Roger Harding

Selected thoughts on strategic communications, winning campaigns, behaviour change and routes to making Britain a fairer country to live in. @Roger_Harding

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Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most

Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most | Roger Harding

The implications of policy are felt very differently depending on how well-off you are. Politicians need to recognise this, says Roger Hardi

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Many of Rishi Sunak’s political decisions are baffling, but one that’s easy to understand is his recent rowing back from the UK’s climate commitments: he, like many creatures of Westminster, thinks working-class people don’t care much for climate action. This is a lazy stereotype and, predictably, did nothing for his poll numbers.

The simple truth is this: when it comes to the climate crisis, working-class people are often the first to spot the changes occurring because even slight fluctuations can make or break family finances. That doesn’t mean this is the first subject working-class people raise when a canvasser knocks at the door or a pollster asks, but it is there in the background when deciding who to trust with our futures.

It’s the people who think twice before turning on a fan or know their homes aren’t fully insured who are most attuned to the fact that summers are getting hotter and the rain is increasingly heavier than their drains can cope with. If you use the calculator app when you shop to avoid embarrassment at the tills, you have a keener sense that flooded farmers’ fields today mean higher food prices tomorrow.

Above all, working-class people know they have done far less to contribute to our national emissions than those in the private-jet class or the investment managers who have grown rich on fossil fuel. It is therefore unsurprising that many working-class people are slightly suspicious of a climate movement that seems to be whiter and more middle-class than the communities on the sharpest end of climate consequences.

I’m nobody’s idea of a climate radical. I had spent my career working for charities that fight for families on low incomes and tackle inequality, driven by growing up in a council house and seeing my mum struggle (as many more people are sadly doing today). I have never forgotten how tough we had it growing up, so I am determined that working-class families like the one I grew up in won’t bear the brunt of the climate crisis. That’s why my new organisation, Round our Way, highlights the impact the climate crisis is having on working-class communities today, and gets more of our voices into the debate about what we do about it.

This isn’t abstract or something to worry about in the future: the implications are showing up right now in everyday life. Last year, for example, research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found the average food bill was £400 higher thanks to climate impacts and fossil-fuel costs. Working-class communities are significantly more likely to be flooded, and have less money and insurance to weather the storms.

And later this week, Round our Way will be jointly publishing research showing that community and lower-league football clubs, such as Whitby Town, are facing huge bills to cope with the wetter weather that the climate crisis brings. Whole communities are changing because of this.

Given all of this, we shouldn’t be surprised that polling last month by More in Common found what the group calls “loyal nationals” (a term for “red wall” voters) had the climate crisis and the environment fourth on their list of priorities. Politicians have got it wrong if they think attacking climate action presents an easy path to popularity.

All of this is good news for those of us who want to see a fairer and greener future, but this cross-class consensus on climate action is fragile and needs reinforcement. Plenty of working-class people worry that climate policies won’t be applied fairly, and we need only look to recent experiences in Germany to see how quickly things can go badly wrong. There, proposals to ban new gas boilers and replace them with green options created huge splits in the governing coalition over whether enough was being done to help people on modest incomes.

Climate politics curdle when one of two things happen. The first is when effective populists pose as working-class champions. You can spot these fairweather class warriors by the speed at which working-class concerns become their calling card only when climate action is proposed. They are the people who don’t say a word when the youth club closes, job cuts are made or bills spiral, but you can’t get them off news programmes when they can use our worries as a stick to beat the climate consensus.

The second is when the actual climate movement becomes dominated by people whose lives are sufficiently comfortable that they don’t think about the distributional consequences of policy, or recognise that its implications will be felt very differently depending on how well off you were to start with.

Thankfully, both these problems have the same solution. A climate movement of and for ordinary people is the foundation on which a durable climate consensus can be built. That’s what Round our Way is doing. If you are ever tempted to think people can’t simultaneously focus on the daily slog and the future, remember all the heroic single mums battling every day to keep their families afloat precisely because they want a future where their kids won’t have to do the same.

Roger Harding is the founding director of Round our Way

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Politicians have the power to order ceasefire in culture wars

Available here. 

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Politicians have the power to order ceasefire in culture wars

Kirsty McNeill, Roger Harding

Tuesday July 13 2021, 12.01am, The Times

The by-election battle in Batley and Spen was an ugly portent of the culture wars to come. While the transparent decency of the victor is a cause for celebration, the campaigns run by each of the top three-placed parties are to nobody’s credit.

Research being published by the Fabian Society this week provides analysis of what the culture wars actually are and how, instead of ignoring or indulging them, political leaders can end them.

We find that culture war fights — those associated with values and identity — are often discussed as if they represent genuine divides in society rather than being, in reality, fringe issues that are magnified strategically (or made-up entirely) by those looking to benefit from anger and make it look like people who believe in equality are somehow extreme.

The slim Labour victory for Kim Leadbeater (middle) in the Batley and Spen by-election reflected the so-called culture wars on the horizon The slim Labour victory for Kim Leadbeater (middle) in the Batley and Spen by-election reflected the so-called culture wars on the horizon The picture is more complicated than politicians or controversialist commentators just saying whatever they think will be popular. After all, we know that our workplaces and neighbourhoods aren’t anywhere near as divided as the headlines suggest.

Where exactly, apart from in columnists’ caricatures and the furthest reaches of Twitter, are the supposed woke mob to be found? On the other side, who among us knows anyone who is more interested in celebrating empire than getting the kids to bed?

The political utility of this strategy, therefore, isn’t to be found in doing a better job of turning out one of two equally-matched groups. Instead, it serves as a decoy, allowing some politicians to evade scrutiny on their record by orchestrating rows about whether footballers kneel or prom-goers sing Rule Britannia.

Looking back over the past few weeks it isn’t hard to see where this ends. Nobody can be proud about a campaign featuring leaflets claiming the Conservatives are in hock to Indian nationalists or that Labour believes “the biggest threat to our precious multicultural society is whiteness”.

This sort of resentment, once stirred up, is not easily dampened down. So all parties need to consider whether the electoral gain is worth the societal pain — and all of us need to decide what sort of behaviour we are going to reward with our votes and attention.

The question on the right is whether Conservatives want the character of their party changed fundamentally by this sort of strategy. For those drawn to politics to promote ideas around the free market and individual responsibility, picking fights with Oxford students about hanging pictures of the Queen or with the National Trust about how they display artefacts seems an odd way to advance the cause of smaller government.

Culture wars do, however, bind an otherwise heterogenous electoral coalition together. While fiscally hawkish MPs may be restive about the public finances, the new Tory voter base across the Red Wall is keen for them to spend, spend, spend.

The tension could become unsustainable without a steady stream of stories that raise the salience of questions of tradition above those of economics. The short-term electoral incentive for the right is therefore overwhelming: only the virtues of individual politicians will see it resisted.

On the left the dilemma is different. There, Labour’s front bench think they have to choose between abandoning their values and abandoning their voters. There is another way. We argue that the future for the left lies in a four-part strategy.

First, naming what’s happening when culture wars peddlers in politics and the media try to divide society. Second, building a movement that is genuinely inclusive in composition and culture — practising multi-racial, cross class, intergenerational solidarity rather than theorising about it.

Third, laying out an inclusive vision of both economic justice and social cohesion and showing the plausible path from here to there. Finally, shoring up support for democracy itself, including through regulation of the technology platforms that profit from enraging us.

The temptations for all parties are clear. Riling up a base and pointing it at an imagined enemy is much easier than doing the hard yards involved in meeting the prime minister’s ambition to level up or the leader of the opposition’s intention to make this the best country to grow up in and grow old in. Easier – but much more dangerous.

The people of Batley and Spen glimpsed the future and decided they deserved better than clickbait in their feeds and toxic division on their streets. The rest of us deserve better too. Which political leader is going to step forward to ensure we get it?

Kirsty McNeill is executive director of Policy, Advocacy & Campaigns at Save The Children and Roger Harding is chief executive of RECLAIM. They are the authors of a new Fabian pamphlet, Counterculture: How to resist the culture wars and build 21st century solidarity

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Essay in the #OurOtherNationalDebt collection in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Full report and responses to it available here: https://www.ourothernationaldebt.com/

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The coronavirus has illuminated who is truly indispensable in modern Britain.

While some are confident this will bring about new-found respect and reward for working class people, I’m sceptical. The financial crash also brought the sense that things wouldn’t be the same again, and they weren’t, but not for the reasons we hoped. Working class people rarely fare well during or after economic turmoil and, with the financial crash in the rear-view mirror, many of us know it.

I worry an anger is building in many working class communities about how inequitably the current costs and risks are being shared. Just like the idea ‘we’re all in it together’ after the crash, the idea this crisis is the same for all of us just isn’t ringing true. The disconnect presents fertile ground for polarisation, pessimism and populism to grow.

