Labour must learn how to speak to the country again

Voters respond to uber-direct rhetoric - the Tories understand this

- CHRIS CLARKE

Over the last few decades the UK has become more socially liberal. Yet our politics is polarised by cultural questions. In a country with widespread concern about climate change, LGBT+ rights and racial inequality, an alleged culture war rages.

The beneficiaries of this polarisation are the Tory right. From Brexit to the “war on woke”, they are experts at dividing the "very liberal” from the “quite liberal”. And, because the “very liberal” congregate in cities, the electoral arithmetic lies with the Conservatives. They are effectively cornering the "quite liberal”, non-graduate market.

This raises a wider question: why, in an increasingly progressive country, do progressive parties increasingly struggle? In a new paper for Progressive Britain, I tried to answer this.

The American psychologist George Lakoff described two modes of reasoning: direct and systemic. “Direct causation is dealing with a problem via direct action. Systemic causation recognises that many problems arise from the system they are in,” he wrote.

Do you treat crime, for example, as the direct fault of the perpetrator or as the responsibility of the social systems they inhabit? Lakoff adds that “When causation is direct, the word 'cause' is unproblematic.” This way of thinking is intuitive. Systemic logic, by contrast, is not innate and “has to be learned”. Hence, I would argue, it's most common among those with more time in formal education.