Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...
When
Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stood in the pouring rain last
week to announce a general election, there could hardly have been a less
auspicious beginning to the Conservative Party’s campaign. In the space
of a few days, it has gone downhill from there.
Eighty-five Tory MPs have shown their confidence in their party’s
ability to win another term by declaring their retirement. These include
the former PM Theresa May, long-serving minister Michael Gove, and
erstwhile Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom. Twenty-two of these
MPs have served in the Commons for fewer than ten years, and ten of them
were only elected in 2019.
Finding the Floor
The first policy announcement of the Tory campaign did
not go down well either. On May 24, Sunak said he would reintroduce
compulsory national service for eighteen-year-olds if reelected. Young
people would have to choose between a year-long military placement or
“voluntary” work for community groups and charities.
To add to the general sense of chaos, one of Sunak’s ministers had
rubbished this very policy three days previously, and Tory messaging
over sanctions for noncompliance is all over the place. Sunak has
suggested taking up a position would be a condition for a later career
working in the public sector, while others have suggested that parents
could be fined or even called for the imprisonment of refuseniks.
The haphazard campaign launch and the trumpeting of unpopular policy
initiatives mark the shambolic beginnings of the end for a Conservative
Party overdue for its reckoning. While there in no popular enthusiasm
for Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour Party, ever since the calamitous
forty-nine-day rule of Liz Truss, the main opposition party has
maintained a sustained poll lead, usually ranging between fifteen and
twenty-five points, depending on the pollster.
Projections on seat share differ only on one detail: how badly the
Tories are going to lose. John Major laid the previous floor in 1997
when his party was returned with 165 seats. A lot of forecasters say
this year’s result will be worse, with some even suggesting it will drop
below 100 seats. That would represent a cataclysm and a defeat that
some Tories worry their party would not recover from.
Decline and Decomposition
They are right to be worried. What is happening to the
Tories is the culmination of the long-term decline and decomposition of
their vote, which was accelerated by Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Truss
debacle, and Sunak’s time in office. As I have argued in detail elsewhere,
during the 2010s, the party became increasingly dependent on a
coalition of propertied interests, with its core mass base provided by
elderly voters.
These layers of the electorate were shielded from the direct
consequences of the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition
government through protection of pensioners’ incomes via the “triple
lock” — a guarantee the state pension would rise in tandem with average
earnings, inflation, or a baseline figure of 2.5 percent (whichever is
the highest).
Deft manoeuvring around the “need” for cuts and judicious
scapegoating helped ensure the Tories then escaped the political
consequences of systematic cuts to public services, especially the
National Health Service, that this demographic cohort depends on. But
there was more to this loyalty than the consequences of Tory policy from
2010 onward.
First of all, there is the social location of being a pensioner.
Because the incomes of pensioners tend to be fixed and cannot be made
good in an emergency by reentering employment, their experience is
analogous to that of the petty bourgeoisie. As many Marxists have
observed, dependence on one’s own modest capital and ability to labor
produces a political disposition toward stability and a hostility to
real and imagined threats.
This is an echo of their propensity to be buffeted by forces larger
than themselves: from the whims of the market and the competition of
other businesses to the mass movements and collective consciousness of
workers. Parties offering authoritarian programs emphasizing law and
order and victimizing scapegoats (often racialized ones) therefore tend
to attract disproportionate petty bourgeois support and, in more recent
years, a mass base of pensioners, too.
The second factor, which you might call the “strong force,”
comes from the tendency to acquire property over time. In Britain, as
in many parts of Western Europe and North America, higher real wages and
cheap credit, combined with schemes like Margaret Thatcher’s Right to
Buy, in which public housing sold off at a generous discount to tenants,
saw millions become owner-occupiers throughout the 1970s and ’80s.
In Britain, this layer kept hold of their — often quite modest —
properties through to retirement and old age and were caught in a
dynamic where they had a material interest in the inflation of property
values. With successive governments of all parties refusing to build
enough houses to meet demand or replace the public housing stock already
sold off, rising generations of younger people have been locked out of
property acquisition.
