as a boy and was trying to get by, a young ho-bo, and in a Texas town the police picked him up as a vagrant and told him he was going to jail, and youth home (prison) as a suspected thief, unless he wanted to work it off.
He was driven way off in the rough lands to a remote oil rig, told if he ran away he was going to jail, the head of the rig gave the sheriff some money, bought him, – and he worked for them for free for about 6 months till they ended up hiring him. Living with the old ho-bos on the road as I did for years I heard the wildest stories – in USA and Europe, that were not too distant past, people could not believe. Times were hard, the people hard as steel.
Your interesting stories also reveal a different side of the so-called woke problem I think. Our generation and those prior to us grew up freer, on the loose, compared to the woke generations. I was out playing amongst other children on the estates and streets where I lived from the age of 3, older girls or siblings kept an eye on the little ones, but we learnt young about ourselves – our abilities and our limitations and those of others. We also learnt young how to recognise the dangerous bullies and avoid them.
All this early experience and the physical health of playing out of doors so much, gave us the confidence to launch ourselves out into the world in the way you describe.
I think it is important to recognise out of fairness to the woke ones that this experience has vanished. They have grown up protected almost totally, their childhoods circumscribed by the timetables of their parents, or simply confined within the home and garden (if they were lucky enough to have one).
At the same time all the history they’ve been taught has focused on WW2, the ev il Na zis and the ensuing Holocaust.
That’s a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
We were very lucky.
I completely agree with you. I learned so much playing on the streets during twilight hours, I don’t think children are learning this at all these days. I’m a teacher and many parents I speak to are happier for their children to be behind devices than outside ‘getting into trouble’.
This piece is wrong ,the woke left doesn’t even comment on economic issues.
The woke left actually consists of financially successful BAME people and upper middle class luvies.
This whole piece is wishful thinking.
I know of Grace blakey she is basically a crypto proletariat lefties who was sympathetic to brexit.
The woke left are really all just minimising white economic challenges and presenting black people as the ultimate victims (despite them typically being well off)
So the contradictions you point out don’t exist.
One of my mixed race friends is becoming increasingly “woke” anti white.but she inherited her house and is still a classist snob.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
I agree with all of that. I would add one more: if you really make a virtue of insecurity, you might want to re-think that. That just floors me. I can understand other things such as diversity and multi-culturalism – though I think them fatal to a social cohesion that I believe necessary to a happy country. But still it does have its appeal. (In my case, it’s largely to having a variety of cuisines available,)
None such exists for economic insecurity, unless it’s well-off Woke individuals talking about others’ precarious situations, of which they can take full advantage. But it’s a devil’s bargain for the Precariat. Pity that with their education they can’t see that. If they did, making common cause with the Proletariat would make sense to them. And really, since they own so little, how far removed are they – if at all – from that status? The old working class had its little baubles and such like as well.
An interesting perspective from Mary Harrington. She just touches on one significant aspect of progressive politics which is the influence of relatively wealthy people (living well above the API) who, in effect, play at being part of the Precariat. It’s clearly visible in California where tech elite are drivers behind much of the state’s progressive politics but they don’t have to live with the consequences of the policies they support. They can always retreat to fashionable, expensive zip codes or simply leave the state if necessary.
Until we give young people a chance at a stable job, financial security, a family, I doubt we’ll ever get past wokedom or whatever destructive ideology takes its place. The young have little reason to identify with their own society if that society has economically abandoned them. Instead, why not give the world the middle finger, man the barricades, scream injustice, and see if something better comes along. Easy to do when you’ve little to lose.
But how will the house supply ever match demand if the woke insist on importing rapidly reproducing populations from Africa / M.E.? And where would all those houses be built? With what money? What would counterbalance the impact of population growth on the welfare system, infrastructure, healthcare, education etc.? Or even on the job market, as presumably some of the immigrants would seek work. The longer the woke stay woke, the less chance of them ever reaching financial security. And of the unwoke rest of us too, which is the problem. I wouldn’t shed a tear for the woke screwing over themselves, but they are pulling down everyone else too in the process.
The main failing of the wokary is that they seem to fail to see that its only the unfairness in society that allows it to move forward. If we equalised wealth, access to education, health, rights across the world – yes the people in africa / india would get a boost, a very small one, but the disadvantaged communities and groups here would actually be worse off.
Wokness is a race to the bottom.
One way they could get around their problem-supposing they have to work in London is for a group of friends with families to buy a big house in the country for say £1 million to accomodate them all & use a helicopter to get into work in London. This would work out cheaper than each family trying to afford a mortgage on a one-bed flat in a dangerous area in London.
But everyone is at the same bottom and that’s okay with some people. But I don’t think most Wokes realize that this is where their ideas will take them.
In most rich countries, fewer babies are being born, as people delay marriage, are content to be childless, remain single or enter non-conventional relationships that are not necessarily straight. This social change both reflects and is a product of the new precarity. Also, people now live much longer than they used to, which increases the pressure on the housing supply because houses are now typically not inherited until the heirs are themselves old. As the proportion of non-economically active people increases, so does the call upon all service industries, but especially the health and care services. These services are labour-intensive. If there are not enough babies being born even to replace people who are dying, where are our doctors and nurses, not to mention our delivery drivers, mechanics, electricians, to come from? And if we want to attract workers, we must of course make it possible for them to bring their families. Thus the ethnic composition of the population changes.
That’s not exactly how it works. Firstly, the majority of the non-EU (thirdworld) immigrants are functionally ineducable / unemployable – and so will be their offspring, by and large -, they present a large cost in every possible aspect. (The EU migrants – whom you may have had in mind when writing – don’t intend to settle, they go home after a few years’ work. Don’t conflate the two.)
Second, the immigrants grow old themselves too.
And thirdly, more to the point: it’s not some predestined, irreversible cycle. Look at Hungary’s example: not long ago they had one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and with a number of targeted policies they managed to turn it around so the birthrates are steadily on the rise. It’s only a matter of good governing.
In any case, the ‘ageing society’ issue is a temporary one – within a few generations it rebalances itself. You can see the effects of a “young society” if you look at the abject, ever increasing poverty in the child-rich African countries. Now compare that to aged Japan.
Firstly, the majority of the non-EU immigrants are functionally ineducable / unemployable – and so will be their offspring, by and large
Why do you think that is? What is it about them that makes them and their children ineducable and unemployable? Is it genetic?
No. Cultural / environmental. Things like prenatal / infant malnutrition, the practice of inbreeding (cousin marriages) etc. do have an ongoing effect on the “gene pool” so to speak, which are hard to break away from. And a long, protracted process to break away from.
Is it genetic?
I see what you’re trying to do. Nope, i don’t take offence in being called a raycisst. Feel free as you please.
Obviously i didn’t mean the Australians or Canadians etc. But those from s u b s a h a r a n* Africa / MENA are, by and large. You may want to familiarise yourself with the statistics (UK + EU alike).
(* for some odd reason that’s one of the words blocked by the censorfilter, hence the odd typing.)
I have no problem with some immigration. I have no problem with a multi-racial society. I have massive problems with a multi-cultural society. Let them in but let them adapt to us not us to them.
But surely behavioural genetics has shown that cultures are pretty much rooted in genetic differences because traits are heritable, and so each culture and its population co-evolve. Every society selects for some traits and against others.
Yes, a nice article. But ironically, all the wokeists are constantly buying stuff from Amazon, whereas I refuse to do so. And they love immigration while complaining about the lack of homes.
The woke are useful idiots and as such will be eliminated if ever their Marxist masters gain power and control; after all, who wants a load of, now unneeded, proven troublemakers (‘activists’) hanging around causing dissent.
…and then when the woke have families, they often decide they need to move away from the ‘vibrant and diverse’ areas because there is a ‘crime problem’, or an issue with the ‘local school’.
So what about the traditional left that buy stuff from Amazon or are in favour of immigration? Your viewpoint of the traditional left appears to be extremely narrow and blinkered, reminiscent of a bygone age. ‘Immigrants stealing homes’ is a spurious 1970’s argument in terms of taking an anti immigration stance. In 2021 the issues seem to include the lack of the impact of such initiatives like the buy-to-let scheme on affordable housing for example. I often hear similar demonisation of the whole demographic of the young supposedly middle-class ( does that mean graduates?) as all being ‘the same’ coming from people in the same vein as the identitarians they despise. Class, seems to be the last bastion of permitted massive generalisations. I wonder if critics of the young’s ‘woke’ outlook politics, (which actually works against them in terms of the divide and rule principle,) may do better in terms of understanding their situation. Many of them are from working class backgrounds and are the first generation in their families to go to university, propelled by the immense pride of their family. This is a direct result of the ‘50% at university’ push, and of course those new gleaming university’s business models. Maybe the arguments should focus on economics, and what those Amazon workers and laptop cafe-based creatives have in common. Without parents who own property, basically poverty and insecurity. The left should be focussing on less simplistic antagonistic narratives, and building empathetic responses understanding and solidarity perhaps?
‘Immigrants stealing homes’ is a spurious 1970’s argument in terms of taking an anti immigration stance.
I have no idea who makes such an argument, but the fact is that we have let in 8 million people at least while not building homes for 8 million more people. It is simply beyond argument that mass immigration has caused a housing shortage.
In 2021 the issues seem to include the lack of the impact of such initiatives like the buy-to-let scheme on affordable housing
I’m not sure if you meant Help-To-Buy rather than buy-to-let? But as it happens buy-to-let has made a huge and crucial contribution to mitigating the housing crisis. The average density of occupation is higher in rental property than in owner occupied – it’s something like 25 square meters per person versus 33. Housing that’s let out accommodates a third more people.
Tax attacks on landlords are therefore deeply misguided. A 5-bedroom house that’s an HMO may house 16 people. Divested into the owner-occupied market, it will house a family of perhaps 5 to 6. The family may have previously been renting, but even so, forcing the house out of the rental sector turns 6 tenants into owner-occupiers but leaves 16 evicted tenants looking for a new tenancy in a rental market that has just shrunk by one house.
Interventionist measures to make housing cheaper always end up making it more expensive. If there’s somehow a way to buy a house for half the usual cost, the asking price will double.
I understand your point about buy-to let. However there is as always another way of looking at it. This does not negate your points in theory. From my perspective the figures you cite in terms of data do not seem relevant in terms of real life experience of a person who is renting, with all of the massive insecurities that brings. I am not a homeowner for reasons beyond my control and I am 60. I could class myself as one of those precariat as a freelancer who is only able to work sporadically due to a health condition. Since I left home at 18, I have never had a stable home for more than 4 years. I would get settled and the landlords who were looking at their property as an investment would necessarily not keep long term tenants in order to release capital etc. With my two kids I was reliant on fixed term one year contracts and have moved 18 times in 30 years. I have now been where I am for the last ten years due to the landlord wanting a long-term reliable tenant. This is very hard to find. However I have been priced out of good quality housing. I pay far more than I would could I get a mortgage but the house condition is more akin to student housing in the 80’s. I am not alone. The upkeep by the landlord constitutes the bare minimum he can get away with. Buy to Let has contributed to the growth of property portfolio careers and of course there are some good outcomes. But being a renter is often idealised. Young people mostly have no choice.
“the fact is that we have let in 8 million people at least while not building homes for 8 million more people. It is simply beyond argument that mass immigration has caused a housing shortage.”
I would say that of course mass immigration has impacted the housing shortage, but the problem is not the immigration per se but the lack of building in the need of affordable housing to accommodate our whole population, immigrants included. To be clear, I meant that immigrants are not the problem. The short-sighted lack of resources and planning for them is. Recent immigrants are of course also more likely to be the ones in overcrowded low standard housing, unable to claim wage subsidy benefits yet benefitting landlords increasing rents based on the lucrative property market.
It’s complicated.
I note your point about ‘financial envy’ of the Left on a later post, and I would concede there is a semblance of envy in my thinking, but that has nothing to do with my politics. It is to do more with security. Financial envy can come from all over the political spectrum. 😉
I suspect the reason why it’s the problem it is is that there are simply no straightforward or obvious solutions.
Building more houses alone does not build more roads, schools, buses, train capacity, surgeries etc, which are obviously required alongside. We can’t really require developers to build all this as well, because then the price of a new house would have to include a lot more than the cost of the dwelling itself. Making new builds more expensive in this way would either inflate local house prices, or if local prices are already maxed out, would mean the developer would have to absorb these costs; meaning s/he would probably not develop at all.
BTL was in effect an inadvertent but quite effective way of extracting more capacity from the same stock of houses. I wonder if part of the answer might be to extend this, eg charge council tax via a formula based on how many people the property could accommodate, with an add-on if it houses fewer than that. So the charge for living alone in a five-bedroom house would be more than that if it has five people living in it. It might encourage people to downsize as soon as they don’t need the space. You’d probably have to abolish stamp duty as otherwise you could create a class of people who can’t afford either to stay in their house or sell it.
I get your point but it’s possibly overstated. Surely buses, trains and doctors will appear proximate to their customers? Your base case that government should jump in and provide these services sounds like you have been living somewhere where the role of the entrepreneur has been neutered. Needless to say I’m on the other side of the pond but here in Tx the developers build huge housing estates and within weeks or months there are strip malls with every service you can imagine manned by small business owners.
Up to a point, but train lines don’t build themselves and bus routes tend to lose money unless in cities. Health care is socialised over here so someone’s got to build and pay for a surgery and hire and pay staff.
No, they don’t, or at least not in England. Where I lived until recently, the housing stock increased by about 18% in four years. The strip mall, or in this case the shop and garage disappeared around the same time, because they were sold to have houses put on their sites.
The GP practice lost to early retirement both its senior – and excellent – doctors, who had lived and worked in a fairly traditional and cohesive community. They just didn’t want to cope with a heavier workload of people with big city expectations.
The price of a new house already CAN incorporate extra social costs through a Section 106 agreement – not really an agreement but conditions and fees imposed on the developer by the council
Actually most of those costs (roads, schools, surgeries etc) are already factored into house prices via Section 106 payments which are part of the Planning process. Of course that doesn’t stop housebuilders trying to wriggle out of paying these costs, as well as their obligations to provide social housing. This despite the fact they have plenty of money to reward handsomely both their executives and their shareholders, not to mention the gift that keeps giving for developers known as Help to Buy. I speak from some knowledge as I live with someone who has been on a local planning committee for the last 15 years
Try to Get an Appointment with a GP..,Most are still cared of SARS2 ,but ok to give innoculations,paid £12 a jab…that is already a problem,even in Small towns
You think there is an inexhaustible supply of suitable land for housing and associated infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, shops etc)? England is already one the most densely populated countries in Europe, and its agricultural sector is one of the smallest in the world in terms of the proportion of food consumed which is supplied domestically. Then there are non-housing uses. Land for recreation, land for nature, land for other species. You might want a concrete jungle and the destruction of the environment. I don’t. And I haven’t even mentioned all the different sources of pollution from high population densities. The problems brought about by overpopulation are many and varied and immense. And immigration is a major contributor.
Help-to-buy was/is one of a vast number of government grant schemes, from at least cavity wall insulation onwards, which have filled the pockets of contractors.
The market sets the price of a commodity. HMG announces that a grant will be available, at 50% of the price of that commodity. Suppliers of that commodity know that the market will bear a price of x, and immediately increase the price to between 1.9x and 2x, because if people were willing to pay x before, they’ll still be willing to pay x, and even happier to pay the “bargain” price of .95x.
Back in the 70s 40% of the population were owners/mortgaged and another 40% secure public tenants. Thatcher sold off council housing to tenants and subsidised buying a house pushing up prices so much it’s finance of the housing market that’s the driver now not the cost of housing supply. Only the end of the house price bubble or big New public secure renting programmes will offer more secure, sound housing.
You miss the point. It’s the tricks that inflated house prices which make housing unaffordable now for the young unless there’s a house price crash or secure tenancies expanded so more people can live well outside the house purchase system.
If we had controlled immigration rather than mass immigration, we would have been able to plan the infrastructure accordingly. Not complicated if you don’t over-think it.
“‘Immigrants stealing homes’ is a spurious 1970’s argument in terms of taking an anti immigration stance.”
So importing millions of extra people and wondering why there’s no housing is “spurious”? Millions of extra people also means lower wages and people less able to afford accommodation. This is basic maths and, dare I say it, just common sense so lacking in the Left.
Nothing spurious about the fact that immigration increases demand and therefore raises prices in a market which has to build 7 houses a minute just to meet immigration demand. And that figure comes from 2016 not the 70s. The spurious bit is the straw man that migrants “steal” homes. Pathetic.
Towns and cities have become unrecognizable. I observe the different clothing-some ladies are not only covered head to toe but have strange grille bits to see out of-must be difficult for them ? I was in a shop and suddenly a lot of people scuttled out from the cellar-where they obviously live.I don’t think a lot of people who come here do get a better life-I would imagine they are being exploited. This is a situation that benefits only a few.
I don’t think the people who come here are escaping absolute poverty because how could they afford to get here? We are obviously receiving what is their country’s version of the middle class and they often end up doing zero hour work in order to pay back money they or their family borrowed. When my grandparents came to England they were single and so could marry someone from that locality which meant they became part of the community-I noticed as a teacher the amount of Polish surnames for example. If your community arranges your marriage with an unknown person from another country , you are always going to remain a stranger.
…the woke millenials and those that followed are always the ones with plastic bottles of water in their hands, using uber instead of buses and getting dropped off and picked up from school on a daily basis. They have also been by far the generations that have made use of international travel and weekend breaks in Paris/Berlin etc, but at the same time regard themselves as the most virtuous when it comes to Green issues.
Jobs doing what? Globally we overproduce (and over consume) so what can these people do that actually benefits society? We need more fruit pickers (or so they’re saying on TV) would they like to try that?
Labour said loads should go to university. They do and come out with a degree in media management or art (graffiti ) and can’t find anything to do with it. Unfortunately, they and the others, have been told whilst studying for their degree that they’ll get tremendous well paying jobs. What they ended up with was a large debt and disinterest from most employers.
Maybe what we should be doing is educating young people to the fact that what society needs is plumbers, carpenters, electricians not golf course managers.
The wealthy Precariat also benefit from the cheap labour and off shoring that they can tap into as a result of globalisation and immigration. They have cheap people to serve them their lattes, clean their offices and homes and look after the kids. They can also offshore all manufacturing to cheap locations before importing it.
Mark Preston
3 years ago
“At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.” Really? So what happens when one identity group comes up against another? Gays and muslims? Transexuals and feminists?
A few years ago there were violent clashes between police and miners. A number of miners were killed.
Ordinarily the left has no problem knowing who to side with here, but in the case I refer to, the country was south Africa and everyone involved was black. So the left’s prejudices failed to instruct it; this situation did not compute. Both sides were beyond reproach.
I don’t see anything new in the left today. It’s the same old victimhood hierarchy based on identity, with no actual moral underpinning or informing it. The most saintly and irreproachable person imaginable to the left today would probably be a transgender Palestinian Muslim terrorist. Any such person who existed would promptly be killed by some other Muslim terrorist, of course.
That situation (Marikana) was further complicated by the order to break the strike (not an order to shoot) having been given by a leftist government and the strike having been organized by an “upstart” union which was a response to the mainstream unions having become too cosy with the government.
Indeed, Mark. What to do, what to do? They’re police ( = the left hates them) but they’re black ( = the left worships them) and they’re implementing the agenda of a black leftist government ( = the left is swooning).
On the other they’re miners (swoon), black miners (double swoon), police-victimised black miners (triple swoon) and members of an insurgent leftist union (4x swoon).
What a dilemma!
So what happens when one identity group comes up against another?
The noble science of intersekshunalism has the answer. You look up the intersectional charts, graphs and tables to determine the power-dynamics between the groups based on skin colour, mental disorders and political affiliation, and whoever is the darkest / leftest / barkingest wins. Colour is not the sole deciding factor, as many black individuals (Kemi Badenoch, Trevor Phillips, Shaun Bailey, David Kurten etc. etc.) are regarded as the “oppressor enemy”, due to their “internalised raycisum”.
But how can you build solidarity in a world that is obsessed with pointing out peoples differences, encouraging and celebrating them, punishing those who don’t acknowledge them in one way or another? Surely, the way to solidarity is to point out peoples similarities and build on those and celebrate them rather than what separates us. But of course, that is not the agenda; getting people to separate themselves makes them easy round-up targets for when the bidding of their masters is done.
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
I can understand the woke youth feeling aggrieved, but I cannot understand their complete lack of logic in looking for a solution. In fact they are actively ensuring their demise.
If you think there’s no reason in cults, check out the elaborate dogmas of religions and political organizations, especially the more authoritarian ones. They’ve got it all worked out.
Geoff H said “logic”, not “reason”. And you seem to be confused as to two different definitions of “reason”. The elites of the Middle Ages had reason to subjugate the masses, but that didn’t make the period the Age of Reason.
You’re not going to find a lot of logic in the fables right-wingers tell each other about the left-wingers, nor vice versa. It’s mostly tribal hooting and tub-thumping. Evidence and reason and reality are hard. So much easier to make up fables and thump tubs.
In other words, as a predominantly white middle class movement, what the new progressives really object to – the root cause of their discontent – is that their generation has missed out on the “systemic privileges” which their parents enjoyed. Ironic given that it is exactly these privileges that they spend their political lives protesting against.
New progressives are on average better paid, better educated and from wealthier geographies and families than the majority of the population, let alone the traditional left. What this article seems to describe to me is not a justifiable complaint about having been left behind, but rather an overwhelming sense of entitlement – to a job which provides both self-actualisation and an upper middle class standard of living, and to have their political views not only heard, but accepted without question.
More than any generation before them, the woke believe that the world owes them not only a living, but also a hearing.
That seems to be an extremely uncharitable argument, which contains the same prejudices and inaccuracies you are accusing the young of perpetuating. Many in the traditional left own property for example. Those student revolutionaries from the 80’s who bought dirt cheap houses in the run-down East End or Islington for example, are now sitting on considerable assets, potentially topping a million, and are able to leave whopping big inheritances to their kids. The original East End residents are now able to sell up and buy huge houses in Essex just by virtue of being resident of a particular area.
I think that’s largely right, Adam. At bottom, every leftist cause arises from economic envy of someone else.
There is a website called housepricecrash for people who think the housing market is about to crash. Many there have thought this for 20 years, and have paid rent for that long – almost an entire mortgage term – in the belief that any minute now, they will be able to step in and grab a post-crash bargain.
All they want, of course, is to be able to buy in at a lower price, so that post-crash, as hose price inflation resumes, they can enjoy the same advantage they biliously observe others enjoying.
‘..every leftist cause arises from economic envy of someone else.’ I wonder if that isn’t imposing a version of some rightist motivations onto leftist thinking? The ideas behind capitalism, economic competition, free markets and so on are unashamedly based on economic envy, and indeed its merit, as a motivator for organising economies and societies. You could describe ideas of national or ethnic identity (in the white West) as being something that is under threat from immigration are based on a fear of losing economic benefits for the indigenous population due to other people’s economic envy. I think there is probably more to it than that but it is often couched in economic terms (around employment, wages and housing).
That’s not to say all people with conservative or right wing views are motivated by fear or greed – that would be as reductive as saying all leftist people are motivated by economic envy.
The acquisitive impulse is certainly important, but the difference between right and left is that the right doesn’t begrudge others what they have, whereas the left does; if everyone can’t have a Rolls-Royce nobody should have one. If you ask someone of the left where they’d rather live, in a country where everyone has £5, or in one where everyone has £6 apart from the top 10% who have £50 and one who has £1000, they often genuinely struggle to say.
Envy doesn’t really work to explain antipathy against immigration because immigrants tend to be poorer than the indigenes.
Envy doesn’t really work to explain antipathy against immigration because immigrants tend to be poorer than the indigenes. I was trying to say that antipathy to immigration is partly based on the assumption that the immigrants are envious of the wealth of the existing population – they begrudge it – want to take it. If you ask someone of the left where they’d rather live, in a country where everyone has £5, or in one where everyone has £6 apart from the top 10% who have £50 and one who has £1000, they often genuinely struggle to say.
I would struggle – within the question are lots of assumptions based on made up numbers that don’t look at the material consequences of the inequality.
In the UK the top 20% have around 40% of total income earned and the bottom 20% have 8%. The richest 10% have 44% of wealth. If you ask someone on the left whether they’d rather live in a country where income and wealth are more equally distributed among the population they would say yes. I don’t think that is necessarily related to envy but to a desire for fairness.
