The big debate
...so what did I say to Matthew Goodwin?
On Tuesday night I debated with Matthew Goodwin in front of over 300 people at the Conway Hall in Holborn on the subject of his New Social Elite theory. Some of the subscribers to Notes were there, and it was fun to meet some of you afterwards. Anyway this, more or less, is what I said:
Professor Goodwin seemed regularly complain on what used to be called Twitter that people like Emily Maitlis wouldn’t debate against him and his thesis that a New Social Elite was running Britain and was destroying it . It seemed unfair so I offered this debate and he took me up on it and I thank him for agreeing to it, Prospect magazine for organising it and Jo Coburn for agreeing to chair it.
I want to make four arguments:
One, The New Social Elite thesis is a construct not a fact.
Professor Goodwin made it up. There’s no disgrace in that but this particular concept is achieved by some heroic cherry-picking. In his book he writes:
“The new elite is composed of Britain’s doctors, architects, newspaper editors, journalists, politicians, publishers, think-tankers, broadcasters, civil servants and academics”.
And, it turns out, Oxbridge and Russell Group university graduates. But why them? Why just 24 out of 160 odd UK universities and not St Andrews, Sussex, UCs Bangor or Aberystwyth, Aberdeen, Dundee, SOAS, Leicester, Brunel, Bath or Kent (where Goodwin is a professor), or Salford (where he studied)?
Is it because these graduates are not quite rich enough to rise to the requisite level of monied self-interest which a satisfying elite should possess? Come to that do teachers not hold roughly the same attitudes as architects? Yes, they clearly do. But to include them I intuit ruins the elite look of the people who Goodwin holds to blame for our current state. Because like a lot of left-leaning liberals they’re actually quite poor. Also at between 25 and 30% of the population the new social elite is looking baggy enough as it is.
Who else isn’t there? Omitted from the elite group are the people who actually earn the most money, own by far and away the most wealth, enjoy easily the most privileged pre-university educations and the contacts that go with them and, in recent times, have funded directly or indirectly quite a lot of what Professor Goodwin does.
They could always creep back in. This is because at various times in Professor’s Goodwin’s analysis this new social elite comprises of, overlaps with or is held to be synonymous with “radical progressives” (essentially the most idiotic people in universities), Remainers (as opposed to Leavers), Cosmopolitans (as opposed to Traditionalists). They are also “identity Liberals” and “Anywheres”.
Two: the thesis is critically flawed.
I have a plethora of illustrations of where Professor Goodwin selects facts that he likes and leaves alone those he doesn’t. Time is short, so here are a couple that stood out for me.
As we will see as elites go the new social elite (NSE) is a nasty one. Not least because it is self-serving. On page 19 of his book Goodwin asserts that it is the group “least concerned about rising inequality”.
Goodwin offers no evidence on this . But YouGov in Nov 2020 asked the question: “Thinking of income levels generally in Britain today, would you say that the gap between those with high incomes and those with low incomes too high or too low.
Remain voters: too high 87%, Leave voters 77%.
They were also asked: “Is it right or wrong that people with higher incomes can buy better education for their children than people with lower incomes?”
Remainers: wrong 51%. Leave, wrong, 36%
Or this from YouGov, May 2023
“In principle, would you support or oppose a large increase in the amount of new social housing being built in Britain?”
Remainer: Support 73%, oppose 16%
Leavers: Support 63%, oppose 29.
Again on page 19 of his book, to stress how “out of touch” with the ordinary Briton NSE is Goodwin writes: “While 66% of Britain’s university degree-holders express strong support for Black Lives Matter, only 38% of non-graduates do”.
But in fact that 66% figure is for ALL support. Only 38% of graduates actually express “strong support”. And the non-graduates are not just non-graduates but those with no formal qualifications – just 9% of adults. In other words Goodwin appears to have manipulated the figures to be able to draw an unwarranted conclusion.
That’s just one page. But time presses.
Three: not only does the thesis not explain anything, it obscures the truth.
I’ll pass over the hint in the book that Norman Tebbit, as a supporter of untrammelled free trade was a paleolithic member of the new social elite. Not least because it’s far from clear from Goodwin’s own statements (and I have now watched many of his appearances) that he sympathises with the folk of the Red Wall to the extent of welcoming a higher tax, higher spending, higher government intervention approach, as opposed to just favouring trade protectionism – which for a country our size outside the main blocs is just a catastrophe waiting for some new Truss to come along and impose it.