Forget the title, there will be plenty of people – Guardian readers among them – who’ll take one look at this book and refuse to get past the author’s name. For many on the liberal left, David Goodhart became persona non grata more than a decade ago.
In 2004, he wrote an essay for Prospect magazine, which he both founded and edited, that earned rapid notoriety and saw him branded a “liberal Powellite”. In “Too Diverse?”, he argued that there was a trade-off between increased diversity, through mass immigration, and social solidarity, in the form of the welfare state. Goodhart said that for citizens willingly to hand some of their hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they needed to feel a basic level of affinity with those others. He wrote that in the homogenous societies of old that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. But in the highly mixed societies of today, such fellow-feeling was strained. Goodhart offered copious data to show that people bridled at subsidising the housing, education or welfare benefits of those whose roots in the society were shallow. As he wrote, “To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.”
You don’t have to like any part of that argument to recognise that it was prescient, in the sense that it anticipated what would become a, perhaps the, dominant issue of politics in Britain and beyond in the decade to follow. Even as the crash of 2008 was still reverberating, immigration frequently displaced the economy on the list of issues that mattered most to voters. Though some of the more high-minded Brexiters wish it were not true, immigration was the beating heart of the campaign to leave the European Union.
What is even more striking in retrospect is that Goodhart made his case before the huge wave of migration that so reshaped British politics: the post-2004 influx of an estimated 1.5 million newcomers from eastern Europe. In 2004, the Polish plumber and the Czech barista were in Britain’s future rather than its present. Six full years would pass before Gordon Brown would be overheard describing Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman”, because she had asked about the arrivals from eastern Europe who she felt were transforming her native Rochdale.
Given all that, and whatever other objections Goodhart’s new book might provoke, few could call it irrelevant or untimely. In The Road to Somewhere he returns to this most vexed terrain, picking his way through nettles and thorns that might deter thinner-skinned writers. He doesn’t tread that carefully either.
He argues that the key faultline in Britain and elsewhere now separates those who come from Somewhere – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those who could come from Anywhere: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated. He cites polling evidence to show that Somewheres make up roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20% to 25% and the rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.
A key litmus test to determine which one of these “values tribes” you belong to is your response to the question of whether Britain now feels like a foreign country. Goodhart cites a YouGov poll from 2011 that found 62% agreed with the proposition: “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.” Only 30% disagreed. A 2014 survey found a similar breakdown when asked if “people led happier lives in the old days”.
For Goodhart, the data confirms his belief that Anywhere and Somewhere describe real groups, the latter characterised by an unease with the modern world, a nostalgic sense that “change is loss” and the strong belief that it is the job of British leaders to put the interests of Britons first. Anywheres, meanwhile, are free of nostalgia; egalitarian and meritocratic in their attitude to race, sexuality and gender; and light in their attachments “to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation before stability, community and tradition”. Unsurprisingly, Goodhart’s Somewhere/Anywhere distinction maps neatly on to the leave/remain divide. Indeed, the evidence he presents makes the victory of leave over remain seem all but foretold: the only surprise is that the winning margin of 52% to 48% was so narrow.
Given that result, which meant British liberals and internationalists lost something they regard as precious – British membership of the EU – the self-critical progressive will surely want to reflect on where they went wrong, how they found themselves out of step with a majority of their fellow citizens. There can be little escape from the damning conclusion that, when faced with the chasm in attitudes Goodhart charts, especially on immigration, liberals chose to put their fingers in their ears and sing la, la, la. The revulsion that greeted his own 2004 essay, and the ostracism that followed, were part of that reaction, born of a collective desire on the liberal left to hope that if they closed their eyes and branded the likes of Duffy as “bigoted”, the problem might just go away.
A more sophisticated form of ostrich-ism is the redefining of Somewhere anxiety about immigration as purely a material problem that might be solved economically: by, say, enforcing the minimum wage to prevent migrants from undercutting local pay, or by boosting the funds available for housing, health or education in areas that have taken in large numbers of newcomers. Such measures – championed by Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband before him – are good and necessary, of course. But they skirt around the discontent voiced by Goodhart’s Somewheres, which is as much cultural as economic: the non-material sense that their hometown has changed unnervingly fast. Goodhart does not suffer from that economistic myopia: he accepts that when people say their problem is not solely about money, they are telling the truth.
So Goodhart deserves credit for confronting this issue early and front on. But that does not mean either his diagnosis or his prescriptions are right.