To simplify the question, would you rather live in country A where everyone is equally poor, or in country B where there is disparity in wealth but everyone is richer than in country A?
By way of examples, think of Soviet Russia versus say Switzerland.
I’d rather live in Switzerland than Soviet Russia. But I’d rather still live in a world where there was less disparity between Soviet Russia and Switzerland. And I’d also want to reduce the disparity within Switzerland.
The soviet empire has fallen 30 years ago, but that aside the wealth inequality in the Soviet Union was multiple times higher than in Switzerland.
There are many other factors determining wealth per capita. If those GDP-poor but child-rich countries of Africa stuck to near-replacement level birth rates since the 1950s, where do you think they would be now? It’s not that they lack natural resources.
I’m not sure I follow the economic argument. But it’s hard to feel charitable towards people who believe they have a direct line to moral rectitude, shout their opinions loudly, judge anyone who disagrees with them as evil, and use public pressure to degrade institutions and end people’s careers.
There was a great quote in Quilette the other day from a professor who’d had a medical course shut down because some wokesters didn’t like the implications of the science:
“Universities used to be a place where young students sought to be educated by experts in their fields. Now its a place where an expert in their field goes to be re-educated by young students.”
However intellectually uncharitable I may appear, I suspect my overall outlook is significantly more charitable than that of your average woke activist. I happily admit I could be wrong about just about everything.
No,
The woke are BAME professionals who have no problem with capitalism but do what a grudge with white people and Britain.
They congregate on twitter, own property and even portfolios and they insist they are systematically oppressed.they are very unreasonable and have a lot of sneering contempt for white Britain.
jdmoorephotography
3 years ago
I attempted to set up a union in the call centre that fundraised for the labour party back in 2005. An uphill struggle to put it mildly, in a workplace filled with international middle class woke actors, artists etc on zero hours contracts.
Many of them had utter distain and incomprehension at the idea that mass immigration may possibly have a negivitive impact on housing, wages or resourses.
Also worth mentioning the labour party offered no support either.
Last edited 3 years ago by jdmoorephotography
Nick Wright
3 years ago
I’m always a fan of Mary’s writing, so the headline surprised me. Having read the article, the headline baffles me.
This is not a defence of Woke politics, which is a misguided religion in all but name, but a very reasonable and rational explanation of why many of us aged 35-44 (and younger) feel disenfranchised and underrepresented.
The Left won’t save us, but an association of progressive thinkers across the traditional party divides might.
The older one is, the more disenfranchised one is. The world has moved on at a frantic pace, values have been turned upside down, and we can but stare and wonder where our world has gone. We are now irrelevant. But because we (mostly) own our houses, we are obviously standing in the way of the younger renting generation, which has no conception of the hard work and sacrifices most of us made to get on the housing ladder., sacrifices which they don’t want to make.
For context, I’ve spent my career in the City or management consulting jobs Mary mentions in the first paragraph. Amongst my peers who bought, only a select few paid for a deposit solely by their own means and not family money. I’m yet to own a house simply because I moved back to the UK from abroad in 2015 and not a few years earlier, when property prices were last at affordable levels. It’s certainly not the result of a lack of hard work.
mike otter
3 years ago
Precariat my er, foot. The wokists generally come from the top few centiles of wealth and income. They can either scrounge from their parents or obtain a sinecure in one of the many thousands of non jobs in the public or “third” sectors. Normal people on low wages whether in traditional or digital sectors are regarded with horror and contempt by the woke. They are a typical elitist movement like their 1930s forebears. This is why they tend toward anti-semitism and judge character by irrelevent issues like skin colour or sexual preferences. They are simply rich kids behaving badly and “wokism” is their rebel flag like Rock n Roll, Delta Blues or Jazz was in the past.
‘Precariat my er, foot. The wokists generally come from the top few centiles of wealth and income. They can either scrounge from their parents or obtain a sinecure in one of the many thousands of non jobs in the public or “third” sectors.’ Well said, so true.
Look at their fashion – often militarised, BDSM influenced, androgenous and clearly desperate for some physical affection. Their resemblance to messrs Ernst “Geil” Rohm, Edoard Pfieffer and even England’s own Nick Crane is more than just ideological, its physical and sexual as well.
Last edited 3 years ago by mike otter
Nick Whitehouse
3 years ago
Mary raises many points in her article.
The first that springs to my mind, is that 50% of the young go to University, but they still think that this will bring them rewards only available to the top 20%. Perhaps before choosing a course they should look at the jobs market and not waste their time and money on useless courses. If they insist on taking courses that have a poor financial reward, do not complain later that they receive a poor financial reward.
Secondly housing, this is largely tied up with an increasing population and a green mentality. The increasing population comes from immigration, the more people who come to the UK the more houses are required. However, as soon as new houses (and roads, and infrastructure) are proposed out comes the green lobby to try to stop them being built.
Thirdly, Mary writes about her gadfly existence in her twenties and then says she escaped this “because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home”. Lastly, changes to the jobs market have been taking place for a long time. If you wish for improvements in peoples standard of living then you need to increase productivity and innovations. Think back over the last 200-300 years, think the spinning jenny, railways, cars, planes, washing machines, freezers, indoor toilets and bathrooms, the internet and vaccines.
Therefore, in conclusion, the woke left is emotional, self indulgent and illogical and it deserves to fail
The “corporate salt mines” comment is very telling. The writer clearly sees work as some kind of punishment, rather than a necessary and reasonable exchange of labour for money. Presumably industry should be reshaped from the production of goods and services that society actually wants, and realigned with the woke generation’s need for self-actualisation.
That remark reminded me of my sister in law, who spent her 20s happily working in TV and rubbing shoulders with minorly famous faces, but then got to 40 and realised she was unemployable in an ageist, sexist profession. She was then bitterly envious of people like me, who spent their 20s checking boring documentary letters of credit and indemnity, and boring bills of lading, and boring demurrage calculations, and who thereby found a line of work that paid more not less as you get older.
As far as she’s concerned it’s very unfair that we have a better house, car, holidays etc, and she does not see that being poor now is the price she paid for having all that fun; much as I tolerated boredom with a longer term reward in mind.
Not quite sure if you’re celebrating the sexism and ageism that meant your sister lost her job or celebrating your own lack of joy in what you do for a living.
I thought he was saying of his sister ‘being poor now is the price she paid for having all that fun.’
Even though she was working and lost her job because of ageism and sexism – not because she was having fun.
People can do work that is fun and offers security – it’s not a moral failing to enjoy what you do and there’s nothing morally superior about doing a job you don’t like. Although, of course, many of us do.
Rob Mcneill-wilson
3 years ago
Buying a house in the early 80’s was not an easy ride for young workers with 17% mortgages. A lot of young complainants chuck a lot more money around on clothes, holidays and entertainment than their parent’s could or did.
There are plenty of good paying jobs and I know lots of young craftsmen/tradesmen who are not saddled with debt from doing questionable-value degrees, work hard – and take pride in it and enjoy it, make a good living and, consequently have a good standard of living. None of them have any woke tendencies.
Peter LR
3 years ago
“woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.“
I’m really not sure that is what is happening. This whole movement seems driven by something in the ether. There’s no reasoning going on; its adherents seem to be following on autopilot. Can anyone guess what the next madness will be, or from whom or from where it will come?
One of the ways I try to keep free of its influence is by not watching the main news outlets or opinion debates but reading widely and comparatively instead. I know older intelligent people who do follow those media sources and are quite hooked by the opinions of the latest groupthink.
Yes, it makes sense to focus criticism on the ideas as opposed to demonise people. If you show the young contempt and ironically intolerance and venom, why would they be open to any connection and solidarity.? Why would they want to listen to other arguments and explanations?
The author took her cues from Grace blakey who isn’t really woke.
Woke people are largely BAME professionals, business owners who have no problem with capitalism and they largely do well.but they still have a sneering contempt for white people and Britain and insist Britain is racist.
There commentators are shola
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,
Afua hirsh
Kehinde Andrews
Priyamvada Gopal
Saira roa
And another one I forget her twitter handle but it might come back to me
Vikram Sharma
3 years ago
Very good essay. Reminds me of the work of Emile Durkheim who wrote about anomie, translated often as normlessness leading to alienation. This alienation can be social, political or alienation from the self; self estrangement as seen in those suffering from identity problems.
starting with the world wars, to the fall of Berlin Wall and now the digitisation of the self, one could argue that increasing alienation has become the human condition, especially for the young. This is a sociocultural problem and not an economic one. Throwing money at youth centres is easy; but building a support structure of shared norms and values is much harder. Especially when forces of stability and norms- faith, family, community – are systematically being dismantled by the left. Trite observation but very true- the right won the economic argument, but the left has won the cultural war.
absolutely, but I’d add that the right are perhaps just as responsible for the dismantling of faith, family and community. Neoconservatism being the main culprit – the unfettered faith in the market separating families and communities as work is delocalized. And I agree that in recent history the right won the economic argument and the left won the cultural, but do you not sense those polarities switching?
The dismantling of family and community definitely the work of the right. Done deliberately in UK to remove obstacles to ‘free’ market capitalism and destroy the base of the political opposition to the Conservatives.
Striking how Tebbit was telling people to get on their bikes and Johnson says he wants to create jobs where people live. Would suggest the left won the cultural argument as well as the economic.
Yet it’s groups like BLM, so much favoured by the woke Left, that are in favour of destroying the nuclear family and defunding the police and other dimwitted ideas.
The official BLM in USA is a very different beast from how BLM as a general concept is understood in UK – or even what the official UK BLM stands for. Defunding the Police and destroying the nuclear family are not objectives of BLM in UK.
I have read many of Mark Bridgeford’s posts, and he strikes me as a born ‘contrarian’. Whatever the subject under discussion, he will naturally take a contrarian position. Whether this is unconscious or deliberate I haven’t yet fathomed. Additionally, in his defence, I seem to remember that he once mentioned he was a person of colour so his (often prickly) opinions will be formed from a different perspective from many posters on this forum.
I’m not a person of colour or a born contrarian. I thought the purpose of UnHerd was to enable discussion outside the Herd – if I appear contrarian it might be because my views are different from the UnHerd Herd.
You’re either Stupid or So blinkered sanctmonius Virtue signaller/ess ….BLM were on Talkradio earlier this year & Torn apart ,They DO want to defund the Police ,the Do want to Smash Shops ,and destroy Families …
BLM was a protest movement against black people being executed in the street by the police.Thats why its supported by 99% of black people.Funny its mostly white men that hate it so much isnt it?I wonder why that is….defunding the police is about de-militarizing the police in the USA, a very sound idea.
Yes spot on, a lot of reframing of recent socio economical vandalism and blaming the young for a culteral enviromental situation that they live within yet didn’t create.
The dismantling of family and community definitely the work of the right. One might expect just a single example to support such a statement. It is the left that speaks of “borthing People rather than mothres, the left which supports a welfare state that makes fathers superfluous, the left which rails against the nuclear family. But, sure; work of the right.
I gave the example of Norman Tebbit. It’s UK specific – the idea that if there is no work in your town you should leave your town and your family to find work.
Who advocates ‘leave your family’? Leaving one’s town has existed for much of human history. There are jobs of the past that are gone, and jobs today that did not exist when I was born. Something like work-from-home is very recent. But, your point about “dismantling the family” is firmly rooted on the left.
Sure:
–in the US, the rise of the welfare state in the 60s made fathers expendable, with particularly devastating consequences in black communities.
–A tenet of the BLM movement is hostility towards the nuclear family, though it’s not the first group to hold that opinion.
–The attacks on women who choose to stay home with kids, almost always led by feminists.
Rise of the welfare state – you think that was designed to make father’s expendable or to ensure families without work or where work didn’t pay a decent wage could feed and clothe themselves?
Nuclear Family – those references have been removed from BLM’s current webpage. But this is what it said: We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. Reads more like a call for greater community than less.
Attacks on women who choose to stay at home led by feminists? Where? Do you mean equal pay for equivalent jobs for women and men?
When welfare payments are contingent on the father NOT being in the home, what else is that but an intentional result? And black poverty had been dropping since the 40s, so people were working and feeding/clothing families. More importantly, they were families.
Curious how BLM removed that reference, isn’t it? It wasn’t due to a change of heart. As it is, the word “father” is conspicuously absent, and the only mention of ‘men’ is in regard to any threat they pose to women.
if I could women who were equally experienced and skilled as male applicants, why would I ever hire a man? And yes, attacks on women who CHOSE to stay home. It’s not crazy right wingers attacking them.
On welfare payments in the US I’ll defer to your greater knowledge of the US system..
On BLM I still don’t think there is evidence of it being ‘hostile to the nuclear family’.
On the women at home issue I really don’t know what you are referring to with regard to attacks on women who choose to stay at home.
When the manifesto has no mention of ‘fathers,’ that’s not an oversight. It manages to mention q u e e r s and trans and whatever else, but no positive affirmation of males at all. The group took down its What We Believe section because people finally took the time to read it.
Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. BLM Maybe they don’t think black straight men have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.
this was a group founded on the premise that black men are being hunted and killed by racist cops. How do they suddenly ignore the very constituency that gave them life?
Why would you leave your family? His point was that the world moves on and nobody has a God-given right to have a job brought to them just because they don’t feel inclined to go where there is work.
If we adopted that principle, logically we’d be subsidising the continuing production of Spitfires so the workers could stay in Southampton, we’d still be building dreadnoughts in Barrow-in-Furness, and so on.
Governments and should encourage employers to set up in places where jobs are in short supply, unless here’s some compelling reason why they have to be in a specific place. They can move their own departments to those places too, which is what they mostly do.
If you were a young person growing up in 1980s Britain and there was no work in your town you were encouraged to leave the place you grew up and where your family (extended if not spouse and dependents) lived to follow the work. Not always a bad thing – but wasn’t a policy designed to strengthen communities and family bonds.
It’s interesting that some socialist commentators, of the more traditional kind, blue left if you life, see this new left as the stooge of neoliberalism and globalism. So, not really left at all, which would explain why corporations and some pretty big-whig string pullers love identity politics.
On the other hand you have people on the right, who were until recently all about free markets, free trade, and trickle down economics, changing orientation towards thinking about protection of industry and how movement of labour affects employment at home – a change for sure.
I would say that actually, both conservatives on the right, and those on the left, were captured by liberals. Liberalism isn’t at te heart of conservatism or leftism.
I’m not sure I’d say the right won the economic argument, even the right seems to be moving away from the kind of economics it has espoused over the last 40 years or so.
But I think you are on to something with the idea that young people are unable to understand solidarity because they are alienated.
Not sure that deep down they want to win the cultural war, then there would be nothing to protest about.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
The woke deserve all the mocking and scorn that one can muster. Never in human history have so many been so perpetually angry while having very little to actually be angry about. They are among the 1% of all people who have ever lived. They choose to marinate in first-world problems, sometimes not even that. They seem driven by non-stop grievance while offering no solutions or even ideas.
Richard E
3 years ago
The woke left is reaping the results of policies that it has always supported.
The work left have always supported mass immigration (refugees welcome) which has resulted in the shortage of housing.
The woke left were against any form of balancing the books, describing it as austerity, and supported the resulting government borrowing and Quantitate Easing and resulting low interest rates and supply of finance has led to rapidly increasing asset prices (housing being one of them).
The woke left supported globalisation which has provided the foreign based competition that has undermined wages in the freelance arena, as well as causing manufacturing to move abroad.
Finally, and this is ongoing, the woke left support the green policies that once again incentivise businesses to take their energy reliant factories to places like China where energy is cheap, polluting abroad, before polluting even more to ship it back to the West. (While the woke left celebrate achieving their local carbon emissions target – completely missing the point carbon doesn’t understand borders.)
Every generation has its share of wise investors, fools who live for the day and everyone in-between. Even the current generation will have those that succeed and those that fail, but you still can’t get away from the fact that the millennials onwards have supported policies that make it harder for them to own their own homes.
Greenies dont explain how 0.04% of atmosphere is carbon,,necessary for photosynthesis and life on earth. Greens 1) never say Earth or UK are overpopulated,my electoral opponent in london had 5 Children(if every coouple had 5 children,an extra 12.5Million would be in UK) 2) Never say how they’ll pay for Universal credit (Furlough) an Unsustainable benefit
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
David Boulding
3 years ago
A socialist fiddles around pleasing herself and is rescued by finding a husband to support her. The very essence of socialism getting other people to fund their rather vacant lifestyle.
Labour is losing out because most people see that getting rich people to pay for everything is never really going to work.
Possibly Read Ayn Rand 1957 ”Atlas Shrugged” about USA tax payers refusing To Pay for increasing Cost of Politicians,bureaucrats on Capitol hill..The System goes bankrupt, Vulture global capitalism ain’t no picnic either..
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
Kevin Thomas
3 years ago
The battle on the left is not between the working class left and the middle class woke left. If it was, the working class would feel they had a stake in it. It is between the middle class centre left and the middle class woke left. The section of the party that came from the working class and cared about them has gone. Occasionally you can spot its ghost, when Alan Johnson or Caroline Flint says something sensible on a current affairs show, but there is no one in the party who could be their heir. Labour is now a party of middle class graduates, much like the pre-Nick Clegg LibDems but more left wing.
As for the people living hand to mouth to afford to live in London, move out of there. You can’t afford to live there. The reason people of that social class are so unhappy is they’ve been brought up with such enormous entitlement until the day they leave university and then reality hits them like a ton of bricks.
daniel Earley
3 years ago
This sounds remarkably like the new left almost applaud the loss of community that the traditional left was built on. You only have yourself to blame. You chose your career path and now blame everyone else for it, particularly for the loss of identity that the old left had.
When has the traditional Left every supported the family? It has been their stated policy to destroy it since the 1800s.
William Gladstone
3 years ago
The precariat left seems incapable of reason at all. The corporate overlords who have monopolies and have lobbied and created the precariat fund the left wing parties.
A typical left wing millenial on twitter seems to just accept all they are told about who are the good and bad guys (indeed they seem to see the world simplistically like star wars) and then spend their time being snarky and creating memes without ever questioning at all.
If I assume they are not daft and just accept woke as the way of the world and the way to get ahead is to virtual signal so they do ironically signal virtue whilst screwing over their friends in some cases. It is very conformist behaviour with a pre packed tatoo-ey, piercing-ey, hair colour-ey ready made set of opinions.
but I wonder deep down do they know it doesn’t add up and will they one day as a group turn on the woke leaders as the ones keeping them down all along. we will see
None if them care about housing costs for young working class people they only care about “kill white”
davidjacksmith3
3 years ago
Look… we all know that the ‘traditional’ left is a code word for the WHITE working class.
I use it myself because to straight up say ‘white working-class’ immediately gets one labelled a racist by the lumpen woketariat.
A death sentence at the moment in certain circles. But that’s the great divide in my mind. Race war has replaced class war in the modern iteration of the ruling-class left. I say ruling-class left because they really are our rulers via the culture, academia, entertainment, news outlets.
That’s the battle for Labour that is going on. And the lumpen woketariat are losing that war as their serfs resolutely refuse to abandon THEIR habits for insane people who really think they can force..
(and I’m just using one obvious example here)
force the white working class to accept a biological male can be a woman by simply declaring it so.
Last edited 3 years ago by davidjacksmith3
cjhartnett1
3 years ago
It’s a very good article with many truisms.
When Corbyn nearly got in 2017, I was appalled at my kids that voted for him.
But only a brief look at the reasons that they did so, taught me how asleep at the wheel ,and how complacent we had been.
I despised Blair and saw through him since 1993..But his worldview trickled down like a golden shower and into education, media, health and housing. Alongside universities and illegal wars.
And he was only continuing what Major and Bush had set in train, post the fall of the Wall .
In short, ” we didn’t start the fire”.
But we benefited at the camp fire marshmallow toasting. And now we’ve reaped what we either sowed. Or tolerated.
I don’t blame these kids at all. They were taught nothing, were conned with tuition fees and seem unable to say what sex they are. But just KNOW what the weather will be in 2065 by way of compensation.
This is mad. But has been a slow slide into madness , only now is it getting more precipitous and unpleasant.
These kids would rather get killed than be seen to discern real from fake, truth from lie and tolerance from danger. When being judgemental is the only sin that won’t be forgiven , then you’ll pay a price that other civilisational powers won’t concern themselves with caring about.
Yes , they are suicidally stupid as they hopelessly braid tumbleweed whilst gays get thrown from the top of car parks, FGM and border breaches occur. Their oppressors and victims top trumps hierarchies render them mute and serially stupid,cowardly and hypocritical. But the elite caste paid their professors and media houris to spout this rubbish. So we need to detoxify these dodos. But they’d rather get us killed than learn.
And yet they’re hugely judgemental towards those who disagree with Woke orthodoxy.
Kremlington Swan
3 years ago
We have got a very great deal wrong over the past few decades, and those wrongs have accumulated to shatter the social contact between the employer and the employed.
The employer no longer has an obligation to the employee. He may take the hours, days, months and years of his life without ever caring that in return he has enough to eat, decent clothes to wear, or somewhere warm and dry to sleep without having the constant threat of eviction hanging over his head.
The old lie – it was always a lie – that anyone can overcome these circumstances by grafting isn’t peddled any more, because the climate has changed to make the lie unnecessary. It is obvious that the precariousness the author talks about is structural. It is built into the modern economy, and no shame is felt over it.
Once upon a time the Labour Party might have stood against this trend, might have resisted its worst excesses. It might, for example, have invested hundreds of billions in building new council houses.
It might have forbade foreign investors using the UK as a land bank, and hoovering up property everywhere.
It might have refused giant corporations licence to operate in the UK unless those corporations treated the employees humanely (as opposed to spending shed loads on glossy advertising so they can pretend they treat employees humanely).
Labour might have done all these things. If it were electable.
labour’s great betrayal, its catastrophic failure, is that it has become so obsessed by the politics of identity and resentment that a despairing electorate cannot brings itself to vote for the party that most promises to improve lives for the majority.
Crazed Labour zealots talk about being in it for the long haul, apparently caring nothing for the welfare of people while their utopia takes form just over an ever receding horizon.
labour gives every appearance of caring more about whether a man dressed as a woman (because that is how tens of millions see it) can use the gents, and locking up anyone who says they shouldn’t be able to, than about whether a someone who works 60 hours a week can afford to cover the basics of living in this country.
While this article offers a cogent analysis of the foundation for a world view more conservative minded people have come to despise, it is hopelessly self-indulgent.
Make yourselves electable, then do some good. Stop trying to change the electorate in the hope that it will finally see sense and vote for what it currently believes are a bunch of irresponsible crazies, and change yourselves instead. And do it soon.
Last edited 3 years ago by Kremlington Swan
Johnny Sutherland
3 years ago
Interesting article. My personal belief tends towards ephemeral vs material rather than above or below the API. In a global economy everyone is always competing with everyone else but withe ephemera its even easier for the point of production to be half a world away.
I’m lucky. I (shorthand for my wife and I) own (that’s own not paying mortgage on) my home. I’m old enough to remember when it was normal for people to rent rather than buy. The mass sell off of the council’s housing stock fueled home ownership to where it now is seen as a right.
Go back in history a short distance and you’ll fail to see secure employment anywhere. We’ve just had a nice period where things are better but now they’re reverting to “normal”. At least I’ll be leaving (I’m 70) before it gets to bad – I hope.
Last edited 3 years ago by Johnny Sutherland
Ian Barton
3 years ago
A good read as ever from Mary.
If you accept the premise of the ever-diminishing “future value” of many university degrees, then at some point, the growing Precariat are likely to merge with (or become) the Proletariat.
l’d expect them to successfully drive the self-indulgent “woke” out of the Labour Party, which can then return to its roots, and have a chance of success.
For this to happen at any pace, the “educated” Precariat will have to demonstrate sufficient intelligence to replace “woke” thinking with “class” thinking.
The current signs are not good ….
Corrie Mooney
3 years ago
Great article Mary. Two things:
There is absolutely no requirement for wokeness to be a part of the precariat’s programme. Indeed I would say it was massively detrimental.
This terrible employment situation and state of housing is due to GLOBALIZATION.
Last edited 3 years ago by Corrie Mooney
Niels Georg Bach
3 years ago
While the situation isn’t that bad in Denmark, it’s getting there. But at the same time statistics tells that we need + 100.000 young or older educated i different crafts. THe idea – that politicians like Blair (but they were all over Europe) believed in, that everybody should work with symbols was a lie. A good craft education is worth much more than an average university education. And if you aspire to do more by yourself, a craft is often a better background. Labour should do and should have done more for this direction.