The pain in communities is raw and real – and it risks being deepened by middle class activists and commentators too readily racing to talk about the ‘opportunities’ this time presents. Working class movements can, however, start to think – carefully, cautiously, compassionately – about the things we can win together if we stick together. The young people at RECLAIM kicked this off with a rapid response campaign to thank #TheIndispensables but we will need to have a medium and long term plan if we’re to make sure Britain’s working class comes out of this time stronger and more united.

Right now, YouGov polling for the Times Red Box suggests that there’s a reasonable degree of togetherness but in a recent report the Collective Psychology Project highlighted that there’s a fairly consistent progression in collective emotional responses to major events. The initial ‘heroic’ phase is met with high altruism and is then followed by a ‘honeymoon’ phase of great togetherness and optimism. However, this relatively quickly gives way to a long ‘disillusionment’ phase marked by increased polarisation, feelings of abandonment and concerns about the limits of the response.

It is hard to say whether we have reached a disillusionment phase of this crisis, but the toll on people’s mental health is already clear. Ipsos Mori polling for Kings College London finds that half of us feel more anxious and depressed and 29% are finding lockdown extremely difficult (or expect to) in the next four weeks (notably rising to 42% for 16-24 year olds).

Working class people are already experiencing greater threats to their jobs (as reported by the Resolution Foundation), living in more densely populated areas (as covered here by the FT), not having enough space at home (as reported by the JRF), not having as much access to decent green spaces (as reported by CABE), having poorer lung health due to being more likely be exposed to air pollution (as reported by Asthma UK), being more likely to have underlying health conditions (as reported by the King’s Fund), finding it harder to get online or have enough devices for everyone at home (as reported by the Sutton Trust), having less ability to home school (also reported by the Sutton Trust), having less access to affordable food (as reported by the Food Foundation), being less able to access cheap credit (as reported by the Centre for Social Justice) and low paid workers are disproportionally represented in the key worker jobs that expose them and families to increased risk (as reported by the IFS).

Put even more starkly, Office of National Statistics data shows that living in the poorest neighbourhoods means you're twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as people living in the richest ones.

Strangely, I’m not sure that horrific reality is the thing likely to generate the most anger. Having a shorter life due to your postcode was already the pre-coronavirus reality. Instead it’s often the subtle, more visible things that anger people more.

Who is (not) in the room always shows in a crisis

Being working class often makes you acutely aware of the little ways people unconsciously reveal they’re better off. Despite us now being physically separate, social media, video calls and simply how we talk about our lockdown experience is giving people greater insight into ‘how the other half lives’. People won’t easily forget their sneak-peek into the bigger, nicer, greener space of others doing less essential work or making fewer sacrifices.

This moment also tells us a lot about who makes decisions and what informs them. There’s one example that features frequently in discussions at RECLAIM. In early March, during the government’s new daily press conference, ministers and scientists provided guidance on what to do if you suspect someone in your home has the virus. It encouraged those self-isolating ‘to use a separate bathroom’ if possible. This obviously isn’t bad guidance, but the assumption this was more important to cover than how, for example, you deal with isolating in an already-overcrowded home, is telling. I similarly doubt the need for guidance – then flouted in at least one notable case – on whether you can use your second home will be forgotten either.

Some working class people will also be asking themselves why it is that old unemployment and housing benefit rates (the improvements noted in Ashwin Kumar’s essay) aren’t good enough now that it isn’t just them who need to claim them.

This sore created by the coronavirus is only likely to increase when our divides are further exposed by the lockdown easing. People will spot that middle class professionals are more able to continue to work from home and that middle class young people are benefiting from more home-schooling and tutoring (as reported by the Sutton Trust). The young people we support at RECLAIM already often flagged the state of their high street and related areas as top of their list of local economic concerns. Boarded up shops and ever-decreasing visitors are visible signs of something not being right, and sadly many high streets will look a lot worse when the lockdown ends.

In this context it’s not surprising that people hanker for the past. While activists on Twitter enjoy sharing slogans about how ‘we can’t return to normal, because normal was the problem’, much of the British public have been enjoying nostalgia. Recent research from Thinkbox, the TV marketing body, reveals a lockdown surge in the number of us watching old TV, with Last of the Summer Wine and Only Fools and Horses repeats doing especially well. Spotify has seen something similar, with increased subscriber use of ‘throwback’ playlists.

Part of why we get comfort from the past is that we see it through rose-tinted glasses. Comparisons (many unhelpful) are regularly drawn between this crisis and WW2. Our national mind’s eye view of the end of the war is the street celebrations of VE day. Many hope for something similar at the end of this period. What we don’t tend to reflect on is the disillusionment and anger many people felt soon after 1945.

While some people cautiously but thankfully dreamt of us building back better, many just wanted done with Britain. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain notes that in spring 1948, just weeks before the creation of the NHS, a Gallup poll found that 42% of people wanted to emigrate (up from 19% in 1945). We also tend to ignore the post-war resurgence of antisemitism on the streets of our cities, showing that hatred and division can quickly re-emerge.

Turning anger into accountability

It’s hard to know what the exact dividing lines will be this time, but in crises there are always those who encourage working class people to fear one another. White people encouraged to fear people of colour, working people in towns and villages told to be wary of those in cities, southerners to suspect northerners and vice versa, and longer-standing residents urged to fear more recent arrivals. As Kitty Usher notes in her essay, one new split in this crisis might be those furloughed and those not.

We face a double threat here – populists on the right exploiting divisions and some on the left being parasitic on people’s pain. There are some who get excited by a crisis, despite all the human misery, because they see this as a necessary price for change. It’s often not even subtle: at one recent webinar for organisers I heard a left activist happily tell people ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited by all this’. Those don’t feel likely to be the words of someone who spends a lot of time truly listening to working class people.  

We need to get past the anger and turn it into a drive for real accountability. The list of policy, societal and business responses needed to do justice to those leaning into risk or having to get by with even less is huge. This collection covers a good number of starting points on wages, job security (see Andrew Pakes’ essay), the strength of our social security (see Ashwin Kumar’s essay), housing (see Rachael Orr’s essay), our approach to immigration (see Satbir Singh’s essay) and much more. This will all be vitally important to honouring the country’s other national debt, but so will ensuring working class people have a permanent seat around the country’s top tables, regardless of which party is in power and whether we are facing good times or bad.

We need much more direct involvement of working class people in the decisions that affect our lives, starting with specific youth assemblies as part of the national commission outlined in the introduction to this collection. At every layer of society – not just in the professions, business and politics but in charities and funders too – we need class inclusion to be a core equality concern.

There is a very real risk an unrepresentative charity sector becomes more distant from the country when the register of which organisations survive is taken (as noted on race by Charity So White). As work we supported young people on last year showed, the current approach of some charities inadvertently alienates young working class people. If organisations in any sector want to build back better they will need to look as much at their own practice as the changes they demand in others. At RECLAIM we’re reshaping our work and are pleased to see a growing number of organisations work with us and the young working class people we support to go on co-discovery processes to work out the specific changes needed in their field.

Finally, we all need to get better at explicitly calling out those that sow division amongst working class communities. Emerging research from the US shows this is the best framing approach to counter hateful populism. This approach means campaigners on economic issues getting more comfortable explicitly talking about race and immigration, rather than always hoping to pivot away from them. This also means helping everyone to feel included by being explicit about how policy ideas deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a more recent arrival or someone whose family has been here for generations. Most importantly, to be successful this requires campaigners getting as busy delivering better communication messages to the unconverted as they can be debating how best to fine tune them with the choir.

That we owe working class people is so beyond question it unites the Guardian, Telegraph and FT. This situation is also changing so quickly that it’s hard to know what exact prescription of proposals will do their contribution and sacrifice justice. The only way to know for sure is to have working class people round the table when it’s decided. This should be a central legacy of this crisis, the idea that essential workers are essential voices. Working class people more than have the talent, strength and ideas to finally steer the country they so obviously drive. It’s time for all of us to make it happen.  

Roger Harding is Chief Executive of RECLAIM, the Manchester-based charity powering young working class people to change the country today and lead it tomorrow. He is a trustee of Victim Support.

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A party that works and wins for working people will need to understand us first

First published here. Full text below.

I’m nervous to add to what will become an avalanche of post-election analysis. But having seen the response to 2017 from the vantage point of one of the country’s leading public attitudes houses and now witnessing the 2019 campaign from an organisation determined to give working class people the voice we’re so often denied, I already fear that working class concerns are going to be appropriated, mischaracterised and weaponised by politicians and commentators who neither understand nor value the modern multi-racial working class.

Working on the British Social Attitudes reports in 2017 and 2018 I could see the frustration of seasoned pollsters as talking heads leapt to rapid conclusions that months later robust research would disprove.

What follows, therefore, isn’t primarily about what has just happened — the British Election Study, British Social Attitudes Survey and others will show that in time. Instead I want to offer some simple pointers about what the wider evidence shows for when you’re reading articles in coming days:

If any analysis of this election starts and ends with 2019 — and ignores the long-term trends — it’ll likely be wrong.

