Recently I
received this heart-warming message from an old school friend of mine who had
just finished reading my latest book Space to Create: A Writer’s View on the
Housing Crisis. My friend is a family man who works as a black cab driver in
London, where we grew up together. I don’t think he will mind me saying that he
wasn't the most academically-inclined member of our friendship group. But he is no fool. Far from it: he is one of our most respected friends; I have literally
never heard anyone say a bad word about him. (Well – apart from his bald patch
and his support for Arsenal). The idea that someone like him enjoyed my book gives
me great satisfaction.
I have also
received feedback about the book from various friends who could be described as
intellectuals. Curiously, one topic has kept cropping up in their feedback:
social class. One friend suggested that class is an ‘issue’ that ‘looms large’ in
my book. This surprised me, because I didn’t think I was interested in class – well,
not anymore. When I started at university, I was a socialist firebrand with a
massive chip on my shoulder, not least because of my strong cockney accent. However,
by the time I had finished at university – a decade later, having completed a
PhD at Cambridge – my socialist views had begun to fade, and so had my sense of
inverse snobbery. I was now comfortable talking to anyone, because I was comfortable
with myself. Within a few years of graduating, I was describing myself as a
conservative: a long way from a class warrior.
Or so I
thought. If I was surprised at people suggesting that social class looms large
in my book, I was even more surprised at how I reacted: I felt slightly indignant.
I soon began to wonder if I was inwardly protesting too much. After all, ever
since I graduated from Cambridge, I’ve deliberately chosen to ‘slum it’ for the
sake of my writing career. Space to Create documents my life as a
struggling writer during the housing crisis. For a decade, I’ve funded my
writing by working as a delivery driver. I’ve struggled to pay the rent in a
series of cramped shared houses. I’ve lived and worked with some challenging
characters. Throughout all this, I’ve gained firsthand experience of the social
and economic conditions that are blighting the lives of working-class Britons
today. Above all, I’ve seen the woeful effects of mass immigration. I’ve seen how
the problems of overcrowding, overstretched public services and depressed wages
have hit low-income Britons hardest, callously throwing their life chances to
the wind. I’ve lived inside the pressure cooker that cooked up Brexit.
So, yes, I
suppose it’s fair to say I still feel a sense of solidarity with the working
classes. My school friend’s sympathetic response to my book, and my instinctive
enjoyment of his message, indicates as much. Yet I don’t think I have reverted
to being a class warrior. I don’t think my book was about class in any
negative, tribalistic sense of that word. You can be proud of your class, and
you can want to stick up for people in your class, without disliking people
from other classes. Brexit, I think, bears this out. Though the Leave vote is
often simplistically portrayed as a rebellion against the ‘elites’, I don’t
think many people who voted Leave did so because they hate posh people. After
all, some of the heroes of Brexit are extremely posh: for instance, Bill Cash,
Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and of course Boris Johnson. Then of course
there are the countless posh journalists who have championed Brexit. Indeed,
the poshness of many of the leading Brexiteers hasn’t escaped the notice of
left wing remainers, who have relentlessly parodied Brexit as some sort of aristocratic
capitalist conspiracy against the gullible poor. Whichever way you look at it, Brexit spans the working classes and the upper
classes.
What is
going on here? What kind of force can meld the upper classes and working
classes together so seamlessly? Moreover, what kind of force can achieve this result
while still enabling working class people like me to retain a strong sense of their
roots (while presumably the posh folk have retained a sense of theirs)? The
solution to the conundrum can be found, I think, in a little-known fact about
the character of Brexit voters. At the time of the referendum, psychologists
conducted personality tests that found that Leavers tended to be more conscientious
than Remainers. The dictionary definition of conscientiousness is: feeling a
moral responsibility to do your work carefully and to be fair to others.
This definition is extremely revealing. For a start, it explains why Leavers don’t
take kindly to being bossed around by unelected bureaucrats. People who feel a
moral responsibility to do their work carefully don’t need to be bombarded with
rules and regulations. Bureaucratic meddling gets in the way of moral
responsibility.
But most
revealingly of all, moral responsibility explains the link between the upper-
and working-class factions in Brexit. The British upper classes have long been
animated by the concept of ‘noblesse oblige’, a French expression which
translates as ‘Nobility Obliges’. According to this concept, people who are
privileged – the ‘nobility’ – have an obligation to behave responsibly towards
those who are less privileged. In practice, this means leading by example, and
it means accepting an obligation to protect and serve. In other words: it means
good leadership. Anyone who believes that hierarchies are both necessary and
desirable in human affairs can appreciate that noblesse oblige is a valuable
concept. Those at the top of the pile ought to behave conscientiously towards
those at the bottom.
Of course,
noblesse oblige doesn’t simply mean that all responsibility falls upon
society’s leaders. Quite the contrary: good leaders encourage their followers
to take responsibility. The concept of noblesse oblige creates its own mirror
image. In the case of the British working classes, the mirror image created by
noblesse oblige is clear: there is a long tradition of working-class Britons
taking pride in their work. This attitude of ‘working pride’ means not only doing
one’s work carefully, but also treating one’s fellows fairly and charitably so
as to cultivate the sort of cooperative atmosphere in which hard work takes
centre stage. Naturally, the poorer you are, the more important it is to work hard;
hence there’s no surprise that a tradition of working pride has historically
been found among the poorest Britons. The result has been a virtuous circle
between working pride and noblesse oblige. Leaders have felt an obligation to
provide conditions in which their followers can flourish, while the followers have
felt obligated to seize the opportunity to flourish.
Granted, the
quaint-sounding notions of ‘working pride’ and ‘noblesse oblige’ do not imply
that classes are fixed categories – castes. Within the framework of a
capitalist economy, people can move between classes. Social mobility has become
an important part of the system of reciprocal obligation that connects good
leaders and their followers. Good leaders expect their followers to take
responsibility on the promise that the followers who are exceptionally
responsible and capable will advance into leadership roles. Moreover, the
virtuous circle created by this arrangement is not only an important aspect of
capitalism but is essential to democracy. Political leaders emerge as leaders
because they have proven themselves worthy.
At least –
that’s how it should be. Alas, over the last few decades, a new
managerial kind of leader has increasingly come to dominate the UK, in large
part thanks to our immersion within the structures of the EU. The concept of
noblesse oblige has gradually been replaced by something more like: ‘abide, or
else’. Instead of being told to emulate the spirit of our leaders, we have been
told to slavishly conform to the letter of their pronouncements. Leading by
fiat has replaced leading by example. Bureaucratic leadership has replaced
responsible leadership. And, inevitably, the quality of leadership has nosedived.
To put it mildly, the working classes in the UK have not been provided with
conditions that are conducive to flourishing. This amounts to the breaking of a
profoundly important contract. To the extent that Brexit was driven by the
working classes, tribalism wasn’t the driver. The Leave vote was fuelled by the
righteous fury of proud working people who had fulfilled their responsibilities
while Britain’s leaders had reneged on theirs.
It is
interesting to note that on the eve of the referendum, when David Cameron emerged from
his limp renegotiation with the EU, he proclaimed that he had made concessions
which would give the British greater control of their own welfare system. He
radically miscalculated the national mood. In the eyes of the working classes
who voted Leave, Brexit wasn’t all about handouts. The betrayed working classes
didn’t want to give up on responsibility. They didn’t want to be patronised. They
wanted responsibility and all its rewards. And they wanted responsible leaders
who understood this.
Space to Create is available from amazon.
Space to Create is available from amazon.
