Introduction

This chapter proposes that affective polarisation, as outlined throughout this volume, is fundamentally steeped in historicity. The crises and tribulations that have destabilised Britain's long-standing political systems and traditions in the early 21st century are broadly consequences of sweeping transformations that have disproportionately impacted upon specific demographics and regions. Indeed, since Britain's voters took the unprecedented and seismic decision to leave the EU in 2016, there has been significant academic interest in the Eurosceptic demographic of ‘older, white, socially conservative voters in economically marginal neighbourhoods’ that Ford and Goodwin have termed the ‘left-behind’ (2014a, pp 151–9). They recognised these voters as being ‘on the wrong side of social change … and feeling threatened by the way their communities and country are changing’ (Ford and Goodwin, 2014b, np). The left behind saw the referendum as an opportunity to rally against a ‘political class’, perceived to be ‘dominated by socially liberal university graduates with values fundamentally opposed to theirs’ (Ford, 2016, np). The left behind are characterised as a collective of unskilled workers surviving on stagnant incomes in towns where globalisation has extenuated inequality (O’Rourke, 2018, pp 175–83). These voters are now furious at the ‘establishment in London’ for allowing their communities and country to decay (Ainsley, 2018, pp 139–51). More nuanced analysis has also enriched our understanding of left-behind values and culture. By correlating support for Brexit with personal principles, Kaufmann found that the referendum is best understood as a dichotomous choice between ‘order’ and ‘openness’, with Leave voters proving overwhelmingly in favour of measures such as surveillance and capital punishment (2020, np). Kaufmann's study found that left-behind voters opposed ‘modern liberal’ values including forgiveness and diversity, and voiced ‘a feeling that they don't belong to the present’ (2020, np). This formative analysis is undoubtedly insightful, and collectively provides a definitive impression of an elusive, reticent demographic – but is steeped in contemporaneity, with only partial consideration given to the historical changes that have facilitated the formation of the left-behind voting bloc. These ‘top-down’ examinations pay inadequate attention to the gradual, subtle transformations that have influenced disenfranchised voters; after all, the left behind were once the ‘lagging behind’, and, before then, the ‘keeping up’.

‘We are all in this together’ was an often-heard quote throughout the early stages of the pandemic, and was still used by world leaders in 2021, albeit with slightly greater awareness of the limits of this collective conceptualisation (see, for example, Guterres, 2020, 2021; HM Government, 2020; Sturgeon, 2020). While it is true that no country has been unaffected by COVID-19, it is clear that the pandemic has hit particular people and communities much harder than others. The reasons for this are, first and foremost, social reasons: poverty, crowded or non-existing housing, unemployment, poor health – in that order, not forgetting ethnic inequalities in many cases, which are often related to all of these issues. It is a convenient myth, which turns attention away from the fundamental elements of late capitalism, namely social injustice and inequality, which have been exacerbated by the fallout from Brexit and ten years of Conservative and coalition governments’ austerity politics in Britain (see Ahmed et al, 2022).

Ethnic minority Britons are more likely to have been hit by COVID-19, as research such as that undertaken by the Runnymede Trust has shown. They attribute this not to existing co-morbidities – as these are also prevalent in the White population – but rather to social inequality, which affects many ethnic minority Britons. Social scientists involved in longitudinal studies have shown that at the beginning of the pandemic, ethnic minority workers lost their jobs to a greater extent than their White counterparts who, in contrast, had a greater chance of being furloughed. Although this has levelled out again to some extent (Crossley et al, 2021: 18–19), there is little doubt that the pandemic has further entrenched inequalities and made it more difficult for ethnic minority Britons on the lower income scale to recover from the economic fallout of the pandemic. In turn, this is likely to have knock-on effects on health (Kapadia et al, 2022), education and housing, thus increasing the key elements of inequality. Since the advent of the most recent crisis – the cost-of-living crisis as a consequence of energy provision problems and high inflation – one can imagine how these communities will be impacted for the fourth time since the financial crash of 2008 (Treloar, 2020).

Introduction

It is widely known that the UK has seen a remarkable increase in inequality over the last half-century. In the late 1970s, the UK was one of the least unequal nations in the world measured by income and wealth disparities, in large part attributable to high and progressive taxation on income and inheritance (Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015; Jenkins, 2016). Since the 1980s, however, income inequality in the UK has grown substantially, especially during the Thatcher years, and it has persisted at a high level since the turn of the 21st century. These inequalities are increasingly seen as driving wider processes of social and political polarisation (for example, Savage et al, 2015), manifested by growing political volatility and the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Recent analyses of these developments have considered how social polarisation takes a linked economic and geographical form, and especially how marginalised locations are peripheral to more prosperous and dynamic urban centres, including but not confined to London (see Goodwin and Heath, 2016; Hobolt, 2016; Ford and Goodwin, 2017).