First, in his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his category – which, by his measure, should include between 8 million and 10 million people – collapse into an upmarket version of the hated “metropolitan liberal elite”. He makes the same mistake as Theresa May did when she declared last year: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” This is to assume that those who look outward are automatically disconnected from the people around them. But a visit to even the much derided, ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still genuine communities, right down to their neighbourhood street parties for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Anywheres come from somewhere too.
Second, Goodhart insists that the views of Somewheres have been overlooked for decades, over-ruled by the Anywheres who control the commanding heights of political and cultural power, from the civil service to the universities to the BBC. This will come as news to those who have observed our criminal justice system, for example, where the “prison works” mantra of Michael Howard prevailed right through the New Labour years (with a brief hiatus while Kenneth Clarke was at the justice department). The Asbo culture favoured by Tony Blair, David Blunkett and Jack Straw was arguably Somewhere in its orientation. Somewheres might feel similarly at home with the division of the population into “strivers” and “skivers”, a distinction that has underpinned government welfare policy since 2010.
Such language is echoed and reinforced with relentless vigour by our national press. Goodhart skates over this crucial hole in his argument. He claims Somewhere views are marginalised in our collective life, yet the Mail, Sun, Express, Telegraph and the rest air little else. It is the liberal internationalism of Anywheres that is drowned out.
Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities. Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes – prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.
Perhaps my own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared.
Even if that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive, despite the difficulties. Goodhart is right that people are more inclined to share with those they regard as their fellows: so the challenge is to make all citizens, including the newer ones, appear to each other as fellows.
That need not be an impossibly utopian goal. The patriotic pride invested in and unleashed by the likes of Mo Farah may seem trivial, but it shows that people can indeed come to see a relative newcomer as one of their own. But it takes effort from every level of society. It requires immigrants to work at becoming integrated of course, but it also demands that everyone else welcome and embrace them as Britons. The US used to be a model in this regard, but it’s hard to see it that way now. This is a task we will have to take on ourselves. Goodhart’s book does not offer much advice on how we might get there, but it is a powerful reminder that we have to try.
• The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics is published by C Hurst & Co. To order a copy for £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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'Even if that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive' - integration like many other facets of life in todays Britain has been fatally wounded by an economic model that favours the few at the cost to the many.
Happy, or at least economically secure citizens are more likely to feel less threatened by rapid cultural change.
Do you understand that the white British people complaining most about immigration affecting cohesiveness are usually living in places with very low levels of immigration? By contrast, the white British people living in places like London with very high levels of immigrant seem to have much less of an issue with it.
tele and tumbrils
I find it quite instructive that many of the people who'd choke on their sautéed avocado when confronted with the above statement, would be more than happy to get behind a near-identical statement about about Brixton or Peckham or some other previously unloved, rundown area being gentrified, changed beyond recognition, so that it felt like a foreign country and made long-term residents feel uncomfortable.
"I find it quite instructive that [INSERT STRAWMAN X] would hold the opinion that [INSERT STRAWMAN ARGUMENT Y], blahblahblah foreign country."
Don't ever change, twinkle.
Very true!
Which, of course, is why we come here :)
Goodhard gave a talk about this at the LSE two nights ago. Was a good evening I had (I recommend public lectures like this).
I'm not convinced by this Anywheres voter narrative. The areas that voted Leave, yes, includes old Labour type seats, people who voted Michael Foot in mining and ship building towns. BUt most Leavers old enough are Tory/swing voters. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron. These voters have carried globalisation and neoliberalism! It's us in places like Lambeth, Liverpool, Glasgow who vote against freebooting capitalism and redistributions!
And we lose, because more people will vote for the Thatchernomics! Most people want this economic model, then to complain about it. Which is like a binge eater complaining about tummy ache, I didn't vote for this, etc, then binge eating more.
There's a political leader who wants to break with this economic model (well, really, it's his sidekick as shadow chancellor). And, outside of Lambeth, Liverpool, Manchester, they'll get absolutely trounced. Because right wingers and anti Corbyn left wingers, basically 75% of the electorate, want this economic model.
A narrative that tells us that in order to win, somebody else needs to be seen to lose is incredibly toxic. But it's taken control of our political life in a deeply disturbing way, and it leads to absurd statements that, when examined more than superficially, are clearly nonsense but which have an appeal that is difficult to challenge without spending far too long on it. (A good example would be the classification of pensions as part of "welfare" spending, thus allowing ministers to declare that we spend far too much on "welfare" and thus tacitly enabling the demonisation of benefit claimants.)
