Dr Matthew Johnson
Senior Lecturer in Politics, Lancaster University, and Editor of Global Discourse. His work focuses on means of promoting wellbeing and nation-building through public policy. He has used international, interdisciplinary, participatory methods and engagement with GPs and healthcare professionals to develop the health case for Universal Basic Income.
Email: m.johnson@lancaster.ac.uk
Section 5: Policy and Strategy
- The uses and abuses of the left-right distinction in the campaign
- Brexit doesn’t mean Brexit, but the pursuit of power
- What ever happened to euroscepticism?
- Immigration in the 2019 General Election campaign
- Immigration in party manifestos: threat or resource?
- Foreign policy in the 2019 election
- Post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ as the theatre of the New Cold War
- The Rorschach election: how the US narrates UK politics
- If everyone has a mandate… surely nobody has a mandate?
- The climate election that wasn’t
- Is this a climate election (yet)?
- Movement-led electoral communication: Extinction Rebellion and party policy in the media
In experimental economics, ultimatum games measure individuals’ distributive behaviour. Two players participate. The first has $10 and is tasked with making an offer to distribute an amount to the second player. If the second accepts the offer, both keep their respective shares. If they decline, they both lose.
Homo economicus assumes individuals are rational, self-interested and concerned with absolute gains. Even an offer of $0.01 should be sufficient for the second player to accept, since they are materially better off. However, time and again, in a range of cultural contexts, players reject offers even approaching $5. This finding indicates individuals are concerned with relative, not absolute, gains and that there is a species-wide sense of fairness that leads to acts of spite when presented with insulting offers. We saw that in action on Thursday night.
For the last three years, Centrists have campaigned relentlessly against the leadership of the Labour Party and, to a lesser degree, the Conservative Party, on the basis of Brexit. Woke Labour Centrists, apparent Lib Dem and Green allies and the ‘liberal’ media made a case for Remain that had already been rejected in 2016 and 2017 and was increasingly being rejected, viscerally, on the ground in constituencies that Labour needed to hold or win.
Beyond the centrist echo chamber, anger was palpable about the contempt in which voters were being held. Put simply, over the past three years, Leave voters and their family members who voted Remain but respected democratic decision making, were told that they were ‘thick’, ‘brainwashed’, ‘racist’ and ‘self-defeating’. The only justification given for revising their decision was that their lives would get worse by leaving the EU.
While some are racist and many lives will certainly get worse as a result of this election, for many the notion of their lives getting even worse is a bit of a stretch. After 40 years of decline in the EU, in which no substantive measures have been taken to invest in declining communities and reasonable concerns about the effect of migration on those areas and working conditions were rejected as racist, many people just could not see their lives could get worse. Hence, the biggest motivating factor for those who voted Conservative for the first time can be seen in the behaviour of players who reject pitiful ultimatum game offers. These voters were being given the proverbial $0.01 offer by actors who were ubiquitous and utterly self-obsessed.
Now, everyone bar the 1% will lose, those losing the most would have benefited most from the first systematic attempt at reconfiguring our country since 1945. Labour’s Manifesto was the only project capable of restoring Labour heartlands. But time and again, voters, including those who had voted Labour in 2017, said that they would not back a party frustrating the will of the people led by someone who was weak or actively hostile to their interests.
Centrist analyses of the catastrophe are already focusing exclusively on the weakness of Corbyn, but that fails to take into account the effect of four years of effective, but disastrously self-defeating, lobbying and bullying by a conspiratorial liberal wing of the establishment. The most effective vehicle for tarnishing a 70 year old vegetarian, anti-racist peace campaigner as a racist, terrorist Remainer, has been a vapid, self-absorbed Centrist cult who used wedge issues to advance a policy to which the leadership was intuitively opposed and to frame party discipline issues as being wholly disproportionate to reality. Studies show a third of voters thought Labour was anti-Semitic, despite only 0.08% of members being found to have committed anything remotely anti-Semitic. That is due to the work of Watson et al, attacking Corbyn to recapture the party for the Centrist cult. Those of us who live in the heartlands knew exactly how this would pan out and feared watching our family members suffer.
The evidence of this election offers a remarkable insight into Centrist thinking and strategy: campaign for Remain in the wake of defeat and get the hardest of hard Brexits; campaign against the leadership on the assumption that everyone shares the same fetishistic dinner party concerns about the impact on European identity.
Niemöller famously stated ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist’. In the case of Labour Centrists and the liberal establishment, ‘First they came for the socialists and I helped because I was not a socialist and felt entitled to leadership’. Spite is powerful and we are headed for a generation of it. Centrists need to own it, but they will likely just pay a trivial visa fee and head to their châteaux in the Dordogne. As the Lib Dems would put it, that’s just ‘bollocks’.