Adrian Smith
3 years ago
As someone who has worked hard all his life with a wife who has worked hard all her life, with 3 brief interludes to give birth to our 3 children, and have managed to find nearly £100k to help the first of our children, who has been in full time employment for 4 years, buy his first house, I absolutely understand the housing problem. There is a lot of guff talked about supply and demand and there not being enough supply when every where you look there are new housing estates being thrown up with little thought to improving the surrounding local infrastructure. The housing bubble, which was already there before 2008, was fuelled by QE which made the rich richer so they bought more expensive houses with it, sometimes to live in sometimes as investment, which has rippled out across Southern and Middle England (the Chelsea ripple). The government’s response has been to have “help to buy” schemes and stamp duty holidays, but all this does is maintain the bubble. I had thought and indeed hoped COVID, or at least the effects of the restrictions and the impending after effects of them would finally burst the bubble, but so far, in residential property markets this has not been the case. I am still hoping it will come as I have 2 more children to get out of my house, if not out of my wallet – somehow they never seem to get out of there (eldest has a new job so guess who is buying the new suits).
So when we have a real issue for the young to protest about, one which has been exacerbated by government (it was the tail end of the last Labour government that started QE but the Tories continued then did the wrong thing to try to “help” the young) why is the left not raising merry hell about it, instead of creating imaginary issues about women with penises and creating racial disharmony through white privilege nonsense – I am not privileged, I just worked hard all my life and am doing what every decent parent of any colour would do and trying to give my children the best chance in their lives as I can.
The answer is simple, the left has no solution to real problems so is merrily creating problems it thinks it can solve by abusing the human rights of the majority. I am all for a sensible redistribution of wealth to narrow the now gaping chasm between rich and poor – something the left used to care about, it was just the vindictive and totally ineffective way they want to go about it I have a problem with.
A major problem in the housing /construction industry is lack of highly qualified craftsmen and tecnicians( HND) and large parts of industry. Many teenagers do not want to work out of doors . Also middle class snobbery. Many middle class people consider that any degree is better than a NVQ4/HND electrician/electronics/controls technician.Someone who leavers school at 16 years of age with good English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Technical Drawing and enters a electrician/ plumber apprenticeship; once they achive a NVQ 3 or higher and progress to a foundation degree, is on a good salary. By the age of 22 years an lelectrician/electronics technician can be on £50K and there is no college debt. If one is prepared to work shifts, nights, undertake storm damage repairs, Sundays, Bank Holidays , etc double rapidly boosts wages. Qualification Comparisons – NVQ Level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | City & Guilds (cityandguilds.com)
Nicholas Moore
3 years ago
The description of the ‘precariat left’ reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s view of English well to do intellectuals… having everyone else’s point of view – but none of their own.
Steve Moxon
3 years ago
There is no defence of the woke Left. The hokey wokey jive of ‘identity politics’ and it’s imposition in ‘political correctness’ is in origin, development and manifestation hate-mongering towards the non-Left: it has nothing whatsover to do with consideration for any minority in any domain. Why don’t people read up on the documented history?
Last edited 3 years ago by Steve Moxon
Paula Jones
3 years ago
This urinating in bottles sounds a bit of a squeeze. Couldn’t those Amazon drivers just urinate into them?
David Stanley
3 years ago
When I was at university I met an anarchists. I was interested in his politics so I asked him when him and his fellow anarchists were going to meet up next. He sighed and said that one of the problems with anarchism is that they don’t believe in rules and hierarchical structures. As a result, whenever they try to organise meetings no one turns up.
This is one of the problems with the woke left and the reason their politics rarely goes beyond virtue signaling. If you set out to deconstruct everything around you (nation, gender, family, western culture, etc.) then don’t be surprised if you can’t get anything done.
It also becomes harder to work with others when you are repulsed by anyone who doesn’t share your perfectly pure ideology. Do you really think that all those immigrants from far off countries share your view that there are at least 10 billion genders and that drag queen story hour is the best thing ever? What are you going to do when they start voting Conservative?
….at the same time, while failing at the ballot box time and time again, they have made great progress in gaining power and influence by capturing education, universities, the civil service, charities, focus groups, the media etc. They push to give away power to international bodies that more closely follow their policies and take power away from the electors and use their influence to bully the elected into following their woke policies.
They are very clever in how they use language to scare people into keeping quiet about a whole range of issues.
Keith Johnson
3 years ago
A commentator called The RanMan (@ranman_the) on Twitter recently posted this concise analysis:
“Labour’s brand is toxic. We’ve seen 20 years of Labour bouncing around between corporate war-mongering Blairism; the Marxism and Wokery of Corbyn-Momentum; and tired, Remainer-lite Starmerism. There’s something there for everyone to hate, and a new leader won’t solve it.”
Someone asked, “How is Wokery bad?”
“Because it divides people and empowers bigots. It divides by splitting us all up on demographic grounds (gay/straight, black/white, etc.), rank-ordering these groups’ importance in and to society, and thereby creating conflict between us rather than boosting our common humanity and interests. The bigots empowered are those who use demagoguery, tied to their membership of a perceived disadvantaged group, to gain power at the cost of social division. Examples include: Stella Creasy’s demonisation of men, Diane Abbott’s attacks on white people; Naz Shah’s anti-Semitism.
“The unpopularity of Woke politics also empowers bigots on the right, since their views are given a more receptive hearing in the face of a ‘common enemy’.”
They think if they can create enough victim groups while importing even more potential members of these victim groups, then one day they will cobble them together and form a majority to get them into power.
No it isn’t. That kind of generic ‘compliment’ smells of bot.
Steve Hall
3 years ago
Will they succeed? Of course not. They have allowed the evolution of an atomised post-social economy in which each individual must put their own interests first. Alliances are temporary and instrumental. No solidarity is possible. Identitarian ‘communities’ are nothing more than imaginary victim-cults. What’s left of traditional grounded communities quite rightly see the woke as corrosive to everything they hold dear. The first reactionary – used here as a neutral, denotative term – step on the path back towards national and regional cultures, if indeed that path is to be taken, will be a legally-driven assault on the Woke, their institutional positions and their ‘cancel culture’. If that doesn’t work, things could get nasty. People really don’t like their reputations and livelihoods threatened by slanderous cultists virtue-signalling to get the job they have just lost or can’t even get short-listed for.
Last edited 3 years ago by Steve Hall
David McKee
3 years ago
Well, yes, absolutely spot-on
In fact, it more or less rehashes what David Willetts said in his book. “The Pinch.” And that was published in 2011.
This is not to criticise Ms. Harrington or her sources for being behind the times. In fact, it highlights how little progress we have made in the last ten years.
Mark Preston
3 years ago
“But my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on only came about because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home.” Ah, I just love those strong independent women.
🙂 and if it all goes wrong, i wonder who will keep hold of the house 🙂
Last edited 3 years ago by Richard E
Trevor Q
3 years ago
Very insightful. Thank you.
James Hamilton
3 years ago
From the vantage point of the Proletariat Left, obviously what’s needed is more solidarity.
And yet that seems to be what all the procrustean Manicheanism that so offends the allegedly less tolerant Proletariat Left (and many others, like me) seems to be about: conform, comply or burn.
Perhaps the final paragraph gives us a clue. These “gilded entryists” thrive on the anger their demagoguery creates. In the search for stability each new offering, based on something tangible and non-negotiable like self-identity, must seem like a solid rock in an ocean of sand.
Last edited 3 years ago by James Hamilton
Chauncey Gardiner
3 years ago
Hypothesis: all of the money printing post-Bretton Woods (post 1973) and especially post-Great Recession immiserates folks who don’t own stuff but allows those folks who have purchased “assets” (homes) and have invested in financial markets to keep ahead.
Here’s the mechanism. A country’s treasury sells $100 billion in bonds. The central buys those bonds by telling the treasury that it will take the bonds. Just like that, $100 billion get created from nothing. The economy is not $100 billion bigger. The economy is not more productive. But there is more money in it. The money people already had gets diluted. It’s like poring water into ale. The ale gets weaker. But those new dollars (or pounds or yen or whatever) start swimming around the economy, and people who can get hold of that freshly printed case invest it in their financial holdings. Others use the case and bid up housing prices. The price of day-to-day cheap stuff from China remains cheap, so the authorities have some excuse for saying that inflation remains low. But there is inflation in “assets”. The wealth of well-invested people keep pace with the rise of financial indices and the rise housing prices. A problem is that young people who are living paycheck to paycheck get left behind. Rising prices affect them. They find themselves locked out of housing markets and less likely to enjoy seeing their financial investments increasing.
Over the last year the S&P 500 index is up about 40%. It is not up because the American economy is 40% bigger. Since late March 2020 the S&P 500 is up more like 70%. Again, it’s not because the economy is so much bigger or creating so much more value. It’s a manifestation of the inflation that the Self-anointed Best-and-brightest in our central banks says is not there.
The central bankers operate in a mono-culture, and we keep voting in regimes that support the monoculture — a monoculture of expert-driven technocracy.
Now, think about that, and, while your at it, consider taking off your bacteria-laden mask. That mask can’t filter out marijuana smoke. It’s not going to filter out viruses.
John Riordan
3 years ago
Interesting, but I think this fails the test of hard numbers. The demographic changes required to rebuild a left-wing coalition large enough to win elections won’t exist: you can’t win elections by appealing to the middle class vote alone, so the middle class precariat is no use on its own, and the working class voters who do exist in large enough numbers are almost certainly never getting past the judgemental metrollectualism of the middle-class left, an attitude that only appeals to the sort of person who has been educated into artificial stupidity. Yes, I know that the article does say that attitudes in the working class must surely change with the passing of the generations, but I suspect not the specific attitude in question.
Clem Alford
3 years ago
The classic cheap immigrant labour versus the indigenous UK work force is typical of todays capitalism. It’s OK if you want to be a global competitor and the cheapest labour companies will always win out. Of course it doesn’t mean that the quality of produce will be high.and the human working conditions are way down on the list.
Employers win out with these conditions and a black African worker slaving all day up to 10 12 hours for a pittance or an illegal refugee taking what he is given is what greedy bosses want.
Then the overcrowding of property due to housing shortage with Immigrants prepared to sleep 5 or 6 in a room to keep their sleepong accomodation costs low and anway they are out working for most of the day.
If a free market economy is what you want then don’t be surprised by all this with politicians complicit in all of this.
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
Here’s a couple ideas for you clueless precariat left.
Build houses in Britain. Millions of them. If you think there is “no more room” then drive from London to Brighton. There is nothing but countryside from the M25 to the Brighton Pavilion! And an occasional very swank house. Hey! Spoil their view why don’t you!
Tell the universities to put it where the sun don’t shine. Only prats like Boris need a university education. Not that there’s anything against the Iliad in ancient Greek. Most of the rest of us just need a modern apprenticeship.
You young’uns need to get a clue.
Meanwhile the educated ruling class has you chaps over a barrel. As they had the working class over a barrel for a century and more. It’s time you echoed the immortal Lina Lamont: “whaddya think I yam? Dumb or something?”
A typical city-centric view from someone who has no idea where their food or clean air comes from, who never enjoys solitude or a walk in the country, who has no regard whatsoever for the ecological system of which humans are just one (albeit the most destructive) part, who in short must hate the natural world.
From my perspective, the country is already heavily overdeveloped. People need space and peace and quiet as well as a roof over their head. You see empty field waitng to be built on. I see milk, butter, beef and lamb production, wildlife habitats, places to escape to away from the foul cities and their teeming hordes.
Jonathan Smith
3 years ago
I agree with much of this despite the puzzling and misleading header…. but whether or not I agree with Mary Harrington, oh the pleasure of reading such wonderful prose.
Geoffrey Wilson
3 years ago
Interesting article, managing to cover important political issues with minimum aggression and name-calling. I wonder why Ms Harrington seems instinctively in favour of “coalition building” on the left, presumably so that the “left” can become the government and implement their policies. I would agree that very important issues for young people in the UK are stability of housing, work and environment, and in particular I like the analysis of job insecurity for the many “above the API” low paid young. Society can overcome, and actually is overcoming, many of these problems – but I would suggest this is done better from the “right”. Avoid the horrors of fundamental radicalism, which puts its priority on tearing down what is seen as unattractive – and embrace the wonders of gradual improvement, dealing with problems one step at a time in cautious steps making sure they are actually improvements rather than having unintended adverse consequences. Only make changes when the public consent. Recognise that most people are perfectly happy to be nice to someone “strange” (trans, whatever) but want to be cautious before letting men into womens’ loos and sport. We already have laws and enforcement processes, against race and sex discrimination – knee-bending is superfluous. Radicals will never be happy with this, so leave them outside grown-up politics.
Zorro Tomorrow
3 years ago
In summary, the old proletariat ‘knew their place’, didn’t like it and did something about it. The precariat rely on a roof with their parents or someone with the wherewithal or forethought to get one. The perpetrator of this state of affairs is indeed he who would never suffer any consequences, Tony Blair, and they who helped destroy our inefficient industry, accountants and trade unions. The precariat are like nomads in a desert where all compete for the oasis water. They lack place and expect someone else to provide it.
Looney Leftie
3 years ago
This article goes some way to explaining why the ‘woke’ left are aggrieved and the shifting in opinion and society. However it does not tackle the cognitive dissonance in the ‘woke’ leftists minds, and how many ‘grievance points’ should be attributed. ie, Attitudes on Black Conservatives, the economic success of Asians, LGBTQ v Islam, Womens rights v Trans rights, Inter-minority prejudice.Their way of thinking is just baffling to most people.
mendriki
3 years ago
At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.
That’s where the article lost me. Assuming the term “woke” is referring to those who believe that everyone in society is either an oppressor or being oppressed, it’s difficult to see how advancing that ideology will do anything but further divide us. Essentialist views are what create the impassable fissures in society- where group identity is paramount and unifying concepts are sacrilege.
I’d argue we are currently seeing “woke” identity politics at its best, and at its worst. Because it seems impossible to establish a spectrum of value for such a zealously shallow interpretation of humanity, which is paradoxically constrained by competing ego-centric (“you must understand me”) and nihilistic (“you’ll never understand me”) worldviews.
Last edited 3 years ago by mendriki
David Foot
3 years ago
The real revolutionaries in the woke movement are a mixture of failed and of “too many intellectuals / degrees”, a glut of quite useless professions from the upper middle class who can’t find a job or a future, they use the “race component” because it is useful to exploit a grievance to get cannon fodder. Marx would recommend doing this in order to force more favourable outcomes later.
The real workers are not with these in the snob mob of Marxists because they see them as champagne socialists which is correct, they don’t identify with these as “their saviours”, the real workers have a future and nothing to gain by overthrowing the State. Marx would have told the workers that “all they had to lose were their chains”, well not now the real workers have a lot more to lose and the wokes are the ones with nothing to lose.
The woke are very dangerous and the same “class” of people who have caused terrible revolutions in the past, we must not underestimate them, even though the degrees which they have are quite useless today. They can’t hold a candle to geniuses even the ones from far back like Darwin, Newton, Maxwell so they try to take them out of their time and their context and useless as the woke are they take upon themselves to judge the great of the past and to re-write history with their useless degrees in their useless universities. If it weren’t that this group can be so dangerous it would be farcical and we could sit back and laugh at them, most likely all this is paid for and instigated by enemy states abroad.
Any responsible political leader in the West would set out to crush this movement, it is parasitic, it contributes nothing to society, to the contrary it is an obstacle to progress, race is not the real issue though it is made to appear to be like that. Marxists use “zero sum” and envy arguments to fire up clashes, but let us face it the blacks who are in USA and UK are mostly very lucky to be here, and those without experience of Africa wouldn’t last five minutes there if they went.
In reality it was a catastrophe to decolonize the best Empire which had India united, Rhodesia was prosperous and feeding great part of Africa and so was Burma, it was trying to keep the peace in the Middle East, Aden etc. That Empire had been the first in the history of man to end slavery and had been the source of modern science of today and kept peace. It created real paradises to live in, people are prepared to die with their children to get in to the best places left by the old Empire. Whites were taken before the XVIII century from North Africa for their slave markets in greater number than all the blacks taken to North America. The woke are all at sea where history is concerned but they do their best to use their falsehoods to cause problems. Let me put the woke out of their misery: Marx himself chose the Capital city of that Empire to live and die in with his friend, the other champagne socialist Engels! They lived off exploiting the poor in Manchester of course. What hypocrites you all are.
Sean L
3 years ago
What’s called “left” is a negative form of membership or identity well described by my old university teacher Roger Scruton as “culture of repudiation”. A negation peculiar to West/Christendom. As Rene Girard, ‘Darwin of the human sciences’, put it: ‘Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West.’
His term for predicament of West is “undifferentiation”. Order depends on ‘difference’, first and foremost the ‘difference’ between man and God. Otherwise we become gods to each other. For Girard humans can be reconciled only at the expense of a third party or ‘scapegoat’ / ‘surrogate victim’. The original function of God/religion he accounts for in purely anthropological terms: the Christian Gospels being first: theory of man: anthropology; and second theory of God: theology.
Christianity collapses the old sacrificial order. The meaning of Christ’s death on the cross is to reveal the “scapegoat mechanism”, ie the governing principle of archaic cultures. Once we realise the truth that the victim is innocent we no longer have anyone to blame as the cause of our discontent, a means of reconciliation, at least until the next “sacrificial crisis”, ie when our rivalries again intensify such that we need another sacrificial victim upon whom to visit our restorative violence / “justice”.
Religion is ritual reenactment of the “founding murder” whereby we are reconciled by a performance which bears a trace of the original violence but without any actual bloodshed. All ritual partakes of this character whether or not we call it ‘religious’. Even Covid mask wearing has now become an ascetic rite of membership, a pretext for accusing or ‘scapegoating’ barefaced others of “literally killing people”.
One might argue that a Protestant service bears no trace of violence. But we know as historical fact that it’s based on the Catholic Mass where bread and wine represent the body and blood of the crucified Jesus. All we see is a man preaching to a group.
The great Christian paradox is that in laying bare the “scapegoat mechanism” it destroys religion which for Girard is continuous with culture understood as social order. Political correctness is a caricatural Christianity licensing persecution in the name of the victim.
Hence Girard also defines current predicament of West as “omnipresent victim”. The hunt for victims is paganism in Christian guise. Whether people ‘identify’ as Christian is beside the point: that Christianity is their primary scapegoat doesn’t alter the fact that siding with the victim in principle derives from Christianity.
Our political culture is wedded to economic rationalisations. But they don’t bear scrutiny. Once basic material needs are answered for economics isn’t much more than an index of status and prestige, whose corollaries are envy and resentment. A century ago a car would have conferred such status as would require a private jet or at least a Lamborghini today. Nothing to do with economics or utility but a matter of what Girard calls “acquisitive mimesis”.
This can be demonstrated scientifically. Put x number of children in a playpen with any number of identical toys and as soon as one child grabs a toy another will imitate his desire for that toy even though all the other toys are the same. ‘Toy’ here could symbolise *any* rivalry.
Desire is premised not on any intrinsically desirable property of its object but on what Girard calls a ‘model’, its desirability for another or others. Which is also the premise of practically all consumer marketing. Political parties also typically market themselves on their popularity with others. No one wants to be left out.
“Undifferentiation” also accounts for the fact that we fight not because of difference but because we’re the same. Not only do want the same things, status and prestige for ourselves, but we each seek to distinguish ourselves from everyone else – which practically amounts to the same thing. And as our rivalry develops its original cause drops out of consideration as we become what Girard calls ‘doubles’: each the object of fascination for the other.
The premise of political journalism and public discourse generally is economic functionalism. Political debate is supposed to consist in discovering the correct or ‘fairest’ arrangement. But surely the slightest self-examination will show that our every day squabbles are rarely if ever reducible to economic causes, even if in some cases that’s their ostensible justification.
Scruton put it well in his The Meaning of Conservatism where he says that economics stands to politics as neurology to friendship. Even though defining the same phenomenon, they belong to incommensurable realms of significance. One could give an exhaustive account of physiological states but it wouldn’t offer the slightest clue as to what friendship or enmity means.
Friends can easily become rivals, of course, especially when they desire the same thing. Girard calls this ‘internal mediation’, that is when our ‘model’ is close enough to us to arouse envy as with children in the playpen. The issue with a ‘free’ or ‘fair’ society where there are no distinctions of class, caste or race to separate people physically or spiritually, as in US for instance prior to ‘Civil Rights’, is that we all become rivals for each other.
As Girard put it: ‘If the modern emotions flourish it is not because “envious natures” and “jealous temperaments” have mysteriously increased in number, but because internal mediation triumphs in a world where differences between men are gradually erased.’ Which is only another way of stating the Christian paradox.
The desire to outsmart people on the internet, where nothing at all is at stake, is more truly mimetic in character than any yearning for material gain.
It seems that the term “woke” can be used to define almost everything and nothing. If you disagree with some others opinion they are now automatically classed as woke. The sooner we stop referring to those we may disagree with under the singular banner of wokeness the sooner we will get back to a more sensible form of discussion on what divides us.
This article at least attempts to delve into the changing times, environments and experiences that determine the thoughts and political choices of the various demographics that associate with centre left politics and offers some cogent thought on the manner of change. It is unfortunate that its title employs the use of Woke, given that the term is meaningless.
Woke is way more specific than that. It derives from post modernism and incorporates inter alia critical race theory, identity politics/group think, grievance studies, intersectionalism and the like. It is characterised by extreme intolerance, cancel culture, no platform ing, mob and cult-like behaviour. You need a woke dictionary to navigate your way.
Pete Marsh
3 years ago
Problems with high accommodation costs and scarce housing, and pokey rented flats in HMOs may also have something to do with the fact that the UK population has increased from about 59 million in 2000 to ~68 million now.
Last edited 3 years ago by Pete Marsh
michael stanwick
3 years ago
Mary does have a gift for lateral thinking. To borrow from attribution theory, in this case for suggesting that motivations effected by dispositional states are well recorded but situational ones are not.
In my view, ‘woke’ is a valid label that applies to having been awakened to having a critical consciousness – “being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.”… this awakened consciousness is set particularly with regard to issues of identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and others.”[newdiscourse dot com]
Eric Kaufmann takes this further – ‘woke’ is defined as sacralisation of perceived historically marginalised groups within these categories.[Eric Kaufmann interview; triggernometry podcast]
All else follows from that realisation.
That’s what Woke is, but its core ideology is Equitarianism.
T J Putnam
3 years ago
Thank you, Mary, for highlighting the new Precariat, graduate or not. We need to pay attention to what’s going on here, and not only in relation to the restricted availability of one-time middle class perquisites. Liquidity is one thing in a buoyant context, insecurity comes to the fore when opportunities thin out, as is now happening post Brexit in London and elsewhere.
Precarity is not a monopoly of young cosmopolitans however. You mention how it has also undermined security in post-industrial communities. The remedies are surprisingly similar in both cases, so there is the possibility of a common politics beyond the different terms in which the issues appear to present themselves to those here and there.
Not at all sure though about how map Woke onto this. For a start, it’s necessary to ask what is Woke anyway beyond the caricatures set out by antl-Woke polemicists? There may be something in your idea that graduate insecurity feeds a radical disregard for convention – even though that was not how high fees and loans were supposed to work.
But we also see the characteristic marks of student politics from any age, including the overhasty generalisations of half-disciplined intellects and immature awareness of context – people have been understandably keen to show what they think they have learned, without much regard for the consequences. From that point of view, some of the choice excesses held up against the Woke are a byproduct of higher education in process rather than a measure of its contribution to society. In other words, not necessarily worthy of being taken seriously especially as regards their claims for political priority. Some of the recent attempts made to extend the historical and cultural context of the quest for racial justice, however well intentioned and supported, have to be considered naive and not sufficiently thought through.
Now it may be that one of the consequences of graduate precarity is an extension of the space for ungrounded student type politics. That’s something to look at closely, case by case. If you take Free Movement for example ( not as it exists in the EU but as a demand for free movement across frontiers willy nilly) is this student stuff, the material interests of precarious graduates in search of opportunity, or simply the mobility mindset of youth?
Last edited 3 years ago by T J Putnam
David Brown
3 years ago
“Coalition-building among the Precariat Left is not just between Hampstead and Hartlepool but across barriers of language, culture and values, as well as above and below the API and between graduates and non-graduates. At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.”
