'Stirring up apathy' ; or, why so many people still 'love' the Tories (2)

In the previous section (Part 1) of this blogpost, I specified the general reasons why people have, for a long time, been predisposed to support the Tories. In this section, I want to examine in more detail, the factors which, over the past ten years, have reinforced this propensity.

It has often been remarked (by commentators such as Polly Toynbee, for instance) that austerity has impoverished the public realm (parks, libraries, museums etc). What has been less noticed is the political consequence of this. If there are fewer places where people can congregate, that means fewer opportunities to discuss politics, fewer opportunities to experience community with others, to develop spontaneous communities of people. (Online commiunications often do not let people experience community with others, except in the most negative ways). If opportunities to experience the public realm and community with others in positive ways are denied, that increases feelings of apathy and disengaement. This has been most obvious during the pandemic, but this phenomenon had existed for quite a few years before that, but it had not been quite so apparent. The ongoing crisis of the retail sector (or 'disappearance of the high street'), due to the destructive impacts of private equity (e.g. Debenhams) and criminal owners (e.g. BHS), as well as a discriminatory fiscal regime, has reinforced this trend. Of course, cafes and pubs still exist (at least before the pandemic), but, of course, you have to have money to use them regularly, or at all.

All this is extremely central, and not at all peripheral, to our understanding of politics in the second and third decades of the 21st century. The historian Richard Overy notes in his fascinating book, 'The morbid age' (2009), which is a social, cultural and intellectual history of Britain between the wars, something which is pertinent to this analysis. In the decades after 1918, which, not insignificantly was the year when Britain first became a mass democracy, the public realm was characterised by a proliferation of public meetings, public lectures, discussion groups and book clubs. This sustained public interest in political issues and encouraged active political engagement. This phenomenon had been apparent in the Victorian era (and earlier), but now the interested public had become even wider. Of course, since the advent of television and more comfortable homes over the past seventy years, the public realm and public spaces had been gradually evacuated, but aiusterity has accelerated this trend.

The narrative which the Tories told about austerity 'privatised' the crisis. The metaphor which Cameron and Osborne were very fond of using was that the nation had 'maxed out its credit card', thereby implying that everybody was responsible for the consequences of the global financial crisis, when the opposite was the case. If people could be persuaded that austerity was the correct punishment for their own stupidity and short-sightedness, then of course it is much easier to accept.

(To be continued)