I love the comments sections of social media. I’ve always preferred to be an active viewer of media, and part of the allure of new media to me has always been the ability to have a conversation with the people I’m watching. I’m so old that I remember when YouTube allowed you to post video responses in the comments, and I would often have back-and-forths with other early YouTubers.
One comment I saw this week:
We are sick of electing idiots who don’t follow through on their promises and just flat out ignore what we want to happen in our country.
Then stop voting for the people who are so clearly lying to gain power.
I can understand how people’s votes were captured by the media in the 80s and 90s. It took significant effort to research candidates and their pasts, and people mainly accepted what the newspapers claimed. Memories are poor, and with life happening around oneself, it can be easy to forget that the paper wot won it for the Tories also won it for Blair and every government since.
But in the 2020s, failing to understand the nuances of who and what you’re voting for is a dereliction of one’s democratic duty. It is not that I think everyone should believe what I do, or desire the life that I desire, but that I think everyone should be certain that the person or cause they’re handing their power over to in the ballot box is who or what they say they are and plans to follow through on their promises.
These elites who have been elected in the past few decades have been lying to us in plain sight.
A London-based family member recently admitted to me that they regretted voting for Brexit, and recognised they had been lied to. They said they believed there would be more money for the NHS. When asked what they thought of the Remain campaign’s argument, they said there’s always opposition and that the rich and academics are always against the government.
So much to unpack.
For those of you who have successfully removed the Brexit campaign from your memory, it was Boris Johnson travelling around the country on a bus claiming that there would be more money for the NHS in 2016, and the bus was the brainchild of Dominic Cummings.
Cummings, who four years earlier was called a career psychopath by Cameron, has credited the claim on the bus that £350 million a week could go to the NHS for the Leave campaign’s victory, but by 2018 only 42% of people who had heard of the claim still believed it was true. The figure was disputed by the UK Statistics Authority and the Institute for Fiscal Affairs at the time, and challenged by some news outlets, but it stayed on the bus.
The last time I was actively involved in politics, I learned that the Advertising Standards Authority refuses to regulate political campaigns. They support the idea, but say they are not the appropriate body to do so. (You can read their statement here.) And so, our (wannabe) politicians can lie to us without fear of consequence. The Electoral Commission has rules on political advertising, but the Elections Act 2022 has seriously undermined the body’s independence by allowing ministers to set its agenda. It did recently fine the Conservatives, but I doubt they noticed £70,000. Check out Transparency for more info.
Boris - or rather Alexandar - Johnson, descendant of the noble German family de Pfeffel, had no reason to be considered trustworthy by 2016. In 1995, he was found to be part of a plot to beat up a journalist for uncovering criminal activities of an old school friend. In 2004, he accused Liverpool’s drunken fans of being responsible for the Hillsborough disaster. As MP for Henley for two terms from 1999, he missed many meetings, spoke poorly, and attended only half of the Commons votes; said he wouldn’t vote to appeal Section 28 and then did; supported the invasion of Iraq and then tried to impeach Blair for it. As Mayor of London 2008-2016, he illegally built a shed in his garden and repeatedly overturned borough council planning rejections, allowing construction projects that local residents didn’t want. Regardless of the outcomes or your personal stance on these issues, this is a man who had repeatedly shown the people his values through his deeds.
…the rich and the academics…
I’m aware that some academics make good money to the point of definitely not being working class, but not of the kind that makes you rich. Boris famously couldn’t maintain his lifestyle on the £140,000 he earned as Mayor, so kept working as a columnist for a further £250,000 (10x the average salary at the time), which he referred to as “chicken feed.” I’ll give credit here, though, and admit that from a poorer perspective, career academics certainly feel like the rich.
But I think it’s a misleading explanation, and ignores that Brexit is just one in a long line of lies told and we’ve believed since the 1970s. Who I believe was meant by this statement were the multi-generational middle class. Not old money like BoJo, but the successful descendants of new money. We all know that the upper class look down on all of us, and they have for so many generations that we understand it to be part of their burden, not ours.
But what about those who have only recently left our number, and now look down on us as though they weren’t one of us not so long ago? Have the working classes spent decades rebelling against a system that has allowed social mobility because people were successfully socially mobile?
The post-war compromise was the gratitude this country showed its fallen after two world wars. It was to ensure we all had our needs met, could achieve our ambitions, and all improve together as one regardless of our birth. Education, healthcare, employment. Suddenly we were all living better than a generation or two before us.
This was also true for the upper class, even for those who were unable to maintain their large estates. The National Trust had to be expanded to help keep our historic land and houses, when the old families who occupied them could no longer afford death duties and gave government their estates instead. Even though the society as a whole was progressing, even though this was benefiting everyone, it is easy to see how old money perceived it as an existential threat. They needed to do something before they were eroded out of existence.
They lied.
They lied, and they lied. They told us we had problem people among our ranks, and we shouldn’t stand in solidarity with them. They questioned why we would want to ensure that someone who isn’t like us has the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges as we do. They suggested that we could live even better lives if we took from each other. It wasn’t a hard lie for the elite to come up with, because for them, it was the only truth. They gave as little as possible to others, so they could have as much as possible themselves.
We believed them. Even when people with the same accents and backgrounds told us we were being lied to, and reminded us of our history. We continue to believe them because they speak properly, ‘better’ than we do. They spoke as though they wanted better for us, but we weren't included in the “we” they spoke of.
They were always our masters, and it appears we’ve decided they should be again. Better them in charge than us. Better the 1% than the 99%.
Classism runs deep and in all directions.