This research, important though it is, runs the risk of reducing social divisions to abstract variables and their distribution across geographical space. As the Introduction to this edited collection has argued, processes of polarisation are always historically contingent and socially situated. Focusing in on the term ‘affective polarisation’, Stedman and Gohrisch suggest that existing accounts of polarisation ought to be revised in light of the fact that affect is not a simple given, but is rather ‘subject to historical change’ and can hence not be read ‘without taking issues such as power imbalances, gender, race/ethnicity, and the impact of social convention into account’. We share the authors’ emphasis on historical and social contingency but extend our analysis to include a focus on social relations between different groups (as well as how these relations might, in turn, shape and be shaped by affect). It is also for this reason that we prefer the term ‘social’ polarisation over that of ‘affective’ polarisation, though we acknowledge that the concepts are necessarily co-extensive.

In this chapter, we argue that we need to give more attention to the differing local processes which affect how social polarisation may be happening ‘on the ground’. Our chapter shows that processes of polarisation can at times override geographical variation and reveal commonalities that occur across apparently contrasting areas.

Introduction

The global spread of SARS-CoV-2 leading to the illness COVID-19 is a strong reminder of how pervasive and disastrous a virus can be – in medical terms and in terms of social, cultural, economic and political repercussions. The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the shortcomings of the social security system in Great Britain, which was already under pressure after ten years of austerity politics. As social scientists point out, ‘[w] ave after wave of “welfare reform” and cuts to entitlement meant that the social security system entered the pandemic ill-equipped to provide effective support to families already in poverty and those pushed into it by COVID-19’ (Kaufman and Patrick, 2021). During the pandemic, the proportion of the population with some experience of claiming benefits rose considerably (see de Vries et al, 2021, p 7). In fact, Great Britain has ‘witnessed the fastest increase in the number of people claiming working-age social security benefits … since records began’ (Edmiston et al, 2020, p 2). Compared to pre-pandemic times, the cohort of COVID-19 benefit claimants is ‘atypical’ (Edmiston et al, 2020, pp 3, 18) in that new claimants are more likely to be younger, university graduates and owner-occupiers (Edmiston et al, 2020). In effect, COVID-19 has disrupted the labour market to such an extent that it brought about a ‘considerable change in the socio-economic profile’ (Edmiston et al, 2020, p 14) of benefit claimers.

Although not immediately concerned with the COVID-19 pandemic, the films I, Daniel Blake (2016), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Sorry We Missed You (2019), by the long-standing collaborators director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty, are very topical, making for a viable case study to investigate divisions in contemporary Great Britain. Bearing in mind that social realist cinema is strongly interrelated with the societal and historical contexts from which it emerges, the films provide a ‘nuanced, troubling and provocative state-of-the-nation address’ (Johnston, 2019), as Trevor Johnston puts it in Sight & Sound. Creating vignette narratives of the everyday realities among the underprivileged in northern England, the films give screen time to those who feel left behind in austerity Britain (see Chapters 4 and 7, this volume).

Introduction

Reni Eddo-Lodge begins her polemic Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017) by indicting ‘the emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p ix). White people, she continues, behave as if their skin colour was ‘the norm’ and they ‘truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p ix). She appeals to her readers to channel their anger and use it to overcome racial inequality. The book surged in sales during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the US and the UK in 2020 and 2021. This chapter reads it, and similar titles, as an intervention into the current conjuncture to take a closer look at this particular discourse and its argumentative thrust.

Social inequality in the UK and elsewhere has been severely exacerbated during and following austerity politics, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. One fault line, which has emerged early on, is that which runs along the colour line (see the Introduction to this volume). How then can one read the responses against racial inequality brought to the fore during BLM? From an intersectional perspective, one cannot easily separate the impact of race and ethnicity from other factors such as class, gender, geography and age as they have to be analysed together. More importantly still, the current movement needs to be seen as part of a historical trajectory. Comparing older and more recent activism and publishing in Britain throws patterns into relief and shows where salient differences lie. One of the differences follows from the affective argument, which many activist writers make. This in turn is linked to an upsurge in both emotion research (‘affect studies’) and emotion-based memoirs, books of advice, popular culture and accounts by activists. However, basing political activism solely on individual emotional experience and addressing audiences on the level of morality only will not lead to structural change as it continues to hold the individual liable, thus reinforcing neoliberal tenets of individualist responsibility for economic, social and individual ‘success’. This appeal to the emotions also links with the idea of affective polarisation, which is a key concept structuring the current volume.

