| 8 mins read
For so long we have lived in societies where increasing inclusiveness was a taken for granted good, that we find it hard to cope with a world where movements pressing for precisely the opposite are making all the political waves. The main targets for current campaigns for social exclusion are immigrants, but behind that is a growing agitation for hostility towards settled ethnic minorities. Opposition to close relations with foreign countries follows logically from there. Denying the reality of climate change helps avoid the need for international cooperation, and also justifies excluding concern for future generations. Reversing the progress in women’s rights has to tread more carefully, as women are a majority, but misogyny thrives in demands for women to devote themselves to childbirth. Hostility to the disabled takes the form of attacks on their claims to social benefits.
These demands for exclusion are part of the new ‘cultural turn’, which many see as replacing the concern for material issues – public spending versus low taxes – that had dominated politics for decades. But look a little closer, and all these questions are a mix of the cultural and the material. Immigrants, ethnic minorities and women can all be depicted as materially ‘taking jobs’ from white males. The disabled make claims on taxation. At the same time, materialist politics depended on various cultural categories to champion its rival causes: the organized industrial working class seeking first the vote and then the security of a welfare state, versus a bourgeoisie wanting to protect its high earnings from income tax. Shared cultural attributes were necessary to take sides in that conflict. No-one identifies with being part of particular deciles of the income distribution.
The importance of historical working class struggles for inclusion meant that parties representing that class became major carriers of many other kinds of inclusionary demand. For so long as the industrial working class could be seen as a growing class representing society’s bright future, that coalition of inclusionary demands hung together.
But it ceased to be true as long ago as the 1980s, when employment in industry and mining declined, to be replaced by a mass of services jobs with no history of political identity. From that time the tendency of voters to have political identities leading most of them to support the same party at successive elections began to decline. But for a long while this didn’t seem to mean much. It was still expected that formerly industrial towns would deliver Labour majorities, even though they no longer provided much industrial employment. The old working class had lost its role as the main carrier of inclusionary optimism, but so long as people could expect to become a little better off every year, this didn’t provoke any crises.
This changed dramatically following two unrelated, massive shocks: the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-22. While a small wealthy class emerged from these crises richer than ever, the great majority of people have suffered a major setback to their expectations of a better life. If support for inclusionary causes needs people to feel confident about future prospects and to sense that they are part of a gradually improving world, a world of shrinking prospects can only be expected to have the opposite effect. Finding suitable cases for exclusion makes a diminishing space less crowded.
Parties supporting various kinds of exclusion had started to develop in several countries before 2008, spurred initially by Islamic terrorist attacks in several western countries that created space for an anti-Muslim exclusionary rhetoric. These parties enjoyed a major growth spurt after 2008, and an even bigger one after the pandemic. Just as inclusionary tropes could spread from issues of class to those of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, so exclusionary appeals, starting out from hostility to immigrants, could branch out to support racism, national isolationism and misogyny.
Where do we go from here?
Where are the protagonists of inclusionary politics to turn, if we have lost the once reliable class base for our politics? First, we must remember that exclusionary parties rarely achieve the support of a third of citizens. There is much that is deeply unattractive about their appeal. It seeks a narrowing of perspectives, ignoring and even hating those outside a tight little world, not caring about future generations. A majority, though they might not be committed liberals, are uncomfortable with much of that. This emboldens us to call out exclusionism and to formulate a positive appeal to those of all classes who care about the world around us.
Within that, it is possible to identify particular groups more likely to support such an appeal. Public service employees encounter the importance of the public realm daily in their lives. This will be true of such workers at many levels, but public services also contain a high proportion of the highly educated, especially in health and education, who are most likely to welcome a broad view of the world. Women, especially younger ones, have little reason to support a politics that often includes elements of misogyny; more women than men also work in public services. Members of various cultural minorities (if they are citizens) also have an interest in acceptance of diversity, though some might seek integration into mainstream society by stressing their loyalty to local nationalist values.
That list constitutes a potential majority able to sympathize with the inclusive agenda across both material and cultural issues, provided the policies needed for that position are explained and celebrated. It leaves less educated white males living in ex-industrial towns as the population – apart from the very wealthy – most resistant to inclusiveness. They cannot be expected to feel otherwise unless they can see that an expanding world has a place for them, that they can be part of a future, and that the pursuit of exclusion will serve only to keep them in their current hopelessness. This can only happen if ever more towns can share in the advanced activities that will provide the jobs of the future, especially those in the green economy. This will not be achieved by concentrating economic grow on a few chosen places, which will generate enough tax revenue to keep everywhere else living on benefits, or by relying on dismal jobs in warehouses and call centres. The main answer to developing a population open to inclusiveness lies in urban industrial policy.
Exclusion and the New Politics of Hatred is out now on Polity Press.