Let us face it, the history tells us that whites treated others in colonial days like second rate citizens and now that so many are around, wanting equal rights and bringing different cultures, many are scared. They need not be. As long as everybody respects each other and believe in human rights, the newcomers are an asset. And do not forget, the men at the top floors are still the locals. Same is true of most of those with political powers.
Unwittingly, you illustrate a big misconception - that 'colonialism' is always something 'white' people do to 'brown' people.
It was of course the Ottomans who subjugated Hungarians and white Europeans, it was of course Arab slave traders who were among the most brutal towards African slaves, it was off course the Chinese who invaded Tibet and the Japanese who invaded China, it was of course Arab armies that invaded Morocco and marginalised the native Berbers (and worse), a marginalisation that continues today ... the list goes on.
Absolutely....one of the few humanitarian heroes of the Japanese Nanjing massacre was a German Nazi officer who was working there as a diplomat.
When he realised what was going on, he put his uniform on, went out into the streets and ordered the Japanese soldiers to pack it in.
His name was John Rabe. He was estimated to have saved, as a minimum, a quarter of a million civilian lives, and countless girls and women from rape at huge danger to himself.
Until the middle of last century, the world was mostly colonialized by Brits, followed by France and Netherlands and then of course there Turks, but they could be technically called more white. But give me an example of dark skinned people ruling whiter skinned people. That was my point.
Yes, the animus is about more than economics, but:
Without the central lie that immigration drives down UK wages, there would have been no leave campaign. This was the language in which pure xenophobia paraded as an economic policy.
Leave lies aren't just lies about the facts. They are lies about what the liars are really thinking. The Brexit vote demographic doesn't map onto oppressed workers- those are the young remainers. The Brexit vote maps onto aged fantasists who are the chief beneficiaries of European peace and UK house prices, and in memory of empire mediated only by fiction, bridle at the idea of the UK as anyone's equal partner.
Indeed. I should have raised this at Goodhart's talk on this book two nights ago (I'm loath to put my had up especially surrounded by LSE types)
You are absolutely right. Most Leave voters who are old enough are not old Labour, they are Tory voters, or Mondeo Man swing voters (so only vote Blair, otherwise Tories). Happy with globalisation when steeltowns and shiptowns were dying, well, it's free markets, the unions need to move with the times etc. There were anti globalsaiton protesters, May Day rioters, protesting against third world debt, IMF structural adjustment programs in east asia, latin america. But people here still happy with globalisation, the mainly older white people that is. Now they see s resurgence of inner cities, they see immigration, and now it's a problem.
Then they'll vote for more neoliberalism and win, while 'liberal elite' voters in LIverpool and Lambeth vote for less neoliberalism, and lose.
Immigration may not drive down the wages of the already well-offs (indeed I suspect it makes many in the managerial classes better off - either by increasing their leisure time/spending power by being able to hire a Polish ironing lady and get their car cleaned for £5, or by enabling them to 'take cost out' of a business they are running by sacking everyone in the union and hiring a load of 'self-employed' eastern Europeans), but it has had a devastating effect on the incomes of the working class.
So, if immigration is making David Robjant better off, then I'm very pleased for him. But don't expect truck drivers, office cleaners, farm workers or semi-skilled tradesmen to join him as he laughs all the way to the bank.
The immigration debate is tedious. One side says all immigrants are criminals, one side says they're all doctors and nurses. And if you take one of these sides (like most people do) then any view other than agreement means you're an idiot or a raving racist.
I personally have only been positively affected by immigration, but I can see things happening in other communities which I may not like if I lived there.
We need more balance and less frothing at the mouth if someone dares say they don't think immigration has been great.
It's not about whether immigration has been great or immigration has been bad. Like everything there are good sides and bad sides.
The simple fact is, however, immigration as an issue is wildly inflated beyond its supposed impacts, wither positive or negative. It is the almost monomaniacal obsession with a subject that has little or no actual impact on people's everyday lives or quality of life that reeks of prejudice, more than anything else.
You can argue all day long whether the impacts of immigration are positive or negative (personally I tend to think narrowly net positive economically and narrowly net negative culturally), but the point is immigration on a massive scale happened, and changed peoples daily experience of their lives noticeably, without anyone stopping to ask the electorate if they thought it was a good idea. I think it's that context which fuels the power of the immigration debate.