If the analysis starts and ends with Brexit — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it starts and ends with the analysis of any party leader — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it includes sweeping statements about ‘left behind’ or ‘traditional’ working class people — it’ll likely be wrong and probably dangerous to boot.

Why 2019 is bigger than 2019

The result is obviously an enormous win for the Conservatives, especially after austerity and nearly 10 years in power. The size of their majority could easily mean they are in power for another decade. If we want a different future we need to understand how we got to this dismal present. Here are the seven long-term trends to be aware of.

First, since the late 1990s Labour has consistently shed overall working class support as a portion of its vote while it, to varying degrees of success, appealed to more middle class voters. The loss of this support was hidden in Labour’s electoral dominance in the early 2000s as more of this switched to non-voting than to other parties.

The left of the party made regaining this support a rallying call for the Corbyn project but they’ve only succeeded in exacerbating the problem. To understand this further, I would really recommend The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class by Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley. Their analysis — based in part on the British Social Attitudes survey — uses more sophisticated class coding than the crude ABC1 C2DE cross-breaks found in weekly polls. Among other things they highlight that over this period people became less likely to describe Labour as a party of and for the working class and that this feeling was stronger when (where relevant) their Labour MP didn’t come from a working class background.

Crucially this is a long-term trend, meaning any suggestion that 2019’s result is purely about Brexit is likely to be wrong. We get hints of the truth of this from early analysis showing that Labour’s vote also dropped notably in remain as well as leave seats and that Brexit isn’t the top reason people give for voting another way.

Second, the Conservatives are likely to have continued to do terribly amongst BAME voters. In recent elections Labour has returned to the dominant (around 80%) 1997 levels of BAME voter support across all social classes, but this was in evidence well before the 2016 Brexit vote. British Future and the Runnymede Trust have long been pointing this out and urging pollsters to produce the breakdowns of BAME voter support to give us a more consistent picture.

Third, age and education have become much, much bigger voter divides. Again, these trends pre-date this election, with poor support among older voters support costing Ed Miliband dear and formal education level being the single best guide to how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Academic Paula Surridge and others have been pleading with us to pay more attention to this for some time now.

Whereas your social class tends to be a good guide on where you sit on the left — right economic scale (i.e. working class people are more likely to support things like redistribution), education is a better guide to where you sit on what’s called the libertarian — authoritarian scale. This measures your attitudes to things like law and order and whether you think young people ‘respect traditional British values’. Crucially these scales don’t neatly overlap so any party wanting to hoover up the votes on one end of these scales, e.g. the economic left, will have to find a way to appeal to those left-leaning voters spread across the liberal and conservative scale (or vice versa).

It’s important to note the authoritarian/conservative — libertarian/liberal scale doesn’t directly get into issues often seen at the heart of US “culture war” debates, like LGBT rights and abortion. On both these issues we’ve thankfully been getting consistently more liberal across class and age for some time now.

As Paula Surridge has been pointing out, the big group of people who feel politically homeless at the moment are economically left-leaning social conservatives. Labour has been doing especially badly amongst older working class people in this group. During the campaign the Conservatives seemed to appreciate this by honing in on socially-conservative dividing lines (Brexit and crime) while being prepared (at least in messaging terms) to flirt with economic left ideas around more public spending. By contrast journalist Jennifer Williams and others highlighted pre-election that Labour’s failure to major on issues like tackling crime and anti-social behaviour would hurt them.

Fourth, Labour’s vote has become a lot stronger in big cities and their suburbs, and weaker in towns, as the Centre for Towns has charted. The relates to the trends above, with cities themselves becoming younger and more diverse and towns being home to an older demographic. As Lewis Baston has pointed out, the make-up of towns like Mansfield which consistently voted Labour post-war looks demographically very different to the ones that voted Tory in 2017 and 2019. Crucially he adds “Labour is coming close to exhausting this potential source of gains — there are simply not that many city, suburb and university town seats left to win.”

Fifth, the Conservatives have a women problem, and Labour have a men problem. This was on display in 2017 and from pre-election polls looks likely to have been a major factor this time round.

Sixth, Labour also need to resolve their now long-term problem in Scotland which threatens to undermine another redistributive trans-national political and economic union. The Conservatives equally have a problem in Scotland, but it’s easier to ignore when they’ve done so well in England and Wales.

These six long-term trends do a lot of explanatory work, but they don’t explain the scale of the defeat. For that we must also account for the fact Jeremy Corbyn has been an unprecedently unpopular leader. Labour is unlikely to win with a leader as unpopular as Corbyn and his faction need to account for their role in Boris Johnson’s rise to power given he beat Ken Livingstone twice in Labour-leaning London (in 2008 and 2012) and has now demolished Corbyn nationally. Corbyn’s leadership is the top reason given by people for not voting Labour and that’s despite his competition being two PMs who themselves were not well liked at the end of both election campaigns.

Likewise, some outriders are in a bit of a tangle with the much-promoted line that the Labour manifesto swung the 2017 election more toward Labour but bears no responsibility for 2019. It can’t be both. A good starting point in understanding the role of policy in political choice is Drew Westen’s 2007 book The Political Brain where he pleads with Democrats in the US — following their back-to-back loses to George Bush Jr — to realise that their long lists of individually popular policies are little use if the Presidential candidate can’t emotionally connect with voters’ hopes and fears and convince them of their credibility to deliver the policies in office.

Labour doesn’t have a hope of working out where to go if it can’t face up to where it is and why. Members need to take an unflinching look at these six long-term trends alongside the stark reality of the more recent leadership problem when picking a vision for the future. While emerging leadership contenders are already signalling their intentions to run, what members really need to be clear on is which of the following four visions they choose and why.

Four visions of Labour

From my perspective running a organisation dedicated to supporting a new generation of working class leaders, I already worry about how class will feature in this debate. Only one of these options will truly deliver for working people and take account of the six trends above. But the other three all have serious backers and could yet take Labour away from its historic mission.

I. Liberal Labour

Tilley and Evans’ analysis shows that Labour has done especially well in recent decades amongst the ‘new middle class’ –people working in roles like university lecturer, nurse, social worker, dental hygienist and occupational therapist. They’re socially liberal and broadly in the middle on economic policy, unless it comes to funding the public sector when they’re quite left.

One future strategy would be to try to max out this vote out — for example to try to hoover up those of them found in the 12% of Lib Dem voters on Thursday. This has a certain logic to it and falls in line with the Conservatives doing much better with working class social conservatives.

But, this approach may not work. As noted above, Lewis Baston and others seriously question whether there are enough seats with these kinds of voters in to make this a route to government. More importantly, I’m not sure this route is possible without the Labour Party gradually abandoning being on the economic left.

If you start unifying people based on their social conservatism or liberalism you’ll be pulling in people with views across the left and right of the economic spectrum. As the Conservatives may well soon find out, for them that’ll mean they either have to deliver on some of their more economically left rhetoric or find their new voter coalition rapidly splinters. If you are what you eat, a Labour Party primarily focused on gaining more middle class social liberals would gradually cease to be a working class party of the left and more resemble the Lib Dems.

II. Posh Labour

The Labour Party has always been a cross-class coalition that has had leaders from well-off families (a personal hero, Clement Attlee, was even posher than Blair or Corbyn), but it has ultimately been rooted in a mass-membership working class union movement. Historically this has provided a talent pipeline of brilliant working class politicians and advisers.

It also meant Labour saw itself first and foremost as striving to provide representation for working class people, rather than being primarily driven by theoretical conceptions of class struggle. Jonathan Rose (part quoting fellow historian Ross McKibben) puts it better when analysing why a Marxist party never took off in Britain:

‘”The sort of men who were so prominent in European socialist parties — marginal bourgeois, journalists, ‘theoreticians’, professional orators — were comparatively rare in Britain.” The British working class had forged its own organisations and its own leaders, who did not care to accept middle class patronage, even under the name of socialism.’

Trade unions continue to provide a great working class talent pipeline but haven’t been able to stop senior parts of the party being dominated by people not just from middle class backgrounds, but very posh ones.

Labour need not worry about choosing this path if ideological focus is what matters most. If instead Labour wants to be the parliamentary wing of the British working class then it needs to start looking and sounding like us. Right now, I can point to some corporates who take monitoring class diversity more seriously than the Labour Party.

III. ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’

This approach is summed up with ‘less identity politics, more class politics’ and the idea the party needs to appeal to the ‘traditional working class’. It doesn’t tally with the evidence (if you read only one piece linked here, I’d make it academic Cas Mudde’s account of why left leaning parties mimicking populist ones rarely prosper) and it crosses all sorts of moral lines that shouldn’t be open to people on the left.

When Labour has done so badly in many leave voting towns where it once weighed rather than counted its vote the appeal to forget the cities and focus on ‘the heartlands’ is getting a lot of traction but there are two things we have to guard against here.

