THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE

by David GOODHART

Three Sentence Summary

There is a divide in the UK population between Anywheres - who tend to be well-educated, socially and geographically mobile, and who place less value on group identity - and Somewheres - who are less educated, more geographically rooted and who value security and familiarity. Underlying the divide is the question of who is benefiting from the social change that has been occurring in the UK? The Anywheres and their worldview were in ascendency until Brexit, but now one of the central tasks of our politics is to build bridges between the Anywhere-Somewhere perspectives as failure to do so could damage the social fabric of the UK.

WHAT DID I THINK?

Goodhart's book was described as one of the first to make sense of the factors that drove Brexit when it was published in 2017. Its continued influence on the Conservative Party was highlighted by Michael Gove's reference to it in his Annual Lecture at the Ditchley Foundation in July 2020.

The key contribution of this book, Goodhart's formulation of the Somewhere-Anywhere cleavage, resonated with me. Reading it I felt my Somewhere origins. Having spent eighteen years growing up in Loughborough, I’ve spent the subsequent twelve years living elsewhere. In doing so, I've felt dislocated from the community in which I grew up even though it continues to have an emotional pull on me. And despite living in London for the last half decade, I've never considered myself to be Londoner. So what am I? To use Goodhart's language, I'm an "Inbetweener."

The value of Goodhart's book is that he - for the most part - manages to set out the differing worldview and values of the different tribes in a way that seeks to show the validity of both.

He argues that creating a "new settlement" between Anywheres and Somewheres is one of the critical tasks of our time. It's hard to disagree. But I wondered if his suggestion to work with the grain in terms of the Somewhere worldview would mean much-needed social change is slower in coming.

Reading this against the backdrop of Covid-19, I wonder whether this “new settlement” could materialise perhaps sooner than Goodhart envisaged? Could there be an alliance of Somewheres and Anywheres with a focus on basic rights (i.e. the right to work, build back better, wage subsidies) motivated by the negative impacts of Covid-19? As Goodhart illustrates though, for this to happen, Labour has to tread a narrow path on issues related to culture and values. This is because they have the potential to divide their voting base.

How strongly I recommend it: 7/10

NOTES

• Goodhart identifies three groupings fairly evenly split:

  • Anywheres

    • 20-25% with 5% belonging to extreme sub-group "Global Villagers."

    • A large minority grouping, with the following characteristics:

    • Highly educated:

      • Vernon Bogdanor calls them the 'exam-passing' classes, comfortable with the "achievement society." Meritocracy and most forms of equality "second nature to them".

    • Mobile - comfortable with new places and people:

      • Progressive individualism - value autonomy.

      • Portable 'achieved' identities - based on educational and career success.

      • Go to university and then never return home instead moving to London.

    • Less value placed on group identity.

    • Disproportionate nunmber of people who feel a special responsibility for society as a whole.

    • Upper quartile in income and social class spectrum.

    • Left of centre wing in caring professions (health, education), media and creative industries and right of centre wing in finance, business and traditional professions like law and accountancy.

    • Until recently, dominant in politics and wider society.

    • Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP.

  • Somewheres

    • Sometimes described as 'left behind', described by Goodhart as "decent populism."

    • 50% of the population, with 5-7% sub-group "Hard Authoritarians" i.e. bigots, with the following characteristics:

      • Less educated.

      • More geographically rooted.

      • Connected to group identities, traditions, national social contract (faith, flag and family) and citizenship; moderately nationalistic.

      • Value security and familiarity.

      • Uncomfortable with many aspects of cultural and economic change:

        • Mass immigration.

        • Achievement society where they "struggle to achieve."

        • Fluid gender identities.

        • Reduced status of non-graduate employment.

        • Middling income, bottom three quartiles of income and social class spectrum.

        • Older, small towns and suburbia, where 40% population lives - and former industrial and maritime areas.

    • Comfortable with: "part of the air they breathe"

      • Women's equality and minority rights.

      • Distrust of power.

      • Free expression.

      • Consumerism and individual choices.

    • Want a form of openness that does not disadvantage them:

      • "They want some of the same things that Anywheres want, but they want them more slowly and in moderation."

    • Dominant worldview around 30-40 years ago, then gradually excluded from public spaces until Brexit.

    • Conservatives, UKIP (ex-Labour).

  • Inbetweeners (approx 25%)

• Anywheres vs. Somewheres

  • Divide between two potentially contributing to feeling that no longer a single society. A divide increasingly based on education and mobility.

  • Central task of politics to find a new settlement between these two groupings. Anywhere politics must be able to come up with a response to Somewheres on issues related to belonging and group attachment.

  • Anywheres should stop looking down on Somewheres and accept legitimacy of "their 'change is loss' worldview and even accommodate some of their sentiments and intuitions."

  • Successful societies based on cooperation, familiarity, trust and on bonds of language, history and culture. Goodhart thinks on immigration the left "abandons its normally social and communitarian instincts and becomes libertarian in its individualism". The universalism of the left meets the "there is no such thing as society" individualism of the right.

  • Immigration the biggest litmus test of Anywhere/Somewhere difference. Attitude toward immigration is increasingly about wider attitude to social change that is occurring, and whether individual feels like they are benefiting from it.

  • Traditional societies are 'sociocentric', meaning the needs of groups and institutions are put first. An individualistic society is one where the society is a servant of the individual. Even a society is individualistic, traces of our sociocentric past are found in people instincts and intuitions.

  • We are still group-based primates and our moral psychology remains shaped by historic evolutionary forces.