If the aim of identity politics is to bring people together, it’s picked a bl**dy funny way of doing it. “Hierarchies of oppression” merely serve to make each group mistrust all the others. Attitude surveys have been done in companies, before and after “anti-racism” training, and found that whilst employees of every colour might have been happy together before they were trained to be anti-racist, afterwards mutual suspicion was the order of the day.
If you are white and went to a mediocre school in the North or the Midlands, with friends of every colour, and you now have a dead-end job, or no job at all, and have seen some of your classmates of South and East Asian parentage go on to university and into the professions, will it help you to become less racist (and it is highly debatable whether you were a racist in the first place) to be hectored about the “white privilege” from which you benefitted, and from which your school friends the doctor, the solicitor and the teacher did not?
From at least the time of Karl Marx, the Left has been excellent at one thing: identifying a problem, and then prescribing a cure which will, always in the long term and often in the short, actually make things worse.
Last edited 3 years ago by David Brown
Jake C
3 years ago
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and heterodoxeconomics.
Last edited 3 years ago by Jake C
Cathy Carron
3 years ago
When I read that the Woke were going after ‘gardening’ in Britain as an indication of white supremacy & racism – I knew for sure that the Wokists are just Joke-ists. These people need to establish real lives. Playing the victim is just tedious at this point.
This American would truly appreciate some links about going after gardeners as racists. I need some laughs.
James Moss
3 years ago
The UK’s “traditional left” as characterised by Embery was mainly interested in being paid more and more for doing less and less work. Surprised, surprise, this hastened the closure of their traditional workplaces and the movement of their jobs offshore. This is why the traditional left is so much in favour of international trade barriers, to the financial detriment of the rest of us We cannot very easily do this with certain work, like fire-fighting, thus leaving this occupation as a bolthole for dinosaurs like Embery. The traditional left had very little interest in such issues as equality and discrimination; pioneers like Roy Jenkins and Barbara Castle advanced the inferior positions of groups such as homosexuals, women through legislation in spite of the trade unions rather than with their support.
Once it is realised that being born into a working class family or living in the north are not actually political philosophies which oblige or encourage an individual to have any particular set of political views or to vote for a particular party, much follows from this.
Jake Jackson
3 years ago
“In response, the new post-industrial Left seeks to challenge Amazon and its ilk today, not via the old union style but forms of solidarity that celebrate instability, diversity and inclusion.”
—–
You deserve your penury.
Alan Matthes
2 years ago
A large part of why young people can’t afford homes is because around 300,000 new people have been coming in to this country every year for decades. Cheered on by the woke.
Andrew Raiment
3 years ago
You could of course read Jonathan Portes over at Byline Times for his solution to the current economic insecurity that many young people are facing, sadly he leaves out his involvement in it, modest man that he is.
And from this article: “This new model is advocated by a group of commentators attached to the national-populistUnherd website”
Doesn’t really seem that grounded in reality I have to say….
I notice with that article that it pursues the usual leftist strategy of denying the existence of a demographic that loses by leftism.
Thus the left informed people who were worried about the effects of immigration on British identity that there is no such thing as British identity. It has said the same about English and white culture, while oddly having no trouble identifying black or Scots culture. It likewise dismisses feminist concerns about trans people infringing on women’s position by denying there is such a thing as a woman. This article likewise denies there is any such thing as a white working class. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
Thank you for the link.
For those (like me) who haven’t heard of this man, “Jonathan Portes is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College London”.
love your comment about his modesty!
Portes, self proclaimed “migration expert” was the man who advised Blair that only 13,000 Poles would come to the UK with the accession of Poland to the EU – and that over a period of 10 years. Blair could have asked me and I would have advised him for free that every man jack of them and their dog would want to come… Mr Portes – one of the BBC’s favourite talking heads – is just the sort of leftist that causes the problems we have today.
Last edited 3 years ago by David Boulding
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
This is a very thoughtful article but it uses jargon and over-complicated ideas for a phenomenon which must really be simple.
Young people are rebelling – not new. They are rebelling because they don’t see a future – not really new because a future has to be striven-for, not presented on a plate.
There are three much more important issues now. The first is that young people don’t have to automatically fall into responsibility for a family – either they don’t want a family or the state takes the responsibility. So there isn’t an automatic path from rebellion to quiet middle age.
The second is that you get thousands of middle-aged people, like the author, who want to be seen as young or understanding the young and who have nothing special to do apart from socialising and analysing life.
The third is that medical science is keeping people alive so that there are about 20 million old people hanging around. These people, say the over-60s, are being encouraged to see themselves as middle-aged and want to have an opinion. These millions must see young people as feckless and stupid.
So we have woke and nobody can fight it. A quiet revolution that can’t be stopped because we have no systems in place to deal with it. Really, it is neither Right nor Left – it is new.
The third is that medical science is keeping people alive so that there are about 20 million old people hanging around. These people, say the over-60s, are being encouraged to see themselves as middle-aged and want to have an opinion.
That’s it! We are hanging around, doing nothing, kept alive by the NHS (what a joke!). And we have opinions too! Quelle horreur! Perhaps Mr Wheatley would like a Final Solution for the likes of us.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
Arnold Grutt
3 years ago
“What’s driving the civil war on the Left is that a life defined by instability tends to produce a worldview radically at odds with the core values that gave birth to “traditional working-class” politics.”
So what did drive “traditional working-class politics.”? If that ‘class’ was ‘stable’, why did ‘politics’ exist at all? This suggests that there is a ‘politics of stability’. So, in that condition, what were the intra-class differences which necessitated politics?
In my view ‘politics’ in Britain (till recently) has always been about two religiously-derived views, which are antithetical to each other. Unfortunately Wikipedia often fails to supply the religious background of notable actors in politics (e.g. J. Corbyn and Sturgeon). Suffice it to say that those whose religious background is mentioned always hold exactly the views that I would expect them to e.g. Andy Burnham.
Last edited 3 years ago by Arnold Grutt
hijiki7777
3 years ago
I get frustrated by the way the word “woke” gets thrown around, as though we all have the same understanding of what it means. It is perfectly fine to want liberation for oppressed groups in society, and some use the word “woke” as cover to justify their own prejudice. On the other hand some who are “woke” go too far, demanding that people follow rules that often they are not even aware of, and sometimes losing their jobs or right to free speech accordingly. The working class, like the rest of society can change. In the 1980s the Sun had a field day attacking the “loony left” over their politically correct job advertisements. Today the Sun is happy to cover Elton John and other gay icons in a positive light. Both the left and the right need to be careful. The left that they go too far today, and the right that in the future they do not look out of touch like they did when they were defeated in 1997, a time when they were still attacking the “loony left” and the 1960s.
Sean L
3 years ago
R
Last edited 3 years ago by Sean L
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
..
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
Very interesting piece.
There seems to be an inherent contradiction within the worldview of the Precariat Left intelligentsia.
They seek a ICT connected globalist framework of solidarity and egalitarianism with its attendant transcultural relativism which is borne from the Precariat consequences of a just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism.
This inherent contradiction is then bypassed by supporting the values of a just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism which then proceeds to feedback with one another whilst at the same time projecting any anxiety to anyone who isn’t part of the loop.
The only logical non-Precariat outcome of this state of affairs is Global Woke Paternalistic Corporatism based on the Model villages of the Industrial Revolution.
I say this because in an economic environment of rising energy costs of energy which is eroding the potential of economic growth coupled with a human growth crisis and an increasingly educated ICT connected global workforce, the just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism will find it increasingly difficult to make profits without a race to the bottom in terms of wages, prosperity and taxes.
Hence the reason for the billions in monetary stimulus.
It is therefore quite likely that the future will mean the increased deployment of Special Economic Zones in order that financial markets can capitalise on concentrated social, economic and ecological productivity gains which as State finances erode will increasingly be coupled with Paternalistic Corporatism.
The alternative is for the Precariat Left to self organise and form cooperatives like the Mondragon Corporation.
However, at present Marxist economists like Grace Blakeley are too busy trying to reimpose out of date Marxist ontology.
Last edited 3 years ago by Steve Gwynne
James Chater
3 years ago
Great article. My vicariously felt outrage at the brutal working conditions and unaffordable housing grew as I was reading. (How lucky have I been?) No wonder there is violence towards authority and never-ending commodified hedonism. But for all the online distractions the protest would be more sustained and targeted.
Neil Mcalester
3 years ago
That was a lot more interesting than the title suggested!
eugene power
3 years ago
yes Woke has a cahier de doleances like a macron discourse.
But how come eddycashun rips £60k off mugs who cant see through it
Stephen Makk
3 years ago
Good article. I believe the Precariat will go extinct naturally. Perhaps there will be a renaissance of the Proletariat. Instead of racking up unsustainable debt and wasting precious years on a useless degree, it is better to get busy in a useful trade as early as possible. The new generation of carpenters, electricians and other workers have an entrepreneurial streak their parents never developed. Today, I’d pick the Proletariat path above the Precariat path, for sure. We still need people who make stuff, or maintain the robots that do. Concentrate on being useful. You will do OK.
But you get your fingernails dirty. These middle-class and above children can’t stand the thought of it. It’s a demotion.
Meghan Kathleen Jamieson
3 years ago
It’s possible Harrington is on to something here, but I’m not entirely convinced. I would tend to agree that many young people don’t seem to quite understand some of the traditional leftist values and misinterpret them.
But I am not sure what Harrington is saying beyond that, because it seems clear to me that in most cases this is to their own detriment and shows a real lack of clarity about their own position, for example:
Above the API, how is a freelance graphic designer meant to negotiate for a better piece rate, when he or she is competing against workers all over the world?
Which is the exact reason that globalism has always been suspicious to the left, not because they are parochial racists but because it is only really good for people who want to cut off the possibility of real worker solidarity.
Similarly with housing and lifestyle. Even when working families had it really bad, they managed to function because they had close knit and supportive communities with family close by, often extended families. A mobile labour force, which is good for employers, tends to take this kind of resource and support away from members of the precariat.
I’m not sure what Harrington feels should happen – is Blue Labour somehow supposed to reach out to make this clear, or what?
Neil MacInnes
3 years ago
Let’s all feel sorry for the poor educated who have to compete in this world.
Wot a bunch of dozy twonks.
They’re having to compete and they don’t like it.
What’s the solution?
Vote for a government that protects them and gives them something for nothing.
Meanwhile the rest of the world continues to compete, enjoys the continual improvements that competition brings while our poor educated dozy twonks fall further and further behind.
Then they wonder why we want them to pay for their own education.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
Victor Newman
3 years ago
People can be so cruel in condemning “woke-ism”, it’s merely a fashion-statement and isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It is a provocation designed to draw attention to not having to work for a living.
Brian Villanueva
3 years ago
Articles like this are why I read unHerd. This is a perspective I woul never encounter in my daily life otherwise, and I really appreciate it. The only way the West will avoid imploding completely is by trying to understand each other (ala John Stuart Mill.) As a secure 50 year old, this really gives me a window into the lived experience of poorer Millenials and how that life can easily push them into wokeness as the only form of solidarity they can find. Great job, Mary.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
I agree that there’s a very 1930’s economic solidarity vibe to the author, but I think her point is people seek solidarity with a group. To that end, a precarious economic situation in a society who’s liberalism has dissolved most social bonds and structures tends to push people toward solidarity by innate traits (race, sex, gender id, etc…), since it’s the one group liberalism can’t dissolve.
That the politically militant and intolerant woke go along with that is unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable. When your solidarity groups are based on innate traits, maybe tribalism is inevitable.
Last edited 3 years ago by Brian Villanueva
Michael Harrington
3 years ago
Yes, the Precariat Left is incoherent, which does not portend well for its future. What is needed is a deeper understanding of the uncertain nature of the universe that industrial and post-industrial society managed for a short time but no longer does. Markets are not an enemy here because markets help to manage uncertainty and risk. But politics corrupting markets is a malicious foe.
The fluffy pseudo-intellectualism I hear from the “woke” and CRT corners doesn’t seem to understand any of this uncertain nature of life and therefore flails about attacking the symptoms of their precariousness, which will only make the consequences far worse. The rich and comfortable will not solve this for them. The “woke” need to get educated, but I doubt the schools and unis will get them there. Hard knocks.
To add, identity politics is a Marxist-inspired attempt to secure power in developed democracies where class politics has utterly failed to overturn the capitalist order. If we can’t divide by class, let’s divide by race, ethnicity, and gender. It can’t help but die by eating itself.
Last edited 3 years ago by Michael Harrington
Jake C
3 years ago
People calling wokeness Marxism are cowardly.its just anti white resentment.
“Republican state legislators are white people, so they like to have principled-sounding arguments for taking stances. Being anti-Marxist appeals to them. In contrast, being against a movement of black people trying to take white people’s home equity sounds tawdry ”
Also There’s two different things in the left, real economic left (which Grace blakely belongs too)
And anti white resentment politics by black ppl.
I’ve been on twitter feeds where young black people scorn white homeless people for not taking advantage of “white privlege” and so therefore being doubly useless and pathetic ,and being very vicous about it too.and this type of content generated 100,000’s of likes and approvals.
“There are two separate things going on on the Left at present: the growth of Woke anti-white racism vs. the growth of Bernie Sanders-style non-racial class-based socialism. Calling the former Wokeism “Marxist” distracts from its dominant feature: its racist hatred of whites”
“Moreover, referring to Wokeism as “Marxist” distracts from how much it is in bed with Woke Capital.”
“Nah, the essence of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) movement is to get their hands on your home equity. They aren’t against property rights in general, just your right to your property. They intend to have the government protect their new property once they take it from you.”
“For example, the BLM lady who has bought four houses since her Racial Reckoning windfall last year is not against property: she just wants you to have less of it and her to have more of it.”
You people need to wake up to how pernicious and anti white this is.
This author just took (Grace Blakely) a nice smart middle class woman who is actually coherent and not threatening and is relatable…and pretend wished that this was “wokeness”.
Grace really only pays lip service to mild wokeness ,infact she’s a proper leftist doing analysis of the UK capital account.
Wokeness is actually a pernicious anti white
Resentment.
Think Kehinde Andrews, shola mos shogbaminu,afua hirsh
Saira roa in the US,a wall street millionaire for goodness sake
rob monks
1 year ago
Good points as often the case with your interesting pieces. However, as someone else pointed out, woke can be PMC affluent who are more about slotting people in bureaucratic categorie, an aggressive identity essentialistism than a concern for economic hardship Grace is good with her emphasis on who owns what but there are plenty more identarian essentialist in the woke liberal not necessarily left wing.
Also Mary people have been cancelled just for raising class issues eg Adolf Reid.
As well the Guardian ganged up on a woman who dared to challenge trans dogma about gender just being a construct
Nice piece from Mary Harrington which definitely hits a few salient points particularly the clash between the proletariat left and the precariat left. But I can’t help but feel that the woke are so profoundly self-absorbed and cult like that I struggle to feel any sympathy for them. Struggling to buy a house? Then stop clamouring for open borders and mass immigration. Complaining about the gig economy? Stop supporting virtue signalling corporations and stop celebrating the multicultural mush that ensures competition for the lowest paid most insecure work. Hate your own country for its ‘colonial past’ but worship the EU which not only is stuffed full of countries with colonial pasts but busy expanding a new Empire sucking in every country around it. It appears to me that being Woke has a strong correlation with being dumb. Should have saved their money and swapped a useless uni education for a house deposit frankly.
Yeah, I’m with you on all that. ‘Woke’ just means ‘immature’ regardless of age.
‘Woke’ = ‘identity politics’ totalitarian, which has its roots a century ago in blaming the ordinary workers for the failure in Europe of the predicted Marxist revolution. It was idiotically supposed that ‘capitalism’ ‘repressed’ the workers and they in turn their families. This is the origin of the core of ‘identity politics’ in contemporary extreme feminism. When this baloney crossed the pond, the new Left co-opted the civil rights and Stonewall movements, thereby (after unjustifiable extension from the specific to the generic) expanding the ‘victim’ class from one domain to three. So by inversion ‘the workers’ — the masses — were in effect retro-stereotyped as male + ‘white’ + hetero. It’s all sophistry as a cover for hating the masses because we wouldn’t play ball. So it’s not immaturity: it’s virulent hatred; though yes, you have to be an adult child to be dumb enough to buy and spout the bull.
Its not even grounded in Marxism
Its just grounded in anti white racial resentment from black people.
Like from Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,Afua hirsh, who are all well off.
Think about one of the most anti white woke south asian American commentator saira roa,she’s a wall st millionaire who just spends all day being viciously rude about white people.
Zero concern about economic issues
“Its not even grounded in Marxism” 100% grounded in Marxism, and Freudian Existentialism, founded in the Wiemar Republic in the Goethe Institute by academic intellectuals and called ‘The Frankfurt School’. Google it, and especially the 11 Points:
“The 11 Point Plan of the Frankfurt School
1. The creation of racism offenses.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.”
https://celticsavageyoutube.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-11-point-plan-of-frankfurt-school.html
Why can’t you just accept its just black people pursuing anti white resentment.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1394619238556389379
This American gets it
Can’t it be both, two separate factions in the Woke ranks?
I’d agree that using the term woke to describe people you disagree with is immature, regardless of age.
Why, little boy, is moral to oppose the life-interests of native British people on their own soil?
How adult. (Now you’ve got me at it!)
No, they coined the term and use it on themselves. It’s a bit of doublespeak, no?
This whole piece is wrong.
Grace blakey isn’t woke.
The woke are typically BAME super successful young professionals who own property portfolios love finance capitalism but love attacking white people an Britain i know these people personally. The are unreasonable vicous and nasty.
Think more afua hirsh and Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and kehinde Andrews than
Grace blakely
Couldn’t agree more. I would say that ‘woke’ is not cult like, but is a cult in every way shape or form – it has all the hallmarks.
Hmmm. Is climate change woke?
Stop changing the subject.
I wasn’t. Just wondering if that’s why climate change is also like a religion.
Climate change is not testable. IE the stats show no overall change since the mini ice age, and before that last change was the medievil warming. Yet warmists are convinced its true. So it is technically a religion like Marxism or Christianity. It cannot be falisfied or verified so must appeal to some imagined “authority” to obtain its credibility. Notice that wokists, marxists, national socialists and freaks of all hues follow warmism, it gives them a chance to vent their hate, damage property and send global power consumption/emissions sky high with their smart phones and crypto currencies etc etc.
Humour here or bad humour?
“So it is technically a religion like Marxism or Christianity.” Nice bit of gratuitous hate thrown in there Mike. But how is Marxism like Christianity? Do you believe Carl is a secular god you worship? That his words are divine and his morality and rules are from ultimate truth?
It’s a religion until it happens. And then it will be something else.
What you mean you Don’t believe shreiking Scientifically illiterate St.Greta?….
One definition of a religion is ‘a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion’.
I would say you are spot on with your assessment, and I have long said this to anyone who would listen, in fact I would say it is a cult.
That is no definition of religion, it is mere stupidity sounding clever.
Religion is best defined simply as:
‘That which is of Ultimate Importance’. (beyond the mundane. Death in its self is mundane, it is just what is. What is ultimate is greater than that, than everything)
You are quite right sir! I shall write straight away to Oxford Languages and let them know at once how stupid and clever sounding they are trying to be, and ask, nay, demand they alter their dictionaries – immeadiately!
It’s dope.
It is a deception practised on the gullible by corporate and political interests seeking to generate The Globality.
Yes its is; So An odd Coalition of Marxist Greens &Capitalist multinnationals Can have Ever rising Energy prices with stupid Windfarms & Solar Panels (made from oil ,hydrocarbons &imossible to recycle) Climate We have had Coldest April &possibly May in over 100 years (See Met office archives, Climate4u.com)..Forest fires have been made worse,but No natural ‘Firebreaks’ in Forests,woodlands…Arsonists arrested in Caifornia,and New South wales have not been covered by BBC…Sky news etc..
It is also pushed by China behind the scenes to aid in disruption of the West.
In my experience about a 70% overlap. If you’re woke, you believe in AGW. If you’re traditional, you don’t.
“Hmmm. Is climate change woke?”
Meaningless. Climate change is climate change. The RESPONSES being pushed for are mostly Woke, as the way they are being pushed will lead to the West being vastly harmed by self inflicted damage for very minimal returns. Much saner responses would be even more effective, but warming is a tool being used to wreck the Western economy more than to fix warming.
Do you not think the Western economy is already wrecked? There are plenty of countries proving they can do well in the global economy with a version of capitalism unencumbered by pesky concepts like democracy or freedom. If you believe in freedom and democracy maybe it’s time to reconsider the capitalism (in the West) because freedom democracy and capitalism are clearly not joined at the hip.
I can’t see how abandoning the prejudices and delusions of the Left and replacing them with the prejudices and delusions of the Right are going to solve the problems of the ‘precariat’. They’re still going to have the same problems. It’s not a matter of the woke hating the masses. The masses hate themselves, because they’re losers, because in liberal capitalism 90% of the adult population are losers (i.e. working class). At some point some of them should start rethinking things.
Those losers live better than 99% of the rest of the people on the planet.
And yet they still want more – including trying to improve the lives of the other 99%.
No, they don’t. They probably live better than a majority of people in the world, though even there you have to take into account such things as price levels and degrees of job security. But nowhere near 99%, not by my reckoning anyway.
Actually WOKE is not a cult as a cult requires a messianic leader who’s word is law. Woke is a back behind the curtain led conspiracy where Global Elites AND China trolls are trying to destroy the west by getting us to destroy ourselves from inside. Woke is a Conspiracy.
Agree. It’s been mentioned on our side of the pond as well. The younger wokesters have problems equating their naïve political choices with the issues they rant on about. Their social conscience demands they support green vanity projects and mass immigration but fail to appreciate the direct damage those inflict on their other personal wants of good jobs and housing.
‘Affordable housing’ is a popular sore point and in reality a load of nonsense. House prices are a supply and demand deal. If houses are selling quite well at $1M then they are obviously affordable but young progressives, when they’re not complaining that they can’t afford such prices, will happily don a “Save the Squirrels” t-shirt and support anti-development ‘a blight upon the land’ activism or vote for political red-tape that can delay development for years. If you refuse to increase supply then you have to reduce demand.
It is also diametrically opposed to current green thinking. Expanding the population perforce increases the demand to expand infrastructure. The UK is a densely populated country, particularly the south east where the most opportunity exists.
If there was a triangle (like the cost/quality/time one used in manufacturing) for a nation, it may look like like population, quality of life and environment. It’s necessary to pick one or a lesser combination of the three.
I have read a Leftist claiming that house prices are not affected by supply and demand. Presumably that is why they feel comfortable simultaneously suppressing supply by arguing against the building of new homes and increasing demand by suggesting that all borders should be open to the world, his wife, their children, and maybe their dog as well.
What they say isn’t entirely wrong though. Take NZ for example, since 1990 the number of average people per dwelling has remained steady at 2.7 despite a large population growth. However the average house price has risen from $100k (about $170k in today’s money when taking into account inflation) which was around 4x the average salary, to $900k today, which is around 17x the average salary. I can’t find the figures for the UK, and whilst they won’t be as extreme I’d imagine they’ll paint a similar picture.
Have enough homes been built to satisfy the demand of the new population growth, regardless of how many are per unit? If not, you’ve made his point. And if not, why not?
No, there are not enough houses to go around, largely because of a punitive Resource Management Act that is expensive to navigate, and so skews new building to large, expensive houses. (The Resource Management Act is going to be replaced by – wait for it- 3 Acts which will make new house building easier -not)
There is a hidden population of poor people living in government supplied motel units, or in cars and campsites, because there is not enough public housing, and private rental accommodation suppliers are being demonised as “greedy landlords” and have increasing levels of cost loaded on them, which in turn raises rent and excludes those without jobs and with bad rental histories. These are the people that would normally be housed in council houses, that have been sold off and not replaced.
There is much tinkering around the edges, but house prices in NZ won’t come down until supply starts to catch up with demand.
Greedy landlords are a major cause of NZs problems. They’ve been allowed to leverage themselves massively, pushing prices out of reach of first time buyers, knowing full well they won’t have to pay any Capital Gains on their investment. The properties they rented out were also of a shocking standard, closing to a Brazilian favela than what you’d expect from a first world country
Housing doesn’t have to be something bought and sold on the free market. There are any number of things which aren’t, and historically it often hasn’t been. Many other things are sold on the market but not necessarily on a pure supply and demand basis.