This has had two significant political consequences. For the elderly
property owner, it has strengthened the tendency to right-wing,
authoritarian politics that was already latent in the social location of
pensioners. In contrast, for younger people — today’s under-fifties —
the housing shortage has severed the link between aging and the
propensity to vote for the Right which, in the British case, means the
Conservatives. Not being able to acquire property has delayed or
prevented other conservatizing processes, such as starting a family.
Brexit and Beyond
These developments help explain why the UK’s European
Union (EU) membership referendum and the results of the last three
general elections saw such a stark divergence of political preferences
between generations. The elderly won the referendum for Leave because of
their greater propensity to turn out in support of a campaign that
touched all their concerns.
For such voters, leaving the EU meant returning to an imagined past
of security and national assertiveness, embracing “British values,” and
keeping out obvious markers of discomfiting social change — above all,
immigrants and refugees. The fact that leaving the EU has not led to
greater stability — anything but — doesn’t matter for a layer of people
who are relatively insulated from its effects.
When the 2017 and 2019 elections came round, May and Johnson
respectively mobilized this same support base by using similar tropes
and arguments. May’s gamble to win a renewed majority failed because the
opposition largely cohered around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. This was not
the case in 2019, when Johnson increased the Tory vote by only 300,000,
but Labour crashed to defeat as its voter coalition was pulled apart.
However, the character of Johnson’s mandate made it clear, even on
election night, that he had maximized the strength of a coalition based
on mass pensioner support. Unless the Tories did something to reach
beyond that layer, the party faced a crisis of political reproduction
that would make it progressively harder to win elections. As its elderly
supporters passed away, they were not being replaced on a like-for-like
basis by a new generation of conservatives.
Far from meeting the challenge, the Tories and their three prime
ministers since 2019 have only accelerated the crisis. Things initially
went Johnson’s way for about two years. This period stretched from his
superlative approval ratings during the initial wave of the COVID-19
pandemic to the electoral high point of the 2021 local elections, where
Labour councils fell like dominoes to the Tory onslaught and Labour lost
the formerly safe seat of Hartlepool to the Tories in a parliamentary
by-election.
What undid Johnson from this point on was a series of attempts to
shield key allies and the prime minister himself from the consequences
of wrongdoing, above all the celebrated “party gate” allegations, in
which it transpired that those working at Downing Street had egregiously
ignored social distancing and quarantine rules while the rest of the
country was in lockdown.
Since many people had been barred from seeing gravely ill loved ones
and attending funerals while the Downing Street parties were going on,
this scandal was the first hammer blow against the Tories. Johnson’s
promise to “level up” the country by using money saved from EU
membership did not see the light of day. The idea that the Tories would
use their newfound love for state-directed projects to rebuild
infrastructure and kick-start a new generation of home building turned
out to be as characteristically empty as all of Johnson’s other
rhetoric.
Trussed Up
When Liz Truss was campaigning to become Johnson’s
successor, her prospectus didn’t just fail to address the problems
facing the Tories — it ignored them completely. Her view — which
coincidentally was shared by the hedge fund interests that backed her
leadership bid — was that if her government slashed taxes for the rich,
British capital and foreign investors would pour money into new ventures
and create new jobs.
In practice, ever-diminishing corporate tax rates and the whittling
away of higher tax bands had not led to a commensurate rise in
investment. But this didn’t stop Truss and her supporters from arguing
that it was in everyone’s interest to hand more money to the rich. By
extension, they assumed that if the economy was booming, it would magic
away the wider problems afflicting working-age people.
The result of this short-lived experiment was a run on the pound, a
near collapse of pension funds, and an emergency hike in interest rates
over and above what was due anyway. Far from helping anyone, Truss’s
experiment in flat-tax capitalism sent mortgage rates soaring. It
exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis and destroyed the ill-deserved
Conservative reputation for economic competence.
It was to Sunak’s credit that he had warned of the dire consequences
Truss’s plan would have during the 2022 leadership contest. But after he
was appointed by a cabal of Tory MPs who ensured there would be no
competitive election, the new leader’s chosen remedy was to do nothing.
