The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation

Values, voice and virtue

Matthew Goodwin's Values, Voice and Virtue received considerable attention from across the political spectrum when published in 2023. Goodwin's interventions since have been increasingly explicitly oriented towards the launch of some new political movement, apparently allied with ‘national conservatism’.

It remains to be seen whether these efforts will successfully launch Goodwin as a conservative populist leader, or how he will negotiate the fact that his own book would seem to prescribe a political programme closer to that of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in 2017 than to parties of the right.

Our main purpose here will be to consider certain points of apparent congruence between some of Goodwin's implicit and explicit assumptions and those informing the work of decidedly ‘mainstream’ political commentators and political scientists. What is at stake, in particular, is the question of the explanatory power of ‘values’.

Against the ‘new elite’

Goodwin's central historical claim is that a ‘new elite’ is now the dominant force in British politics and culture, against which conservative populism represents some kind of justified (or at least inevitable) resistance.

According to him, this new elite is primarily defined by its members having graduated from Russell Group universities. To what extent it also includes graduates of non-Russell Group universities (by definition, the vast majority of university graduates) is entirely unclear, and never addressed.

The observation that graduates—particularly, graduates of selective, high-prestige institutions—occupy a privileged place is not new. But Goodwin writes as if cultural capital were the only source of status or power in British society. Consequently, he lists ‘non-graduate pensioners’ as a key component of an oppressed conservative majority, without acknowledging that most of them are debt-free homeowners with secure incomes, or that young graduates have seen real earnings fall and rents increase by historic amounts.

Goodwin's political sociology

Goodwin's argument points to some salient features of contemporary British culture, politics and society that frequently go unacknowledged by liberal commentary, both journalistic and academic. The normative status of cosmopolitan liberalism within British high-prestige institutions—from corporations to universities to the BBC—is demonstrable, as is the fact that the vast majority of university graduates seem to share some allegiance to it. This can only be properly analysed with a complex, multidimensional approach to the interactions between different sets of power relationships that produce inequalities both of social status and of wealth and income.

In fact, Goodwin’s book itself begins with a surprising and welcome claim for the value of intellectually capacious and sociologically and historically grounded analysis of major political events—Brexit, above all. In the second chapter, Goodwin presents an impressive synthetic history of the major social, cultural and political changes that Britain has undergone since the 1970s. While there are some obvious elisions and omissions in this chapter, what is most striking about it is that it relies almost entirely on research by well-respected, centre-left political scientists and economists to paint a convincing picture.

The chapter describes Britain since 1979 as having undergone a ‘political revolution’, characterised by the twin victories of the neoliberal economic programme and the liberalising sociocultural agenda of the ‘New Left’.

Simultaneously, Goodwin points to the emergence of a professional political class, constitutively more committed to the project of corporate globalisation than to any defence of democratic institutions during the same period. Referring to Crouch's analysis of contemporary ‘post-democracy’, Goodwin argues that this professional political class's commitment to the liberalisation of immigration controls has reinforced a general sense amongst sections of the public that this administrative elite does not see itself as accountable to them.

By the end of the book, however, Goodwin is arguing not for any kind of progressive programme, but for the inevitable continuation of the conservative ‘counter-revolution’ against the ‘new elite’ of which he sees Brexit as just one early historical stage. So how does he reach this bizarre conclusion?

First, Goodwin’s account simply ignores both the possibility and the actuality of reactions from the left against neoliberal hegemony. The fact that Corbyn's popular base was among poor, precarious urban graduates, while his most vehement political opponents were precisely the elite-graduate political class, starkly illustrates the inadequacy of Goodwin's characterisation of all ‘graduate’ as belonging to a single, undifferentiated ‘elite’. Thus, Goodwin simply ignores this entire historical episode.

But his key conceptual move, without which his conservative conclusions would be impossible, is to shift analytical focus away from the complex realities of changing class relations and shifting modalities of inequality, towards the less tangible realm of ‘values’.

The vices of values

The central chapter of Values, Voice and Virtue presents a simplistic account of an electorate divided between an elite committed to an aggressively modernising strain of cosmopolitan liberalism and a broader citizenry committed to ‘traditionalist’ values: sexual conservatism, casual xenophobia and crude cultural nationalism.

As such, while Goodwin attributes New Labour's loss of support from ‘Labour traditionalists’ entirely to ‘New Labour's embrace of the revolution and the rise of a far more liberal cosmopolitanism, he makes no reference even to the possibility that New Labour may have been able to secure more support for its liberalising cultural agenda had its economic programme been more effective at reducing social inequality.

At the same time, Goodwin ignores the possibility that both ‘elite’ and non-elite social groups may themselves be internally divided by differing sets of values. Conversely, he ignores the possibility that, in some instances, sets of values may serve to weld together both elite and non-elite groups into distinctive social ‘blocs’. The consequence is a transparently simplistic analysis of the relationship between politics and culture in modern Britain. Goodwin’s insistence on ‘values’ as both the only symptom and the only cause of political division is fundamental to this analytical and rhetorical strategy.

The concept of ‘values’ on which Goodwin bases his argument is never precisely explicated. At no point does he set out a theory of what values are, how they work or explicitly what makes them different from ‘opinions’, ‘norms’ or ‘identities’. At the level of definition, the distinction between values and mere opinions is rarely, if ever, stated.

In much contemporary conservative and liberal thought, what we might call ‘values theory’ plays a key explanatory role. This approach implicitly claims a degree of substantiality for ‘values’ as distinct from mere clusters of opinion, positing them as quasi-structural explanations for political behaviour and almost entirely ignoring socioeconomic factors, while offering almost no explanation for the genesis and transformation of values as such.

Arguably, very similar assumptions play a functionally identical role in the work of political scientists like Maria Sobolewska, Robert Ford and Paula Surridge, as well as political strategists such as Deborah Mattison and Claire Ainsley who have become influential figures at the core of Keir Starmer's Labour Party. Sobolewska and Ford's influential and justifiably lauded book Brexitland offers a nuanced and persuasive account of the political impact of cultural divergences between liberals and ‘identity conservatives’. But, even on this account, the correlation between levels of cultural capital and commitment to liberal cosmopolitan values is observed, while this correlation is not treated as itself in need of explanation or as subject to possible political intervention.

For a political sociology

It seems self-evident to us that any attempt to explain a phenomenon as complex and significant as Brexit or the rise of the new populist right ought to involve rigorous efforts to map (a) the complex nature of changing socioeconomic circumstances, (b) the ways in which different social groups conceptualise those changes and (c) the ways in which those conceptions drive political behaviour. But values-focussed accounts can only ignore (a), thereby resorting to a poorly theorised model of (b) for all explanations of (c).

Fortunately, other analyses are available, most notably in the work of political sociologists such as John Clarke, Satnam Virdee and Brendan MacGeever. In their book Britain in Fragments, Virdee and MacGeever understand Brexit as the outcome of historical processes including the long aftermath of British imperialism and the decline of capitalist profitability in the UK. Their analysis particularly focusses on the complex social character of the pro-Brexit voting coalition. These authors show that the Brexit coalition was composed of a number of socioeconomic groups bound together by a complex set of material interests and shared ideologies, so cannot be associated simplistically either with ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ voters.

Each also suggests that radical, egalitarian social and democratic reform are the only likely remedies, at least for the most disadvantaged in society.

The approaches offered by these studies are essential to any attempt to understand contemporary politics from a progressive perspective. By contrast, the widespread tendency to focus on ‘values’ at the expense of all other factors can only lead to hopelessly reactionary conclusions.