The past flashes into view. It is 1956. Britain has led an Anglo-French expedition to retake the Suez Canal which has been nationalised by the Egyptian President Abdul Nasser. America has forced Britain to abandon its expedition. The humiliation exposes our faltering role in the world. The British empire has gone and our economy is failing.

The solution of the governing class is to join the EEC. But, in 1963, Charles de Gaulle refuses Britain’s entry and warns, “the nature, the structure, the conjuncture that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals”. Once we finally join, this difference never substantially changes.

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs a De Gaulle

By Peter Franklin

Now we are leaving. Brexit, the controversies of immigration, and the fraying of relations between the four countries of the United Kingdom, are symptoms of the long and chronic unwinding of Britain’s imperial role and identity. Just as the Union was constructed out of the growth of empire, so its post-Brexit reconstitution will need to evolve out of the making of the UK’s post-imperial role in the world.

We are in the early stage of a new political era. Boris Johnson exploited the opportunity of Brexit to realign British politics. In doing so, he inadvertently broke with its liberal consensus and changed its primary agents. Agents are those forces, groups or classes that play an active role in producing a political settlement. Over the past 40 years, four primary agents have determined British politics and reshaped the country: globalisation, the rise of the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. 

These are now being superseded. The new agents of the coming political era are the antithesis of the liberal global settlement. They are the nation state, the working class, social conservatism, and unconstrained democracy. “What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary.”[1.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986, p. 195] They were forged in the political battle around Brexit and they belong to the winning coalition of Tory provincials and working class.

This coalition promised a profound shift in the balance of political forces, but it found no representation in Westminster’s two-party political system. In 2019, the Conservatives succeeded in winning it over and took the wind out of the sails of nationalist populism. Victory however remains tentative.

Suggested reading

2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

The new political era begins with the estrangement of the governing class from the country. Neither a liberal progressive Labour Party, nor a Conservative Party dominated by market liberalism has the necessary politics to forge a new hegemony. Both parties are products of the liberal settlement which favoured state driven, technocratic and legalistic responses to political problems. Institution and nation building democratic politics is an alien concept. Neither has shown the capacity to think big and strategically about Britain’s future role in the world.

No 10 appears to understand the new political imperatives, the Conservative Party does not. Conservatives have put capital and the market before democracy and society. They have sold off key national strategic assets and favoured global trade over protecting the national economy.

Their treatment of the working class has been callous and destructive. George Osborne’s austerity was born of a deep class arrogance and indifference toward people in need. Their admirable conservative disposition — which valued country, the small platoons of society, and family relationships — was crushed beneath the Hayekian liberal juggernaut. The Conservatives have been a heartless party.

Corbynism, meanwhile, was supposed to be a decisive break from New Labour and the neo-liberal consensus, as embodied by those four primary agents, globalisation, the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. In fact, it only succeeded in breaking with market liberalism, while reinforcing Labour’s drift toward a globally, socially liberal, progressive party of the middle class.

Corbynism with its focus on the individual and the state is the unruly offspring of New Labour and a product of the liberal political settlement. It misunderstands social conservativism and holds it in contempt, denouncing it in a litany of Maoist vitriol as racist, misogynist, fascist, imperialist, and white nationalist. Under Corbyn, Labour has been indifferent to England, hostile toward the idea of the nation, and believes patriotism is jingoism. Its claim to democracy has been compromised by the many in its ranks who spent three years undermining the Leave vote. It has now lost the majority of the working class.

And yet, the future of our country rests upon these two parties rising to the historic challenge of re-establishing the foundations of our nationhood and Union.

Suggested reading

It's time for the doom-mongers to clock off

By Tom Chivers

The first task is to restore a national economy that prioritises work and wages, families, and local place, with the purpose of correcting the class and regional inequalities of productivity, wealth and income. The kind of centrally imposed, city region devolution with limited powers, exemplified by the Conservative’s Northern Powerhouse, will have only a limited impact.

It will require a national economic development strategy which focuses on improving and modernising the everyday economy of child and elder care, health and wellbeing, education, utilities, and the low wage sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and supermarkets which sustain daily life.