Introduction

Since the 1970s, wealth inequality in the UK has been rising year on year with the only exception being the early 2000s when the Blair Labour government made a few tweaks through their tax credit policy, slowing down the rapid widening of the wealth gap for a few short years. The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government's austerity measures in 2010 speeded the process up to such an extent that by 2014 the gap between the wealthy and the poor had never been greater (Hills, 2014). Consequently, it should come as no surprise that in the country where the Industrial Revolution began – and, as E.P. Thompson chronicled, the English working class were made – the vertical class system that capitalism needs to function is in great shape. There has been a redistribution of wealth from the poorest upwards since 2010 (ONS, 2021). The divisions between the rich and the poor both in the UK and in Europe have never been greater in modern times, and there is now a full body of work from academics studying economics, sociology, anthropology and urbanism, focusing on the elites and the evergrowing wealth gaps particularly in the UK and within Europe (Savage, 2010, 2015, 2021; Picketty, 2014; Atkinson et al, 2017). However, the narrative of a solution to the widening wealth gap has focused somewhat on social mobility and meritocracy. To an extent, these concepts acknowledge the structured nature of inequality within capitalist societies, but for the most part social mobility is still seen as an individual act of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. The social mobility narratives favoured by governments and administrations focus on shaping and introducing specific policies targeted at the bottom of society with the intention of creating ‘fairer opportunities’, with the hope that this will change the fates of some working-class people who are ‘hardworking’, ‘naturally clever’, and who accept without complaint the dominant narratives and culture (Friedman and Laurison, 2019; Social Mobility Commission, 2021). However, these policies focusing on social mobility are not intended to change the system, nor to tackle the unfair advantages the system awards to those in the middle or at the top.

Introduction

The 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the continuing movements towards a second referendum (‘Indyref 2’) provide opportune examples for the examination of the development of affective polarisation in Scotland. The concept of opinion-based identities as differentiated from identities of a more historic and structural form, notably class, gender, race and ethnicity, emerges from the discipline of political science. Here the focus is upon singular events, namely referenda or parliamentary elections, whereby voters are required to make binary choices, rather than being defined by the historical social and legal structures in capitalist states (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012, Iyengar et al, 2019; Hobolt et al, 2021). As such the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the likely Indyref 2 provide useful case studies for this approach.

Nation states and nationalism represent two of the most defining features of structural forms of traditional insider and outsider identities. Emerging in the rise of capitalism, the nation state defined geographic boundaries and forms of political, social, linguistic and economic development within a unified legal framework. While modern nation states developed within the European context during the mid-19th century's bourgeois revolutions, the developments within Great Britain arguably have deeper roots. The 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England, coming after the English Civil War of the 17th century, facilitated the unification of the British state and provided the basis for the economic and social developments of the 18th and 19th centuries, ensuring Britain emerged as the first industrial nation and subsequent dominant global power (Hobsbawm, 1962; Daunton, 1995; Davidson, 2012). However, the current form of the state arose later than states within continental Europe, with the retention of six of the nine counties of Ulster within a United Kingdom following the independence of the Irish state in 1921.

Identification with nation and the feelings of belonging to a particular national community thus might be considered to be reflective of a traditional concept of structural identity. However, the growth of support for Scottish independence in the months prior to the 2014 independence referendum may still legitimately lead us to understand and apply the concept of opinionbased identities within the framework of affective polarisation.

Introduction

This chapter offers a poet's perspective on how affective polarisation can be helpful in considering some of the conflicting interpretations of the modern history of Wales – and how they might be reconciled.

Let us begin, then, with a story: the story of Taliesin. The poet Taliesin was a historical figure, one of the earliest poets to write in Welsh, in the latter part of the 6th century. His 11 surviving poems constitute the earliest known British poetry in any language. However, it is the medieval myth surrounding his birth that describes how he accidentally acquired magic powers of shape-shifting and turned himself successively into a hare, a salmon, a bird and then a seed, in order to evade death at the hands of a murderous assailant. It is a story that has inspired creative minds as varied as Tennyson, Deep Purple and Frank Lloyd Wright, and in 1984 it suggested the title of Emyr Humphreys’ polemical history, The Taliesin Tradition, where he argued that Wales’ survival within the UK is a Taliesin-like constant reinvention in the face of successive threats to her identity.

