The Right Wing and Political-Economic Alienation
One of the reasons for Brexit and the rising right-wing is increasing economic precarity and political alienation. This has been caused by the gradual economic downturn, growing inequality, lack of job opportunities, and welfare cuts that have emerged in the 14 years of Tory governance but also have their home in the late 1970s.
Today families feel more alienated from being able to live a good life. Their alienation brews resentment, which needs a place to be released — Brexit and the Reform Party are the most recent airings.
The results of the UK general election in July 2024 might reveal the real impact of austerity, economic stagnation, and a wrongly promised Brexit as an economic, social, and cultural utopia. That impact being the rise of Right-wing parties, like Reform, growing in popularity.
Increasing Precarity and Alienation
In England, economic insecurity and a lack of belief in the Conservative government of 2010–2024 have partly resulted from relentless rounds of austerity and welfare reform, most notably the Welfare Reform Act (2012), which cut welfare and introduced new rules of deservedness and sanctions driving food bank use.
Ask the average Eastbourne working-class family how they have felt over the past 15 years. They will likely describe some sense of political and economic alienation and anger, whilst others potentially apathy and a lack of concern or care for the political system, calling them all “crooks” as one did on a canvassing round I was on with the local Lib Dems.
As recent polls show, people feel alienated from decision-making and their ability to have an impact at the local and national levels. They also feel alienated from British identity, stable jobs and careers that are meaningful and pay well, time to spend with family, and feeling a part of a wider society.
The alienation some working-class families already felt from the middle and upper classes has only worsened. Inequality has grown to unprecedented levels. There is a link between this and 64 per cent of working-class voters voting for Brexit, the highest sway in any class group.
Brexit was a mode of venting. It was a last-gasp hope to change society that just happened to get directed at the EU due to the media and political fear-mongering of migrants wrongly being labelled as the underlying course of Britain’s stagnation.
Contradictions between national identity and Liberal economics.
A sense of growing alienation is not just a condition of people in the UK. The dawn of Trumpism is a very similar situation. People wanted Brexit to take back some imagined idea of control over Britain, and they voted for Trump to do the same thing.
However, a sense of conservative identity has been under threat since the start of capitalism. Capitalist economies drive for GDP, and a cheaper labour force knows no bounds. There is a contradiction between conservative values and the inherent liberalism within the economy’s systemic laws of capital accumulation.
It is a problem which should not be new to academics of neoliberal capitalism either. Neoliberal economics, which consists of open borders, free trade, individualism and the movement of people and goods, tends to have access to and movement within and around tradition, culture, and identity.
However, instead of economic and political analysis, racist and discriminatory views blaming immigration tend to rise in economic downtimes. “Hard times can make people more racist”, A Time magazine article highlights, covering some academic research.
Where is the left?
With the far right conjuring solutions to economic problems of growth and state expenditure, all-be-it shallow ones like ending migration, it’s about time the left and centre of politics lived up to their name in proposing better counter-solutions. It’s arguably the left’s fault partly for failing to do so that enables the possibility for these feelings of oppression to be re-territorialised and captured on/by the right.