These are the basic building blocks that form the foundations of economy and society. The everyday economy is the key to a one nation politics that bridges the divisions between towns, cities and regions, and between different classes and ethnic groups.

The second task is to instil a social and democratic politics of belonging about how we are to live together in our multi-ethnic, multi-national Union. A shared sense of national identity is fundamental to social cohesion and upholding our democracy and the equality of citizen’s rights and obligations. It involves re-founding the United Kingdom to secure it for the long term; deepening and extending democracy, notably in England, in order to strengthen the accountability of governing elites; and reforming our structures of governance to devolve power and resources to regions and localities.

And thirdly Britain must define its role in the world.

China is becoming a major global power. Russia is asserting itself as a pivot between Europe and Asia, but leaning toward the latter. Economic and geopolitical power is shifting east of Suez. The Atlantic as the fulcrum of global influence is giving way to the Pacific. The strategic competition between the US and China will define geo-politics in the 21st Century.

Suggested reading

A manifesto to rescue Labour from irrelevance

By Paul Embery

Globalisation will not be predicated on our western interests. The time when Europeans could determine the course of world affairs is passing. In this global interregnum Britain is well placed to construct a role for itself as a strategic actor. It is not the global power it once was but nor is it in decline. It is well placed to exert strategic influence if there is the political will and capability.

Our Union has been the most successful in the world, but it needs re-founding to safeguard its future. England is one of the oldest nation states, but it needs a democratic refit. The economy has suffered from the uncertainty of Brexit and its structural weaknesses create social division and high levels of class and regional inequality. It needs reform. Britain remains a world power with an economy and technology to match but we are diminished by a governing culture of decline management.

On Friday we take our first step into the world unencumbered by empire. Verhofstadt is wrong. Globalisation has slowed in response to the disruptive impact of hyper-globalisation. Western democracies are looking to restore their nation states and repair their domestic social contracts with their alienated voters. Britain is leading the way, overcoming populism to forge a democratic nationhood, open to building a strong relationship with our European neighbours and further afield. It is time to end the doom-mongering. The future is in our hands.

The most feted name in television right now is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of the television series Fleabag, and the writer of the first series of the equally exalted Killing Eve. Waller-Bridge deserves the praise heaped upon her. That she is a woman is also cause for celebration, given the scores of male writers that have long inhabited TV’s lauded list. But the fact that she is the privately-educated granddaughter of a baronet is hard to ignore. Since Fleabag ended, the protagonist’s poshness, and her “relatability” to non-posh viewers, has been a matter of exhaustive online debate. But more significant, surely, is how Waller-Bridge’s privileged status has helped clear her path to success.

Last year, a report from Create London and the charitable foundation Arts Emergency looked at class and inequality in the cultural industries, and found that only 12.4% of those working across film, TV and radio had “working-class” origins. The figures were even worse for BAME workers, at just 4.2%. A review from the media regulator Ofcom, published last autumn, offered a marginally brighter picture, noting that “diversity and inclusion are an increasingly core focus of the BBC’s agenda”, and that there is a “more nuanced approach to understanding and measuring representation and portrayal”. It did, however, acknowledge that there is more work to be done.

Further reading

The invisibility of disability on screen

By Ian Birrell

The problem of TV’s class ceiling can be found at every level of the food chain, from the commissioning editors whose decisions are influenced by their own biases and experience, to the script editors second-guessing the commissioning editors’ tastes, all the way down to those in graduate schemes and entry-level roles, often working for peanuts with the help of parental support.

Lisa McGee, the Northern Irish writer of Channel 4’s BAFTA-nominated Derry Girls, says that in the early stages of her career she had assumed “you just work hard, and talent will out”. But her attitude changed. “I have had my eyes opened. It’s not just the writers, it’s the people in the room with the writers. I find myself in rooms with script editors who are all lovely, clever people, but a lot have gone to Cambridge and Oxford, and that affects the storytelling. And the accents you’re hearing are pretty revealing. I’m conscious that a lot of people don’t understand what I’m saying.”

