Speaking afterwards outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Miller said she was disappointed at the decision but would fight on..“We are pleased that the judges have given us permission to go to the supreme court,” she said. “Today we stand for everyone. We stand for the future generations and for the representatives of democracy...“To give up now would be a dereliction of our responsibility. We need to protect our institutions. We should not be shut down or bullied.”
Meanwhile, there is a strange almost-sociological piece on working class community by a Graun writer (who has apparently written about class). After a few oddities, she seems to be offering a quite good sort of economic determinism -- but it leads to Remain?
community life has never been, and never will be, as straightforward as some dewy-eyed nostalgics would like to present it. [the link goes to a very similar article saying working class community is a myth]...In successive studies [in a recent book] people were interviewed at length, over many months, at work and at home, and encouraged to put across their side of the extraordinarily complex story of postwar society.
But the findings initially seem to contradict her view:
What they reveal, unsurprisingly, is that people hate being told what to do: whether by family members, neighbours, bosses, colleagues or politicians....But at the same time they do want to feel supported. When government fails and basic needs go unmet, people turn in on themselves and try to look after their own as best they can. The idea that community is bolstered by character-building hardship is a myth. An unemployed Sheppey couple interviewed by the sociologist Ray Pahl in 1982 told him that when it was a struggle to maintain family life, it made you “sort of more narrow”. In Lawrence’s words, “the outside world ceased to matter when they were struggling to survive”.So hardship does bolster community but in a defensive way, not in the nostalgic character-building way? What will be the implications for Brexit then?
It was undoubtedly [!] resentment at such malign neglect over past decades that drove much of the Brexit vote in 2016, among traditionally Labour working-class communities in the north of England and the Midlands....But the result has been a series of tired popular narratives about the role of place in forming our identity, the most common being the idea that certain places have been “left behind”
Tired popular narratives from whom though? Guardian writers? Any lengthy interviews to back this up? A 'right-leaning thinktank Onward' seems to have one of these tired popular narratives, which can easily be refuted:
[Onward] entreated Tories to place more emphasis on “the politics of belonging”, suggesting that “voters do not want more autonomy, choice and mobility. They want a government that … protects them, their families and British businesses from the modern world.” Do they mean the same modern world in which the British use smartphones, social media and cashless payments more than anyone else? The problem is not modernity, or nostalgia for an idealised close-knit “community”. People desperately want the feeling of autonomy, but are intelligent enough to recognise that autonomy isn’t possible without an underpinning of material security. And they are not going to get that under the Tories [ but what do working class voters actually think? Support for Tories -- and Brexiteers -- must be false consciousness?]
Miliband's Labour were just as 'tired':
Their approach was to paint Labour’s problem as cultural – an inability to understand “how the working class thinks” – rather than one of policy. Labour spent decades accepting the policies that left deindustrialised England battered, bruised and angry. In the 1990s and 2000s it believed that if it spent enough money on welfare and education it would cover the cracks. When the cracks widened and working-class voters began to desert the party, they went for the “culture” explanation. [The cultural explanation also invoked the fake Europeanism of Remainers]
And finally:
The very idea of a culture war, invoking supposed working-class values, is empty. What we are really talking about is quality of life. The problem of our times and our communities is that a full, rich life, free of avoidable stresses, in which the right to stay and the right to move are equally taken for granted, now feels so hard to achieve for so many people. [And what part has the EC played in that?]
An odd piece. To drive off Tories and their apparent popular appeal to working class voters, she embraces a kind of marxism (possibly more like Bourdieu). Somehow, this seems to support Remain though possibly because the objective destiny of the British working class is solidarity, with 'Europe' though,not the European working class? A Brexit vote was classic false conscious of the real underlying material conditions? Ultimately, this is not very different from the 'left-behind' thesis that she criticises.
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