We are meant to be living in the age of the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’. Professor Matt Goodwin and David Goodhart tell us that selection by merit has created a new ruling class of the cognitively gifted. This class, worldly and urbane, finds its natural home in the cosmopolitan entrepot of London. Unlike previous Establishments, we are told, the liberal metropolitan elite look with contempt on those less gifted than they are, those who live in the provinces and hold to traditional ways of life.
Hence, the extended scuffle that has broken out between the two, with populism being a revolt of the provinces against the liberal metropolis. This idea is now more or less taken for granted. Most of the authors, academics, and even politicians who criticise the status quo still insist on flattering Britain’s rulers as society’s natural elite, the cream of the crop.
What actually marks Britain’s urban liberals out is their relative weakness
The Starmer saga should bury this idea forever. Keir Starmer, spokesman of the metropolitan elite, named the football comic Roy of the Rovers as his favourite book and has no discernible interests other than team sports. Much of his first week in office was spent watching football on TV. He blames most social problems on technology: on ‘the auto-play, the never-ending scrolling’. Liberal elites are meant to be flexible and postmodern in their outlook but Starmer’s whole view of the world rests on objective morality – human rights – the sort of just-so moral fables that one might find in Roy of the Rovers. His main line of attack against other parties is that they are secretly in league with foreign governments. It took a great feat of imagination to see a liberal metropolitan in this latter-day Colonel Blimp.
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Starmer is representative of his class. This much we know from Tom Baldwin, his biographer and consigliere, who describes him as a fixture of Kentish Town society. Like Keir, England’s nominal liberal elites are narrow and despairing, bewildered by the problems of a new age and liable to blame them on a sort of general miasma, a ‘polycrisis’ or ‘anti-incumbency bias’.
They deemed Dominic Cummings a dangerous eccentric for knowing who Bismarck was. They have an almost limitless faith in the power of football to heal national divides. A certain cultured disenchantment with society and its institutions is supposed to be characteristic of liberal elites, but with Britain’s rulers it is the complete opposite – these people speak without irony of impartial judges, neutral state broadcasters, generals who think only of the nation. In temperament, they much more resemble the Tory squires than the Whig magnates.
Their educational advantages are minute, certainly too small to matter. To an ordinary grammar schoolboy in 1926 nearly everyone living in 2026 is a blockhead. A lot has been said about the decline of autodidacticism among the British working classes; just as dramatic, if not more so, has been the decline of knowledge and learning among the rulers.
As such, it is nonsense to speak of ‘educational polarisation’ in society today, let alone as the determining factor in politics. As for meritocracy, Britain has spent the past 60 years getting rid of free selective education – an act that singlehandedly revived the great public schools. The Equality Act of 2010 means that the country is, de jure, not a meritocracy. There is considerably less of a connection between talent and earthly reward than when Starmer’s parents were young adults.
What actually marks Britain’s urban liberals out is their relative weakness. Unlike other developed nations, Britain does not have an haute intelligentsia to provide this class with moral leadership. Its dons are narrow and cloistered. There is no British analogue to Noam Chomsky or bell hooks, no analogue, even, to Bernard Henri-Levy. The task of public intellectualism is left to entertainers like Stephen Fry or Sandi Toksvig, or to children’s authors such as Philip Pullman. The last real activist academic was probably E.P. Thompson, and he died in 1993. English academia still produces leading lights, but these tend to be rather otherworldly figures like Quentin Skinner – not the sort of people to take an active role in the affairs of the nation.
Why is this the case? Britain does not have a confident activist intelligentsia because it did not have a ‘Sixties’ in the ordinary sense. There was no real student movement in Britain, and most of the liberal gains of the era came by the abrupt fiat of Roy Jenkins, or from liberal-minded aristocrats like the 8th Earl of Arran and Lord Longford. There was no British equivalent to the French ‘68ers, let alone to the Red Army Faction or the Weathermen. Nor did Britain have much of a New Left; when it arrived, very belatedly, in the magazine Marxism Today, its doctrine was not one of postmodern scepticism but objective morality – human rights. The idea that the ’68ers were postmodern is quite wrong, but in Britain, unlike in the USA or France, there was not even the pretence.
There is another reason for their weakness. In 1945, Britain went further than any other western country in nationalising its economy. In the postwar years, France and West Germany opted for a corporatist muddle which preserved the great capitalists as a class, but in Britain, liberal elites, the ‘managerialists’, really did come to run almost everything. As a result, when this system fell apart in 1979, Britain’s liberal elites saw a collapse in their social position almost without parallel.
Baffled, befuddled, Britain’s metropolitan liberals no longer have a real agenda of their own and feel passive in the face of events. They cling tremblingly to ancien regime institutions like Whitehall, the law courts, the monarchy. Look at the contents of Keir Starmer’s latest reset speech and what you will find are simply the accumulated breakfast table prejudices of Hugh Dennis’s character from the sitcom Outnumbered. A hazy sense that leaving the EU was a bad idea, but being too unimaginative to become a Eurofederalist. That too many people are going to university these days to study ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and that they should probably be doing apprenticeships instead.
Whatever this is, it does not deserve to be flattered as ‘liberal metropolitanism’; those who do not like the way things are in Britain must oppose these ideas on their merits. Otherwise, it will be ruled by Roy of the Rovers forever.
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