At the heart of the debate is authenticity: Shane Meadows, the son of a fish-and-chip-shop-worker mother and a lorry-driving father, doubtless knows of what he speaks when writing about working-class lives on housing estates in his This is England series. At the other end of the social strata, you sense that Lord Fellowes of West Stafford knew a thing or two about the early 20^th-century aristocracy before he sat down to write Downton Abbey. While no one’s suggesting you have to be a space traveller to write a sci-fi drama, an emotional connection to your subject is broadly seen as good thing.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

There is an increasing number of initiatives aimed at opening the door to less privileged young writers – last year the BBC launched two schemes, one offering training to 50 school students to help them secure BBC roles, and another, based in Cardiff, offering ten traineeships to “high potential raw talent”. Meanwhile the Edinburgh TV Festival has launched the 2019 New Voice Award designed to make the industry accessible to marginalised writers.

But as well-intentioned as these schemes are, the broader impact is negligible. As Lisa Holdsworth, writer of Midsomer Murders and Call the Midwife, and the deputy chair of Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, explains:

“The things that get in the way of diversity, gender equality and multiple voices on television from different social backgrounds are all down the same thing: it’s people getting commissioned on a nod and a wink, and the sense that people who are not white, cis-gendered, and middle-class are a risk.”

Holdsworth says that the Guild has spoken to scores of commissioners who “genuinely think they have open doors. They think it doesn’t matter whose name is on the front of the script just as long as it’s a good story”.

What they are not doing, however, is looking at how the scripts land on their desks. “You’ve got to get through lots of gatekeepers before you’re even close to the door,” Holdsworth explains. “They need to look at the people who are bringing the work to them. That’s production companies, development producers and in-house editors, all of whom are looking for lower risk stuff. So that’s a narrowing of the field right there.”

Further reading

Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

A further narrowing of the field occurs in the actors who make it to the screen. It pays to be privileged. In a recent interview, the actor Vicky McClure, currently on our screens as DI Kate Fleming in Line of Duty, spoke of the advantages enjoyed by actors who have never faced financial hardship. “I have friends who are millionaires. I have friends who are piss-poor. I know that at the end of the day you can’t help what you are born into, that it doesn’t make you less talented… But I just find it frustrating that if you haven’t got funds, you haven’t got the same opportunities.”

For young actors and writers attending state school, the doors begin to close during secondary education, with subjects such as drama, music and theatre studies the first to be squeezed as budgets come under pressure. Small wonder our actors and TV executives are still disproportionately privately educated.

Once you’ve overcome those barriers, there is also the problem of typecasting. In 2016, the actress Maxine Peake complained: “If you’re a northerner, you only play one character and that’s northern… Nobody says, ‘Oh, Judi Dench is doing it posh again’.” Eyebrows were raised when the Eton-educated actor Dominic West was asked to adopt a Yorkshire accent for his role as Valjean in Les Misérables. It would, said the director, help audiences understand the social divisions in Victor Hugo’s novel and the character’s earthy, peasant roots. Because, while TV viewers may not be au fait with the literary classics, we all know that anyone north of Peterborough lives in a bog and subsists on a diet of raw turnip.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

There is a distinction, too, in how plots vary according to the backgrounds of the protagonists. The storylines of working-class characters and are invariably issue-led, and involve trauma or deprivation – recent examples include Three Girls, about the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, starring Lesley Sharp and Maxine Peake; and Happy Valley, with Sarah Lancashire. In both dramas the protagonists’ class is integral to their identity.

“I would love us to be able to tell the stories that anyone can tell, only with working-class characters,” explains McGee. “But it’s as if being working-class has become a genre of its own.”

Inequality off-screen is actively reinforced by the stereotyping on-screen, an endless cycle of marginalisation and ghettoisation – and misunderstanding. This seems especially galling in what is, we are forever being told, a golden era of television.

But as arts budgets shrink and risk-averse TV networks look for guaranteed hits, it’s always the supposedly niche or challenging work that is first to go. If the aim of art is truly to imitate life, though, then the networks need to do more to dismantle the barriers encountered by those unable to rely on benevolent parents or a fallback job in the City. A lot of white middle-class types working behind the scenes making key decisions inevitably leads to a lot of stories about the white middle-class – or, worse still, stories of other cultures and classes told through the same old middle-class lens. And TV is the poorer for it.