Good points. Turkeys voting for Christmas, which incidentally is one of their go-to insults whenver the working class votes the “wrong way.”
But then again, their other favourite pass-time is hypocrisy .
Absolutely Cheryl Jones, I wish I could upvote your comment 1000 times.
Agreed. The average electrician is more intelligent, i.e. has a better grasp of applied logic, than the average gender studies graduate.
If the electrician did not have such a grasp, s/he’d kill us all.
That;s shocking?..
Don’t accept the implication that the Woke have some kind of monopoly on self righteousness, especially when your account of antiWoke positions is suffused with the same. Wake up enough to see that.
And why are the antiWoke so self righteous? Any clues? To those of us not buying into this type of skirmish, it’s a tell ( and comical unknowing self mockery.)
You covered every point I was going to make Cheryl, well done. I do however feel some pity for those caught up in the ridiculous race that is London and other expensive locations. That said, I left school in Manchester in the summer prior ‘the winter of discontent’. Jobs were scarce, and those available were crap and poorly paid. I was 28 before I could afford a deposit for an ex-council house costing £29,000. I lay awake at night wondering how I’d afford it. My diet was beans on toast, I drove a 25 year old car, and never went abroad.
Now I realise this is getting a bit like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and my name isn’t Obidiah, but it was worth it in the long term. I still have never had a new car, and I still have some of the old furniture I bought from 2nd hand shops and refurbished. I’ve been debt free for a decade and paid off my mortgage recently so I wasn’t indebted to anyone. I see people of my acquaintance and at work who are supposedly struggling. Yet they go out all the time, have phones worth £500, drive new cars etc. They never bring sandwiches to work but buy them at a stupid cost. As for their coffee bills!
Now I don’t expect younger people to live like paupers, but at work they are tech savvy but can’t string together a coherent written sentence, and then spend every other working minute grousing about how crap their lives are. There seems to be a generation who can’t seem to accept that ‘stuff’ only comes for ordinary people if you’re prepared to avoid debt and easy credit, and wait a while.
Beans on toast? You were lucky! In my day, we only had beans on toast for Christmas dinner. Most days we made due with grass seedheads, served on clumps of roof moss.
Totally agree with you. Just to point out a paragraph from Mary´s comment that never fails to put a smile in my face, the one “… but my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on, only came about because I married someone who´d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a house”.
Yeah, women can always do that, fall back into the safety hands of the poor salt miner when breeding time starts to appear in the horizon. Clever move that we chaps never seem to visualize in time. Never mind, I didn´t myself whilst in the salt mines.
Only the more attractive women can do this. For most it isn’t an option.
I’m sure it is mostly women, but not always. I’ve personally met three female doctors (two surgeons and a urologist), just in the city where I live (population less than 200,000), who have stay-at-home husbands taking care of their kids. I have no doubt all of these men are well educated and can keep up their end of the conversation at dinner, but the lifestyles they are living would be out of reach if not for the “lucky escape” of their marriages.
Self pitying whinging, that almost everyone now days is a Lazy, Entitled, Idiot is the real problem.
Like the writer claims,. I dropped out of the real world at 18 and lived totally poor and rough for 22 years, just running around the world looking at stuff and working manual work as needed. And then I hit 40, living in a camp in the Sub Arctic making a very meagre living off the Taiga, and thought how un-cool, and miserable, it would be to be a poor old person. All I owned was a dog, 25 year old truck and falling apart trailer, so I headed to a big city to get some real money. I had basic construction skills, not a skilled tradesman by far, but was iron hard physically.
So I talked my way into a piecework Industrial electrical job which worked 13 hour shifts, and then worked general construction on the days off – for myself. I then worked 12 hours a day (with setup time on top, and commute, about 14 hours a day) 7 days a week for 5 1/2 years not taking a single break – I could not take time off as if I was sitting about my mind saw the money I was losing dancing past – So I worked, slept, ate, and that was it 5 1/2 years – at HARD construction, dangerous, miserable, tedious, painful often, and slept a day away when I ‘Hit The Wall’ or was too hurt, otherwise I worked.
In those years I earned about 15 years pay as I had some really good work sometimes. I spent NOTHING but very small rent, much of my work was being put up in hotels and meals paid, I saved everything (My wife began her own business and kept the house and dog and did laundry for me so every penny I made was pure profit). (and I am now a skilled tradesman is a couple trades)
Naturally I ended up with a load of money and owned a couple houses – in all close to half a million dollars clear. Made with my own hands and back – and head as I worked smart too. I was fried at the end of it though – it is fantastically hard to do this, but I was on a mission. We dropped out then and went back to living on the road a wile, and later I began building again, but just 50 hour weeks as I hate construction, but at mid 60s still build houses myself – by hand, but part time now as I do not like building, but feel it is a waste to not build – like throwing away food – to waste my skills and not build real things, that people need – and to make the money, is why I still do it.
Anyone tough enough could do this. Work 2 full time jobs. Get a skill like helper at some trade, work 80 hour weeks till you are going nuts, then do it a couple more years, buy a nice house for cash, or two falling down ones and rebuild them (as I did later). Anyone who works 40 hours a week and does not have children, and complains about money is just a lazy wa* ke r.
PS, in today’s degenerate world some people think working two jobs is taking a job from someone else, BS! By working 2 jobs you are making growth, you are making the nation prosperous, you are creating money, jobs for others, you are REAL GDP GROWTH, because you are making more for others to consume and use, and you are making much more for you to spend, and so make others money. It means you are doubling productivity. The West is doomed because so many people will not work hard, but expect money anyway.
My Scottish Grandfather left his farm at 14, Walked 500 miles to the big cities to find opportunity (around 1900), worked 12 hour days , and later Put him self through professional school wile working, then raised 10 children, through the Great Depression, with always broke relatives staying too, took about 18 people through the depression – poor but sheltered and fed well, and worked every minute he did not sleep. He retired at 92!
“My Scottish Grandfather left his farm at 14, Walked 500 miles”
And then walked 500 more?
The thing is, all the above is true. I could tell so many stories I have heard first hand from my long and weird life that are a lot harder than that – and again this is true, I met a guy who had worked from when he was 3 years old, supporting him self, and at 70 he had never had a holiday/vacation. people like him are gone now in the west, we are a soft and weak people.
(That guy’s story was great, during the Great Depression his parents died and he was sent to live on a big farm by the Sheriff. The Family were German Immigrants who had a children of their own and had him live in a room in the barn, his job was to feed and water the chickens from the start, He was not allowed to even eat with the family, he was from low class and they were hard times, and this was how it was. At 9 – 10 he began hanging with the Rail Road crews when they were in the area, and more and more he was working in their camps full time for tips and food, doing chores, washing, laundry and such, for traveling RR maintenance crew camps, living with them just as a sort of camp-follower. At 14 he was old enough to be hired on by the Rail Company and knew the work and they got him on, and so was hired – becoming a steam engine worker eventually – a machinist, then WWII started and….). This is 100% true, as my Grandfather set out on foot at 14 with his kit and some food and a tiny bit of cash to find a life.
I knew another guy who was sold to a remote oil rig camp by the Sherrif. Again late depression, this guy had run away from his hellish home as a boy and was trying to get by, a young ho-bo, and in a Texas town the police picked him up as a vagrant and told him he was going to jail, and youth home (prison) as a suspected thief, unless he wanted to work it off.
He was driven way off in the rough lands to a remote oil rig, told if he ran away he was going to jail, the head of the rig gave the sheriff some money, bought him, – and he worked for them for free for about 6 months till they ended up hiring him. Living with the old ho-bos on the road as I did for years I heard the wildest stories – in USA and Europe, that were not too distant past, people could not believe. Times were hard, the people hard as steel.
Your interesting stories also reveal a different side of the so-called woke problem I think. Our generation and those prior to us grew up freer, on the loose, compared to the woke generations. I was out playing amongst other children on the estates and streets where I lived from the age of 3, older girls or siblings kept an eye on the little ones, but we learnt young about ourselves – our abilities and our limitations and those of others. We also learnt young how to recognise the dangerous bullies and avoid them.
All this early experience and the physical health of playing out of doors so much, gave us the confidence to launch ourselves out into the world in the way you describe.
I think it is important to recognise out of fairness to the woke ones that this experience has vanished. They have grown up protected almost totally, their childhoods circumscribed by the timetables of their parents, or simply confined within the home and garden (if they were lucky enough to have one).
At the same time all the history they’ve been taught has focused on WW2, the ev il Na zis and the ensuing Holocaust.
That’s a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
We were very lucky.
I completely agree with you. I learned so much playing on the streets during twilight hours, I don’t think children are learning this at all these days. I’m a teacher and many parents I speak to are happier for their children to be behind devices than outside ‘getting into trouble’.
Okay if you insist, I still think house prices should still be cheaper.
None of this has anything to do with the anti white woke.
This piece is wrong ,the woke left doesn’t even comment on economic issues.
The woke left actually consists of financially successful BAME people and upper middle class luvies.
This whole piece is wishful thinking.
I know of Grace blakey she is basically a crypto proletariat lefties who was sympathetic to brexit.
The woke left are really all just minimising white economic challenges and presenting black people as the ultimate victims (despite them typically being well off)
So the contradictions you point out don’t exist.
One of my mixed race friends is becoming increasingly “woke” anti white.but she inherited her house and is still a classist snob.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
I agree with all of that. I would add one more: if you really make a virtue of insecurity, you might want to re-think that. That just floors me. I can understand other things such as diversity and multi-culturalism – though I think them fatal to a social cohesion that I believe necessary to a happy country. But still it does have its appeal. (In my case, it’s largely to having a variety of cuisines available,)
None such exists for economic insecurity, unless it’s well-off Woke individuals talking about others’ precarious situations, of which they can take full advantage. But it’s a devil’s bargain for the Precariat. Pity that with their education they can’t see that. If they did, making common cause with the Proletariat would make sense to them. And really, since they own so little, how far removed are they – if at all – from that status? The old working class had its little baubles and such like as well.
I agree with every word of this.
An interesting perspective from Mary Harrington. She just touches on one significant aspect of progressive politics which is the influence of relatively wealthy people (living well above the API) who, in effect, play at being part of the Precariat. It’s clearly visible in California where tech elite are drivers behind much of the state’s progressive politics but they don’t have to live with the consequences of the policies they support. They can always retreat to fashionable, expensive zip codes or simply leave the state if necessary.
Until we give young people a chance at a stable job, financial security, a family, I doubt we’ll ever get past wokedom or whatever destructive ideology takes its place. The young have little reason to identify with their own society if that society has economically abandoned them. Instead, why not give the world the middle finger, man the barricades, scream injustice, and see if something better comes along. Easy to do when you’ve little to lose.
But how will the house supply ever match demand if the woke insist on importing rapidly reproducing populations from Africa / M.E.? And where would all those houses be built? With what money? What would counterbalance the impact of population growth on the welfare system, infrastructure, healthcare, education etc.? Or even on the job market, as presumably some of the immigrants would seek work. The longer the woke stay woke, the less chance of them ever reaching financial security. And of the unwoke rest of us too, which is the problem. I wouldn’t shed a tear for the woke screwing over themselves, but they are pulling down everyone else too in the process.
The main failing of the wokary is that they seem to fail to see that its only the unfairness in society that allows it to move forward. If we equalised wealth, access to education, health, rights across the world – yes the people in africa / india would get a boost, a very small one, but the disadvantaged communities and groups here would actually be worse off.
Wokness is a race to the bottom.
One way they could get around their problem-supposing they have to work in London is for a group of friends with families to buy a big house in the country for say £1 million to accomodate them all & use a helicopter to get into work in London. This would work out cheaper than each family trying to afford a mortgage on a one-bed flat in a dangerous area in London.
Ha ha, maybe you’re right. I’d like to see that costed out!
But everyone is at the same bottom and that’s okay with some people. But I don’t think most Wokes realize that this is where their ideas will take them.
In most rich countries, fewer babies are being born, as people delay marriage, are content to be childless, remain single or enter non-conventional relationships that are not necessarily straight. This social change both reflects and is a product of the new precarity. Also, people now live much longer than they used to, which increases the pressure on the housing supply because houses are now typically not inherited until the heirs are themselves old. As the proportion of non-economically active people increases, so does the call upon all service industries, but especially the health and care services. These services are labour-intensive. If there are not enough babies being born even to replace people who are dying, where are our doctors and nurses, not to mention our delivery drivers, mechanics, electricians, to come from? And if we want to attract workers, we must of course make it possible for them to bring their families. Thus the ethnic composition of the population changes.
That’s not exactly how it works. Firstly, the majority of the non-EU (thirdworld) immigrants are functionally ineducable / unemployable – and so will be their offspring, by and large -, they present a large cost in every possible aspect. (The EU migrants – whom you may have had in mind when writing – don’t intend to settle, they go home after a few years’ work. Don’t conflate the two.)
Second, the immigrants grow old themselves too.
And thirdly, more to the point: it’s not some predestined, irreversible cycle. Look at Hungary’s example: not long ago they had one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and with a number of targeted policies they managed to turn it around so the birthrates are steadily on the rise. It’s only a matter of good governing.
In any case, the ‘ageing society’ issue is a temporary one – within a few generations it rebalances itself. You can see the effects of a “young society” if you look at the abject, ever increasing poverty in the child-rich African countries. Now compare that to aged Japan.
Firstly, the majority of the non-EU immigrants are functionally ineducable / unemployable – and so will be their offspring, by and large
Why do you think that is? What is it about them that makes them and their children ineducable and unemployable? Is it genetic?
No. Cultural / environmental. Things like prenatal / infant malnutrition, the practice of inbreeding (cousin marriages) etc. do have an ongoing effect on the “gene pool” so to speak, which are hard to break away from. And a long, protracted process to break away from.
I see what you’re trying to do. Nope, i don’t take offence in being called a raycisst. Feel free as you please.
Non EU immigrants are ‘ineducable’ and ‘unemployable’? How so?
Obviously i didn’t mean the Australians or Canadians etc. But those from s u b s a h a r a n* Africa / MENA are, by and large. You may want to familiarise yourself with the statistics (UK + EU alike).
(* for some odd reason that’s one of the words blocked by the censorfilter, hence the odd typing.)
I have no problem with some immigration. I have no problem with a multi-racial society. I have massive problems with a multi-cultural society. Let them in but let them adapt to us not us to them.
But surely behavioural genetics has shown that cultures are pretty much rooted in genetic differences because traits are heritable, and so each culture and its population co-evolve. Every society selects for some traits and against others.
Yes, a nice article. But ironically, all the wokeists are constantly buying stuff from Amazon, whereas I refuse to do so. And they love immigration while complaining about the lack of homes.
And the immigrants they clam to love generally hate gay people, who they also claim to love.
They generally hate ‘us’ full stop.
Yes, for people so in favor of “inclusion”, they seem to hate an awful lot of people, don’t they?
The woke are useful idiots and as such will be eliminated if ever their Marxist masters gain power and control; after all, who wants a load of, now unneeded, proven troublemakers (‘activists’) hanging around causing dissent.
Yes, Stalin was very keen on eliminating veteran Bolsheviks. Although a Red I encountered on Twitter told me that that was a lie.
…and then when the woke have families, they often decide they need to move away from the ‘vibrant and diverse’ areas because there is a ‘crime problem’, or an issue with the ‘local school’.
but so true…
So what about the traditional left that buy stuff from Amazon or are in favour of immigration? Your viewpoint of the traditional left appears to be extremely narrow and blinkered, reminiscent of a bygone age. ‘Immigrants stealing homes’ is a spurious 1970’s argument in terms of taking an anti immigration stance. In 2021 the issues seem to include the lack of the impact of such initiatives like the buy-to-let scheme on affordable housing for example. I often hear similar demonisation of the whole demographic of the young supposedly middle-class ( does that mean graduates?) as all being ‘the same’ coming from people in the same vein as the identitarians they despise. Class, seems to be the last bastion of permitted massive generalisations. I wonder if critics of the young’s ‘woke’ outlook politics, (which actually works against them in terms of the divide and rule principle,) may do better in terms of understanding their situation. Many of them are from working class backgrounds and are the first generation in their families to go to university, propelled by the immense pride of their family. This is a direct result of the ‘50% at university’ push, and of course those new gleaming university’s business models. Maybe the arguments should focus on economics, and what those Amazon workers and laptop cafe-based creatives have in common. Without parents who own property, basically poverty and insecurity. The left should be focussing on less simplistic antagonistic narratives, and building empathetic responses understanding and solidarity perhaps?
I have no idea who makes such an argument, but the fact is that we have let in 8 million people at least while not building homes for 8 million more people. It is simply beyond argument that mass immigration has caused a housing shortage.
I’m not sure if you meant Help-To-Buy rather than buy-to-let? But as it happens buy-to-let has made a huge and crucial contribution to mitigating the housing crisis. The average density of occupation is higher in rental property than in owner occupied – it’s something like 25 square meters per person versus 33. Housing that’s let out accommodates a third more people.
Tax attacks on landlords are therefore deeply misguided. A 5-bedroom house that’s an HMO may house 16 people. Divested into the owner-occupied market, it will house a family of perhaps 5 to 6. The family may have previously been renting, but even so, forcing the house out of the rental sector turns 6 tenants into owner-occupiers but leaves 16 evicted tenants looking for a new tenancy in a rental market that has just shrunk by one house.
Interventionist measures to make housing cheaper always end up making it more expensive. If there’s somehow a way to buy a house for half the usual cost, the asking price will double.
I understand your point about buy-to let. However there is as always another way of looking at it. This does not negate your points in theory. From my perspective the figures you cite in terms of data do not seem relevant in terms of real life experience of a person who is renting, with all of the massive insecurities that brings. I am not a homeowner for reasons beyond my control and I am 60. I could class myself as one of those precariat as a freelancer who is only able to work sporadically due to a health condition. Since I left home at 18, I have never had a stable home for more than 4 years. I would get settled and the landlords who were looking at their property as an investment would necessarily not keep long term tenants in order to release capital etc. With my two kids I was reliant on fixed term one year contracts and have moved 18 times in 30 years. I have now been where I am for the last ten years due to the landlord wanting a long-term reliable tenant. This is very hard to find. However I have been priced out of good quality housing. I pay far more than I would could I get a mortgage but the house condition is more akin to student housing in the 80’s. I am not alone. The upkeep by the landlord constitutes the bare minimum he can get away with. Buy to Let has contributed to the growth of property portfolio careers and of course there are some good outcomes. But being a renter is often idealised. Young people mostly have no choice.
“the fact is that we have let in 8 million people at least while not building homes for 8 million more people. It is simply beyond argument that mass immigration has caused a housing shortage.”
I would say that of course mass immigration has impacted the housing shortage, but the problem is not the immigration per se but the lack of building in the need of affordable housing to accommodate our whole population, immigrants included. To be clear, I meant that immigrants are not the problem. The short-sighted lack of resources and planning for them is. Recent immigrants are of course also more likely to be the ones in overcrowded low standard housing, unable to claim wage subsidy benefits yet benefitting landlords increasing rents based on the lucrative property market.
It’s complicated.
I note your point about ‘financial envy’ of the Left on a later post, and I would concede there is a semblance of envy in my thinking, but that has nothing to do with my politics. It is to do more with security. Financial envy can come from all over the political spectrum. 😉
I suspect the reason why it’s the problem it is is that there are simply no straightforward or obvious solutions.
Building more houses alone does not build more roads, schools, buses, train capacity, surgeries etc, which are obviously required alongside. We can’t really require developers to build all this as well, because then the price of a new house would have to include a lot more than the cost of the dwelling itself. Making new builds more expensive in this way would either inflate local house prices, or if local prices are already maxed out, would mean the developer would have to absorb these costs; meaning s/he would probably not develop at all.
BTL was in effect an inadvertent but quite effective way of extracting more capacity from the same stock of houses. I wonder if part of the answer might be to extend this, eg charge council tax via a formula based on how many people the property could accommodate, with an add-on if it houses fewer than that. So the charge for living alone in a five-bedroom house would be more than that if it has five people living in it. It might encourage people to downsize as soon as they don’t need the space. You’d probably have to abolish stamp duty as otherwise you could create a class of people who can’t afford either to stay in their house or sell it.
I get your point but it’s possibly overstated. Surely buses, trains and doctors will appear proximate to their customers? Your base case that government should jump in and provide these services sounds like you have been living somewhere where the role of the entrepreneur has been neutered. Needless to say I’m on the other side of the pond but here in Tx the developers build huge housing estates and within weeks or months there are strip malls with every service you can imagine manned by small business owners.
Up to a point, but train lines don’t build themselves and bus routes tend to lose money unless in cities. Health care is socialised over here so someone’s got to build and pay for a surgery and hire and pay staff.
No, they don’t, or at least not in England. Where I lived until recently, the housing stock increased by about 18% in four years. The strip mall, or in this case the shop and garage disappeared around the same time, because they were sold to have houses put on their sites.
The GP practice lost to early retirement both its senior – and excellent – doctors, who had lived and worked in a fairly traditional and cohesive community. They just didn’t want to cope with a heavier workload of people with big city expectations.
The price of a new house already CAN incorporate extra social costs through a Section 106 agreement – not really an agreement but conditions and fees imposed on the developer by the council
… the effect of which is to reduce supply, driving up price.
Of course.
More accurately, reducing profit, which the suppliers compensate for by reducing supply to increase price.
Until your Tory Council has an 8 year ;;Build everywhere’better” philosophy beloved of conservatives, and lib-dems,labour, &other Globalists
Actually most of those costs (roads, schools, surgeries etc) are already factored into house prices via Section 106 payments which are part of the Planning process. Of course that doesn’t stop housebuilders trying to wriggle out of paying these costs, as well as their obligations to provide social housing. This despite the fact they have plenty of money to reward handsomely both their executives and their shareholders, not to mention the gift that keeps giving for developers known as Help to Buy. I speak from some knowledge as I live with someone who has been on a local planning committee for the last 15 years
Affordable housing According to Most MPs,Councillors are £ 400-950,000!
Try to Get an Appointment with a GP..,Most are still cared of SARS2 ,but ok to give innoculations,paid £12 a jab…that is already a problem,even in Small towns
45 minutes waiting on the phone to speak to a receptionist.
Need of affordable housing ? – i.e. social housing, largely.
Agreed.
But there’s no public money with which to build it.
You think there is an inexhaustible supply of suitable land for housing and associated infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, shops etc)? England is already one the most densely populated countries in Europe, and its agricultural sector is one of the smallest in the world in terms of the proportion of food consumed which is supplied domestically. Then there are non-housing uses. Land for recreation, land for nature, land for other species. You might want a concrete jungle and the destruction of the environment. I don’t. And I haven’t even mentioned all the different sources of pollution from high population densities. The problems brought about by overpopulation are many and varied and immense. And immigration is a major contributor.
Also Pandemics Spread easily in Cities ,Megaopolis? As John Cleese said ”Stating the bl8888 obvious”.
Help-to-buy was/is one of a vast number of government grant schemes, from at least cavity wall insulation onwards, which have filled the pockets of contractors.
The market sets the price of a commodity. HMG announces that a grant will be available, at 50% of the price of that commodity. Suppliers of that commodity know that the market will bear a price of x, and immediately increase the price to between 1.9x and 2x, because if people were willing to pay x before, they’ll still be willing to pay x, and even happier to pay the “bargain” price of .95x.
Back in the 70s 40% of the population were owners/mortgaged and another 40% secure public tenants. Thatcher sold off council housing to tenants and subsidised buying a house pushing up prices so much it’s finance of the housing market that’s the driver now not the cost of housing supply. Only the end of the house price bubble or big New public secure renting programmes will offer more secure, sound housing.
“Back in the 70s 40% of the population were owners/mortgaged and another 40% secure public tenants.”
The population of the UK fell between 1971 and 1981. That’s what enabled the Right-to-Buy policy.
The removal of credit controls removed the suppression of house prices. Remember mortgage waiting lists?
You miss the point. It’s the tricks that inflated house prices which make housing unaffordable now for the young unless there’s a house price crash or secure tenancies expanded so more people can live well outside the house purchase system.
If we had controlled immigration rather than mass immigration, we would have been able to plan the infrastructure accordingly. Not complicated if you don’t over-think it.
“‘Immigrants stealing homes’ is a spurious 1970’s argument in terms of taking an anti immigration stance.”