    • Liberals - sensitive to harm and suffering and fairness and injustice.

    • Conservatives - connect emotionally to loyalty to the in-group, authority and the sacred.

  • Haidt: "It’s as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning."

  • Haidt argues liberals will be more successful in persuasion if they seek to understand and accommodate conservative anxieties vs. telling them their moral intuitions are wrong. If you want to improve integration and racial justice, don't just preach about tolerance, but seek to promote a common in-group identity.

  • Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, authoritarianism isn't a stable character trait but one that can become activated when one's values, security or in-group feel under threat. She writes:

    • "All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant … Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness … Ultimately nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions and processes."

  • Fragmentation of society:

    • As Julian Baggini puts it: ‘When it is no longer even clear what it means to be working or middle class, there is no clear sense of belonging to a group that can be represented. “The likes of us” are no longer members of a well-defined group, spread all over the country, but more fragmented groupings, such as the people “born and bred around here” or “from the estates”

  • Anywhere/Somewhere value divide only one part of the social democratic decline, others include de-industrialisation and the shrinking of the unionised working class.

• Brexit

  • Brexit highlighted many white working class voters more upset by cultural loss, due to immigration and ethnic change, rather than making their decisions based on economic calculations.

  • Observed that people woke up in aftermath of Brexit feeling like they lived in a foreign country; by implication, those others must feel that they were also living in a foreign country - albeit for much longer.

  • If a graduate, more of a predictor that you were a Remainer than affluence.

  • The Leave/Remain 52% / 48% divide does not map neatly onto Anywhere/Somewhere grouping. Almost all Anywhere votes Remain, but most Inbetweeners and a few somewheres voted for Remain too.

  • Fairness - we are not rational beings.

    • The Ultimatum Game -

      • One-off deal, someone given £100 to share with someone else in whatever proportion they choose.

      • If other person rejects offer, no-one receives anything.

      • Experiment shows if offer below £30, 2nd person doesn't accept.

  • Same logic applies to Brexit vote. People willing to trade economic gain for sense of political agency.

• What has driven growth of Anywhere worldview?

  • Old British elite has absorbed "the rising 'cognitive' elite of meritocrats' and in doing so, "exchanged traditional conservatism for a more liberal Anywhere ideology."

  • Currently in a period where neither Anywhere not Somewhere world view is dominant.

  • Growth of Anywhere worldview due to legacy of Baby Boomer 1960s liberalism and expansion of higher education.

    • 50 years ago (1960s) just 6% of school leavers in England and Wales went to university, with 90% from private or grammar schools

    • In 2016, nearly 50% school leavers were heading to university, 13% from private or grammar schools

    • Higher education contributes to a changing in people's worldview "making them more open to change, less connected to particular places", but may also shape and bond elite.

  • Research by Inglehart on value change argues when countries industrialise the traditional values of religion and deference to authority give way to more secular and rational priorities, initially among education. Increasing wealth sees the loosening of 'survival values' - security based on family, tribe and in-group - in favour of self-expression and 'emancipative value'. New values stress right and well-being for everyone.

• Anywhere assumptions can be unfounded and don't necessarily create 'win-wins'

  • In Goodhart's view, many policies that Anywheres advocate for aren't working and have been accepted too unquestioningly:

    • Free trade - creates cheaper good and services, but assumption that someone can find work once they lose their job means in the words of Keynes "free trade argument breaks down."

    • Education - critical of educational changes that have elevated educational qualification as markers of social success. But vocational educational important as it confers respects on different types of jobs.

  • Challenges assumption that globalisation does actually mean people are on the move.

    • According to Goodhart, little over 3% world's population live outside their country of birth - risen only slightly in last few decades.

    • In late 1980s/1990s, net immigration to Britain was zero.

    • "Large-scale immigration is not a force of nature".

• Reflections on the Somewheres worldview

  • Role of London in terms of upsetting national balance needs to be better understood.

  • Post-industrialism, largely abolished manual labour, reduced status of lower income males and weakened national social contract - with employers no longer taking on social obligations they once did.

  • Some of the changes are hard to measure - i.e. psychological loss (Shenker referred to it as solstagia).

  • Good societies characterised by high levels of trust and social capital. Quotes Putnam's research which shows that high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity can reduce trust in short-term, especially when arrivals are from culturally distant - "absorbing 100,000 Australians is very different to 100,000 Afghans."

  • Geography matters

    • Amongst White British people, 42% live within 5 miles of where they lived when they were 14; 60% within 20 miles. Of the 19% who live more than 100 miles from where they lived when they were 14, vast majority are graduates.

    • More than 50% of BNP voters live within 15 minutes of their mother. Nationalist voters had the highest levels of rootedness.

    • Least likely to live close to their mothers, Green voters only 25% and Liberal Democrats only 30%.

  • Age plays a part. Many Anywhere graduates under-45, may shift to Somewhere values as they age.

  • Shouldn't necessarily view what defines the populist radical right - nativism, authoritarianism and elite mistrust - as exclusive. Exist in milder forms in centre of orthodox politics.

  • Tories lowest % share of graduates among party members of all main parties. The Tories understand the Somewheres, because they are the Somewheres.

  • Labour finds it difficult to talk on Somewhere issues because there is a schism in their old traditional voting base. London left powerful within the party.

• The Future

  • Goodhart finds it hard to forsee another Clinton/Blair Third Way project, especially as policies - living wage, apprenticeship levy - as well as the language of social democracy can be coopted by the right.