Marx saw class as an economic category: your class was determined by your place in the system of production. But Marx also believed that there is more to class than your economic role. He distinguished the class ‘in itself’ from the class ‘for itself’, and this ‘for itself’ makes its own special addition to the ‘class struggle’. The proletarian who builds identity, culture, politics and relationships around a working-class status becomes an additional, and decisive, danger to the ruling bourgeoisie.

Just such a class-conscious proletarian was my father, who, having been brought up in great hardship in the Manchester slums, never lost his deep attachment to the community into which he had been born. But it was not a community that could include him. He hated his drunken father, who forced him to leave Manchester High School at the minimum age (then 14) lest he get above himself; he lost his one beloved sibling (Jenny, who died from TB aged 16), and he did nothing to sign up to the kind of job that his family expected. He had only one ambition, which was to get out.

He achieved this, aged 16, by joining the RAF, moving south in the war with Bomber Command, and eventually becoming a primary school teacher, having been hastily educated in the post-war teacher shortage. His life illustrated a feature that has characterised English society since the Middle Ages, which is radical social mobility. No sooner had he reached for a life of his own than he had left the working class. Within a few years he was respectably married, with a semi-detached house and a mortgage, and three children at local grammar schools. He had joined the middle class, even if only the lower echelons, a long way from the demonised bourgeoisie of the Marxist narrative.

More from this author

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

But that’s not how he saw himself. He retained the class-consciousness into which he had been born. As far as he was concerned, he was working class through and through. He spoke with a Manchester accent, supported Manchester United, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party, and also secretary of his local branch of the National Union of Teachers. In all political conflicts, he was on the side of the Trades Union Congress, whatever it decided.

He believed that his country was ruled by a conspiracy of public school boys, and that there would not be social justice in Britain until the privileges that enabled such undeserving and treacherous characters to advance were finally abolished. He saw in the House of Lords, in the established Church and in the Monarchy, branches of this long-standing conspiracy and he understood all of our history in terms of it – as a never-ending confiscation of England from its rightful owners by a class of privileged usurpers. Normans against Saxons, Anglicans against Puritans, Cavaliers against Roundheads, Factory owners against the industrial working class – all such conflicts, for my father, illustrated the one great truth about England, which is that it has been, is and will always be a society riven by the great division between upper and lower class.

Interestingly, he did not subscribe to the Marxist worldview. Indeed, he was, in his special way, a patriot, who believed (rightly as it happened) that Marxism was nothing but a conspiracy to betray our country to Stalin. For him class was a moral rather than an economic category. It was the ‘class for itself’ that contained the true story of people like himself, who carried the flickering light of the oppressed proletariat in the catacombs to which the upper class had banished them.

More from this author

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

And the members of the upper class – although, of course, they owned everything and stole everything – were not, primarily, defined by their economic status. Far more important were accent, dress, manners and sociolect. They said ‘lunch’ when we said ‘dinner’, and ‘dinner’ when we said ‘tea’. They had salaries while we earned wages; they went out to dinner in restaurants, while we stood rounds of drinks in the pub (but only on Friday, after the wage packet). They watched rugby and cricket rather than football, and – most important of all – they voted Conservative, while we voted Labour.

The great divide between them and us showed itself in everything that mattered: taste in art, literature and music, ways of getting about (car versus bus), religion (Church versus Chapel), recreation (hunting and shooting versus picnics and zoos) and of course education (Oxford and Cambridge versus whatever else you could scrape).

This conception of class, as a moral rather than an economic category, has survived the very many changes that have wiped away the England of those days. We still live in a society in which class resentment is a major social and political force, and in which people strive to make sense of all that happens to them in terms of the great ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide.

More from this author

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Tell educated Americans that the question of whether or not to ban hunting with hounds occupied 240 hours of Parliamentary time, while the decision to go to war in Iraq took only 18 hours, and they will be entirely non-plussed – especially when you add that virtually nothing else was discussed by the ruling Labour Party during the two or three years that it devoted to this topic. But when you explain that the aim was not to protect foxes but to punish the upper class, a light will dawn. For they will know, as we all know, that class in this country is not only a matter of moral status, but a matter of highly developed and inexhaustible social drama.