Firstly, it can slip into suggesting that people in cities — especially London — are having a high old time of it while ignoring the reality that our cities are often home to the biggest numbers of people who are really hard up.

Much more dangerously it implies ‘identity’ issues like racism, sexism and homophobia aren’t issues that concern working class people, who are presumably all white, male and straight. Labour should be the party countering, not indulging, sweeping characterisations of working class people as some homogenous lump. Nobody whose values are rooted in social justice should be mounting an argument that echoes the language of the Brexit Party and before them the BNP with their slogan that they were ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’.

If your image of the ‘traditional working class’ doesn’t have space for black, Asian or LGBT working class people, it’s neither progressive nor accurate and has no place in left politics in 2019.

IV. Modern Working Class Labour

Instead, Labour’s future has to lie in building a multi-racial modern working class movement — one that keeps the voters it’s got but appeals to those it needs like older voters on the left who didn’t vote for Corbyn or Miliband.

This will require delicate balancing, but it’s perfectly possible for Labour to do things like respond to the rising concerns about anti-social behaviour in working class communities without embracing a criminal justice approach that criminalises young working class black men.

Likewise, it’s possible to design an immigration policy that has widespread buy-in but doesn’t demonise or dehumanise immigrants or indulge ideas that they are responsible for a low-wage economy.

This option requires more dexterity than the other three, but both strategically and ethically it’s Labour’s only option. Given that, the task for the months ahead is clear — candidates for Labour’s leadership must show how they’ll build a movement of diverse working class talent, top to bottom.

Building a truly modern working class movement

Here are the six places they could start.

1. Monitor and have a plan to fix class diversity in all of the Labour’s Party structures ­

Jeremy Corbyn called on the BBC to do this, but as far as I can see this doesn’t yet happen in Labour. In my day job we’re helping corporates and charities do this so there’s plenty of good examples to learn from.

2. Speak to people’s pride and dignity

People need meaning and sense of pride but the right are better at speaking to it, with messages along the lines of ‘you’re amazing and you’re being mugged off by these people over here’. That resonates — in many working class families people will tell you they’re proud and strong but also struggling, hard-up or feeling like they’re ignored and invisible. Labour hears that but for whatever reason communicates back using terms we never use about ourselves. Try talking to my single mum and others like her about being the ‘most vulnerable’ and see how far you get.

3. Don’t shy away from immigration and race — build working class unity across communities

Labour should act on the brilliant research coming out of the US on how to build a mutli-racial working class movement. Anat Shenker-Osorio, Celinda Lake and others have for a few years now been publishing research showing that it’s possible to build greater unity amongst working class people. To do that you have to explicitly say you want to deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a newcomer or someone whose family has been here for generations, so everyone feels included. You also need to make clear that some politicians have an active strategy of pitting communities against each other. Closer to home, Runnymede and Class have also been taking the lead with the race / class narrative work that deserves much more attention.

4. People with little actually have the most to lose — stop promising a ‘revolution’

I once heard an academic say ‘the history of labour studies is middle class academics trying to work out why the working classes didn’t do what they thought they would’.

Well off people on the far left have often assumed that the worse it gets the more people will embrace radical change. In reality, when you’ve got little you tend to hold on even more tightly what’s left. The Conservatives in 2019 promised a ‘safety first’ manifesto that will radically change the shape of the economy. They did much the same in 2010 — cautious language to sell a very radical agenda. By contrast Labour promised that ‘the revolution is coming’. They need to urgently consider which of being radical or sounding radical is most important, because Conservative success would suggest you can have one or the other but not both.

5. Make sure policy actually addresses working class priorities

One of the most astonishing things about Labour’s 2019 manifesto — for all the rhetoric about how revolutionary it was — was that its social security plans would only deliver a halt to the rise in child poverty, not reduce it. This felt symptomatic of a policy agenda that never seemed to be truly driven by the actual priorities of working class people.

One Labour-supporting film released just before the election promised ‘a mighty choice is coming’. It still is. Which of the four visions Labour members choose will determine whether the Labour party can once again work and win for working people, in all of our magnificent diversity.

[rogerjharding]

Too many powerful forces are driving division – here are the seven trends you need to know about if you want to democratise and depolarise our common life instead

https://www.globaldashboard.org/2019/09/05/seven-trends-undermining-our-democracy/

FULL TEXT:

Lawyers, historians and constitutional experts will ultimately have the final say about whether last week’s decision to prorogue parliament is a democratic outrage or well within the bounds of our unwritten constitution. But however history judges prorogation, it’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture: the seven ways in which a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’ has emerged at precisely the time we need leaders to tell a powerful story of our shared humanity.

Earlier this summer, we commemorated the bravery of the veterans who landed in Normandy on D-day, and in coming weeks we will be inspired by the active citizenship of thousands of young people who rally to avert climate catastrophe. But can those of us in the generations in between be proud of the political culture we’ve let develop, where we are encouraged to view fellow citizens as ‘enemies of the people’ and national treasures talk about our Prime Minster and ropes and lampposts in the same breath? Our children are watching – surely we can give them better examples of how to disagree well?

There is already plenty of research about how public opinion has become more polarised, people have become more isolated and hate actors have infected our shared online spaces. There are also many incredible organisations already working in community cohesion or at a grassroots level to counter loneliness. Sadly, these are critical but insufficient responses to the fractures in our society. So the four of us – two working with young people and two working on depolarisation – came together to think what can be done about the coarsening of public discourse and how to inspire the next generation about the value of our democracy.

As activists we think there’s plenty of injustice to get angry about – none of us are hankering after a lost era of deference. But we do think there is still a role for political leadership in countering the following alarming trends:

The use of violent language and threats of violence not being taken seriously. Politicians and candidates receive appalling abuse from strangers and organised trolls, but we should also be worried when politicians themselves are talking about their colleagues being lynched, stabbed or bayoneted, threats to their safety are diminished by their leaders, and digital supporters threaten or abuse without censure.

The use of dehumanising language and imagery. Again this is something that is all too common on the street or online, but the striking thing is how normal it has become for elites to talk about each other as traitors or saboteurs, and how few long-term political penalties are paid for using language and tactics which have real world consequences for those already subject to demonisation and discrimination.

The promotion of conspiracy theories. In many respects the 2014 Scottish independence referendum was the test case for how far conspiracy theories have penetrated the mainstream. Since then, Brexit coverage and the response to evidence of antisemitism has normalised them further still.

Attacks on experts and expertise. Claims that ‘Britain has had enough of experts’ and accusations of the ‘clear misuse’of official statistics, combined with the arguments surrounding the expert definition of antisemitism have all added up to the sense that the notion of ‘alternative facts’ has jumped the Atlantic.

Swift rehabilitation after failures to tell the truth. One ex minister rejoined the cabinet in an elevated role just two years after resigning for misleading the then PM, another was in contention for her party’s leadership just one year after misleading MPs about Universal Credit and a shadow minister remains on the front bench despite misleading journalists about previous statements.

Attacks on democratic institutions. From the civil service to the BBC to the judiciary, Britain’s independent institutions are increasingly under attack from senior politicians and media decision-makers.

Low level efforts to limit participation in public life. From voter ID policies to differentiated registration to restrictions on charity campaigning, we are seeing new barriers to full civic participation.

There are, of course, plenty of brilliant ministers, MPs and councillors – politics remains full to bursting with people of phenomenal integrity and commitment. Likewise there are so many journalists and editors committed to maintaining our great national tradition of robust but civil debate through initiatives like Britain Talks. So ordinary people coming together to fight these seven trends aren’t setting ourselves against politicians or journalists – we are helping create a climate in which the best of them can do their best by us all.

So what can you do? In the short term here are three things:

Show there’s a reward for good practice. Write a letter to the editor, call in to a radio show, tell a candidate that your vote will be determined partly by who shows the most commitment to democratising and depolarising politics. Show your support online for journalists, judges, civil servants and activists who are making your country or community better.

Extract a penalty for bad practice. Get involved with efforts to fight Islamophobia, antisemitism and other forms of hatred in our political parties. Support those, like Stop Funding Fake News who are fighting conspiracy thinking and join campaigns like this one from the Fawcett Society to put a stop to abuse in public life.

Vote and register everyone you know to vote. Support Democracy Club and other efforts to make voting easier.

And finally, even if you don’t care about politics at all, or feel that the seven trends are bad but not really your business, do take a moment to think about your kids (or those of someone you love) and decide whether you want them growing up thinking this is how powerful and important people treat each other. It’s hard to teach young people about respect if the example being set from the top is of anything but. The next generation are watching – it’s up to this one what they’ll learn from what they see.