So importing millions of extra people and wondering why there’s no housing is “spurious”? Millions of extra people also means lower wages and people less able to afford accommodation. This is basic maths and, dare I say it, just common sense so lacking in the Left.
“ just common sense so lacking in the Left.”
If only common sense was more common!
Nothing spurious about the fact that immigration increases demand and therefore raises prices in a market which has to build 7 houses a minute just to meet immigration demand. And that figure comes from 2016 not the 70s. The spurious bit is the straw man that migrants “steal” homes. Pathetic.
Towns and cities have become unrecognizable. I observe the different clothing-some ladies are not only covered head to toe but have strange grille bits to see out of-must be difficult for them ? I was in a shop and suddenly a lot of people scuttled out from the cellar-where they obviously live.I don’t think a lot of people who come here do get a better life-I would imagine they are being exploited. This is a situation that benefits only a few.
No, I really do think life here is better for many immigrants than it was at home.
I don’t think the people who come here are escaping absolute poverty because how could they afford to get here? We are obviously receiving what is their country’s version of the middle class and they often end up doing zero hour work in order to pay back money they or their family borrowed. When my grandparents came to England they were single and so could marry someone from that locality which meant they became part of the community-I noticed as a teacher the amount of Polish surnames for example. If your community arranges your marriage with an unknown person from another country , you are always going to remain a stranger.
A sort of not wanting their cake and eating it.
…the woke millenials and those that followed are always the ones with plastic bottles of water in their hands, using uber instead of buses and getting dropped off and picked up from school on a daily basis. They have also been by far the generations that have made use of international travel and weekend breaks in Paris/Berlin etc, but at the same time regard themselves as the most virtuous when it comes to Green issues.
Thats not true the woke don’t care about the housing crisis.
Grace blakey isn’t woke,she was sympathetic to brexit even.
Explicit complaining about white people,and/or open borders immigration is whats required to be woke.
Think afua hirsh,Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,kehinde Andrews.
And most BAME young successful professionals who love liberal capitalism and they frequently own property portfolios.
And the people that vote for them.
So socialism’s answer is to import millions of people which is what Blair did. And you wonder why wages are low and housing in short supply?
Jobs doing what? Globally we overproduce (and over consume) so what can these people do that actually benefits society? We need more fruit pickers (or so they’re saying on TV) would they like to try that?
Labour said loads should go to university. They do and come out with a degree in media management or art (graffiti ) and can’t find anything to do with it. Unfortunately, they and the others, have been told whilst studying for their degree that they’ll get tremendous well paying jobs. What they ended up with was a large debt and disinterest from most employers.
Maybe what we should be doing is educating young people to the fact that what society needs is plumbers, carpenters, electricians not golf course managers.
Or diversity Officers, Media monitors, Gender studies etc..
“but they don’t have to live with the consequences of the
policies they support. ”
Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t live next door to their opinions…
Richmond,Surrey has around 92% White is also A Capital of wokeness and regularly elects lib-dems..
The wealthy Precariat also benefit from the cheap labour and off shoring that they can tap into as a result of globalisation and immigration. They have cheap people to serve them their lattes, clean their offices and homes and look after the kids. They can also offshore all manufacturing to cheap locations before importing it.
“At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.”
Really? So what happens when one identity group comes up against another?
Gays and muslims?
Transexuals and feminists?
Now now, that’s all supposed to be brushed under the carpet. Go and stand in a corner!
A few years ago there were violent clashes between police and miners. A number of miners were killed.
Ordinarily the left has no problem knowing who to side with here, but in the case I refer to, the country was south Africa and everyone involved was black. So the left’s prejudices failed to instruct it; this situation did not compute. Both sides were beyond reproach.
I don’t see anything new in the left today. It’s the same old victimhood hierarchy based on identity, with no actual moral underpinning or informing it. The most saintly and irreproachable person imaginable to the left today would probably be a transgender Palestinian Muslim terrorist. Any such person who existed would promptly be killed by some other Muslim terrorist, of course.
That situation (Marikana) was further complicated by the order to break the strike (not an order to shoot) having been given by a leftist government and the strike having been organized by an “upstart” union which was a response to the mainstream unions having become too cosy with the government.
Indeed, Mark. What to do, what to do? They’re police ( = the left hates them) but they’re black ( = the left worships them) and they’re implementing the agenda of a black leftist government ( = the left is swooning).
On the other they’re miners (swoon), black miners (double swoon), police-victimised black miners (triple swoon) and members of an insurgent leftist union (4x swoon).
What a dilemma!
Tosh
A well argued and logical response worthy of the wokest.
The noble science of intersekshunalism has the answer. You look up the intersectional charts, graphs and tables to determine the power-dynamics between the groups based on skin colour, mental disorders and political affiliation, and whoever is the darkest / leftest / barkingest wins. Colour is not the sole deciding factor, as many black individuals (Kemi Badenoch, Trevor Phillips, Shaun Bailey, David Kurten etc. etc.) are regarded as the “oppressor enemy”, due to their “internalised raycisum”.
You make a joke, but that’s exactly how it’s worked out. I think it was Kimberle Crenshaw that designed the intersectional grid.
They invent intersectionality. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. [Job 5:7]
But how can you build solidarity in a world that is obsessed with pointing out peoples differences, encouraging and celebrating them, punishing those who don’t acknowledge them in one way or another? Surely, the way to solidarity is to point out peoples similarities and build on those and celebrate them rather than what separates us. But of course, that is not the agenda; getting people to separate themselves makes them easy round-up targets for when the bidding of their masters is done.
I can understand the woke youth feeling aggrieved, but I cannot understand their complete lack of logic in looking for a solution. In fact they are actively ensuring their demise.
For there to be logic, they must have brains, sadly many don’t. Their brains got taken from them at university.
Ha ha! That’s sadly often true.
There is no logic in a cult. Their masters have no intention of them finding a ‘solution’ for they are the solution – to their masters agenda.
If you think there’s no reason in cults, check out the elaborate dogmas of religions and political organizations, especially the more authoritarian ones. They’ve got it all worked out.
Geoff H said “logic”, not “reason”. And you seem to be confused as to two different definitions of “reason”. The elites of the Middle Ages had reason to subjugate the masses, but that didn’t make the period the Age of Reason.
You’re not going to find a lot of logic in the fables right-wingers tell each other about the left-wingers, nor vice versa. It’s mostly tribal hooting and tub-thumping. Evidence and reason and reality are hard. So much easier to make up fables and thump tubs.
The woke do not represent the entire left.
Politics in a nutshell.
In other words, as a predominantly white middle class movement, what the new progressives really object to – the root cause of their discontent – is that their generation has missed out on the “systemic privileges” which their parents enjoyed. Ironic given that it is exactly these privileges that they spend their political lives protesting against.
New progressives are on average better paid, better educated and from wealthier geographies and families than the majority of the population, let alone the traditional left. What this article seems to describe to me is not a justifiable complaint about having been left behind, but rather an overwhelming sense of entitlement – to a job which provides both self-actualisation and an upper middle class standard of living, and to have their political views not only heard, but accepted without question.
More than any generation before them, the woke believe that the world owes them not only a living, but also a hearing.
That seems to be an extremely uncharitable argument, which contains the same prejudices and inaccuracies you are accusing the young of perpetuating. Many in the traditional left own property for example. Those student revolutionaries from the 80’s who bought dirt cheap houses in the run-down East End or Islington for example, are now sitting on considerable assets, potentially topping a million, and are able to leave whopping big inheritances to their kids. The original East End residents are now able to sell up and buy huge houses in Essex just by virtue of being resident of a particular area.
I think that’s largely right, Adam. At bottom, every leftist cause arises from economic envy of someone else.
There is a website called housepricecrash for people who think the housing market is about to crash. Many there have thought this for 20 years, and have paid rent for that long – almost an entire mortgage term – in the belief that any minute now, they will be able to step in and grab a post-crash bargain.
All they want, of course, is to be able to buy in at a lower price, so that post-crash, as hose price inflation resumes, they can enjoy the same advantage they biliously observe others enjoying.
‘..every leftist cause arises from economic envy of someone else.’
I wonder if that isn’t imposing a version of some rightist motivations onto leftist thinking? The ideas behind capitalism, economic competition, free markets and so on are unashamedly based on economic envy, and indeed its merit, as a motivator for organising economies and societies.
You could describe ideas of national or ethnic identity (in the white West) as being something that is under threat from immigration are based on a fear of losing economic benefits for the indigenous population due to other people’s economic envy. I think there is probably more to it than that but it is often couched in economic terms (around employment, wages and housing).
That’s not to say all people with conservative or right wing views are motivated by fear or greed – that would be as reductive as saying all leftist people are motivated by economic envy.
The acquisitive impulse is certainly important, but the difference between right and left is that the right doesn’t begrudge others what they have, whereas the left does; if everyone can’t have a Rolls-Royce nobody should have one. If you ask someone of the left where they’d rather live, in a country where everyone has £5, or in one where everyone has £6 apart from the top 10% who have £50 and one who has £1000, they often genuinely struggle to say.
Envy doesn’t really work to explain antipathy against immigration because immigrants tend to be poorer than the indigenes.
Envy doesn’t really work to explain antipathy against immigration because immigrants tend to be poorer than the indigenes.
I was trying to say that antipathy to immigration is partly based on the assumption that the immigrants are envious of the wealth of the existing population – they begrudge it – want to take it.
If you ask someone of the left where they’d rather live, in a country where everyone has £5, or in one where everyone has £6 apart from the top 10% who have £50 and one who has £1000, they often genuinely struggle to say.
I would struggle – within the question are lots of assumptions based on made up numbers that don’t look at the material consequences of the inequality.
In the UK the top 20% have around 40% of total income earned and the bottom 20% have 8%. The richest 10% have 44% of wealth. If you ask someone on the left whether they’d rather live in a country where income and wealth are more equally distributed among the population they would say yes. I don’t think that is necessarily related to envy but to a desire for fairness.
To simplify the question, would you rather live in country A where everyone is equally poor, or in country B where there is disparity in wealth but everyone is richer than in country A?
By way of examples, think of Soviet Russia versus say Switzerland.
I’d rather live in Switzerland than Soviet Russia. But I’d rather still live in a world where there was less disparity between Soviet Russia and Switzerland. And I’d also want to reduce the disparity within Switzerland.
The soviet empire has fallen 30 years ago, but that aside the wealth inequality in the Soviet Union was multiple times higher than in Switzerland.
There are many other factors determining wealth per capita. If those GDP-poor but child-rich countries of Africa stuck to near-replacement level birth rates since the 1950s, where do you think they would be now? It’s not that they lack natural resources.
I know you think it is because they are inherently inferior to Europeans.
So would you make Soviet Russia more like Switzerland or Switzerland more like Soviet Russia?
Soviet Russia more like Switzerland. These questions are getting more and more bizarre.
I believe it was Switzerland that installed a policy that the CEO of a company cannot earn more than twelve times the lowest paid employee.
I’m not sure I follow the economic argument. But it’s hard to feel charitable towards people who believe they have a direct line to moral rectitude, shout their opinions loudly, judge anyone who disagrees with them as evil, and use public pressure to degrade institutions and end people’s careers.
There was a great quote in Quilette the other day from a professor who’d had a medical course shut down because some wokesters didn’t like the implications of the science:
“Universities used to be a place where young students sought to be educated by experts in their fields. Now its a place where an expert in their field goes to be re-educated by young students.”
However intellectually uncharitable I may appear, I suspect my overall outlook is significantly more charitable than that of your average woke activist. I happily admit I could be wrong about just about everything.
We ALL have the right to claim BOTH, surely?
No,
The woke are BAME professionals who have no problem with capitalism but do what a grudge with white people and Britain.
They congregate on twitter, own property and even portfolios and they insist they are systematically oppressed.they are very unreasonable and have a lot of sneering contempt for white Britain.
I attempted to set up a union in the call centre that fundraised for the labour party back in 2005. An uphill struggle to put it mildly, in a workplace filled with international middle class woke actors, artists etc on zero hours contracts.
Many of them had utter distain and incomprehension at the idea that mass immigration may possibly have a negivitive impact on housing, wages or resourses.
Also worth mentioning the labour party offered no support either.
I’m always a fan of Mary’s writing, so the headline surprised me. Having read the article, the headline baffles me.
This is not a defence of Woke politics, which is a misguided religion in all but name, but a very reasonable and rational explanation of why many of us aged 35-44 (and younger) feel disenfranchised and underrepresented.
The Left won’t save us, but an association of progressive thinkers across the traditional party divides might.
Small-p progressive, yes perhaps.
“Progressive” is a moch abused word. there is nothing “progressive” about the Left who want to take us back to 1917 Communism.
The article author does not necessarily, or even very often, think up the headline.
For what it’s worth, many of us in our 50’s (and I’d guess older) feel disenfranchised and underrepresented too.
The older one is, the more disenfranchised one is. The world has moved on at a frantic pace, values have been turned upside down, and we can but stare and wonder where our world has gone. We are now irrelevant. But because we (mostly) own our houses, we are obviously standing in the way of the younger renting generation, which has no conception of the hard work and sacrifices most of us made to get on the housing ladder., sacrifices which they don’t want to make.
For context, I’ve spent my career in the City or management consulting jobs Mary mentions in the first paragraph. Amongst my peers who bought, only a select few paid for a deposit solely by their own means and not family money. I’m yet to own a house simply because I moved back to the UK from abroad in 2015 and not a few years earlier, when property prices were last at affordable levels. It’s certainly not the result of a lack of hard work.
Precariat my er, foot. The wokists generally come from the top few centiles of wealth and income. They can either scrounge from their parents or obtain a sinecure in one of the many thousands of non jobs in the public or “third” sectors. Normal people on low wages whether in traditional or digital sectors are regarded with horror and contempt by the woke. They are a typical elitist movement like their 1930s forebears. This is why they tend toward anti-semitism and judge character by irrelevent issues like skin colour or sexual preferences. They are simply rich kids behaving badly and “wokism” is their rebel flag like Rock n Roll, Delta Blues or Jazz was in the past.
‘Precariat my er, foot. The wokists generally come from the top few centiles of wealth and income. They can either scrounge from their parents or obtain a sinecure in one of the many thousands of non jobs in the public or “third” sectors.’
Well said, so true.
They are a typical elitist movement like their 1930s forebears.
it’s a bit ironic how much they resemble the very thing they claim to hate.
Look at their fashion – often militarised, BDSM influenced, androgenous and clearly desperate for some physical affection. Their resemblance to messrs Ernst “Geil” Rohm, Edoard Pfieffer and even England’s own Nick Crane is more than just ideological, its physical and sexual as well.
Mary raises many points in her article.
The first that springs to my mind, is that 50% of the young go to University, but they still think that this will bring them rewards only available to the top 20%. Perhaps before choosing a course they should look at the jobs market and not waste their time and money on useless courses. If they insist on taking courses that have a poor financial reward, do not complain later that they receive a poor financial reward.
Secondly housing, this is largely tied up with an increasing population and a green mentality. The increasing population comes from immigration, the more people who come to the UK the more houses are required. However, as soon as new houses (and roads, and infrastructure) are proposed out comes the green lobby to try to stop them being built.
Thirdly, Mary writes about her gadfly existence in her twenties and then says she escaped this “because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home”.
Lastly, changes to the jobs market have been taking place for a long time. If you wish for improvements in peoples standard of living then you need to increase productivity and innovations. Think back over the last 200-300 years, think the spinning jenny, railways, cars, planes, washing machines, freezers, indoor toilets and bathrooms, the internet and vaccines.
Therefore, in conclusion, the woke left is emotional, self indulgent and illogical and it deserves to fail
The “corporate salt mines” comment is very telling. The writer clearly sees work as some kind of punishment, rather than a necessary and reasonable exchange of labour for money. Presumably industry should be reshaped from the production of goods and services that society actually wants, and realigned with the woke generation’s need for self-actualisation.
That remark reminded me of my sister in law, who spent her 20s happily working in TV and rubbing shoulders with minorly famous faces, but then got to 40 and realised she was unemployable in an ageist, sexist profession. She was then bitterly envious of people like me, who spent their 20s checking boring documentary letters of credit and indemnity, and boring bills of lading, and boring demurrage calculations, and who thereby found a line of work that paid more not less as you get older.
As far as she’s concerned it’s very unfair that we have a better house, car, holidays etc, and she does not see that being poor now is the price she paid for having all that fun; much as I tolerated boredom with a longer term reward in mind.
Not quite sure if you’re celebrating the sexism and ageism that meant your sister lost her job or celebrating your own lack of joy in what you do for a living.
He’s trying to explain the trade off between enjoyment and commitment at work.
I thought he was saying of his sister ‘being poor now is the price she paid for having all that fun.’
Even though she was working and lost her job because of ageism and sexism – not because she was having fun.
People can do work that is fun and offers security – it’s not a moral failing to enjoy what you do and there’s nothing morally superior about doing a job you don’t like. Although, of course, many of us do.
Buying a house in the early 80’s was not an easy ride for young workers with 17% mortgages. A lot of young complainants chuck a lot more money around on clothes, holidays and entertainment than their parent’s could or did.
There are plenty of good paying jobs and I know lots of young craftsmen/tradesmen who are not saddled with debt from doing questionable-value degrees, work hard – and take pride in it and enjoy it, make a good living and, consequently have a good standard of living. None of them have any woke tendencies.
“woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.“
I’m really not sure that is what is happening. This whole movement seems driven by something in the ether. There’s no reasoning going on; its adherents seem to be following on autopilot. Can anyone guess what the next madness will be, or from whom or from where it will come?
One of the ways I try to keep free of its influence is by not watching the main news outlets or opinion debates but reading widely and comparatively instead. I know older intelligent people who do follow those media sources and are quite hooked by the opinions of the latest groupthink.
Yes, it makes sense to focus criticism on the ideas as opposed to demonise people. If you show the young contempt and ironically intolerance and venom, why would they be open to any connection and solidarity.? Why would they want to listen to other arguments and explanations?
Your right,its not trying to unify anyone.
Its entirely fueled by anti white resentment.
The author took her cues from Grace blakey who isn’t really woke.
Woke people are largely BAME professionals, business owners who have no problem with capitalism and they largely do well.but they still have a sneering contempt for white people and Britain and insist Britain is racist.
There commentators are shola
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,
Afua hirsh
Kehinde Andrews
Priyamvada Gopal
Saira roa
And another one I forget her twitter handle but it might come back to me
Very good essay. Reminds me of the work of Emile Durkheim who wrote about anomie, translated often as normlessness leading to alienation. This alienation can be social, political or alienation from the self; self estrangement as seen in those suffering from identity problems.
starting with the world wars, to the fall of Berlin Wall and now the digitisation of the self, one could argue that increasing alienation has become the human condition, especially for the young. This is a sociocultural problem and not an economic one. Throwing money at youth centres is easy; but building a support structure of shared norms and values is much harder. Especially when forces of stability and norms- faith, family, community – are systematically being dismantled by the left. Trite observation but very true- the right won the economic argument, but the left has won the cultural war.
I keep saying we need to revive Durkheim.
absolutely, but I’d add that the right are perhaps just as responsible for the dismantling of faith, family and community. Neoconservatism being the main culprit – the unfettered faith in the market separating families and communities as work is delocalized. And I agree that in recent history the right won the economic argument and the left won the cultural, but do you not sense those polarities switching?
I don’t know if the polarities have switched or political distinctions erased
The dismantling of family and community definitely the work of the right. Done deliberately in UK to remove obstacles to ‘free’ market capitalism and destroy the base of the political opposition to the Conservatives.
Striking how Tebbit was telling people to get on their bikes and Johnson says he wants to create jobs where people live. Would suggest the left won the cultural argument as well as the economic.
Yet it’s groups like BLM, so much favoured by the woke Left, that are in favour of destroying the nuclear family and defunding the police and other dimwitted ideas.
The official BLM in USA is a very different beast from how BLM as a general concept is understood in UK – or even what the official UK BLM stands for. Defunding the Police and destroying the nuclear family are not objectives of BLM in UK.
The inference is that you know what BLM UK stands for. Pls elucidate.
https://blacklivesmatter.uk/
If BLM UK do not support the basic tenets of the original US BLM (Marxism and destruction of the nuclear family), then best UK gets a new name.
I have read many of Mark Bridgeford’s posts, and he strikes me as a born ‘contrarian’. Whatever the subject under discussion, he will naturally take a contrarian position. Whether this is unconscious or deliberate I haven’t yet fathomed. Additionally, in his defence, I seem to remember that he once mentioned he was a person of colour so his (often prickly) opinions will be formed from a different perspective from many posters on this forum.
I’m not a person of colour or a born contrarian. I thought the purpose of UnHerd was to enable discussion outside the Herd – if I appear contrarian it might be because my views are different from the UnHerd Herd.
You’re either Stupid or So blinkered sanctmonius Virtue signaller/ess ….BLM were on Talkradio earlier this year & Torn apart ,They DO want to defund the Police ,the Do want to Smash Shops ,and destroy Families …
Well they they were objectives when I looked at their website last Summer in an attempt to ‘ educate myself’.
BLM was a protest movement against black people being executed in the street by the police.Thats why its supported by 99% of black people.Funny its mostly white men that hate it so much isnt it?I wonder why that is….defunding the police is about de-militarizing the police in the USA, a very sound idea.
Some rather hysterical claims there. Care to provide some supporting evidence?
Well more whites are killed by police than blacks in the US, so out of the gates you are dead wrong.
“That’s why its supported by 99% of black people”. You’ve interviewed them all I take it.
It was the Clinton administration that started militarizing the police.
Yes spot on, a lot of reframing of recent socio economical vandalism and blaming the young for a culteral enviromental situation that they live within yet didn’t create.
The dismantling of family and community definitely the work of the right.
One might expect just a single example to support such a statement. It is the left that speaks of “borthing People rather than mothres, the left which supports a welfare state that makes fathers superfluous, the left which rails against the nuclear family. But, sure; work of the right.
I gave the example of Norman Tebbit. It’s UK specific – the idea that if there is no work in your town you should leave your town and your family to find work.
Who advocates ‘leave your family’? Leaving one’s town has existed for much of human history. There are jobs of the past that are gone, and jobs today that did not exist when I was born. Something like work-from-home is very recent. But, your point about “dismantling the family” is firmly rooted on the left.
Could you give an example of a mainstream left movement that has advocated dismantling the family?
Sure:
–in the US, the rise of the welfare state in the 60s made fathers expendable, with particularly devastating consequences in black communities.
–A tenet of the BLM movement is hostility towards the nuclear family, though it’s not the first group to hold that opinion.
–The attacks on women who choose to stay home with kids, almost always led by feminists.
Rise of the welfare state – you think that was designed to make father’s expendable or to ensure families without work or where work didn’t pay a decent wage could feed and clothe themselves?
Nuclear Family – those references have been removed from BLM’s current webpage. But this is what it said: We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. Reads more like a call for greater community than less.
Attacks on women who choose to stay at home led by feminists? Where? Do you mean equal pay for equivalent jobs for women and men?
“Do you mean equal pay for equivalent jobs for women and men?” – that’s been enshrined in law in the US and UK for 50 years.
When welfare payments are contingent on the father NOT being in the home, what else is that but an intentional result? And black poverty had been dropping since the 40s, so people were working and feeding/clothing families. More importantly, they were families.
Curious how BLM removed that reference, isn’t it? It wasn’t due to a change of heart. As it is, the word “father” is conspicuously absent, and the only mention of ‘men’ is in regard to any threat they pose to women.
if I could women who were equally experienced and skilled as male applicants, why would I ever hire a man? And yes, attacks on women who CHOSE to stay home. It’s not crazy right wingers attacking them.
On welfare payments in the US I’ll defer to your greater knowledge of the US system..
On BLM I still don’t think there is evidence of it being ‘hostile to the nuclear family’.
On the women at home issue I really don’t know what you are referring to with regard to attacks on women who choose to stay at home.
When the manifesto has no mention of ‘fathers,’ that’s not an oversight. It manages to mention q u e e r s and trans and whatever else, but no positive affirmation of males at all. The group took down its What We Believe section because people finally took the time to read it.
Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. BLM
Maybe they don’t think black straight men have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.
this was a group founded on the premise that black men are being hunted and killed by racist cops. How do they suddenly ignore the very constituency that gave them life?
“Dismantling the nuclear family” was a point in their manifesto. It was there for everyone to read.
Kibbutz, then. But without Jehovah
Why would you leave your family? His point was that the world moves on and nobody has a God-given right to have a job brought to them just because they don’t feel inclined to go where there is work.