This theatrical side retains its appeal, and its comic possibilities – exploited so brilliantly by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh – have made an unforgettable contribution to our knowledge of, and I would also say compassion for, the human condition. But it was not the theatrical side of the class war that obsessed my father. For him it was a matter, not of life or death exactly, but of faith versus betrayal.

I longed to breathe some other air than the ‘for itself’ that made such a fug in our living room (not drawing room, note, since that was what they said). I gathered around myself arty friends and exotic drop-outs. My father began to react with intense and vigilant hostility. He had been deeply opposed to grammar school, though I had no choice but to attend it. He strongly suspected (and rightly) that our school wanted to make us all into Etonians. He hoped against hope that I would not get into Cambridge, and was never reconciled to the fact that I did so – though to be honest it was unavoidable at the time. All in all I passed through adolescence bearing the stigmata of a class traitor, even though all I was doing was what my father had done, in escaping from the tyranny of Capel Street, Ancoats, into the meadows of Old England.

More from this author

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Having embarked on this path it is very hard to turn back. Our grammar schools – mine for boys and the one for girls that my sisters attended – imparted a kind of bland, proper, middle England accent which identified us with no specific class. We found ourselves advancing in whatever sphere was open to us, not because we were particularly adept or ambitious but because that is the nature of life: lean against a door and it opens, unless someone is pushing from the other side.

At Cambridge I advanced as far as an ordinary lower-class heterosexual can manage – which in those days was not very far. But, as the years have gone by, I have made up for the social disabilities of those days (though not the one mentioned), and managed to make an independent life in which class plays no significant role. Social mobility, for me, was the escape route from resentment and the way of looking on the world with acceptance and love. And that is how it should be.

But this very social mobility, which ought to undermine the distinctions between classes, as it does in America, is here in Britain dismissed as a fiction. The great us/them divide remains untouched by it, as it was untouched for my father.

Something about class resentment appeals to us – we cling to it, sustain it with fictions and dramas, and allow it to colour our social contacts and our political beliefs. Why is this? Perhaps, in the end, there is a kind of consolation contained in it. Perhaps, by self-identifying as working class, we join the heroic story of the English people, whose rightful inheritance was once stolen, we don’t quite know how, by people from elsewhere. Maybe some vestige of this narrative can be perceived in the drama of our country now.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

In the 2000s, they were a common sight in English towns and cities. To this day, there’s no consensus as to where the word came from – but it was gleefully adopted as a pejorative term for working class young people, especially those assumed to be ill-educated, welfare-dependent and criminally-inclined. It also referred to a distinctive youth sub-culture – with a dress code heavy on tracksuit bottoms, baseball caps and gold chains.

Though not that different from other street fashions of the decade (or indeed this one), the particular details marked out the wearer as a chav. In some ways, it was an anti-fashion, capable of absorbing upmarket brands (most infamously the Burberry check) and taking them all the way down.

Suggested reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

The style was also a statement, in this case from a group that knew it wasn’t wanted, but which refused to be invisible – or to be excluded from the debt-fuelled ‘good times’ prior to the financial crisis.

Perhaps seeing an unvarnished image of itself, the cultural elite kicked down. Social satirists were merciless in their mockery. By the time the backlash to the backlash set in – for instance, with the publication of Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, in 2011 – it was too late. Chavdom was on its way out.

It’s not that marginalised youngsters have disappeared from our streets, but the distinct sub-culture is dead – swept away not just by the tide of contempt, but also by a generational shift.

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The 2000s were when the Millennials took over – and that was always going to bring about changes. The mimetic nature of a smartphone-centred youth culture leaves less room for the distinct (and, at times, mutually hostile) youth sub-cultures of previous decades. No equivalent of Mods versus Rockers for this lot – or even Oasis versus Blur.

Though class distinctions are far from being absent or unnoticed among today’s young, there’s little appetite to make them more visible than they have to be. Nor does the rebellious impulse to immitate the outsider – and thereby scandalise the olds – express itself along class lines anymore. Indeed, the working class and especially the white working class, has never been less fashionable – whether culturally or politically.