Heather Hamilton is the Founder of Shared Humanity: Countering Us vs Them

Roger Harding is CEO of Reclaim

Kirsty McNeill is an Executive Director at Save the Children

Will Somerville is UK Director at Unbound Philanthropy

[rogerjharding]

Enough with the poshsplaining

Article for NPC’s (New Philanthropy Capital) series -  Walking The Talk -  exploring the diversity of UK charities and foundations. Available here: https://www.thinknpc.org/enough-with-the-poshsplaining/

FULL TEXT:

Enough with the poshsplaining

The young working class people we work with at RECLAIM don’t need the stats to know the sector has a class diversity problem. They hear it most times charity leaders open their mouths.

They regularly roll their eyes when they hear “disadvantaged”, “hard to reach” and the like. Always well meaning, but always the language of weakness working class people don’t use about ourselves.

Charities do brilliant things for people on low incomes (it’s why I’ve spent most of my career in them), and they’ve been on a long journey since Victorian moralising about ‘fallen women’ and the undeserving poor.

But that journey is far from complete and it shows. Take the widely sector-endorsed and brilliantly-intentioned recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur. In his opinion, people on low incomes risk lives that are ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Growing up on a low income is hard; I know that firsthand. It’s a constant source of stress and shame. But seriously – nasty? Brutish? I wonder if he said that to anyone’s face.

This is an extreme version of ‘poshsplaining’, but the phenomenon is commonplace.

When I worked at Shelter a few years ago I got us to ask groups of people facing serious housing problems to review a variety of charity campaigns and fundraising materials. As suspected, they weren’t huge fans. They – with good reason – called themselves ‘strong’, ‘resilient’, ‘hardworking’ and, crucially, ‘hidden’. The charities called them the ‘most vulnerable’.

Privilege makes you stupid because its blinds you to aspects of life. You need to work hard to see past it (I’m in the foothills of being less thick on structural racism, sexism and many other things), and it’s important we do.

If you’re poshsplaining you’re not simply failing to speak to the people you are trying to help, you’re driving them away and compounding their sense of shame. This is summed up brilliantly by a food recycling charity near us who gets it: ‘We’re definitely not a poverty project. We’re an environmental project. And there’s a reason for that. Everybody’s got pride’. Right-wing populists sadly get it too and often do a better job at speaking to some working class people’s pride than many charities.

But, partly thanks to the Brexit referendum shock, there is a growing movement within the sector to ensure charities take the next modernising step to tackle their class diversity problem. We’ll know if it’s working because we’ll all sound less like a 1960s sociology professor and more human.

‘Giving a voice to the voiceless’ is old fashioned. Get people from low income backgrounds involved in co-production. Better still, employs us and give us positions on boards. 1 in 4 people are categorised as in poverty right now – the pool of talent is enormous. Start monitoring class diversity too (so much easier than you’d think). If you’re a funder, join the conversation we’ve started with the Alex Ferry Foundation to explore how class is considered in funding decisions.

The hardest thing is creating a culture where people feel comfortable talking about their experiences. The charity sector does not employ or promote enough working class talent, but it does a bit. It’s telling then how few people from low income backgrounds feel comfortable publicly bringing their experience to their work. I know, it took me until I was a senior manager.

Experiences of adversity are too often seen as a ‘case study’ (deserving of some guilty sad face) rather than vital expertise it would be crazy to be missing from a team. This is why ‘social mobility’ isn’t enough. We don’t just need people from diverse backgrounds at all levels, we need them to be able to voice the experience that comes from that diversity. How we do that on class is something RECLAIM, together with Deeds and Words, are exploring in a new programme learning from approaches developed through the HIV movement and subsequent advances in the LGBT+ and gender equality movements. Come discuss it with us. Just don’t dare call us vulnerable when you do.

[rogerjharding]

Most Tory voters now oppose austerity — but will not join Corbyn on a march any time soon

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/most-tory-voters-now-oppose-austerity-but-will-not-join-corbyn-on-a-march-any-time-soon-2dnkb6t2h

FULL TEXT:

If I ask you to picture a tax and spend fan, who do you see? An idealistic campus radical on their way to the Momentum conference The World Transformed today? Perhaps their liberal lecturer with a Thomas Piketty under their arm.

You’re probably not instinctively reaching for an image of an over-55 Conservative voter. As is often its way, the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey wants you to look again.

Figures released today from NatCen’s BSA show that across Britain 60 per cent of us want the government to tax more so we can spend more on health, education and social benefits.

The last time support was this high it was 2002, Theresa May was cautioning Conservative party conference delegates that they risked being seen as the ‘nasty party’ and Gordon Brown was at the dispatch box pushing for a rise in National Insurance contributions to pay for the NHS.

Unsurprisingly, two thirds of Labour voters today want higher tax and spend. What is more surprising is that a majority (53 per cent) of Conservative voters now feel the same, another first since 2002.

While some quarters of the Conservative backbenches are hoping for post-Brexit tax cuts, Tory voters are not if that means cuts to public services. Just 4 per cent want taxes and spending cut. A similar proportion of Labour voters feel the same.

These results also question one of the 2017 General Election’s more seductive narratives: Jeremy Corbyn is left-wing; young people are more likely to vote for Corbyn’s Labour Party; therefore, younger people are more left-wing.

We find that support for more tax and spend is actually higher amongst those aged over 55 (65 per cent), than those 18-34 (54 per cent). How you view that from a Labour perspective depends greatly on whether you see risks or opportunities.

Labour polled just 31 per cent amongst the over 55s last year, against a landslide 56 per cent for the Conservatives in the same age group.

That means there’s a large number of older people who want more tax and spend but currently find themselves unwilling to support Labour. If Labour wants to win next time round, their strategists would do well to tackle this conundrum.

Support for more tax and spend has always tended to rise the longer we have a Conservative government and fall the longer there is a Labour one, reaching its lowest ever level in 2010.

So the question for the Conservatives is whether they should match this rising demand for public investment and whether there are additional votes in them doing so. Theresa May certainly shows signs of wanting to act with recent spending announcements on the NHS and new homes, but will it be enough?

The answer, of course, partly depends on whether Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is able to reach out to disaffected Conservatives. Public appetite for higher tax and spend was almost as high in 1997 when Labour delivered a crushing landslide victory.

But, before Labour people get too excited, it was higher still in late 1991 just before the party lost an election to a three-term Conservative government. Proof, if it were further needed, that elections are a lot more complex than who has the more popular economic policy.

The national mood on tax and spend is shifting. Parties would be wise to spend some of conference season thinking about how they might respond.

Roger Harding is Head of Public Attitudes at NatCen Social Research who produce the annual British Social Attitudes Survey

[rogerjharding]

Our political class is tearing itself apart, but the rest of us aren’t

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9edb5302-8471-11e8-b7ab-42d55e61ad8f

FULL TEXT:

Brexit has already cost us one government and this week it flirts with making that two. Meanwhile the Labour Party looks no less plagued by heated Brexit divisions.

If our political class is anything to go by, you would think we are a country at each other’s throats. But the British Social Attitudes survey reveals a place that is far more united.

This is not to say we don’t have political divides. As is now well known, your education level is the best guide to how you view Brexit; with graduates being much more supportive of the EU and immigration than those with few qualifications.

Equally, your age is the best predicator of whether you voted Conservative or Labour at the last election. These divides also show up elsewhere in the BSA report.

Graduates are more worried about climate change and the young take a dimmer view of women being harassed in the street. But, for all these findings, there are plenty of others that point to us seeing eye-to-eye more.

For a start, our trust in one another is at the highest level since we started measuring it in 1998. A majority (54 per cent) of us now say that in general we trust other people. A total of 42 per cent of us do admittedly prefer to note that you “can’t be too careful in dealing with people”, but this is lower than is suggested by the national picture that’s often painted.

We are increasingly on the same page when it comes to social issues. Back in the late Eighties almost half of us felt a woman’s job was to look after the home and family, and a man’s job to earn. That’s now just 8 per cent and the gap in these views between young and old people is closing fast. We see the same pattern in view on same sex relationships and abortion. If you are looking for a “culture war” you won’t find one here.

A whopping 86 per cent of us think the NHS has a funding problem and a clear majority would accept higher taxes to fix it. Which is just as well, given Phillip Hammond’s warning that the government’s recent NHS spending pledge makes tax rises inevitable.

We might even be united to a fault. While experts worry about the impact of climate change and the threat to millions of jobs caused by automation, most of us share a more relaxed view about it all. This isn’t to say we’re in denial that a problem exists: 93 per cent of us think climate change is happening and three quarters of us think machines will probably replace many jobs.

Most of us just seem to put our fingers in our ears when experts talk about the consequences. Only 25 per cent of us are very or extremely worried about climate change and just 10 per cent of us think machines will replace our own job.

Brexit might be throwing our politics into turmoil but on many issues the rest of us just quietly agree with one another. So if the week’s political Brexit divisions are getting you down, take heart from the common bonds you share with many fellow citizens. And save your concern for climate change and the robots coming for your job.