"has little or no actual impact on people's everyday lives or quality of life"
Immigration has completely changed the face of some communities. The actions of some immigrants have had a devastating affect on some people's lives. Of course many immigrants have saved people's lives also, but suggesting the affect has had little impact sounds like typical middle class liberal ideology over real world experience.
Goodhart is a bigot who hides his bigotry under a thin veneer of academic detachment.
Precisely the kind of attitude that - counterproductively - ended up giving his viewpoint such traction. As the article says:
That phrase 'I prefer my own kind' is what makes me shudder. Of course it's possible to acknowledge we tend to gravitate towards people who remind us of ourselves - I'm sure that's true - but does that, must that always mean same skin colour, same country of origin? If we believe that, we're no better than Arron Banks.
That phrase 'I prefer my own kind' is what makes me shudder.
But that's because you are projecting onto the phrase what you fear or have been told to fear/reject is it's meaning.
"My own kind" - loosely means people who believe in the same ideals of equality between sexes, and a fair society.
Colour & creed are irrelevant.
Many peoples from around the world have settled in the UK for centuries and have adapted & are just as British as me you or anyone.
However- you cannot have a cohesive & healthy society if significant chunks of it, want to live with their own law & cultural norms that are completely set at odds with our Western liberal values.
It's commonsense to recognise that.
This is a really good review by Jonathan Freedland.
But he's right - Goodhart is trying to get the 'metropolitan elite' to understand the motives and frustrations of the other side, and leaving that essential stereotype unchallenged. Presumably he thinks that 'Somewheres' won't bother reading his book, so is less interested in encouraging them to see the other side of the argument too?
The biggest influence on the EU Referendum was age - older people much more likely to vote Leave, younger people favoured Remain. Of course, there are a whole lot of assumptions and influences that underpin that... but if 16 year olds have been given the vote, Britain would probably not now be on the verge of triggering Article 50.
"the other side of the argument' is the dominant discourse - there's no escaping it.
We still persecute truth tellers, don't we.
Sounds like an interesting book containing uncomfortable realities. Reading this review I am struck as I have been so many times since Brexit (I voted remain) how it has been the push come to shove; increasingly doublethink has been abandoned, and the liberal left have been forced to unambiguously side with the freewheeling haves and to talk down - in however sugar coated a way - to the have nots. The latter is the common modus operandi under which an apparently sympathetic ear is actually about telling people they are wrong, 'with compassion'.
Still strands of doublethink remain - globalisation is a worse problem than mass migration. Really? What is 'globalisation' other than a term for denoting the migration of labour, capital and tax collection? In short mass migration is globalisation.
And their is nothing 'nostalgic' about the view that change is loss in this particular context. It is.
The Guardian's spiritual home - well outside the new aristocracy of media, academia, senior members of NGOs and state bodies - is in the public sector. This affords a false high ground where declining living standards can be blamed on a tight foster government not doling out the lucre. The reality is that the tax payer doles it out and the rest of the workforce is being suffocated by globalisation and denounced for complaining it, from that false high ground.
A previous generation of the left might have called this an exposing of fundamental class interests. The current generation is has traded that for 'self realisation' or is paralysed by having a foot in both camps (stand up Jezza).
And that is why it is on the ropes everywhere.
Goodhart starts with a binary of course. Even more typically for racist theories like his it is a false one. There are no camps of Somewheres and Anywheres. They can only really be fixed at all as Ideal type concepts. As for our trackings between them they are as myriad and complex as something quantum. They are not population groups. Not unless you objectify people into your own assortments as he does. Get close to a new immigrant and you will find them making a somewhere just like ancestors of mine did out of London when they came from Somerset in the 1890's. Goodhart theorises his prejudice not at the level of the phenomena he investigates but in his categories. Then he uses them to deal in self fulfilling prophecy.
"Get close to a new immigrant and you will find them making a somewhere just like ancestors of mine did out of London when they came from Somerset in the 1890's"
That's what people have a problem with, it's whole towns and cities changing by mass fast track immigration. In places like Luton to parts on Southampton to London to Northern towns and cities. It's the segregation that is the biggest problem where it has been made very easy for immigrant communities to completely separate themselves from everyone else and the end result is places the division we see in Luton and other towns and cites and when you ignore these issues and call everyone who disagrees with you a "racist" or a "bigot" the end result is something like Brexit.
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