Millennials strike me as being untroubled by middle-class guilt. It’s not that they use the actual words ‘middle class’ with any more enthusiasm than older generations of Brits, but, then, that’s not necessary when you’ve got euphemisms like ‘knowledge worker’, ‘creative industries’ and ‘working with people.’ Being career-orientated is not uncool if it’s a cool career. Ambitious Millennials don’t just want material success, they want it served with a generous topping of personal fulfilment (and don’t forget the peer recognition sprinkles).

In pursuing their goals, ambitious Millennials carry two bits of deeply implanted programming. The first is that this is what you deserve because you’re special – a wizard in a world of Muggles. The second is that, in spite of the above, the competition is fierce, so you’re going to have to work hard to get it.

Suggested reading

What's bugging the Millennials?

By Peter Franklin

But what if you don’t get it? Or what if you do, but the price is just too high? That is the question – one which brings me to Anne Helen Petersen and her remarkable and much-debated Buzzfeed essay ‘How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation’.

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Petersen asks “why am I burned out?” and offers the following answer:

“Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.”

Let’s deal with the obvious objection to this thesis – i.e. in what way is “working all the time” specific to the Millennial generation? A lot of middle-aged people, especially women, would say ‘wait until you’ve got children or ageing relatives or both; wait until you’re combining the responsibilities of home with the duties of middle or senior management – then you’ll know what hard work is!’

Except this would be to miss Petersen’s point, which is that today’s young people are under pressures that the GenXers and Baby Boomers did not face at the same stage in life:

“Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. “

The hollowing out of middle income occupations, the decline in home ownership and differentials in family breakdown mean that there is a ‘coming apart’ of western societies – an ever-widening divide between the upper end and lower end of the income scale, with an ever more uncertain and insecure buffer zone between them. The ‘room at the top’ assumptions of the easy years of capitalism have been replaced with what appears to be a zero-sum game.

To some extent, that’s a delusion, because for all the dysfunctions of ‘late capitalism’ (as it’s optimistically called), living standards now are higher, and personal freedoms greater, than in the post-war golden age. But at the same time the stakes have been raised: comfortable mediocrity, even if attainable, isn’t good enough anymore – your work, and the lifestyle you buy with it, has to be meaningful (or, at least, look that way through a social media lens). Those sort of jobs, though probably more plentiful than at any time in history, are concentrated in fewer places (the global cities in particular) and demand exceeds supply.

Petersen describes an never ending process of “optimisation” that Millennials must go through in order to make it in a hyper-competive economy. This, she says, began in their earliest years:

“Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.”

It’s interesting how many of the coming-of-age dramas of the Millennial era are about young people testing themselves – both in competition against one another and against hostile powers in the outside world. Prime examples include Harry Potter, of course, but also the Hunger Games and Divergent series. I don’t know to what extent, if any, these were created as allegories of the present, but it’s no surprise that themes of specialness, preparation and selection resonate with a Millennial audience. Certainly, there’s a generational gulf between the larking-about of St Trinian’s and Grange Hill and the serious, self-discovery of Hogwarts.

Suggested reading

Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

And it doesn’t end with school. The process of optimisation goes on to higher education (which has been deemed more necessary and made more expensive for Millennials than previous generations). Increasingly, this includes various levels of post-graduate qualification – yet another extractive opportunity for ‘big diploma’. Petersen describes her own progress (and exploitation) through the lower echelons of academia:

“As I continued through grad school, I accumulated more and more debt — debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a “good” job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my ‘passion.’”

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The post-graduate treadmill is still a minority track for Millennials, but not so the social media treadmill:

“Posting on social media… is a means of narrativizing our own lives… when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s ‘fulfilling,’ balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.”

She says it also about a perceived need for constant self-promotion to potential employers. I’m sure that’s right, but what comes next contains a crucial misunderstanding:

“Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life… to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

It’s certainly a performance, but, with some exceptions, it isn’t “labor” (or “work” as Petersen also describes it). Yes, for certain vocations – writer, artist etc – there is a case for putting examples of what you can do online. But as for putting “every component of your life” online, no one demanded you do that – and most people aren’t interested. If you want to share your experiences with friends and family or a particular interest with likeminded enthusiasts, then that’s great; but if you think of such interactions as “work”, then do something more enjoyable with your time.