In fact, he made a virtue of pushing a prospectus that promised little.
Widely blamed (or praised, depending on one’s perspective) for
derailing Johnson’s state-led investment schemes, Sunak oversaw the
scrapping of major infrastructure projects such as the high-speed rail
links between London and other major cities (apart from the line to
Birmingham). He made a virtue of provoking strikes by rail and hospital
workers, making sure employers received enough money and political
backing to ride out the disputes. In line with the practice of previous
Tory administrations, he ensured that public-service funding did not
meet demand.
Consistent with his record as Johnson’s chancellor, Sunak evinced a
desire to reduce the state’s capacity to do things. He hoped that this
would temper the electorate’s expectations of what a government should
and should not deliver and allow for private provision to fill the gap
for those able to pay for it. In other words, his do-nothing program did
not come from a place of inexperience or incompetence. It was rooted in
a class-conscious form of politics.
Search for Scapegoats
Unsurprisingly, as there have been no marked improvements
since Sunak came to office, the brief polling rally that the
Conservatives experienced upon his elevation has since deteriorated,
leaving the party in the same position Truss bequeathed them. With no
material successes to shout about, Sunak’s time in office has been
preoccupied with substitutionist activity in the form of a search for
new scapegoats.
For example, having noted that the Leave victory in the Brexit
referendum was largely founded on anti-immigrant posturing, and that the
same positioning helped cohere a large coalition of Tory voters in 2017
and 2019, the Conservatives have ramped up the antirefugee discourse
with their cruel and absurd Rwanda scheme.
After Paul Kagame’s authoritarian government received a series of
incentives, it agreed to take a few hundred asylum seekers. For Sunak,
the cost of the plan was no barrier. He argued that if people who came
to British shores “illegally” knew in advance that they would end up in
Central Africa, this would deter them from making the journey in the
first place. As a gimmick, all the Rwanda scheme has accomplished in
practice is to underline Sunak’s inability to stem the flow of boats
across the English Channel.
Sticking with the theme of racism, his hard-right former
home secretary Suella Braverman spent the latter part of her time in
office attacking Palestinian solidarity demonstrations as “hate marches”
and claiming that Islamists and antisemites now controlled the
country’s streets. Although Braverman was sacked after inciting a
far-right mob who attacked the police at the Cenotaph in London on the
day before Remembrance Sunday, Sunak and several of his ministers
subsequently adopted the language that she had used.
The Tories have also jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon, which has
slowly been gaining ground among Labour MPs and prominent media
commentators. Their appropriation of “feminist” arguments that victimize
and dehumanize trans men and trans women forms part of an effort to
frighten core Tory supporters, offering the same diet of
authoritarianism dressed up as stability and a stand against frightening
and unfamiliar manifestations of social change.
It is in this wider context that we must see Sunak’s farcical
national service proposal. It is an attempt to exploit spite and
antipathy toward young people who are assumed to “have it too easy.”
Just consider the following words from an article in the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph supporting the idea:
National service should not just be confined to those
turning 18. Those young adults who benefited so much from lockdown and
furlough — their health and jobs preserved by an enormous national
effort — should be given an opportunity to thank their elders for their
sacrifices.
Sunak’s election campaign is the last gasp of a historically
exhausted party. The task of trying to turn the situation around by
appealing to working-age people is difficult, because his own political
outlook (and that of the Tories in general) seeks to undercut any
demands made on the state.
Steps to addressing the housing shortage would cut against the
interest that the existing Tory coalition has in keeping property values
high and maintaining the private rental sector. A move away from a
politics of scapegoating would deprive the Tories of a tried-and-tested
method of binding their supporters together.
As a result of Johnson’s stupidity, Truss’s recklessness, and Sunak’s
do-nothing attitude, the age at which someone is more likely to vote
Tory has more than doubled since 2019, from thirty-nine to seventy. To
prevent complete disintegration at this hour, all the Tories can do is
double down and hope there will be a viable enough rump left from which
to fight back after the election. Even such a limited measure of success
could well prove to be out of their reach.