Further to my recent post on the perils of Twitter, another British politician has come a
cropper because of a tweet. This time the victim (or villain, depending on your
take) is Emily Thornberry, who tweeted a photo of a house displaying large St
George’s flags (i.e. the English flag) and with a white van parked outside. The
context of this is a little complicated to understand outside of England so I
will try to summarise it.
The house
that was pictured is in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, where there was a by-election yesterday which was won by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) who are opposed to British membership of the EU and to what they believe
are too high levels of immigration. If you want some background, I have written about UKIP elsewhere, and also about British debates about immigration. UKIP
have recently attracted high levels of electoral support, first in European
elections and now in two by-elections where they have won seats in the British
parliament.
Whilst being
a party of the Thatcherite Right, they have a populist appeal that is
increasingly attracting traditional working-class Labour voters in a way not
dissimilar to the way that Thatcher herself was able to do in fact. This is where the
tweeted image becomes important. The English flags can be taken to reference a
particular strand of working-class English nationalism. ‘White van man’ is an
expression connoting a stereotypical working class tradesman – not, actually,
the traditional industrial working class, then, but perhaps a skilled,
self-employed worker. Again, very much the segment of the working class that
Thatcherism appealed to, and now UKIP. Thus Thornberry’s tweet was widely
interpreted as derogatory towards working class voters, and she resigned her
position as a member of Labour’s front bench.
This
interpretation has great purchase because it plays into a narrative whereby
Labour politicians (and politicians in general) are depicted as an out of touch
‘metropolitan elite’ who are alien to working class sentiment and
interests. That Thornberry is an MP for Islington, stereotypically a part of
London associated with multi-culturalism and 'trendy lefties', compounded this. It is an aspect
of the cosmopolitans and locals split I discussed in another post, and has it
counterpart in many countries apart from Britain
This
situation is fraught with strange ironies – the UKIP leader and its two MPs are
all men educated at elite, fee-paying public schools who used to work in the
City of London, and so hardly horny handed sons of the toil, and UKIP are
notably cool on trade union and employment rights whilst being four-square
behind global free markets and deregulation. Elitist Emily Thornberry, by contrast, grew up on a council estate and went to a State school. As for the Labour Party, its leader is
simultaneously denounced as a left wing firebrand and as having abandoned its
left wing roots. That is all part of the long-term consequences of the Blairite
New Labour project, and is another topic.
What I want
to focus on here is something different. It is that the tweeted picture
was instantly read in a particular way. It had no accompanying text other than
to say that it was taken in Rochester, so it was almost entirely a matter of
the picture being interpreted in the way that it was. Other interpretations
were surely possible. It could have been taken to mean that this was a
working-class seat that Labour should be aiming to win (they have held it in
the past), for example. Or it could just be seen as the habitual Twitter post
saying ‘this is where I am today’. But John Mann, a Labour MP, criticised Thornberry’s tweet because he said that the symbols of the English flag and the white van were emblematic of traditional Labour values, so she had insulted traditional Labour voters. This seems truly peculiar: if it is the case (which I doubt)
that these were symbols of Labour values then how could it be ‘insulting’ for a
Labour politician to depict them?
That it was
read the way that it was I think points to another irony of the present
political situation. It is a pervasive trope of UKIP supporters that they are
hamstrung by ‘political correctness’ and are not ‘allowed to say what they
really think’ as a result; in particular that they are ‘not allowed to talk
about immigration’ (bizarre, since it is constantly talked about). Yet what
this episode shows is something quite different. Let’s assume that the picture
did indeed mean something like: ‘look, this is the kind of people who vote
UKIP: English nationalists from the self-employed skilled working class’. Would
this really be so awful? Isn’t it the case that, as UKIP themselves say, they
attract such support? Is it so terribly derogatory and sneering to say this, and yet
fine to ‘sneer’ at the ‘middle-class metropolitan elite’? Isn’t the real ‘political
correctness’ in play that any implicit criticism of UKIP support is immediately
positioned as unacceptable?
We seem to
be a long way from organization theory, I know, but that is not really so. What
lies beneath all of this is the nature and consequences of global capitalism
and in particular the international mobility of what management textbooks would
call the human resource. Politics in Britain, as in many other countries, is
struggling to come to terms with what this means – in terms of employment,
wages, employment protection, welfare, healthcare and communities. These are serious
issues for all of us and yet no politician seems able to discuss them seriously.
Into that gap has stepped, in Britain, the beery, blokeish populism of UKIP but
that offers no realistic answers. That would not matter, except that by
positioning elitism in terms of things like the supposedly sneering nature of a
tweeted photo this populism makes it all but impossible to discuss the actions
of the real elite, who do not tweet but buy and sell our companies, jobs, lives
and livelihoods and for whom welfare, healthcare and community are entirely
irrelevant. UKIP have nothing to say about this, of course, but nor do any of the main political parties in Britain.