Suggested reading

When communities take on the tech lords and win

By Peter Franklin

If you think that a laboriously curated online presence makes you stand out to potential employers then you may be underestimating the capacity of social media to make everyone look and sound the same. In all likelihood, you are advertising your conformity, not your individuality. That you may have ‘travelled in’ (i.e. gone on holiday to) south east Asia, or wherever, is of zero fascination to someone sorting through a stack of CVs. There may be some youthful achievements that do catch a recruiter’s eye – musical proficiencies etc – but savvy employers are realising that what these most clearly signify is having pushy parents with money to spare. Ditto academic qualifications not relevant to the job.

What is relevant to the job, however, is how well you perform it. Which is why I was troubled by Petersen’s explanation for the less impressive side of the Millennial work ethic:

“They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.”

If the overwork comes from the job itself, then that is the employer’s fault. But if the distraction is coming from outside the job – and especially the ‘demands’ of maintaining one’s image on social media, then it is the employee and his or her screwed-up sense of priorities that is most immediately to blame. You should never be so focused on “performing the self” that you fail to see where you fit in to the needs of others – especially those to whom you owe an honest day’s work.

Suggested reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Even in those cases where online activity does contribute to a positive professional reputation, it is highly unlikely to be more important than the reputation you establish by making a decent fist of what you’re actually paid to do. That the gateways to entry-level employment, and thus the chance to prove yourself, are often exploited (through unpaid internships and other abuses) is disgusting, but it doesn’t change the fact that diligence matters.

So, forget Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – the social network that really matters to your career is the one that forms organically whenever people of the same trade meet together to gossip about their colleagues. If you can feel your ears burning, it’s probably because they’re sharing their own direct experience of your performance and treatment of others in the workplace. If your social media self-performance comes up at all, it’ll only be to note the distance between image and reality.

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In reading Petersen’s account of the Millennial culture of optimisation – “as children, in college, online” – I was struck by the thought that it wasn’t optimisation at all. The dictionary definition of the word is “making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource”. But if it’s true that the process “culminates in the dominant millennial condition” of “burnout” then quite clearly it is not optimal. In fact, I’d describe it as a process of maximisation: helicopter parents filling-up their children’s schedules with organised activity; eternal students racking up academic qualifications; consumers compulsively acquiring ‘experiences’ and regurgitating them online. This is life as a form filling exercise.

Petersen argues that “many of the tasks Millennials find paralysing are one that are impossible to optimise for efficiency”, possibly because “they remain stubbornly analog”. I suspect the real problem is that, unlike the digital interactions that tech companies make so addictive, there’s no electronically-mediated reward, no equivalent to ‘inbox zero’ or the affirming recognition of a ‘like’ or ‘follow’.

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By Peter Franklin

To the Millennial maximiser, the more quantifiable the achievement the better. From course credits to retweets, it’s all about the points – and what do points mean? Prizes! Except that real life, real work, real achievement remains profoundly qualitative. Points do not necessarily translate into prizes. Petersen says that Millennials have internalised the idea that they should be working all the time. I don’t doubt it, but a lot of the effort they’ve actually put in isn’t actually work, not in any useful sense. The ‘points’ that they’ve been chasing are the reward – and often the only reward – of a series of expensive and time-consuming displacement activities.

In taking issue with some aspects of Petersen’s argument, I’m not disagreeing with its central thrust. On the contrary, what she gets wrong serves as further illustration for what she gets right – which, fundamentally, is that Millennials have been sold a lie. In fact, a whole basket of lies.

As she says in the context of student debt, the cost isn’t just financial, but also “the psychological toll of realizing that you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’ – worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization – isn’t”.

Well, quite.

But here’s the bitterest twist in the tale: many of the cool careers that Millennials are so ambitious to break into are with the industries most responsible for misleading them. The media, big tech and academia – these are the deceivers-in-chief. These are the guys peddling the dreams that cost so much for so little return.