Roger Harding is Head of Public Attitudes at NatCen - Social Research

[rogerjharding]

What changing attitudes to the NHS mean for the Government

“NHS dissatisfaction jumps to a 10 year high, new @NuffieldTrust/@TheKingsFund analysis of the @NatCen British Social Attitudes survey shows. With the NHS now the no.1 political concern for the public, how concerned should the Government be: https://t.co/wjtqJMGwiT”

http://natcen.ac.uk/blog/the-conservatives-are-being-given-a-health-warning-by-gps

FULL TEXT BELOW

The Conservatives are being given a health warning by GPs

Don’t let the party tear itself apart by in-fighting on Europe and neutralise the NHS: two lessons Cameron and Osborne took from the long years of post-1997 wilderness.

The first is now very publicly on life support. The second isn’t as bad, but it is getting a stern warning from its GP with news today that public dissatisfaction with the NHS is at a 10-year high. The diagnosis is far from terminal, but it is a wake-up call.

Today’s British Social Attitudes data, collected by the National Centre for Social Research and analysed by the Kings Fund and Nuffield Trust, shows that public satisfaction has fallen 6% in the last year. Dissatisfaction is the highest since 2007 and near double what it was in 2014.

The top reasons given by the public are that it takes too long to get an appointment, there’s not enough staff and funding and the impact of ‘government reforms’. Satisfaction with GP services is at its lowest since the survey began in 1983.

It is easy now to forget how hard Cameron and Osborne tried to neutralise the perception that their party could not be trusted with the NHS. In the coalition years the NHS was spared the worst of austerity, despite this entailing deeper cuts for nearly everything else. There was the infamous promise of no more ‘pointless reorganisations’.

Cameron was so committed to changing his party’s image on the issue that rather than shy away from it, his 2010 election campaign was launched with the statement that he now led 'the party of the NHS'. By contrast, Labour got so good at attacking the Conservatives on the NHS that they’ve been dialing it in for years; 2017’s day before polling slogan that there's ’24 hours to save the NHS’ was a carbon copy of nearly every Labour polling eve leaflet since 1997.

But by 2010 those Labour attacks were losing their force in the face of Cameron’s new tack. The strategy worked; NHS satisfaction was largely stable for much of the coalition years despite an initial dip in 2010.

Perhaps because of this, the NHS slowly dropped down the list of issues the public thought were important to the country and some polls even had more people trusting the Tories than Labour to run the service.

The data today shows those days are now gone. The NHS has shot back to the very top of the issues we most care about, the Conservatives lag well behind Labour on the issue and crucially public satisfaction is falling.

However, this isn’t yet terminal. Satisfaction is down but it’s still higher than it was in 2007. The data also points to two areas that might help turn things around. Firstly, the starkest drop in satisfaction is in GP services; the part of the NHS people engage with most. Arresting that decline, especially when the government was so prominently involved in GP-associated reforms, much be part of improving the overall picture.  

Secondly, people do recognise that the NHS needs more money and indications from the BSA show they might just be prepared to pay for it. Last year the proportion of people who want to see more tax and spend overtook those who want to keep things the same for the first time in a decade.

Now, wanting more tax in principle and being happy to actually cough up are two very different things. But it does show that the tide is turning, and with Labour promising significant investment in the NHS, it might be one the Conservatives cannot afford to resist.

[rogerjharding]

Why are there so few working class voices in our public life, and how do we fix it?

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/roger-harding/why-is-speaking-up-for-wo_b_18097046.html

FULL TEXT 

As parties’ annual talking shops get into full-swing where are the working class voices?

I don’t expect the next CEO of the Fawcett Society to be a man, or the next head of Operation Black Vote to look like me. Thanks to decades of toil by people in the women’s and BAME empowerment movements, most of us now understand the importance of a place at the table being taken by those traditionally denied a seat. But when it comes to Britain’s working class, we too often find the job of representing our reality has gone to some sharp-elbowed middle (or even upper) class dude who seems to think we can’t speak (or write, or organise) for ourselves.

New NatCen research out this week shows that despite a return to two party politics, Britain’s political tribes are increasing split along lines determined by age and degree of social liberalism, not class and the economics of left versus right. And yet class remains the dominant story in much of the commentary about this election and listening to it has, for this child of a council house, increasingly felt like watching a Pathe newsreel talking about an exotic lost tribe.

While all sides are concur readily and noisily on the need to take working class people more seriously, you’re unlikely to find this in practice during the party conferences. Over the next fortnight, two parties whose membership is predominately middle class will listen to their privately educated leaders make appeals to working people who’ll be minorities at the events. Notable exceptions aside, the voices politics will amplify this next fortnight will predominantly be those who grew up middle class. This isn’t to have an especial go at the current leaders; both parties have had their own class issues for some time now.

The disappearance of class in our politics wouldn’t be such a problem if it no longer shaped so much of what happens to us, but The Social Mobility Commission’s work clearly demonstrates how being from a modest background anchors all but the fortunate few to the low pay of our parents. Meanwhile, the very top jobs are still the preserve of people who went to private school, with the privately educated accounting for 71% of judges, 55% of civil service heads, 43% of newspaper columnists and 33% of MPs.

That this is the case partly explains why recent electoral surprises have led to a whole new market for people with privilege explaining those who don’t to those with even more. Enter ‘the prole whisperer’, Phil McDuff’s term for those who make me swear in the vernacular whenever they pop up on Newsnight to explain why the natives are restless.

This is not to say that class is the only diversity measure that counts - far from it. Every disabled or LGBT or BAME or female (or frankly non-London) voice that gets a hearing is getting cheered to the rafters in our house too. But I do hope I’ve finally been able to empathise with what women mean when they talk about mansplaining, given what happens under my skin every time I get a lecture about understanding Britain’s working class from somebody who had more spent on a half a year’s worth of their schooling than my family lived on for a year, despite my single mum working every hour.

The lack of diversity in general around the country’s top tables means those missing get patronised and stereotyped. With class this means being portrayed by the right as one-dimensional beer and bingo lovers who live next door to benefit cheats. From the left, the language too readily has the air of philanthropy rather than solidarity. To give an example, I’ve regularly heard working people refer to themselves as struggling or hard-up, but the language of weakness and dispossession is solely used by some well-meaning colleagues in the charity sector. I suggest you ask my mum about her ‘vulnerability’ having raised two kids solo having been widowed in her 20s and see how far you get.

It’s not all bad; our clumsy handling of class does bring some light relief. My favourite genre is the anecdotes every middle class northerner, Scot or BAME person seems to have about meeting a middle class white southerner. How are they supposed to explain they got in to Oxford after a brilliant education paid for by doctor or lawyer parents when their new friend is giving them a face that says ‘well done on how far you’ve come Billy Elliot’?

I don’t want to seem unkind. It’s great we’re discussing class more. I also don’t want to suggest for a second that middle class people shy away from helping the causes of working people. Any progress that has been made has typically been due to working and middle class people working hand in hand for change. And crucially I don’t want to indulge this idea that class politics and ‘identity politics’ are in competition. The portrayal of working people as all white, straight and bigoted is one of the more idiotic and dangerous stereotypes about.

Instead, we just need to ensure working class people are visible and audible at every level of our political debate. To do that we need to learn from the great campaigning on gender, race, disability and LGBT issues, and start treating class like a diversity question.

That means measuring it and holding employers and media outlets to account. It’s harder than measuring race or disability but not beyond our wit. Here, organisations whose missions or mandates encompass poverty, representation or public policy have a particular responsibility to take a lead.

Next we need to call out the worst of those playing the #prolewhisperer. Borrowing from the campaigns to stop all-male discussion panels (#manels), should we really still be holding debates and studio discussions on working class issues that don’t actually feature someone who knows about it personally as well as professionally?

Finally, people raised on low incomes need to cheerlead each other into speaking about their experiences. It won’t be easy - it’s taken me until my mid-30s to clock that having ‘a chip on their shoulder’ is how we tell working class kids their anger isn’t legitimate, just as we warn women about being seen to be bitchy or dislikeable.

Class was largely missing in the election, like it’s absent from our politics and our public life. It’s time to shine a light on it, but we have to do that by giving working class people a platform and not a lecture.

[rogerjharding]

Which party can reach beyond their comfort zone?

You might expect a series of close election results to leave us concluding that people found the choices finely balanced. However, for some politicians and commentators on the left and right, the...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roger-harding-which-party-can-reach-beyond-their-comfort-zone-f9dxh825v

FULL TEXT:

You might expect a series of close election results to leave us concluding that people found the choices finely balanced. However, for some politicians and commentators on the left and right, the recent election and Brexit vote was a signifier of revolutionary change in British attitudes that will sweep all before it.

You might therefore expect this year’s NatCen British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey to throw up some dicey results. Not quite. There are some interesting findings, and while some views are definitely shifting, we shouldn’t get carried away. Thankfully the British public seem to be a little more considered than some of the voices in our public life.

