Thread by @elliemaeohagan

🧵I have some thoughts about today's National Conservativism conference. When I was running CLASS think tank, we ran a project that broke down the component parts of the hard right's "anti-woke" narrative. You can see how much these themes were running through the conference ⬇️

I've seen some people mock conference speakers for conflating the left with elites, big business and even Margaret Thatcher. But this is a feature not a bug: the point is to make the enemy broad and nebulous, so it can serve different purposes depending on the occasion.

So, if you're a liberal who doesn't like Jeremy Corbyn, don't think you're immune from the right's "woke left" accusations. They aim these at anyone who doesn't fall into their narrow parameters of Britishness - including the England football team and the police (!)

The purpose is to divide people who could otherwise form a grassroots coalition by categorising them as "British" - lovers of monarchy, military, strong borders, nuclear heterosexual families, implicit (and sometimes explicit whiteness). Or "woke" - the existential threat.

It's not all tactical: we found that the hard right's base are really motivated by the "anti-woke" story. I suspect that one of the reasons it has become so dominant is that it animates the base so much that they want to repeat it all the time, overstating its popularity.

Having a media whose politics, by and large, align with the most rightwing tenth of the population is obviously pretty useful to the right. But it's not the end of the story. The Mail existed in the 1990s but was seen as gauche, even cranky. What's changed?

I think that, as the material conditions of life shift profoundly around us, the right is dominating because it has developed this resonant, clear anti-woke story and progressives are eating their dust.

We tested what the current progressive story is on class and identity and we found that not only did it not persuade anyone; a third of the people who heard it couldn't remember a single thing about it when we asked them seconds later. It's not working

Worse, some progressive institutions (the Labour Party) have taken this failure of their own messaging as a sign that the only thing they can do is to lean into the anti-woke story as much as they can. All this does is create a consensus around the story and strengthen it.

This is why, despite the fact that most Brits are becoming increasingly socially liberal, progressives feel like we live in a country of petty authoritarian racists. There is currently no node of power offering a persuasive progressive story about identity and class in the UK.