If we adopted that principle, logically we’d be subsidising the continuing production of Spitfires so the workers could stay in Southampton, we’d still be building dreadnoughts in Barrow-in-Furness, and so on.
Governments and should encourage employers to set up in places where jobs are in short supply, unless here’s some compelling reason why they have to be in a specific place. They can move their own departments to those places too, which is what they mostly do.
If you were a young person growing up in 1980s Britain and there was no work in your town you were encouraged to leave the place you grew up and where your family (extended if not spouse and dependents) lived to follow the work. Not always a bad thing – but wasn’t a policy designed to strengthen communities and family bonds.
People Do that anyway…Long before Tebbit was blown up by IRA terrorists &his wife disabled in October 1984
It’s interesting that some socialist commentators, of the more traditional kind, blue left if you life, see this new left as the stooge of neoliberalism and globalism. So, not really left at all, which would explain why corporations and some pretty big-whig string pullers love identity politics.
On the other hand you have people on the right, who were until recently all about free markets, free trade, and trickle down economics, changing orientation towards thinking about protection of industry and how movement of labour affects employment at home – a change for sure.
I would say that actually, both conservatives on the right, and those on the left, were captured by liberals. Liberalism isn’t at te heart of conservatism or leftism.
I’m not sure I’d say the right won the economic argument, even the right seems to be moving away from the kind of economics it has espoused over the last 40 years or so.
But I think you are on to something with the idea that young people are unable to understand solidarity because they are alienated.
Not sure that deep down they want to win the cultural war, then there would be nothing to protest about.
The woke deserve all the mocking and scorn that one can muster. Never in human history have so many been so perpetually angry while having very little to actually be angry about. They are among the 1% of all people who have ever lived. They choose to marinate in first-world problems, sometimes not even that. They seem driven by non-stop grievance while offering no solutions or even ideas.
The woke left is reaping the results of policies that it has always supported.
The work left have always supported mass immigration (refugees welcome) which has resulted in the shortage of housing.
The woke left were against any form of balancing the books, describing it as austerity, and supported the resulting government borrowing and Quantitate Easing and resulting low interest rates and supply of finance has led to rapidly increasing asset prices (housing being one of them).
The woke left supported globalisation which has provided the foreign based competition that has undermined wages in the freelance arena, as well as causing manufacturing to move abroad.
Finally, and this is ongoing, the woke left support the green policies that once again incentivise businesses to take their energy reliant factories to places like China where energy is cheap, polluting abroad, before polluting even more to ship it back to the West. (While the woke left celebrate achieving their local carbon emissions target – completely missing the point carbon doesn’t understand borders.)
Every generation has its share of wise investors, fools who live for the day and everyone in-between. Even the current generation will have those that succeed and those that fail, but you still can’t get away from the fact that the millennials onwards have supported policies that make it harder for them to own their own homes.
Greenies dont explain how 0.04% of atmosphere is carbon,,necessary for photosynthesis and life on earth. Greens 1) never say Earth or UK are overpopulated,my electoral opponent in london had 5 Children(if every coouple had 5 children,an extra 12.5Million would be in UK) 2) Never say how they’ll pay for Universal credit (Furlough) an Unsustainable benefit
A socialist fiddles around pleasing herself and is rescued by finding a husband to support her. The very essence of socialism getting other people to fund their rather vacant lifestyle.
Labour is losing out because most people see that getting rich people to pay for everything is never really going to work.
Possibly Read Ayn Rand 1957 ”Atlas Shrugged” about USA tax payers refusing To Pay for increasing Cost of Politicians,bureaucrats on Capitol hill..The System goes bankrupt, Vulture global capitalism ain’t no picnic either..
The battle on the left is not between the working class left and the middle class woke left. If it was, the working class would feel they had a stake in it. It is between the middle class centre left and the middle class woke left. The section of the party that came from the working class and cared about them has gone. Occasionally you can spot its ghost, when Alan Johnson or Caroline Flint says something sensible on a current affairs show, but there is no one in the party who could be their heir. Labour is now a party of middle class graduates, much like the pre-Nick Clegg LibDems but more left wing.
As for the people living hand to mouth to afford to live in London, move out of there. You can’t afford to live there. The reason people of that social class are so unhappy is they’ve been brought up with such enormous entitlement until the day they leave university and then reality hits them like a ton of bricks.
This sounds remarkably like the new left almost applaud the loss of community that the traditional left was built on. You only have yourself to blame. You chose your career path and now blame everyone else for it, particularly for the loss of identity that the old left had.
When has the traditional Left every supported the family? It has been their stated policy to destroy it since the 1800s.
The precariat left seems incapable of reason at all. The corporate overlords who have monopolies and have lobbied and created the precariat fund the left wing parties.
A typical left wing millenial on twitter seems to just accept all they are told about who are the good and bad guys (indeed they seem to see the world simplistically like star wars) and then spend their time being snarky and creating memes without ever questioning at all.
If I assume they are not daft and just accept woke as the way of the world and the way to get ahead is to virtual signal so they do ironically signal virtue whilst screwing over their friends in some cases. It is very conformist behaviour with a pre packed tatoo-ey, piercing-ey, hair colour-ey ready made set of opinions.
but I wonder deep down do they know it doesn’t add up and will they one day as a group turn on the woke leaders as the ones keeping them down all along. we will see
This article is wrong.
The woke left is just BAME professionals who love capitalism but resent white people.
This article is so off.
Priyamvada Gopal
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
Saira roa
Afua hirsh
Kehinde Andrews
None if them care about housing costs for young working class people they only care about “kill white”
Look… we all know that the ‘traditional’ left is a code word for the WHITE working class.
I use it myself because to straight up say ‘white working-class’ immediately gets one labelled a racist by the lumpen woketariat.
A death sentence at the moment in certain circles. But that’s the great divide in my mind. Race war has replaced class war in the modern iteration of the ruling-class left. I say ruling-class left because they really are our rulers via the culture, academia, entertainment, news outlets.
That’s the battle for Labour that is going on. And the lumpen woketariat are losing that war as their serfs resolutely refuse to abandon THEIR habits for insane people who really think they can force..
(and I’m just using one obvious example here)
force the white working class to accept a biological male can be a woman by simply declaring it so.
It’s a very good article with many truisms.
When Corbyn nearly got in 2017, I was appalled at my kids that voted for him.
But only a brief look at the reasons that they did so, taught me how asleep at the wheel ,and how complacent we had been.
I despised Blair and saw through him since 1993..But his worldview trickled down like a golden shower and into education, media, health and housing. Alongside universities and illegal wars.
And he was only continuing what Major and Bush had set in train, post the fall of the Wall .
In short, ” we didn’t start the fire”.
But we benefited at the camp fire marshmallow toasting. And now we’ve reaped what we either sowed. Or tolerated.
I don’t blame these kids at all. They were taught nothing, were conned with tuition fees and seem unable to say what sex they are. But just KNOW what the weather will be in 2065 by way of compensation.
This is mad. But has been a slow slide into madness , only now is it getting more precipitous and unpleasant.
These kids would rather get killed than be seen to discern real from fake, truth from lie and tolerance from danger. When being judgemental is the only sin that won’t be forgiven , then you’ll pay a price that other civilisational powers won’t concern themselves with caring about.
Yes , they are suicidally stupid as they hopelessly braid tumbleweed whilst gays get thrown from the top of car parks, FGM and border breaches occur. Their oppressors and victims top trumps hierarchies render them mute and serially stupid,cowardly and hypocritical. But the elite caste paid their professors and media houris to spout this rubbish. So we need to detoxify these dodos. But they’d rather get us killed than learn.
And yet they’re hugely judgemental towards those who disagree with Woke orthodoxy.
We have got a very great deal wrong over the past few decades, and those wrongs have accumulated to shatter the social contact between the employer and the employed.
The employer no longer has an obligation to the employee. He may take the hours, days, months and years of his life without ever caring that in return he has enough to eat, decent clothes to wear, or somewhere warm and dry to sleep without having the constant threat of eviction hanging over his head.
The old lie – it was always a lie – that anyone can overcome these circumstances by grafting isn’t peddled any more, because the climate has changed to make the lie unnecessary. It is obvious that the precariousness the author talks about is structural. It is built into the modern economy, and no shame is felt over it.
Once upon a time the Labour Party might have stood against this trend, might have resisted its worst excesses. It might, for example, have invested hundreds of billions in building new council houses.
It might have forbade foreign investors using the UK as a land bank, and hoovering up property everywhere.
It might have refused giant corporations licence to operate in the UK unless those corporations treated the employees humanely (as opposed to spending shed loads on glossy advertising so they can pretend they treat employees humanely).
Labour might have done all these things. If it were electable.
labour’s great betrayal, its catastrophic failure, is that it has become so obsessed by the politics of identity and resentment that a despairing electorate cannot brings itself to vote for the party that most promises to improve lives for the majority.
Crazed Labour zealots talk about being in it for the long haul, apparently caring nothing for the welfare of people while their utopia takes form just over an ever receding horizon.
labour gives every appearance of caring more about whether a man dressed as a woman (because that is how tens of millions see it) can use the gents, and locking up anyone who says they shouldn’t be able to, than about whether a someone who works 60 hours a week can afford to cover the basics of living in this country.
While this article offers a cogent analysis of the foundation for a world view more conservative minded people have come to despise, it is hopelessly self-indulgent.
Make yourselves electable, then do some good. Stop trying to change the electorate in the hope that it will finally see sense and vote for what it currently believes are a bunch of irresponsible crazies, and change yourselves instead. And do it soon.
Interesting article. My personal belief tends towards ephemeral vs material rather than above or below the API. In a global economy everyone is always competing with everyone else but withe ephemera its even easier for the point of production to be half a world away.
I’m lucky. I (shorthand for my wife and I) own (that’s own not paying mortgage on) my home. I’m old enough to remember when it was normal for people to rent rather than buy. The mass sell off of the council’s housing stock fueled home ownership to where it now is seen as a right.
Go back in history a short distance and you’ll fail to see secure employment anywhere. We’ve just had a nice period where things are better but now they’re reverting to “normal”. At least I’ll be leaving (I’m 70) before it gets to bad – I hope.
A good read as ever from Mary.
If you accept the premise of the ever-diminishing “future value” of many university degrees, then at some point, the growing Precariat are likely to merge with (or become) the Proletariat.
l’d expect them to successfully drive the self-indulgent “woke” out of the Labour Party, which can then return to its roots, and have a chance of success.
For this to happen at any pace, the “educated” Precariat will have to demonstrate sufficient intelligence to replace “woke” thinking with “class” thinking.
The current signs are not good ….
Great article Mary. Two things:
While the situation isn’t that bad in Denmark, it’s getting there. But at the same time statistics tells that we need + 100.000 young or older educated i different crafts. THe idea – that politicians like Blair (but they were all over Europe) believed in, that everybody should work with symbols was a lie. A good craft education is worth much more than an average university education. And if you aspire to do more by yourself, a craft is often a better background. Labour should do and should have done more for this direction.
As someone who has worked hard all his life with a wife who has worked hard all her life, with 3 brief interludes to give birth to our 3 children, and have managed to find nearly £100k to help the first of our children, who has been in full time employment for 4 years, buy his first house, I absolutely understand the housing problem. There is a lot of guff talked about supply and demand and there not being enough supply when every where you look there are new housing estates being thrown up with little thought to improving the surrounding local infrastructure. The housing bubble, which was already there before 2008, was fuelled by QE which made the rich richer so they bought more expensive houses with it, sometimes to live in sometimes as investment, which has rippled out across Southern and Middle England (the Chelsea ripple). The government’s response has been to have “help to buy” schemes and stamp duty holidays, but all this does is maintain the bubble. I had thought and indeed hoped COVID, or at least the effects of the restrictions and the impending after effects of them would finally burst the bubble, but so far, in residential property markets this has not been the case. I am still hoping it will come as I have 2 more children to get out of my house, if not out of my wallet – somehow they never seem to get out of there (eldest has a new job so guess who is buying the new suits).
So when we have a real issue for the young to protest about, one which has been exacerbated by government (it was the tail end of the last Labour government that started QE but the Tories continued then did the wrong thing to try to “help” the young) why is the left not raising merry hell about it, instead of creating imaginary issues about women with penises and creating racial disharmony through white privilege nonsense – I am not privileged, I just worked hard all my life and am doing what every decent parent of any colour would do and trying to give my children the best chance in their lives as I can.
The answer is simple, the left has no solution to real problems so is merrily creating problems it thinks it can solve by abusing the human rights of the majority. I am all for a sensible redistribution of wealth to narrow the now gaping chasm between rich and poor – something the left used to care about, it was just the vindictive and totally ineffective way they want to go about it I have a problem with.
A major problem in the housing /construction industry is lack of highly qualified craftsmen and tecnicians( HND) and large parts of industry. Many teenagers do not want to work out of doors . Also middle class snobbery. Many middle class people consider that any degree is better than a NVQ4/HND electrician/electronics/controls technician.Someone who leavers school at 16 years of age with good English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Technical Drawing and enters a electrician/ plumber apprenticeship; once they achive a NVQ 3 or higher and progress to a foundation degree, is on a good salary. By the age of 22 years an lelectrician/electronics technician can be on £50K and there is no college debt. If one is prepared to work shifts, nights, undertake storm damage repairs, Sundays, Bank Holidays , etc double rapidly boosts wages.
Qualification Comparisons – NVQ Level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | City & Guilds (cityandguilds.com)
The description of the ‘precariat left’ reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s view of English well to do intellectuals… having everyone else’s point of view – but none of their own.
There is no defence of the woke Left. The hokey wokey jive of ‘identity politics’ and it’s imposition in ‘political correctness’ is in origin, development and manifestation hate-mongering towards the non-Left: it has nothing whatsover to do with consideration for any minority in any domain. Why don’t people read up on the documented history?
This urinating in bottles sounds a bit of a squeeze. Couldn’t those Amazon drivers just urinate into them?
When I was at university I met an anarchists. I was interested in his politics so I asked him when him and his fellow anarchists were going to meet up next. He sighed and said that one of the problems with anarchism is that they don’t believe in rules and hierarchical structures. As a result, whenever they try to organise meetings no one turns up.
This is one of the problems with the woke left and the reason their politics rarely goes beyond virtue signaling. If you set out to deconstruct everything around you (nation, gender, family, western culture, etc.) then don’t be surprised if you can’t get anything done.
It also becomes harder to work with others when you are repulsed by anyone who doesn’t share your perfectly pure ideology. Do you really think that all those immigrants from far off countries share your view that there are at least 10 billion genders and that drag queen story hour is the best thing ever? What are you going to do when they start voting Conservative?
….at the same time, while failing at the ballot box time and time again, they have made great progress in gaining power and influence by capturing education, universities, the civil service, charities, focus groups, the media etc. They push to give away power to international bodies that more closely follow their policies and take power away from the electors and use their influence to bully the elected into following their woke policies.
They are very clever in how they use language to scare people into keeping quiet about a whole range of issues.
A commentator called The RanMan (@ranman_the) on Twitter recently posted this concise analysis:
“Labour’s brand is toxic. We’ve seen 20 years of Labour bouncing around between corporate war-mongering Blairism; the Marxism and Wokery of Corbyn-Momentum; and tired, Remainer-lite Starmerism. There’s something there for everyone to hate, and a new leader won’t solve it.”
Someone asked, “How is Wokery bad?”
“Because it divides people and empowers bigots. It divides by splitting us all up on demographic grounds (gay/straight, black/white, etc.), rank-ordering these groups’ importance in and to society, and thereby creating conflict between us rather than boosting our common humanity and interests. The bigots empowered are those who use demagoguery, tied to their membership of a perceived disadvantaged group, to gain power at the cost of social division. Examples include: Stella Creasy’s demonisation of men, Diane Abbott’s attacks on white people; Naz Shah’s anti-Semitism.
“The unpopularity of Woke politics also empowers bigots on the right, since their views are given a more receptive hearing in the face of a ‘common enemy’.”
They think if they can create enough victim groups while importing even more potential members of these victim groups, then one day they will cobble them together and form a majority to get them into power.
the woke are the very bigots they claim to hate.
a good thought provoking article informed by some fresh insights
No it isn’t. That kind of generic ‘compliment’ smells of bot.
Will they succeed? Of course not. They have allowed the evolution of an atomised post-social economy in which each individual must put their own interests first. Alliances are temporary and instrumental. No solidarity is possible. Identitarian ‘communities’ are nothing more than imaginary victim-cults. What’s left of traditional grounded communities quite rightly see the woke as corrosive to everything they hold dear. The first reactionary – used here as a neutral, denotative term – step on the path back towards national and regional cultures, if indeed that path is to be taken, will be a legally-driven assault on the Woke, their institutional positions and their ‘cancel culture’. If that doesn’t work, things could get nasty. People really don’t like their reputations and livelihoods threatened by slanderous cultists virtue-signalling to get the job they have just lost or can’t even get short-listed for.
Well, yes, absolutely spot-on
In fact, it more or less rehashes what David Willetts said in his book. “The Pinch.” And that was published in 2011.
This is not to criticise Ms. Harrington or her sources for being behind the times. In fact, it highlights how little progress we have made in the last ten years.
“But my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on only came about because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home.”
Ah, I just love those strong independent women.
🙂 and if it all goes wrong, i wonder who will keep hold of the house 🙂
Very insightful. Thank you.
And yet that seems to be what all the procrustean Manicheanism that so offends the allegedly less tolerant Proletariat Left (and many others, like me) seems to be about: conform, comply or burn.
Perhaps the final paragraph gives us a clue. These “gilded entryists” thrive on the anger their demagoguery creates. In the search for stability each new offering, based on something tangible and non-negotiable like self-identity, must seem like a solid rock in an ocean of sand.
Hypothesis: all of the money printing post-Bretton Woods (post 1973) and especially post-Great Recession immiserates folks who don’t own stuff but allows those folks who have purchased “assets” (homes) and have invested in financial markets to keep ahead.
Here’s the mechanism. A country’s treasury sells $100 billion in bonds. The central buys those bonds by telling the treasury that it will take the bonds. Just like that, $100 billion get created from nothing. The economy is not $100 billion bigger. The economy is not more productive. But there is more money in it. The money people already had gets diluted. It’s like poring water into ale. The ale gets weaker. But those new dollars (or pounds or yen or whatever) start swimming around the economy, and people who can get hold of that freshly printed case invest it in their financial holdings. Others use the case and bid up housing prices. The price of day-to-day cheap stuff from China remains cheap, so the authorities have some excuse for saying that inflation remains low. But there is inflation in “assets”. The wealth of well-invested people keep pace with the rise of financial indices and the rise housing prices. A problem is that young people who are living paycheck to paycheck get left behind. Rising prices affect them. They find themselves locked out of housing markets and less likely to enjoy seeing their financial investments increasing.
Over the last year the S&P 500 index is up about 40%. It is not up because the American economy is 40% bigger. Since late March 2020 the S&P 500 is up more like 70%. Again, it’s not because the economy is so much bigger or creating so much more value. It’s a manifestation of the inflation that the Self-anointed Best-and-brightest in our central banks says is not there.
The central bankers operate in a mono-culture, and we keep voting in regimes that support the monoculture — a monoculture of expert-driven technocracy.
Now, think about that, and, while your at it, consider taking off your bacteria-laden mask. That mask can’t filter out marijuana smoke. It’s not going to filter out viruses.
Interesting, but I think this fails the test of hard numbers. The demographic changes required to rebuild a left-wing coalition large enough to win elections won’t exist: you can’t win elections by appealing to the middle class vote alone, so the middle class precariat is no use on its own, and the working class voters who do exist in large enough numbers are almost certainly never getting past the judgemental metrollectualism of the middle-class left, an attitude that only appeals to the sort of person who has been educated into artificial stupidity. Yes, I know that the article does say that attitudes in the working class must surely change with the passing of the generations, but I suspect not the specific attitude in question.
The classic cheap immigrant labour versus the indigenous UK work force is typical of todays capitalism. It’s OK if you want to be a global competitor and the cheapest labour companies will always win out. Of course it doesn’t mean that the quality of produce will be high.and the human working conditions are way down on the list.
Employers win out with these conditions and a black African worker slaving all day up to 10 12 hours for a pittance or an illegal refugee taking what he is given is what greedy bosses want.
Then the overcrowding of property due to housing shortage with Immigrants prepared to sleep 5 or 6 in a room to keep their sleepong accomodation costs low and anway they are out working for most of the day.
If a free market economy is what you want then don’t be surprised by all this with politicians complicit in all of this.
Here’s a couple ideas for you clueless precariat left.
You young’uns need to get a clue.
Meanwhile the educated ruling class has you chaps over a barrel. As they had the working class over a barrel for a century and more. It’s time you echoed the immortal Lina Lamont: “whaddya think I yam? Dumb or something?”
A typical city-centric view from someone who has no idea where their food or clean air comes from, who never enjoys solitude or a walk in the country, who has no regard whatsoever for the ecological system of which humans are just one (albeit the most destructive) part, who in short must hate the natural world.
From my perspective, the country is already heavily overdeveloped. People need space and peace and quiet as well as a roof over their head. You see empty field waitng to be built on. I see milk, butter, beef and lamb production, wildlife habitats, places to escape to away from the foul cities and their teeming hordes.
I agree with much of this despite the puzzling and misleading header…. but whether or not I agree with Mary Harrington, oh the pleasure of reading such wonderful prose.
Interesting article, managing to cover important political issues with minimum aggression and name-calling. I wonder why Ms Harrington seems instinctively in favour of “coalition building” on the left, presumably so that the “left” can become the government and implement their policies. I would agree that very important issues for young people in the UK are stability of housing, work and environment, and in particular I like the analysis of job insecurity for the many “above the API” low paid young. Society can overcome, and actually is overcoming, many of these problems – but I would suggest this is done better from the “right”. Avoid the horrors of fundamental radicalism, which puts its priority on tearing down what is seen as unattractive – and embrace the wonders of gradual improvement, dealing with problems one step at a time in cautious steps making sure they are actually improvements rather than having unintended adverse consequences. Only make changes when the public consent. Recognise that most people are perfectly happy to be nice to someone “strange” (trans, whatever) but want to be cautious before letting men into womens’ loos and sport. We already have laws and enforcement processes, against race and sex discrimination – knee-bending is superfluous. Radicals will never be happy with this, so leave them outside grown-up politics.
In summary, the old proletariat ‘knew their place’, didn’t like it and did something about it. The precariat rely on a roof with their parents or someone with the wherewithal or forethought to get one. The perpetrator of this state of affairs is indeed he who would never suffer any consequences, Tony Blair, and they who helped destroy our inefficient industry, accountants and trade unions. The precariat are like nomads in a desert where all compete for the oasis water. They lack place and expect someone else to provide it.
This article goes some way to explaining why the ‘woke’ left are aggrieved and the shifting in opinion and society. However it does not tackle the cognitive dissonance in the ‘woke’ leftists minds, and how many ‘grievance points’ should be attributed. ie, Attitudes on Black Conservatives, the economic success of Asians, LGBTQ v Islam, Womens rights v Trans rights, Inter-minority prejudice.Their way of thinking is just baffling to most people.
That’s where the article lost me. Assuming the term “woke” is referring to those who believe that everyone in society is either an oppressor or being oppressed, it’s difficult to see how advancing that ideology will do anything but further divide us. Essentialist views are what create the impassable fissures in society- where group identity is paramount and unifying concepts are sacrilege.
I’d argue we are currently seeing “woke” identity politics at its best, and at its worst. Because it seems impossible to establish a spectrum of value for such a zealously shallow interpretation of humanity, which is paradoxically constrained by competing ego-centric (“you must understand me”) and nihilistic (“you’ll never understand me”) worldviews.
The real revolutionaries in the woke movement are a mixture of failed and of “too many intellectuals / degrees”, a glut of quite useless professions from the upper middle class who can’t find a job or a future, they use the “race component” because it is useful to exploit a grievance to get cannon fodder. Marx would recommend doing this in order to force more favourable outcomes later.
The real workers are not with these in the snob mob of Marxists because they see them as champagne socialists which is correct, they don’t identify with these as “their saviours”, the real workers have a future and nothing to gain by overthrowing the State. Marx would have told the workers that “all they had to lose were their chains”, well not now the real workers have a lot more to lose and the wokes are the ones with nothing to lose.