But what is ‘identity’? Any attempt to describe it is at best a snapshot. It changes over time. We are not the same at the age of 60 as we were at six, despite the biological continuity. And then we must factor in the variables of perception. Different biographers will capture different aspects of one personal history or ‘identity’, much as different walks can lead you to the summit of the same mountain. Welsh identity also has its own ‘biographers’ differing wildly in their interpretations. The Wales of 2022 is not the same as the Wales of 1922, much less the Wales of 922, but there is also at least a degree of continuity – territorial perhaps, rather than biological.

Our focus here will be on national and regional identity, particularly its cultural aspects – a subject that has exercised Welsh poets ever since Taliesin. For much of Welsh history, the poets of Wales have taken on a responsibility as ‘people's remembrancers’, or as historian Gwyn A. Williams colourfully described them, ‘the rib-cage of the body politic … a collective memory honed for historic action’ (1986, p 19).

During the summer of 2022, in the midst of the war in Ukraine, with the obvious signs of a new crisis developing in the UK (and elsewhere) as a consequence of the war, delivery chain problems and economic upheaval in different parts of the world, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, gave an interview to foreign newspapers, including the German broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung. Rather than commenting on his own political future (decided shortly afterwards) or on domestic issues, Johnson focused entirely on foreign policy and on the alleged successes of his government and the relevance of Britain in a global context (Neudecker, 2022).

What sounded like a political utopia, or a deliberate refusal to face up to reality, provoked a written response in the same newspaper, penned by the writer and political satirist A.L. Kennedy (Kennedy, 2022a). In contrast to the utopian discourse of Britain's global political and general economic power, reflecting well on the then prime minister, Kennedy develops a dystopian vision of a UK on the brink of collapse. The same discursive pattern reoccurred shortly after Liz Truss became prime minister and following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. While Liz Truss publicly insisted on tax cuts leading to economic growth, A.L. Kennedy was driven to even greater dystopian despair in her subsequent satirical take on the downward spiral which the UK seems to have taken with an ever-deepening cost-ofliving crisis, political turmoil and economic uncertainty for the majority of Britons (Kennedy, 2022b). While there is good reason, according to leading economists and institutions, to fear Liz Truss’ economic policies (Partington, 2022), which make Kennedy's satirical future look realistic rather than dystopian, meaning that the consequences of Conservative government decisions do not belong to the realm of negative fantasy, it is obvious that both the utopian and the dystopian model of Britain during a time of crisis is built on radical disparity which might, in turn, further encourage affective polarisation.

While the tradition of political satire is, of course, built on pinpointing and sharpening conflict and points of difference, government policy might be expected to address not just a minority of a country's inhabitants, but rather the majority. This does not seem to be the case any longer in Britain, with even Johnson's seemingly ineffective ‘levelling up’ programme finally discarded by his successor.

Introduction

In recent years, political messaging in the UK has taken a worrying manipulative turn, spreading ‘fake news’, manufacturing threats and claiming to break ‘politically correct’ taboos. Within this ‘post-truth’ political climate, trust in political institutions, the judiciary, experts and journalists has dramatically declined, while intolerance and violence have grown (Forkert et al, 2020). Such developments raise questions about the state of liberal democracy in the UK. In their book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, pp 5–7) investigate the takeover of states not by violent rebellions but by ‘would-be authoritarian’ and autocratic leaders ‘at the ballot box’, who, in the course of democratic elections, ‘subvert the very process that brought them to power’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, p 3). Elsewhere, we have argued that ‘Britain in a time of Brexit is an arena of populist politics’ (Guderjan and Wilding, 2020). Although various authors (Taggart, 2004, p 276; Decker, 2006, p 18; Leach, 2015, p 200; Judis, 2016; Freeden, 2017, p 9) have conceived of populist movements as short-lived and as struggling once in office, populists in power do not necessarily ‘selfdestruct’ but ‘seek to establish a new populist constitution’ (Muller, 2016, p 52). So what happens if populists in government foster distrust in the state and political institutions?