In a world of near endless hot-takes and surveys, the BSA enters a more crowded field each year, so it’s important to briefly say why it’s different. First, it’s been around for a long time, tracking attitudes to key issues since 1983. The extent of the survey also allows us to place everyone on very useful left-right and libertarian-authoritarian scales. Second, its sampling is gold standard. Its full random probability sample makes it one of the world’s leading attitude trackers, even though it means that fieldwork takes months.

So, if something dramatic is happening, the BSA will show it. There is nothing seismic in there, but broadly and importantly we do seem keener on more tax and spend, as tough as ever on law and order, more socially liberal and very divided on immigration. For the Conservatives this will mean needing to face up to a country tiring of austerity, and one becoming more sympathetic to benefit claimants. But let’s not overstate this, the demand for more tax and spend is up but not close to the highs reached in the 1990s and early 2000s when New Labour began their spending increases. The Cameron modernisation of the Tory party’s approach to issues like same-sex marriage will also need to continue, if they are to stay in tune with a country rapidly becoming more at ease with difference in how people live their lives. For Labour, the challenge will be in appealing to the majority who want a government strong on national security, and specifically older working class people’s toughness on dealing with crime.

For both, coming to a settled view on immigration that carries the country will be really hard. For Leave voters especially, our data is clear that the Brexit choice was driven by concerns about immigration. On this issue we are one of the most divided countries in Europe, with younger graduates much more positive about the impact of immigration than older people with fewer qualifications. Faced with this stark divide, a compromise policy risks pleasing no one.

The BSA deserves more analysis than a quick snapshot can give, but there is reassuring news for both parties. What happens next will very much depend on which of them can move beyond their comfort zone to build the broader church that breaks our election impasse.

Roger Harding is Head of Public Attitudes at the National Centre for Social Research

[rogerjharding]

What our shifting attitudes mean for our political leaders

Published in the Telegraph comment section, and available here - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/28/tories-take-heart-new-survey-shows-voters-still-profoundly-conservative/

[The choices of headlines and pictures were the papers]

[rogerjharding]

Over half of us don't feel represented by a party in this election. New NatCen research reveals who is politically homeless.

(Published by the Huffington Post here)

This election will be book-ended by two defiant moments of national unity. With the first, who can have failed to have been inspired by the response to barbaric terror of young joyous girls belting out Don’t Look Back in Anger in Manchester, and the impassioned demand in London that we keep flirting and drinking gin? Then, little over a week after the election result, we’ll have the beautiful Great Get Together celebrations to mark the anniversary of the loss of Jo Cox by reaffirming her belief that ‘we have far more in common with each other than things that divide us’.

Both moments speak to our unity and defiance, and our desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These events draw from and give to the national story of who we are and who we wish to be. They show us at our very best.

How stark it is then that the election barges its way in-between both moments carrying little of that unity. Elections demand choices so it would be naïve to expect harmony, but it’s worrying how little we see ourselves reflected in the options. A survey by NatCen released today shows that over half of us (56%) don’t feel represented by the parties in this election.

On the near-horizon Brexit stands as one of the most challenging issues a government has had to navigate since WW2. It coincides with a heightened terrorist threat and a continued squeeze on living standards for many. Together they demand a clear and settled national conversation about our future, yet Thursday’s result cannot deliver that when so many of us don’t feel in the race.

Don’t confuse this for apathy; the vast majority (84%) of us care who wins. If the balance of polls is correct, that winner will be Theresa May. If the recent Labour poll surge turns out to be illusionary and the results conform to longer-term trends, that win will be significant.

The Conservatives’ lead over Labour is perhaps explained by it being the working class, council and housing association tenants and those on the centre-left in our survey who are most likely to feel politically homeless. Our survey suggests that working class people are now almost as likely vote Tory as for Labour.

It also provides a further caution for those inclined to argue that we need a new party of liberal centrists, despite the dismissive treatment our voting system hands out to third parties. Those feeling unrepresented also tend to lean to the right of our liberty-authority scale.

Thursday’s result could give the impression that the country has made a clear decision about its future, but our work suggests otherwise. If Theresa May does win significantly, her challenge will be to represent the majority of the country who do not see themselves in her government. If Labour lose, the party’s leadership team will need to account for why they have increasingly become an irrelevance to the working class Corbyn isn’t of, but is so keen to represent.

For the rest of us, regardless of the result, I hope we continue to feel inspired and represented by the singers and the flirts.

[rogerjharding]

11 lessons for campaigners from the history of the welfare state

A talk given to the Save the Children 'Change History' series

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2017/04/08/historyofwelfare/

[rogerjharding]

How the campaign to ban letting agent fees was won

http://www.charitycomms.org.uk/articles/what-we-can-learn-from-the-campaign-to-ban-letting-agent-fees

Full text:

What we can learn from the campaign to ban letting agent fees

Last week Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, announced in his Autumn Statement that the government would be banning letting agent fees for tenants. 

Just a week before, few would have predicted this. For years the idea of a ban faced political reluctance and very vocal opposition from industry. So how did we get from there to the win we’re celebrating now? 

2010-12 – Identifying the issue

Our services, supporters and surveys first began throwing up that this was a major concern for renters in the early 2010s. Which?, the Resolution Foundation and the Office of Fair Trading all looked in general at letting agent poor practice but the issue – and fees specifically – was not yet on the political agenda.

2013 – The strategy and campaign launch

Despite people’s anger on the issue, we made sure the strategy was hard-headed and focused on winning. And like with almost everything else, we knew evidence of the problem alone was insufficient to shift things. 

Although one in five of us now rents privately, renters aren’t seen as a powerful voter group. We therefore had to amplify and concentrate the power they have, demonstrating this was an issue for all renters – not just the poorest. It also meant focusing on those geographic areas where renters are numerous enough to make waves. Finally we had to show this solution was simple and cost free for the Exchequer.  

With this in mind we stated by experimenting with a media-friendly mystery shopping investigation revealing the extortionate fees tenants were being charged, and a social-friendly comic video imagining how customers in a coffee shop would react if they were met with hidden charges. We used every moment as a chance to recruit thousands of renters to the campaign. 

At the same time we released a policy report calling for a ban and conducted parliamentary lobbying in support of John Healey’s private members bill, calling for better competition, choice and standards in the letting agents industry. By the end of the year we had raised sufficient awareness of the issue and were supported by renters, the media – and even some MPs – but the battle was far from won. 

2014-15 – Small wins 

We were able to release evidence showing banning fees in Scotland in 2012 did not cause a spark in rents as many feared. Fears were vocalised again last week, but which we were able to rebut with clear research. 

We worked to try to get an amendment to the Consumer Rights Bill to ban fees. And although we weren’t successful, the act did bring in transparency requirements meaning that letting agents could be fined for not displaying their fees properly. 

2016 – The big win 

With lots of other organisations picking up the mantle, including Citizens Advice and Vicky Spratt at the Debrief, we were able to take a step back from public campaigning to concentrate on making the policy case behind the scenes.

This included continually pushing the ask as part of our wider efforts on improving the private rented sector and showing that more modest reforms weren’t working, intensive engagement with a government working group on improving renting and supporting Baroness Olly Grender on her private member’s bill. 

Beyond 2016 – Four key lessons 

It’s impossible to include all of the tactics, people and organisations that led up to last week’s campaign win, but we can draw some important lessons for future campaigns.

1. Big wins need a big coalition

As demonstrated above, Shelter were not alone in achieving this. Thousands of people joined Shelter’s and other’s campaigns and made the momentum unstoppable. The changes wouldn’t have happened without Citizens Advice, Debrief, the Resolution Foundation, Which? and many others. These changes also needed the support of pioneering private landlords, companies, journalists and, of course, politicians.

2. Campaigning works. Especially when you focus on what wins

Seems obvious, but you can doubt it sometimes. It’s easy to fall into the trap of self-indulgent, self-righteous and ineffective shouting. Shouting is fine, but only if it helps win. Last week’s win stemmed from hard-headed consumer campaigning strategy and policy thinking. They involved a lot of vocal campaigning, but also behind the scenes constructive discussions with government and the industry too.

3. Change often needs political pioneers

Our politics is far from perfect, but big change often needs it. Despite this, campaigners can too often easily slip into a lazy and dangerous anti-politics. On this issue various Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians deserve credit for putting the issue on the table before the last election, as do various Conservatives and civil servants who’ve been making the case more recently, driving last week’s change. While “charity campaigners need not be partisans in politics, we should always be partisans for politics".

4. Strategy is a shared exercise

If I’m honest, and if it were solely up to me, I’m not sure Shelter would have started the letting agent fee campaign when it did. I was worried we couldn’t win on this and other fronts at the same time. Thankfully many other people at Shelter at the time thought otherwise. Good strategy doesn’t just need a good variety of voices for buy in, but to make it stronger, and on fees I’m very happy to have been proved wrong. 

So whilst we still have a long road to travel in our mission to end bad housing and homelessness, last week made me ever surer we can get there. 

