So! I've just been reading a critique by Jason Cowley, editor of The New Statesman of a book namely "The Dispossessed The Working Class and Their Instinct for Survival" by Frenchman Christophe Guilluy which is a lot about The Gilets Jaunes, but has much resonance here and the US insomuch as we are often mirror images of one another as far as our social demographics are concerned.
Jason Cowley states that he was introduced to the work of the French author in 2017 at a dinner hosted by Labour Together, the network that later became the vehicle through which Keir Starmer won the leadership of the Labour Party. An essay by Christopher Caldwell about Guilluy was circulated among guests who wanted to understand better why so many working class voters loathed the progressive liberal left and had voted for Brexit. Long before Brexit, Guilluy was analysing how globalisation had enriched a hypermobile elite while leaving many of those who lived in what he calls "peripheral France" far from the globalised wealth of the cities. Guilluy, once close to the communists but today non-aligned, had worked as a consultant on housing projects in Paris and observed how the old working class could no longer afford to live in the culturally diverse capital city, or other metropolitan centres such as Lyon or Bordeaux. The old class structures had been supplanted by something new and much closer to America. France was now a country of "winners or losers" Guilluy was to write in The Dispossessed, this elite were to proselytise about diversity and multiculturalism but were utterly detached from the lives and struggles of the working class, in his words "they were the winners of globalisation but had closed the door on the working classes" and isn't that a fact that plays out in London, New York, Los Angeles and all the other major regional cities in our respective countries. In fact nothing captured that more than when Macron at the inauguration of Station F in Paris, the biggest business start up campus in Europe said this "there are people who succeed and people who are nothing" that's shockingly been expressed in many forms Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" "the thick and the uneducated flag waving underclass" "The white working class girls who almost deserved to be abused and raped for so long because they were feckless" but nothing could be done about that in the interests of social cohesion. The left behind.
I don't think there has been a lot of difference in the middle ground of politics over the past 20 years, it's so often been an inter changeable milieu where politicians such as the Mandelsons/Osbornes for example have been found rubbing shoulders in the same social setting. Whatever the present government have to say, it's really just more of the same, with their umpteen freebies, intransigence or stupidity even as to how they don't or won't see just how that is perceived, detached as they ever were from the problems of the unaffordability of basic necessities facing great swathes of the electorate, we haven't really moved on from the fatuous "we're all in it together" In a way I'm sorry Angela Rayner's gone, she came from a background not too dissimilar from the abandoned girls of Rotherham, a baby at 16 whilst simultaneously foolish and brave, she trounced all those low expectations to arrive where she did, but she broke the rules.
My gut feeling is that the middle ground of political parties have had their day and will become an irrelevance, people will swing either further to the right (Reform) and further to the left (Corbyn/Sultana). People may well see the two extremes as the last refuge as to where they may pin their colours. I don't think the outcome will be pretty either way. I'm keeping an eye on France because I think that scenario will arrive there first. They're also marginally deeper in debt than us so the IMF could well be dictating any fiscal strategy to whoever is at the helm.