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Vox pops of Leave voters are too often restricted to white working-class folk in northern England and provincial towns across the Midlands. Regular venues are pubs and working men’s clubs. Soundbites such as “make Britain great again” and “put the Great back in Great Britain” are typical. As well as featuring on primetime TV, these segments are often used as digestible clips on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

But the coverage simply doesn’t reflect the diversity of the Brexit vote. Not all Leave voters are white, left-behind people who live in de-industrialised ‘hollowed-out’ communities. Nor are they all dispossessed ‘nativists’ longing for a bygone era of British territorialism and imperial might. This idea of Brexit as a “white working-class revolt” – an uprising of the nostalgic in stagnant regions abandoned by the London-centric political establishment – is put about by the media, and there is some truth in it.

But there is much more to it, too. Why else, for example, would Milton Keynes, a new town commercial hub, and Watford, with its multi-ethnic population and Zone 7 London Underground station, vote Leave? Media portrayals barely begin to tell the story of why 17.4 million people voted to get out.

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Data suggests that euroscepticism in Britain’s South Asian population – particularly the UK’s Indian ethnic group – is stronger than previously thought. Look at Osterley and Spring Grove. A relatively affluent, non-white-majority ward in the west London borough of Hounslow, it returned a Leave vote of 63.4%. Defying the wider national trend, non-white ethnicity was associated with voting Leave in the two multi-ethnic west London boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing.

A number of jurisdictions with large South Asian populations also delivered Leave votes, including Luton (56.5%), Hillingdon (56.4%), Slough (54.3%) and Bradford (54.2%). All have South Asian populations of 25% and above. It is fair to assume that these figures relied on healthy support for Brexit among voters of South Asian origin.

I wonder if political journalists and correspondents are aware of these voting patterns. If so, where are the vox pops with first-generation South Asian elders in Luton and Slough? How many economically secure west Londoners of Indian origin have been asked by mainstream media outlets to articulate their desire for the UK to leave the EU?

Why did the home-owning, higher-status workers in Osterley, many of whose origins are in Gujarat and the Punjab, not vote in a way – according to convention – that their socio-economic class would predict? [1.  Why did some South Asians vote for a campaign that was, at times, seen as bigoted and xenophobic? I have discussed various reasons here: perhaps voters didn’t feel particularly European; or perhaps the Leave camp’s pro-Commonwealth rhetoric pulled hard on the heartstrings; or perhaps the supposedly xenophobic and racist elements of the Leave campaign just didn’t offend many well-integrated, South Asian voters who strongly identify with the UK.]

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Their views could add great value to the national coverage as to how the Leave vote came about – which still seems to mystify many. London-based journalists don’t need to visit working-men’s clubs in the north and pubs in the provincial Midlands to find Brexit voters. They could look no further than the mandirs and gurdwaras in west London.

Osterley is a ten-minute drive from Sky News HQ, and comfortably under an hour from BBC Broadcasting House on the Tube. So why the myopia? Perhaps it is simply a case of the media being incredibly lax, not with their travel plans but with their research. Maybe the broad exclusion of South Asian Leavers is simply the result of ignorance.

The cynic in me wonders if this is the conceivably intentional no-platforming of non-white Brexit voters whose attitudes are at odds with the media’s dominant narrative. Could it be an orchestrated effort that seeks to portray the Leave result as precipitated by nostalgic, left-behind, lesser-educated, misinformed white working-class folk – low-resourced “simpletons” driven by their irrational jingoistic impulses? In short, is it a Remain plot?

I would like to think not, but either way, the use of vox pops in ‘Brexit Britain’ shows that the media cannot be fully trusted to delve into why important political and social events, such as the Leave vote in June 2016, take place. The appetite for thorough investigation and reporting realities has increasingly given way to the peddling of simplistic narratives.

In the case of Brexit, the dominant media narratives fail spectacularly in capturing the complex nature of British euro-scepticism. Brexit has exposed an unfortunate reality – that the media’s commitment to reporting the facts, pure and simple, leaves a lot to be desired. And while this could be the product of bad journalism and poor research, there is also the possibility that that its ‘research and inform’ function has been usurped by a role as ‘narrative manufacturers’. And that’s a big worry.