Last week was a big win for all the renters who will no longer need to pay extortionate and unnecessary fees every time they move. And it’s an even bigger win for the people who won’t now face £500-700 letting fees tipping them into a spiral of pay day loans just because they’re finding somewhere to live. Less significantly, but still importantly, it’s also a win for the power of campaigning too.

[rogerjharding]

What should we expect from a home?

This piece in Prospect magazine explains how Shelter tried to get back to what home really means and turn that into a powerful new way to campaign on the problem of homelessness and bad housing. The result was the Living Home Standard.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/other/what-do-people-need-from-a-home

[rogerjharding]

Interview with Creative Review - Lessons from 50 years of Shelter’s campaigning

A chance to reflect on how Shelter’s campaigning and creative work has evolved over 50 years and to explore the campaigning approach we’ve tried to foster recently 

See here: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/shelter-at-50/

FULL TEXT:

Shelter at 50 – campaigns, communication and the ongoing fight for housing

29th September 2016

Shelter has fought to raise awareness of homelessness and housing issues in the UK since the late 1960s. As the charity marks its 50th year, we look at how it has communicated its aims over that time and why, as a new crisis emerges, its work remains as vital as ever

In 1966, on the evening of November 16, BBC1 screened Ken Loach’s television drama, Cathy Come Home. Written by Jeremy Sandford and broadcast as part of The Wednesday Play series, it brought the harsh reality of Britain’s slums into living rooms across the country. Blurring the boundary between fiction and social documentary, the film ended with a caption: “All the events in this film took place in Britain within the last 18 months” and a series of national statistics – 12,500 homeless; 4,000 children in care.

Just two weeks later, Shelter: the National Campaign for the Homeless was launched by Des Wilson and Bruce Kenrick. Capitalising on the groundswell of emotion roused by Loach’s hard-hitting film, which was seen by an audience of 12m, the organisation intended to give voice not only to those on the streets, but to those living in the kind of rundown and overcrowded housing that had featured in Cathy’s story – people that the charity called ‘the hidden homeless’.

Like Loach and Sandford, the founders of Shelter realised that by simply telling people’s stories they could move others to act. Taking over a full page in The Times, the group outlined the reasons behind its emergence: it would work to raise awareness of homelessness and the terrible housing conditions in many parts of the country, but also attempt to generate money for stretched housing associations that would enable families to be rehoused securely.

While, today, Shelter still works to combat homelessness directly, its aims and focus have shifted over the intervening years – with its fundraising methods, campaigns and identity evolving to reflect this. And 50 years on from its founding, the charity is now dealing with a new crisis – the result of an unprecedented shortage of housing, a generation priced out of home ownership and the continuing prevalence of substandard living conditions across the UK.

It marks its half century not with a celebration, of course, but with a look back at what it has achieved to date and a refocusing of its efforts in campaigning on behalf of those in need. Certainly, in recent years, as the problems escalate, the issue of housing has crept up the political agenda. Its visibility in 2016 is thanks in part to Shelter’s long-term commitment and hard work.

“Shelter certainly wasn’t the first charity to do campaigning, but I think it’s fair to say it was one of a new generation of modern campaigning charities using, arguably, ‘shock’ approaches that other perhaps more traditional organisations had shied away from,” says Roger Harding, Shelter’s Director of Communications, Policy and Campaigns. “[It was] very much part of the younger generation of the 1960s who were protesting against some of the injustices of their day. Shelter not only told human stories but they combined those with more shock and creative tactics that are now pretty commonplace in campaigning.”

Shelter’s early dynamism even saw the emergence of tactical approaches that would these days be labelled as ‘guerilla’. “They anonymously booked a stall at The Ideal Home Show in the [late] 60s and put in a slum property set-up, rather than the ‘ideal home’,” says Harding. “They took out notable full-page ads that were very striking and so on. At the time, these very much broke the mould.”

From the outset, Shelter made use of powerful imagery to get its point across. Nick Hedges, a young photographer who had recently graduated from Birmingham College of Art, was commissioned by Wilson to document some of the families living in the country’s post-war slums and the result is one of the most significant social records of the 1960s (an interview with Hedges about his work for Shelter will feature in a forthcoming ‘Shelter at 50′ post on CR). Hedges’ ability to gain the trust of the people he had come to photograph enabled him to record their dignity in the face of unimaginable hardship. His unflinching work was integral to the charity’s beginnings and has just recently been exhibited again to mark Shelter’s 50th anniversary in some of the key cities Hedges visited: Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.

In 2016, Shelter is combating a more complex problem, however. “When we were founded we were pointing at whole slum areas in cities, very large spaces where the housing was very decrepit, whereas now the housing crisis is much more of a hidden problem,” says Harding. “We’ve got families in hostels, people having to sofa surf, people facing significant issues with their benefits and so on … it’s hard to paint on such a grand scale as the slums.” Yet while the disparate nature of the problem has meant there are more issues to hone in on, Harding believes  that, at its core, Shelter still reacts to a tried and tested method.

“What we’ve tried to do, and what I think you’ll see over the evolution of Shelter’s visual and creative work, is that we’ve continued to tell human stories, but that we’ve strived to become ever more empathetic in the way that we do it – and make it very much about this being a problem for everyone,” he says.

“It affects people up and down the income scale, up and down the country. One of the reasons for doing that – in the campaigning sense – is to reach more people, which propels it up the political agenda. But it also reduces the stigma of the issue. One of the problems we face with our services is that homelessness is horrific, it is difficult to go through and therefore is difficult for any of us to admit, even to ourselves, that that may be starting to happen.”

The hard truth of this is something that Shelter’s work with agency Leagas Delaney has attempted to drive home. “A much more prominent message for us has been, ‘there’s no shame in this happening to you’,” says Harding. “We’ve broadened the range of stories that we use; we’re no longer just about the most acute situations.”

While Shelter can still deliver a punch in its work, Harding believes that the real shock of today is in the ordinariness of the crisis: it could happen to anyone. Recent campaign work has included targeting people with children, for example, making the point that this generation will struggle to buy their first home and inevitably rely on ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’. (In 2014, Shelter worked out that when all family lending was added up, this ‘bank’ would constitute the 11th largest provider in the UK). Similarly, another campaign applied the rate of increase in house prices to common consumer goods – in posters and print ads, the new costs of milk and bread, for example, reached absurdist levels.

This new thinking is delivered within some old applications, however. Repetition of message is key to it being effective, says Harding. “Repeat it until you’re bored of it and it sticks with your audience. The interesting thing we’ve found is that it sparks more creativity, not less, because after the first couple of years we’d exhausted the more obvious ways to highlight there’s a housing crisis … you’re forced to go way beyond the first few ideas that pop up in a brainstorm.”

So after 50 years of work, what’s next for Shelter as it endures one of its toughest periods to date? “It’s a useful moment to look back and celebrate the successes we have had,” says Harding. “The slums have gone, we have made huge advances in terms of housing need, even if the problem is far from fixed. And it’s also good to be reflective – where are the areas we’ve been more successful, where can we do more?” Furthermore, Shelter is also looking to broaden out and engage with the ‘positives’ of home in its next big campaign.

“There is a danger, for all charities particularly, that you focus exclusively on the problem, rather than taking the time to celebrate the great successes you’ve had,” says Harding. “And also the fact that what you’re fighting for is a brilliant thing, there are few things more brilliant than ‘home’. So what we’ve done is worked closely with our corporate partner, British Gas, to find out from the public what home means to them – and [ask] them to share those ideas, so we get a sense of what we’re all fighting for. But we also want to take those views and try and build them up into a ‘standard’ of what a reasonable home looks like in the 21st century.”

Shelter is set to create for the home what the ‘living wage’ is for incomes, says Harding. The Living Home Standard will launch in mid-October as a new level from which Shelter can assess the number of people who aren’t in a home of that standard – the aim being, says Harding, “to get that number down to as near to zero as possible”.

Alongside the Standard will be a new, more positive campaign on the country’s need for affordable homes, Harding adds. This, too, reflects a new kind of campaigning: warmer, more human and emotional. “People are looking for optimism and we’re positive about how we can fix this,” he says. “It’s more human than some of the creative we’ve used – there’s a sense of ‘this is an awful problem but it’s not a problem we have to live with’. If we bind together and put pressure where needed, we can hopefully fix this. So we don’t have to have any more birthdays which aren’t celebratory.”

During the 2015 general election, ‘housing’ became a top five issue among the public and was visible in the top manifesto pledges (it was notably absent in the 2010 election, Harding says). So despite the obvious problems still to tackle, the housing crisis is finally being talked about more widely.

“I think we’ve made a huge amount of progress in terms of the public and political consciousness,” says Harding. “I’d rather be in a position where we’re debating what is the right way to fix the problem, rather than a situation where the problem isn’t even being discussed.” Thanks to Shelter, this kind of talk will hopefully lead to continued dialogue, action and even change.