The case of the UK government and especially the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, is especially illustrative of the fortunes of populists in government. Based on polling data, in April 2020 Boris Johnson's approval rates were at a high. In May 2021, when we started writing this chapter, views of his performance as prime minister were balanced (48 per cent approved and 47 per cent disapproved). By the end of 2021, however, less than a quarter of respondents thought of him as doing well, while over 70 per cent rated him badly (YouGov, 2022). Aside from an initial success story about vaccination rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's track record was characterised by failures, scandals, misinformation and Uturns in policy direction.

In this chapter, we will therefore examine how populist politics have played out since Boris Johnson's coming to power. We want to explain the initial appeal of his administration and gain a better understanding of the nature of populism in the UK.

Introduction

Goffman's (1978, p 813) famous dictum that provides the chapter's title followed by Sacks (1992 [1972], p 572), who pointed out that ‘we won't find that strong sorrow and joy are just distributed over the course of the conversation but instead, there are real places for them to occur’, and Jefferson (1988), who among other things, studied the ways in which talk about troubles makes relevant affiliative responses, pave the way for a research avenue that considers emotion as a relevant aspect of the organisation and structure of discourse.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the conceptualisation of selected key terms of the referendum debate in the UK by identifying accessible patterns of language use. Available evidence suggests that displays of emotion in the language of top agents seem to be crucial in institutional and formal settings and in various modalities of expression (spoken and written), including grammar but to the exclusion of prosodic features, facial expressions or body gestures.

Provided that language can be viewed as a collective repository of memory chunks linked to units of conceptual knowledge such as schemas, categories and conceptual metaphors, and metonymies or blends, lexical concepts used in two selected speeches will be seen as exponents of discursively constructed ideas and values. Different constructions of British interests currently centre around concepts such as sovereignty, identity, immigration and economics, and it does not come as a surprise that in the context of Brexit, some top agents in politics and the media in particular view Britain as the victim at the hands of the EU, appealing to ‘the people’ to take back (power) control from the government and the elite or encouraging ‘our great country’ to rely on its strength and determination. The construction of ‘the people’ versus ‘the government’ or ‘the elite’ is an ordinary ‘us’ or ‘self ‘ versus ‘them’ or ‘other’ construction where common unity (or disunity) and consensus (or dissent) is invoked through populist discourse (see section Theoretical orientations: discourse, meaning, language use on polarity-indicating and polarity-evoking devices and section Conclusion on populism).

Introduction

In recent years, the British social and political landscape has been shaken by a series of major upheavals: the 2007–9 Great Recession and the resultant prolonged austerity and social polarisation, the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 Brexit referendum and the COVID-19 pandemic. These events have had a great impact on the political system, leading to the long-term dominance of the Conservative Party (Bale, 2017, 2023; Cutts et al, 2020), increased political volatility and participation (Sloam and Henn, 2019; Fieldhouse et al, 2021), the takeover of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland (Johns and Mitchell, 2016), the realignment of voters and parties along Brexit-related identities (Clarke et al, 2017; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020), a temporary surge of Eurosceptic forces (Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Tournier-Sol, 2021), the rise and fall of Corbynism (Seymour, 2017; Batrouni, 2020; Pogrund and Maguire, 2020; Burton-Cartledge, 2021; Eagleton, 2022), and the withdrawal from the European Union (Fabbrini, 2017, 2020, 2021). Despite some important local successes, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the UK left has generally failed to benefit from these developments, ending up marginalised in Westminster, politically divided and weaker than ever among working-class communities.

This chapter surveys the current state of the left in the UK through a quantitative analysis of the results of the 2019 general election (Uberoi et al, 2020), the survey data of the British Election Study (BES; Fieldhouse et al, 2020) and other sources. Relying on descriptive statistical methods, it pinpoints its key electoral weaknesses, internal divisions and strategic problems. The first section delimits the boundaries of the UK left and quantifies its present weight within the British electorate according to six indicators. The second section explores its partisan, sociological, ideological and national divisions. The third section analyses the role played by the left in broader trends of ideological and affective polarisation among British voters from 2014 to 2019. The concluding section summarises the main findings and briefly discusses possible avenues for renewal.

What is ‘the left’ in the UK?

The left–right criterion is undisputedly the most popular way to classify the political ideas of thinkers, parties and citizens along a one-dimensional continuum. Originating in the seating arrangement of deputies during the French revolution, this distinction has dominated academic and popular discourse ever since (Fuchs and Klingemann, 1990; Bobbio, 1996; Bakker and Hobolt, 2013).