The woke are very dangerous and the same “class” of people who have caused terrible revolutions in the past, we must not underestimate them, even though the degrees which they have are quite useless today. They can’t hold a candle to geniuses even the ones from far back like Darwin, Newton, Maxwell so they try to take them out of their time and their context and useless as the woke are they take upon themselves to judge the great of the past and to re-write history with their useless degrees in their useless universities. If it weren’t that this group can be so dangerous it would be farcical and we could sit back and laugh at them, most likely all this is paid for and instigated by enemy states abroad.
Any responsible political leader in the West would set out to crush this movement, it is parasitic, it contributes nothing to society, to the contrary it is an obstacle to progress, race is not the real issue though it is made to appear to be like that. Marxists use “zero sum” and envy arguments to fire up clashes, but let us face it the blacks who are in USA and UK are mostly very lucky to be here, and those without experience of Africa wouldn’t last five minutes there if they went.
In reality it was a catastrophe to decolonize the best Empire which had India united, Rhodesia was prosperous and feeding great part of Africa and so was Burma, it was trying to keep the peace in the Middle East, Aden etc. That Empire had been the first in the history of man to end slavery and had been the source of modern science of today and kept peace. It created real paradises to live in, people are prepared to die with their children to get in to the best places left by the old Empire. Whites were taken before the XVIII century from North Africa for their slave markets in greater number than all the blacks taken to North America. The woke are all at sea where history is concerned but they do their best to use their falsehoods to cause problems. Let me put the woke out of their misery: Marx himself chose the Capital city of that Empire to live and die in with his friend, the other champagne socialist Engels! They lived off exploiting the poor in Manchester of course. What hypocrites you all are.
What’s called “left” is a negative form of membership or identity well described by my old university teacher Roger Scruton as “culture of repudiation”. A negation peculiar to West/Christendom. As Rene Girard, ‘Darwin of the human sciences’, put it: ‘Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West.’
His term for predicament of West is “undifferentiation”. Order depends on ‘difference’, first and foremost the ‘difference’ between man and God. Otherwise we become gods to each other. For Girard humans can be reconciled only at the expense of a third party or ‘scapegoat’ / ‘surrogate victim’. The original function of God/religion he accounts for in purely anthropological terms: the Christian Gospels being first: theory of man: anthropology; and second theory of God: theology.
Christianity collapses the old sacrificial order. The meaning of Christ’s death on the cross is to reveal the “scapegoat mechanism”, ie the governing principle of archaic cultures. Once we realise the truth that the victim is innocent we no longer have anyone to blame as the cause of our discontent, a means of reconciliation, at least until the next “sacrificial crisis”, ie when our rivalries again intensify such that we need another sacrificial victim upon whom to visit our restorative violence / “justice”.
Religion is ritual reenactment of the “founding murder” whereby we are reconciled by a performance which bears a trace of the original violence but without any actual bloodshed. All ritual partakes of this character whether or not we call it ‘religious’. Even Covid mask wearing has now become an ascetic rite of membership, a pretext for accusing or ‘scapegoating’ barefaced others of “literally killing people”.
One might argue that a Protestant service bears no trace of violence. But we know as historical fact that it’s based on the Catholic Mass where bread and wine represent the body and blood of the crucified Jesus. All we see is a man preaching to a group.
The great Christian paradox is that in laying bare the “scapegoat mechanism” it destroys religion which for Girard is continuous with culture understood as social order. Political correctness is a caricatural Christianity licensing persecution in the name of the victim.
Hence Girard also defines current predicament of West as “omnipresent victim”. The hunt for victims is paganism in Christian guise. Whether people ‘identify’ as Christian is beside the point: that Christianity is their primary scapegoat doesn’t alter the fact that siding with the victim in principle derives from Christianity.
Our political culture is wedded to economic rationalisations. But they don’t bear scrutiny. Once basic material needs are answered for economics isn’t much more than an index of status and prestige, whose corollaries are envy and resentment. A century ago a car would have conferred such status as would require a private jet or at least a Lamborghini today. Nothing to do with economics or utility but a matter of what Girard calls “acquisitive mimesis”.
This can be demonstrated scientifically. Put x number of children in a playpen with any number of identical toys and as soon as one child grabs a toy another will imitate his desire for that toy even though all the other toys are the same. ‘Toy’ here could symbolise *any* rivalry.
Desire is premised not on any intrinsically desirable property of its object but on what Girard calls a ‘model’, its desirability for another or others. Which is also the premise of practically all consumer marketing. Political parties also typically market themselves on their popularity with others. No one wants to be left out.
“Undifferentiation” also accounts for the fact that we fight not because of difference but because we’re the same. Not only do want the same things, status and prestige for ourselves, but we each seek to distinguish ourselves from everyone else – which practically amounts to the same thing. And as our rivalry develops its original cause drops out of consideration as we become what Girard calls ‘doubles’: each the object of fascination for the other.
The premise of political journalism and public discourse generally is economic functionalism. Political debate is supposed to consist in discovering the correct or ‘fairest’ arrangement. But surely the slightest self-examination will show that our every day squabbles are rarely if ever reducible to economic causes, even if in some cases that’s their ostensible justification.
Scruton put it well in his The Meaning of Conservatism where he says that economics stands to politics as neurology to friendship. Even though defining the same phenomenon, they belong to incommensurable realms of significance. One could give an exhaustive account of physiological states but it wouldn’t offer the slightest clue as to what friendship or enmity means.
Friends can easily become rivals, of course, especially when they desire the same thing. Girard calls this ‘internal mediation’, that is when our ‘model’ is close enough to us to arouse envy as with children in the playpen. The issue with a ‘free’ or ‘fair’ society where there are no distinctions of class, caste or race to separate people physically or spiritually, as in US for instance prior to ‘Civil Rights’, is that we all become rivals for each other.
As Girard put it: ‘If the modern emotions flourish it is not because “envious natures” and “jealous temperaments” have mysteriously increased in number, but because internal mediation triumphs in a world where differences between men are gradually erased.’ Which is only another way of stating the Christian paradox.
Thanks. So why do I have no desire for a Lamborghini or Private Jet?
The desire to outsmart people on the internet, where nothing at all is at stake, is more truly mimetic in character than any yearning for material gain.
Good point.
It seems that the term “woke” can be used to define almost everything and nothing. If you disagree with some others opinion they are now automatically classed as woke. The sooner we stop referring to those we may disagree with under the singular banner of wokeness the sooner we will get back to a more sensible form of discussion on what divides us.
This article at least attempts to delve into the changing times, environments and experiences that determine the thoughts and political choices of the various demographics that associate with centre left politics and offers some cogent thought on the manner of change. It is unfortunate that its title employs the use of Woke, given that the term is meaningless.
Totally agree. Would be so much more helpful to refer to the thoughts and political choices.
Woke is way more specific than that. It derives from post modernism and incorporates inter alia critical race theory, identity politics/group think, grievance studies, intersectionalism and the like. It is characterised by extreme intolerance, cancel culture, no platform ing, mob and cult-like behaviour. You need a woke dictionary to navigate your way.
Problems with high accommodation costs and scarce housing, and pokey rented flats in HMOs may also have something to do with the fact that the UK population has increased from about 59 million in 2000 to ~68 million now.
Mary does have a gift for lateral thinking. To borrow from attribution theory, in this case for suggesting that motivations effected by dispositional states are well recorded but situational ones are not.
In my view, ‘woke’ is a valid label that applies to having been awakened to having a critical consciousness – “being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.”… this awakened consciousness is set particularly with regard to issues of identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and others.”[newdiscourse dot com]
Eric Kaufmann takes this further – ‘woke’ is defined as sacralisation of perceived historically marginalised groups within these categories.[Eric Kaufmann interview; triggernometry podcast]
All else follows from that realisation.
That’s what Woke is, but its core ideology is Equitarianism.
Thank you, Mary, for highlighting the new Precariat, graduate or not. We need to pay attention to what’s going on here, and not only in relation to the restricted availability of one-time middle class perquisites. Liquidity is one thing in a buoyant context, insecurity comes to the fore when opportunities thin out, as is now happening post Brexit in London and elsewhere.
Precarity is not a monopoly of young cosmopolitans however. You mention how it has also undermined security in post-industrial communities. The remedies are surprisingly similar in both cases, so there is the possibility of a common politics beyond the different terms in which the issues appear to present themselves to those here and there.
Not at all sure though about how map Woke onto this. For a start, it’s necessary to ask what is Woke anyway beyond the caricatures set out by antl-Woke polemicists? There may be something in your idea that graduate insecurity feeds a radical disregard for convention – even though that was not how high fees and loans were supposed to work.
But we also see the characteristic marks of student politics from any age, including the overhasty generalisations of half-disciplined intellects and immature awareness of context – people have been understandably keen to show what they think they have learned, without much regard for the consequences. From that point of view, some of the choice excesses held up against the Woke are a byproduct of higher education in process rather than a measure of its contribution to society. In other words, not necessarily worthy of being taken seriously especially as regards their claims for political priority. Some of the recent attempts made to extend the historical and cultural context of the quest for racial justice, however well intentioned and supported, have to be considered naive and not sufficiently thought through.
Now it may be that one of the consequences of graduate precarity is an extension of the space for ungrounded student type politics. That’s something to look at closely, case by case. If you take Free Movement for example ( not as it exists in the EU but as a demand for free movement across frontiers willy nilly) is this student stuff, the material interests of precarious graduates in search of opportunity, or simply the mobility mindset of youth?
“Coalition-building among the Precariat Left is not just between Hampstead and Hartlepool but across barriers of language, culture and values, as well as above and below the API and between graduates and non-graduates. At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.”
If the aim of identity politics is to bring people together, it’s picked a bl**dy funny way of doing it. “Hierarchies of oppression” merely serve to make each group mistrust all the others. Attitude surveys have been done in companies, before and after “anti-racism” training, and found that whilst employees of every colour might have been happy together before they were trained to be anti-racist, afterwards mutual suspicion was the order of the day.
If you are white and went to a mediocre school in the North or the Midlands, with friends of every colour, and you now have a dead-end job, or no job at all, and have seen some of your classmates of South and East Asian parentage go on to university and into the professions, will it help you to become less racist (and it is highly debatable whether you were a racist in the first place) to be hectored about the “white privilege” from which you benefitted, and from which your school friends the doctor, the solicitor and the teacher did not?
From at least the time of Karl Marx, the Left has been excellent at one thing: identifying a problem, and then prescribing a cure which will, always in the long term and often in the short, actually make things worse.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and heterodoxeconomics.
When I read that the Woke were going after ‘gardening’ in Britain as an indication of white supremacy & racism – I knew for sure that the Wokists are just Joke-ists. These people need to establish real lives. Playing the victim is just tedious at this point.
This American would truly appreciate some links about going after gardeners as racists. I need some laughs.
The UK’s “traditional left” as characterised by Embery was mainly interested in being paid more and more for doing less and less work. Surprised, surprise, this hastened the closure of their traditional workplaces and the movement of their jobs offshore. This is why the traditional left is so much in favour of international trade barriers, to the financial detriment of the rest of us We cannot very easily do this with certain work, like fire-fighting, thus leaving this occupation as a bolthole for dinosaurs like Embery. The traditional left had very little interest in such issues as equality and discrimination; pioneers like Roy Jenkins and Barbara Castle advanced the inferior positions of groups such as homosexuals, women through legislation in spite of the trade unions rather than with their support.
Once it is realised that being born into a working class family or living in the north are not actually political philosophies which oblige or encourage an individual to have any particular set of political views or to vote for a particular party, much follows from this.
“In response, the new post-industrial Left seeks to challenge Amazon and its ilk today, not via the old union style but forms of solidarity that celebrate instability, diversity and inclusion.”
—–
You deserve your penury.
A large part of why young people can’t afford homes is because around 300,000 new people have been coming in to this country every year for decades. Cheered on by the woke.
You could of course read Jonathan Portes over at Byline Times for his solution to the current economic insecurity that many young people are facing, sadly he leaves out his involvement in it, modest man that he is.
Why don’t you give us a couple of his key proposals.
Here’s the article:
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/05/11/what-does-boris-johnsons-great-levelling-up-really-look-like/
And from this article: “This new model is advocated by a group of commentators attached to the national-populist Unherd website”
Doesn’t really seem that grounded in reality I have to say….
I notice with that article that it pursues the usual leftist strategy of denying the existence of a demographic that loses by leftism.
Thus the left informed people who were worried about the effects of immigration on British identity that there is no such thing as British identity. It has said the same about English and white culture, while oddly having no trouble identifying black or Scots culture. It likewise dismisses feminist concerns about trans people infringing on women’s position by denying there is such a thing as a woman.
This article likewise denies there is any such thing as a white working class. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
Ho hum. I found myself starting to count the number of times the authors used the words ‘populist’ and ‘conspiracy theory’.
Thank you for the link.
For those (like me) who haven’t heard of this man, “Jonathan Portes is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College London”.
love your comment about his modesty!
Portes… https://www.spectator.com.au/2015/06/jonathan-portes-master-of-correct-politicalness/
Interesting, thanks.
Portes, self proclaimed “migration expert” was the man who advised Blair that only 13,000 Poles would come to the UK with the accession of Poland to the EU – and that over a period of 10 years. Blair could have asked me and I would have advised him for free that every man jack of them and their dog would want to come… Mr Portes – one of the BBC’s favourite talking heads – is just the sort of leftist that causes the problems we have today.
This is a very thoughtful article but it uses jargon and over-complicated ideas for a phenomenon which must really be simple.
Young people are rebelling – not new. They are rebelling because they don’t see a future – not really new because a future has to be striven-for, not presented on a plate.
There are three much more important issues now. The first is that young people don’t have to automatically fall into responsibility for a family – either they don’t want a family or the state takes the responsibility. So there isn’t an automatic path from rebellion to quiet middle age.
The second is that you get thousands of middle-aged people, like the author, who want to be seen as young or understanding the young and who have nothing special to do apart from socialising and analysing life.
The third is that medical science is keeping people alive so that there are about 20 million old people hanging around. These people, say the over-60s, are being encouraged to see themselves as middle-aged and want to have an opinion. These millions must see young people as feckless and stupid.
So we have woke and nobody can fight it. A quiet revolution that can’t be stopped because we have no systems in place to deal with it. Really, it is neither Right nor Left – it is new.
The third is that medical science is keeping people alive so that there are about 20 million old people hanging around. These people, say the over-60s, are being encouraged to see themselves as middle-aged and want to have an opinion.
That’s it! We are hanging around, doing nothing, kept alive by the NHS (what a joke!). And we have opinions too! Quelle horreur! Perhaps Mr Wheatley would like a Final Solution for the likes of us.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
“What’s driving the civil war on the Left is that a life defined by instability tends to produce a worldview radically at odds with the core values that gave birth to “traditional working-class” politics.”
So what did drive “traditional working-class politics.”? If that ‘class’ was ‘stable’, why did ‘politics’ exist at all? This suggests that there is a ‘politics of stability’. So, in that condition, what were the intra-class differences which necessitated politics?
In my view ‘politics’ in Britain (till recently) has always been about two religiously-derived views, which are antithetical to each other. Unfortunately Wikipedia often fails to supply the religious background of notable actors in politics (e.g. J. Corbyn and Sturgeon). Suffice it to say that those whose religious background is mentioned always hold exactly the views that I would expect them to e.g. Andy Burnham.
I get frustrated by the way the word “woke” gets thrown around, as though we all have the same understanding of what it means. It is perfectly fine to want liberation for oppressed groups in society, and some use the word “woke” as cover to justify their own prejudice. On the other hand some who are “woke” go too far, demanding that people follow rules that often they are not even aware of, and sometimes losing their jobs or right to free speech accordingly. The working class, like the rest of society can change. In the 1980s the Sun had a field day attacking the “loony left” over their politically correct job advertisements. Today the Sun is happy to cover Elton John and other gay icons in a positive light. Both the left and the right need to be careful. The left that they go too far today, and the right that in the future they do not look out of touch like they did when they were defeated in 1997, a time when they were still attacking the “loony left” and the 1960s.
R
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Very interesting piece.
There seems to be an inherent contradiction within the worldview of the Precariat Left intelligentsia.
They seek a ICT connected globalist framework of solidarity and egalitarianism with its attendant transcultural relativism which is borne from the Precariat consequences of a just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism.
This inherent contradiction is then bypassed by supporting the values of a just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism which then proceeds to feedback with one another whilst at the same time projecting any anxiety to anyone who isn’t part of the loop.
The only logical non-Precariat outcome of this state of affairs is Global Woke Paternalistic Corporatism based on the Model villages of the Industrial Revolution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_village
I say this because in an economic environment of rising energy costs of energy which is eroding the potential of economic growth coupled with a human growth crisis and an increasingly educated ICT connected global workforce, the just in time ICT connected globalist framework of corporate solidarity with its attendant transcultural relativism will find it increasingly difficult to make profits without a race to the bottom in terms of wages, prosperity and taxes.
Hence the reason for the billions in monetary stimulus.
It is therefore quite likely that the future will mean the increased deployment of Special Economic Zones in order that financial markets can capitalise on concentrated social, economic and ecological productivity gains which as State finances erode will increasingly be coupled with Paternalistic Corporatism.
The alternative is for the Precariat Left to self organise and form cooperatives like the Mondragon Corporation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
However, at present Marxist economists like Grace Blakeley are too busy trying to reimpose out of date Marxist ontology.
Great article. My vicariously felt outrage at the brutal working conditions and unaffordable housing grew as I was reading. (How lucky have I been?) No wonder there is violence towards authority and never-ending commodified hedonism. But for all the online distractions the protest would be more sustained and targeted.
That was a lot more interesting than the title suggested!
yes Woke has a cahier de doleances like a macron discourse.
But how come eddycashun rips £60k off mugs who cant see through it
Good article. I believe the Precariat will go extinct naturally. Perhaps there will be a renaissance of the Proletariat. Instead of racking up unsustainable debt and wasting precious years on a useless degree, it is better to get busy in a useful trade as early as possible. The new generation of carpenters, electricians and other workers have an entrepreneurial streak their parents never developed. Today, I’d pick the Proletariat path above the Precariat path, for sure. We still need people who make stuff, or maintain the robots that do. Concentrate on being useful. You will do OK.
But you get your fingernails dirty. These middle-class and above children can’t stand the thought of it. It’s a demotion.
It’s possible Harrington is on to something here, but I’m not entirely convinced. I would tend to agree that many young people don’t seem to quite understand some of the traditional leftist values and misinterpret them.
But I am not sure what Harrington is saying beyond that, because it seems clear to me that in most cases this is to their own detriment and shows a real lack of clarity about their own position, for example:
Which is the exact reason that globalism has always been suspicious to the left, not because they are parochial racists but because it is only really good for people who want to cut off the possibility of real worker solidarity.
Similarly with housing and lifestyle. Even when working families had it really bad, they managed to function because they had close knit and supportive communities with family close by, often extended families. A mobile labour force, which is good for employers, tends to take this kind of resource and support away from members of the precariat.
I’m not sure what Harrington feels should happen – is Blue Labour somehow supposed to reach out to make this clear, or what?
Let’s all feel sorry for the poor educated who have to compete in this world.
Wot a bunch of dozy twonks.
They’re having to compete and they don’t like it.
What’s the solution?
Vote for a government that protects them and gives them something for nothing.
Meanwhile the rest of the world continues to compete, enjoys the continual improvements that competition brings while our poor educated dozy twonks fall further and further behind.
Then they wonder why we want them to pay for their own education.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
People can be so cruel in condemning “woke-ism”, it’s merely a fashion-statement and isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It is a provocation designed to draw attention to not having to work for a living.
Articles like this are why I read unHerd. This is a perspective I woul never encounter in my daily life otherwise, and I really appreciate it. The only way the West will avoid imploding completely is by trying to understand each other (ala John Stuart Mill.) As a secure 50 year old, this really gives me a window into the lived experience of poorer Millenials and how that life can easily push them into wokeness as the only form of solidarity they can find. Great job, Mary.
But Grace blakey isn’t really woke.
She’s great,she highlights economic problems.
The “woke” people are typically BAME professionals or business owners in their 20’s and 30’s who make huge salaries and have secure housing(even property portfolios).And they devote all their online Energy to attacking white people,with sneering contempt and Britain-but they don’t have a problem finance Capitalism.
It also includes BAME commentators who want to get rid of the St George flag,Kehinde Andrews, Afua hirsch who wants to take down nelson column, and ofcourse Shola Mos-Shogbamimu who insists UK is racist and only white people can be racist.
Antipathy towards white people and the country.that’s what woke is.
Grace Blakey focuses on economic issues and was even sympathetic to Brexit.
The woke left is not interested in building coalitions.
This piece is way too sympathetic and minimises the malevolence and malicousnous of these people.Of whom Grace Blakey is hardly a representative.
I think to author just tried to look for someone she could most sympathise and seem the most familiar and then presuppose that “oh these people aren’t so bad”
Grace blakey is basically a crypto proletariat left worrying about capital accounts and
I agree that there’s a very 1930’s economic solidarity vibe to the author, but I think her point is people seek solidarity with a group. To that end, a precarious economic situation in a society who’s liberalism has dissolved most social bonds and structures tends to push people toward solidarity by innate traits (race, sex, gender id, etc…), since it’s the one group liberalism can’t dissolve.
That the politically militant and intolerant woke go along with that is unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable. When your solidarity groups are based on innate traits, maybe tribalism is inevitable.
Yes, the Precariat Left is incoherent, which does not portend well for its future. What is needed is a deeper understanding of the uncertain nature of the universe that industrial and post-industrial society managed for a short time but no longer does. Markets are not an enemy here because markets help to manage uncertainty and risk. But politics corrupting markets is a malicious foe.
The fluffy pseudo-intellectualism I hear from the “woke” and CRT corners doesn’t seem to understand any of this uncertain nature of life and therefore flails about attacking the symptoms of their precariousness, which will only make the consequences far worse. The rich and comfortable will not solve this for them. The “woke” need to get educated, but I doubt the schools and unis will get them there. Hard knocks.
To add, identity politics is a Marxist-inspired attempt to secure power in developed democracies where class politics has utterly failed to overturn the capitalist order. If we can’t divide by class, let’s divide by race, ethnicity, and gender. It can’t help but die by eating itself.
People calling wokeness Marxism are cowardly.its just anti white resentment.
“Republican state legislators are white people, so they like to have principled-sounding arguments for taking stances. Being anti-Marxist appeals to them. In contrast, being against a movement of black people trying to take white people’s home equity sounds tawdry ”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1394634214197268480
Also There’s two different things in the left, real economic left (which Grace blakely belongs too)
And anti white resentment politics by black ppl.
I’ve been on twitter feeds where young black people scorn white homeless people for not taking advantage of “white privlege” and so therefore being doubly useless and pathetic ,and being very vicous about it too.and this type of content generated 100,000’s of likes and approvals.
“There are two separate things going on on the Left at present: the growth of Woke anti-white racism vs. the growth of Bernie Sanders-style non-racial class-based socialism. Calling the former Wokeism “Marxist” distracts from its dominant feature: its racist hatred of whites”
“Moreover, referring to Wokeism as “Marxist” distracts from how much it is in bed with Woke Capital.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1394623741632544774
“Nah, the essence of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) movement is to get their hands on your home equity. They aren’t against property rights in general, just your right to your property. They intend to have the government protect their new property once they take it from you.”
“For example, the BLM lady who has bought four houses since her Racial Reckoning windfall last year is not against property: she just wants you to have less of it and her to have more of it.”
You people need to wake up to how pernicious and anti white this is.
This author just took (Grace Blakely) a nice smart middle class woman who is actually coherent and not threatening and is relatable…and pretend wished that this was “wokeness”.
Grace really only pays lip service to mild wokeness ,infact she’s a proper leftist doing analysis of the UK capital account.
Wokeness is actually a pernicious anti white
Resentment.
Think Kehinde Andrews, shola mos shogbaminu,afua hirsh
Saira roa in the US,a wall street millionaire for goodness sake
Good points as often the case with your interesting pieces. However, as someone else pointed out, woke can be PMC affluent who are more about slotting people in bureaucratic categorie, an aggressive identity essentialistism than a concern for economic hardship Grace is good with her emphasis on who owns what but there are plenty more identarian essentialist in the woke liberal not necessarily left wing.
Also Mary people have been cancelled just for raising class issues eg Adolf Reid.
As well the Guardian ganged up on a woman who dared to challenge trans dogma about gender just being a construct
Su